I'm going to to be terribly pedantic here, but GST, like all VATs, does not work like that. It is not an expense (as in it does not effect profit and loss). Like all VATs, GST collected on sales is subtracted from GST spent on purchases, and if the remainder is positive, then you pay that to the government, and if it is negative the government sends you the difference. The point is to make a fairer sales tax, where goods and services are not taxed at multiple points. All these financial operations happen on the balance sheet as changes to assets and liabilities, and have nothing to do with expenses at all.

I guess the point has to be, what has VMWare bought to the game. They've essentially grabbed the Linux kernel, stacked their own kernel extensions on top of it and called it their own. I've never heard of them as major contributors to the Linux kernel itself.

We've seen enough corporate sociopathy to accurately answer that question.

Why didn't they just go with BSD?

If you use Source 2 for 'free', the only way to sell it is through Steam, which gets *30-40%* royalties. Source 2 isn't free, it's a hook to try to get more lock-in to keep Steam as the premiere distribution platform.

it's not royalties. Just like how selling in Google Play or Apple App Store doesn't charge 30% royalties. It's a flat charge for selling through the store where the provider (Google, Apple, etc) provide all the necessary payment, storage, download and other facilities for you. Some, like Apple, do way more so at the end of the day you get a cheque and a tax form, while others (Google) make you do most of the hard work.

But they basically provide a bunch of services for that 30% of the purchase price. Being able to track your purchases is fairly important so you can re-download your purchase over and over again (too many digital download sites give you 30 day links and charge you another $10 if you want to extend it to a year), plus all the payment integration.

Steam is the first app store to come to market. They generally charge around market rates.

Source is an incentive to use that app store. To say to use it costs you 30% royalties does a disservice because it isn't accurate - if you want to sell on steam, you still give up that 30% or so.

That is true. My comment was(in retrospect, very poorly explained) narrowly focused on an issue I heard a lot of complaining about from people operating reactors in the US(PWRs, if my memory serves): between stray hydrogen from the water in the primary coolant loop and massive neutron flux, a combination of hydrogen embrittlement and neutron damage had a way of pushing even very classy alloys into serious risk of developing cracks; and properly servicing internal parts wasn't something you did lightly, since you'd have to substantially lower output power or take the reactor offline while doing so(and when you've got that much capital equipment sitting idle, team balance sheet is not happy).

None of these stories ended catastrophically, or even dramatically, nothing even approached leaving the containment vessels; but the complaint was that speccing materials for use inside the reactor was even less fun than handling plumbing for chemical plants, refineries, and the like.

An engineering challenge, it's what engineers do; but not good for cost cutting.

The special demands of finding materials that work adequately in enthusiastically radioactive environments don't help. Some are worse than others; but I don't think that there is anything that appreciates prolonged neutron bombardment. Can make for some very expensive repairs inside the reactor assembly.

The tricky question(and the one that I've been bombarded with vehement and competing answers on, which has left me confused) is whether nuclear isn't cheap; but military procurement slush used to make it look that way; or whether nuclear could have become cheap; but military procurement slush made that unnecessary and potentially even directly inhibited it.

It's definitely the case that military purposes kept the money rolling in for R&D, pesky questions about safety and storage largely under wraps, purchases of a lot of equipment that could also make plutonium, and some PR-piece "Look at how fuzzy and peaceful nuclear energy can be!" reactor installs at home and in selected friendly-and-not-too-likely-to-change locations abroad.

It's likely that, at the same time, this left the industry largely in the hands of companies that are very, very, good at government contracting; but perhaps a bit shaky on less lucrative and parasitic forms of economic activity.

Where the optimists and the pessimists part ways is the question of whether nuclear energy is in fact just not terribly economic; and so achieved certain unique capabilities for cost insensitive customers, while largely floundering without them; or whether nuclear energy as an industry was wildly distorted by catering exclusively to select cost insensitive customers with substantially different needs than energy production, and simply needs to develop product lines that reflect current requirements.

Are they just incompetent, or do they do most of their work for the same government that owns a third of their stock and not have a lot of experience with real customers?

