I have often suspected that part of the reason that MS continues to make a phone is so it won't be accused of being a patent troll. If it is making phones, then it is not just trying to monetized a portfolio by attacking others who are doing the real work. I suspect the Surface is the same issue, and the the two might actually be breaking even given royalties.

I also think that this has nothing to do with MS or the royalties to MS. I think it has to do with Apple. Samsung, for some reason, gave MS a sweetheart deal on the thinnest of evidence. Samsung did not go to court, wait for google, but just paid MS a reletively large amount of cash for every handset sold. This tells me that there was so backroom negotiations going on, possible lawfully questionable negotiations. This, probably, is negatively effecting the Apple situation because if they were so eager to give MS money, why are they fighting Apple on claims that are at least as good? Which means that whatever possible underhanded deal Samsung made with MS is no longer paying off.

This seems like good advice, but it does not necessarily lead to the idea of a suicides because a business failed. Suicide, especially at a young age, I think is either a mental issue or lack of experience with failure. It is not failed bussiness tactics, or losing respect among your peer group, or being made fun of on twitter, because, really, what does a person care about what some strangers think(unless you are a 13 year old adolescent). When we look at some suicides, these kids have had their life propped up, been protected from failure, ridicule, and hard work,. When they are then subject to a public failure, it is simply too much for them. I am in no way saying it is their fault or anyone's fault. I am simply saying even if you do everything right, even if you have all the support in the world, bad luck or a single bad decisions can still make the enterprise fall. A lack of experience of how to deal with such failures can lead to a person taking the quick way out.

There, simplified it for you. Even quantum tunneling can't penetrate the barrier of a thick skull.

You should think that through a little more. Extraterrestrials might breed like spiders where the males get cannibalized after mating. Can you imagine "To Catch a Predator" on another planet?

CHRIS HANSEN: Tonight, we're waiting for NudeSpiderMan as he crawls up... he thinks he's just here for sex. Little does he know that he's about to get trapped in our web.
NudeSpiderMan: Hi, are you "Charolette"?
DECOY: Wow, you look cute! Hold on while I finish spinning this orb around the lunch I just caught for us!
NudeSpiderMan: Sure babe, take your time...
CHRIS HANSEN: Hi! How are you doin'?
NudeSpiderMan: Oh no! All the way here I wanted to turn around! I knew I was being stupid!
CHRIS HANSEN: well, NudeSpiderMan, I don't understand. You knew she was going to rip your head off, but you came here anyway...?
NudeSpiderMan: Yeah, yeah... sigh... I knew I was stupid... I kept telling myself to turn around... Now I'm losing everything!
DECOY: Oooh, yeah! SWIPE *munch* *munch*
NudeSpiderMan: Chris? Chris? Are you OK? Oh no... she went for him instead... I'm such a loser!
DECOY: You know, I might want seconds!
NudeSpiderMan: Well babe, I still want to stick my head in your mouth, even if I'm not your first...

I dimly recall that method too but IIRC the array couldn't be saved to tape- you needed POKE statements underneath the DIM. There was also another method involving adjusting the SP register to lower the top of the stack and claiming a few kilobytes of RAM for whatever purpose- but that approach had the same problem with not getting saved to tape.

I remember I had a yellow book that was for kids learning assembler, and it had a cartoon CPU with registers for hands and feet. I can't remember the title- I just pulled the ZX81 out of the closet to look for it, but it isn't in the box anymore. I still have the 16K pack and the awful little ZX Printer that sparked onto rolls of aluminum thermal paper.

A good hammer, a good manual drill, a good screwdriver, will last a lifetime. Many people, however, invest in pneumatic hammers, electric drills, and bit sets even though they know it will break. There is myth of how we own records, but I am old enough to own LPs and CDs, and let me tell you that the lifetime was limited, and they were difficult for mobile devices. Transferring them to tape was a significant loss of quality.

Comparing a phone to a plunger is silly, and makes me question the cognitive abilities of the person making the analogy.

Everything is a trade off. My car is so complex I can't begin to figure out how to fix it, but I do have a diagnostic tool on my iPad that I could not possible afford 10 years ago. My watch, and iPod Mini, is obsolete but it still tells me the time. As long as that is all I want it do it is fine. I used my 3GS over the summer as a roaming phone. Slip a sim card in it and I was good to go. As long as I wanted it as a phone, I was good to go.

