But if you don't you're in shit-town where you have to manually re-activate (ask permission from Microsoft to use your software) individual installs a month after installation.

Sometimes the hosting company doesn't keep track of it either. I recently was involved in a datacenter decommission (20yo) and at the end of the day a shit ton of hardware was still happily humming along, nobody claimed it nor did anyone keep track of whose it was (most likely they once did but moved asset tracking platforms which missed certain things).

About a decade ago another company I worked for had a similar thing where we expanded the datacenter and started keeping accurate track of new assets. Again, bunches of devices were left over with no traces at all in asset or order tracking and entire racks of cable runs had to be cut out with chainsaws (after the power was removed). We had a notorious salesperson that would often allow 'good' clients in a pinch (often due to administrative and physical disaster at neighboring centers) to get colocation and even dedicated servers, rush built/installed after hours and installed with "we'll do the paperwork on Monday".

WTH is poor or blue collar crime. I have been both on and off since childhood, I don't need to turn to criminality to make a buck. The US has the largest numbers of prisoners because the US is putting away alcoholics and smokers of weed over drug dealers and violent criminals.

Being drunk is a felony with in some cases 6 months of prison time and 3 years probation, some states even have minimum prison sentences. Vandalism is a misdemeanor with a maximum 1 year probationary. I'd rather have a drunk vomiting on the sidewalk than someone smashing my windows.

You're also spending 5-6, if not more digits on licenses on a yearly basis. In the long term it might be cheaper to convert.

Actually you do. Microsoft actually recommends you install an authorization proxy (several $1000 in Windows Server) to activate your "Enterprise" versions. I am on a network that cannot reach said servers and every Win7+ Enterprise install expires about a month after installation after which I have to run an arcane command or call Microsoft to activate. That is with the key and activation commands baked into the image.

Office 365, Sharepoint, Exchange and associated CAL's. Windows Server alone runs in the $1000/CPU

Surprisingly little for an entire OS ecosystem (those bugs include packaged software). I wish there were only 3k bugs and minor annoyances on other platforms.

Win10 boot is plenty slow through either BIOS or UEFI. The trick it does with UEFI however is keeping the UEFI boot screen active while booting the entire OS. On a brand new 32-core Intel Xeon machine with NVM SSD and 64GB RAM it takes about 30-45s to get to the login screen after UEFI has handed over control. That's slow. In comparison, Fedora with SELinux and systemd takes ~5-10s

Not just Microsoft which is one thing but it advertises itself aggressively on the network, similarly discovery and pulls in a lot of data from 'apps' and 'tiles'

European countries have the same spectrum 'tax'. The issue is that the governments here don't promote competition. Fines and even spectrum should be a function of a companies income or net worth. That way a startup can compete to get spectrum. Also, European countries make spectrum and sometimes even customers non-transferable so you can't buy out a competitor that provides better service.

Transfer doesn't cost money, bandwidth does. So free transfer is indeed possible because the infrastructure has to run regardless of how many bits you send in a month.

Oh please, the government isn't putting nearly as much criminals away as necessary. If we had a bit harder punishments for actual crimes and less 'soft' punishments (rap sheets that follow you for the rest of your life), we wouldn't have nearly as much problems. These days the courts and prisons are simply a revolving door that create better criminals while locking away civilians that need help and/or made a simple mistake. You get more time in prison for drinking a bit too much and walking in the street than vandalizing someone's property (which police won't even come out for)

Early 3G was ~200kbps, only double of what the 2G standard could do (128kbps). Back when 1G/2G was available, ~56/128kbps was maintained on the network. The current average for 3G/4G across carriers is 0.5Mbps and 1.5Mbps respectively. It's hard to find actual historical data because after the iPhone, the marketing drones started redefining bandwidth as the amount of GB (the amount of transit, not the amount of bandwidth) you were allowed per month.

Also, 20Gbps seems to be an aggregate of all connections in a given geographical area. It is just the amount of bandwidth the radio waves make available before all the demux and filtering has been done. No way in hell, anyone in the US is going to outfit a cell tower with a 1Gbps connection, let alone 10 or 20.

100kbps before you're throttled, 9600bps afterwards?