Windows Phone!= Windows Mobile.

They are completely different as in Windows 3.1 vs Windows NT different with separate apis and frameworks and kernels.

No I simply stated Windows Phone was growing .. which is true ... and it has 3 times the market share. Also true. Blackberry is dying in both marketshare and volume.

It seems you are moving the goalpost by giving a false illusion that people are leaving Windows Phone which is not the case as the explosion in growth is cheap Chinese phones in Asia with Android pre-installed.

But I said blackberry marketshare down while Windows Phone is growing. Instead the GP got me modded down to make it look like people are actually leaving Windows Phone by that one hand picked statistic. That is not math or true.

Blackberry is declining. Windows phone is growing. Just not as fast in Asia where they all have el cheapo Chinese Androids.

XP was supported for a very very long time.

MY PC is built from sabertooth Asus series with solid caps, capicators, vrm, etc. Same with gtx 770 video card. It will last 10 years :-)

2020 is still quite a ways out. Windows 7 is not going anywhere. Sure Intel will try to sabatoge atom with no SOC drivers so they can cut back on support costs and keep prices low but for real systems the demand for 7, like XP, is too great to ignore.

Many of us will stick with 7 even more so than with XP during the last time. 7 is the best OS ever made PERIOD. ... besides the flat ugly icons in 10 I do not like the cortana search as I wanted to open power options in control panel and instead binged control panel ... face palm. That needs to be fixed too. But still I just end up with another 7. No reason to change. It is kind of sad as we are geeks who used to like change but I guess we have aged and operating systems have matured now.

10 seems more like a laptop oriented system with applets and power saving stuff.

Honestly, if we are stuck with the NSA amassing a database of all the phone calls, ever, anywhere; and a policy of using CIA killer robots on people who annoy us; I'd be a great deal happier if we at least got some visible benefit from the whole mess by using these assets to locate and terminate telemarketers. They have to stick out like a sore thumb in call traffic analysis, and I'm pretty sure that 'the corporate veil' is not rated to withstand most contemporary munitions.

I've done a bit of system integration with bill acceptor machines, and they should be fine. They're not looking for visual spectrum stuff, or comparing a bitmap, they're checking for a finite number of specific features. Usually, it is 9 or 11 small spots that are each checked for one thing. None of them are the face visuals.

Actually, if they're spocking the old $5 bills, it's probably not going to be accepted anyways as we've moved to the new polymer bills. While for a time the old bill acceptors wouldn't accept the new bills, the new bills have pretty much taken over.

Granted, not being an artist, I have to admit I'd probably keep that $5 bill. Being a paper one it's probably close to being cycled out naturally.

It's possible (indeed virtually certain) that insurance types will factor in the expected value (positive or negative) of a given feature. They already evaluate expected costs tied to more nebulous associations between a vehicle and risk (Does model X get stolen disproportionately frequently? Are buyers of model Y, in midlife-crisis-crimson possibly not the most cautious of drivers?); if assisted braking or rear-view cameras, or lucky rabbit's feet, reduce the expected cost of insuring a given vehicle and operator, they'll presumably be folded in. How much of any savings the end users sees may or may not be an exciting number; but that'll be more about relative bargaining power.

I suspect that reductions in legal requirements are less likely. With things like BAC, people are already pretty tepid judges of when they've actually had one too many, and keeping the test equipment and testing environment calibrated, reliable, repeatable, and adequate as evidence is a fairly big pain. Even if we assume that all the relevant laws are 100% about public safety and have absolutely no secondary purposes (which is a matter of some...doubt), those aren't conditions that are going to endear some tiered system of caps based on a the car's feature matrix to anyone. Purely informally, effective input stabilization, assisted braking, and any other tech that keeps your car moving in a nice respectable, not-drunk-looking, way even if you are a bit sloshed will probably reduce your risk of being pulled over and tested, and thus effectively raise the limit a bit (except at the delightful 'sobriety checkpoints'); but if they don't mask the effects well enough to avoid attracting attention, I'd bet that the legal results will be the same.