Google makes all of their money selling ads, Microsoft makes their money selling software and services (mostly to businesses), and Apple makes their money selling a hardware/software ecosystem. Apple's cut on software sold in their app store is a multi-billion dollar business all by itself. That's what I was talking about when I said there's room for more than one business model.

Hardware is not what distinguishes a high-margin iPhone from a low-margin but high end Android or Windows Phone. It's the software.

Do you have any recommendations for C++ tools?

I've used PVS-Studio and was pretty happy with it.

That's not Apple's model and Apple is making lots of money too. There's room for more than one model I think.

They do for sure. My point though, was that Comcast wasn't throttling Netflix traffic, they were throttling Cogent traffic because Cogent was operating well outside of the peering agreement. If they had been throttling Netflix, then Apple TV (via Level 3) users would have also had problems.

Rather than buy bandwidth from Cogent, Netflix is now buying it directly from Comcast. It's cheaper for Netflix, it makes Comcast more money, and it gives better service to Netflix's customers. Everybody wins, except Cogent.

People forget that when all of the Netflix congestion was happening, customers watching via Apple TV didn't experience any of the drop outs or pauses. That's because for some reason, Netflix streams to Apple TV via Level 3, not Cogent. Other companies that bought transit from Cogent had the same problem with the congested interconnect. If Comcast was targeting Netflix, the Apple TV customers would have experienced the same problem. In reality the problem was a between Cogent and Comcast.

Linux has finally become the dominant operating system and nobody knows it.

Well, it's still early days as far as education and computers go. There are some amazing resources out there though. For example, my kids regularly use Khan Academy. For some reason, the way he explains things just clicks with them.

For anything Khan doesn't cover, Wolfram Alpha is an unbelievable tool.

For writing, some kids are going to do better on a text editor or word processor. I know I can no longer sit down with a pen and an empty page and just write.

I'm glad to see schools trying new things though. You could take a teacher from 150 years ago and drop them into a classroom and they would be able to work as a teacher. There aren't too many professions where that's true and it seems like we should be able to do better.

One thing that is working well for my kids is reversed classrooms. Rather than get a lesson in class then homework problems, they are expected to learn the material for homework and the teacher helps kids with problems during class. It doesn't work for every kid though and our one-size-fits-all approach fails too many kids.

I wonder if TPB people ever regret posting their hilarious replies to copyright notices? Taunting your accuser is hardly ever a good tactic.

How well does it track other types of activity? For example, how well does it track bicycle riding or weight lifting?

The credit card companies don't allow stores to charge more for a cc transaction. Perhaps this practice should be stopped as well. So something that costs $100 with cash, you might get a 2% discount for using CurrentC (and surrendering your data) or a 3%-5% surcharge for using a credit card.

Am the only one who things COM is pretty nifty? I like being able to write components in different languages and have them all work together. You just have to get used to thinking in interfaces.

Don't forget that the rule itself is some arbitrary thing made up by Facebook. It's their rule and they can define and enforce it any way they want (as long as they don't violate anybody's civil rights).

I suspect they will change the enforcement of the rule so that only people trying to cause somebody else grief will be punished.

This is something I thought about when I took out a term life insurance policy. My biggest fear is that near the end of that term (20 years), some problem will be discovered that indicates I may have only a few years left to live. I'll have to decide if I kill myself so that my family gets the life insurance payout or let nature take its course.

If I choose the latter option, I'm terrified that my death will be slow and incredibly expensive consuming everything I've saved. I'm going to die no matter what and if I can help it, I won't leave my wife and kids with nothing.

How would a quantum computer change the equations?

The best PDF software I've ever used is Prince XML.

For years, we got by with HTMLDoc but finally dumped it because we absolutely needed unicode support.

After trying many different packages, we settled on Prince. Our main constraints were performance related which you apparently aren't worried about, so maybe it's overkill for what you need.