Yes, you can't take stuff apart. OTOH I was one of the few people I knew that actually soldered computers to repair them, rather than just plug and play with a new board. Yes, some phones are not upgradable to current software, but many consumers seen to happy to make that choice to have a cheaper phone or a phone with other features. I can even see the current situation where you pay per page for ink is an option that many people would prefer.

Certainly there is a loss when we do not have a choice, but I think in many cases we still have a choice, it is just that we do not want to pay the real or opportunity costs for that choice.

Tesla is part of the old boys club and they are playing it perfectly. First they create an exclusive product to sell to a privalidged few. Then they say they are going to create a product for anyone, any day now, and start crying how the states are oppressing them and keeping them for helping the impoverished masses. Then they play the old game of hustling states and end up with a deal that will result in the siphoning of 1.3 billion dollars of taxpayer money directly into Tesla's pocket, even if they never reach the targets of employment or sales. The only part of the old boys club they don't respect is that it fraud is a two way street. you can't take, you also have to give. Dealerships were one way for the car companies to spread the wealth back to the friendly politicians in the states. Tesla is saying it is all theirs, and they are not going to share.

Again, nothing against Tesla or electric cars, just saying they are not a knight in shining armor that is going to save us from the politicians and climate change. They are just another company trying to maximize profit and take whatever welfare they can get.

Yes, it was obviously a very shitty system, since they were selling them thirty years ago for about $99. It was like a 1980s version of a Raspberry Pi. But it did have a Z80 in there and that's how I learned assembly when I was a kid; I just dug to it through all the crap it was soldered to.

Car dealerships have outlasted their usefulness- they're a 20th century solution for selling 20th century cars. If a Tesla can self-drive itself to my house, or if an Amazon quadcopter can drop it off here, car dealerships have no reason to be involved except for an old law that allows them to stifle competition and that will now be cemented into place.

The methane itself is relatively harmless- but usually indicates the 999 other chemicals in fracking fluid are there too, and when the methane catches fire it creates even more toxins. If the kit can detect 4-methylcyclohexanemethanol without igniting it, it's a better option.

Back in 1980 my parents got me a British ZX81 kit to assemble, with 1024 bytes of RAM. (I still have it buried in the closet along with my other antiques- AFAIK it still works.) It ran BASIC so slowly that you could actually read the code about as fast as it executed, so I was "forced" to learn assembly language. I was amazed by how fast it was- it ran a million operations in just a few seconds! (wow.) You had to start by writing a BASIC program:

10 REM AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
20 PRINT USR(16514)

Then you had to POKE each assembly instruction into the comment, starting at 16514 for the first "A". The comment line would slowly turn into "10 REM x&$bL;,$_)[vU7z#AAAAAAAA". The next line was 20 PRINT USR(16514) (printing out the return value from the BC register).

Saving any ZX81 program onto a cassette tape was excruciating- they recorded as several minutes of loud high-pitched screeching. Usually you needed to save them twice because it failed half the time. Then to load the program you had to cue the tape you had to find exactly where the start of the screeching was, rewind several seconds, play the tape, and only then could you hit enter on LOAD. (Otherwise LOAD got confused by the *click* noise when you pushed the play button on the tape player.)

You young people don't realize what an easy life you have.

To be sure, like most legacy industry, there is likely no ability to innovate. Think of american cars in the 70's. Energy generation is still powered by coal, coal plants are still being built, and we are still fighting over emissions. I don't know if a report saying that the industry needs to innovate will do any good. Making coal fired plants too expensive to build by requiring them to be clean might have an effect, and force the industry to innovate.

In any case, the incumbents are clearly show massive inefficiencies. In locations where electricity is sold competitively, prices can vary by 25% or more. This indicates that there is quite a bit of wiggle room in pricing. However, what we are really talking about here is volume. Without volume the incumbents firms that sell power, not produce it, are going to get squeezed out. Producers will shut down plants, and that may have long term effects in energy security.

What is really an issue is the grid. There is at some point going to have to be a charge for hooking up to the grid. Already people on low cost plans that do not use enough electricity pay an extra fee for administrative and grid costs. This is where legislation will come in. Are we going to require a house that is self sufficient to be connected to the grid? Are we going to allow houses in more expensive locations, be it rural or more prone to damage, to be charged more to be connected to the grid?

I think the patient in Berlin now has a Wall to isolate himself from incorporated viral entrepreneurs.

If you live near fracking wells, using this kit is a much better way to determine if your water is safe than the alternative- holding a lit match under your faucet..