Someone told him to ask me what was wrong, and what he could do to fix it, and I said "Concrats, you now own a very very fast 16-bit DOS machine. Enjoy DOOM".

It booted? Wow. The one time I accidentally did that to that class of processor, it blew apart -- very quickly.

At any house brand computer store in China the computers come windows installed and activated but no disks.

When was the last time you bought a PC with Windows in the USA? Install disks have not been included for several years.

Personally, I'm not sure that I need to be protected from this type of vertical monopoly given the strength of Toyota and Honda in the US. If the big three from Detroit don't treat me right, I'll just buy a Toyota.

Exactly. It's not that such rules were never required, but they are not required now. The current effect is not to protect consumers, but instead, to protect incumbent dealerships. Look at all the states that don't have such rules. The auto market hasn't imploded in those states.

why does Tesla not think they can compete on equal terms as the competition? Sounds like they feel they need help being competitive.

Perhaps for the same reasons that allowed society to exit the feudal era? The current rules favor incumbents. The current rules are against progress.

The bright spot in all this: In all but one case, the health care providers contacted for data refused to comply with PaymentsMD's requests.

Naturally. Those health care providers did not want any competition in selling their customers' data.

Didn't the English have a room in London where *every*single*wire* coming into the country went through? Weren't they reading each and every cablegram coming in and going out?

That was in WWI.

1. That was a time of real war (not the phony "war on .." BS)

2. Only a tiny fraction of the population would have sent or received cablegrams.

Everyone has been spying on everyone for at least a couple of centuries.

No, they haven't. Yes, spying has been common for many centuries, but because of the size of the task, it had to be highly targetted. What's changed is the way data is collected which makes almost every person a target for spying.

Really it's not. They(police, social services, etc.,) didn't do anything for fear of being labeled racists.

And the reason they did nothing about Cyril Smith? Would that be racism also?

This sentence is completely meaningless. Do you even cite, bro?

Anyone who reads UK newspapers will know what the GP is talking about. This isn't Wikipedia, but here you go

My day job sees me working as a technicalish manager where I am the interface between the general staff and the development team. I may not be a developer but I understand enough to translate

You mean like this:

Tom Smykowski: Well-well look. I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?

The article takes some real information (Intel to be used in next gen Google Glass) and extrapolates it into "x86 to be used in next get Google Glass". But this seems to be a wild guess.

Remember Intel makes ARM chips also.

Perhaps if those webpages were not laden down with masses of Javascript, doing who knows what, the pages would be faster to load. All that Javascript has to be downloaded from a server somewhere and executed in the browser. It all takes resources.

Many website developers today seem to think that his/her web pages only need to load on the fastest computers as the sole page open in the browser. I think of them as "greedy" websites, because they are greedy with the end-users' compute resources.

As a consequence we still have emissions testing on everything back to 1967 when federal emissions first came into effect, but even still it's not hard to meet the rules for a given year.

Different states have different regulations. California, which has a climate that is very conducive to long-lasting cars (even in the Sierras, they don't use salt on the roads) only tests cars those built in 1975 or later. And there are 6 counties where vehicles registered in only certain zip codes are required to be tested. The rest are exempt.

What's going through their mind is this - we are politicians and regulators. We are in charge

Why are these same politicians and regulators trying to push through treaties with investor/state provisions that grant rights to companies that override local laws and regulations?