Because it's still 100 years away. Let others be the pioneers, spend the research money, and then come in and deploy the same tech for cheap.

Consumers yes, Enterprise, perhaps not so much. Enterprise doesn't like to upgrade and stuck with XP till they pretty much had to move to Win7 (although many including my company are still paying for XP patches for current deployments). Enterprise will stick with Win7 as long as they can again. Moving to Win8 looks like a user training issue that would be a nightmare in the Enterprise setting. Of course, few enterprise would consider upgrading anyway while the current standard is still being supported, so Microsoft probably had one or two upgrades to do what they wanted and it wouldn't upset their Enterprise licensed users for Windows and Office that account for a lot of their income. Win10 will probably be the next Enterprise standard and if they do mess it up, it might allow for somebody else to eat some of their market. I've already seen vendors switching to Linux servers for the back end on Enterprise systems. If MS messes things up and it would mean user retraining and software rewriting anyway, vendors and enterprise might look at other options.

Great! As a physicist, I eagerly look forward to your supporting math to back up those posits which contradict the math I have already seen.

Sorry. I just don't think you really have worked for large enterprise IT before. The roadmap for a vendor like GE to get customer feedback on Enterprise applications, make those changes, do internal testing, get the FDA to do their testing and certify it, deploy to a test site and work out bugs, then get other enterprises who don't want to be a test site to deploy let alone have the capital budget to do it, is often longer than two years. That's not even counting dependencies on other applications from other vendors whose implementation has to be staggered because it can be the same people doing both projects.

Except when it runs some specialized piece of equipment which still works and is needed and the drivers only exist for Win3.1, or the specialized card can't be moved to a newer machine, or everything still works with some special networking app built into the software. Finding people who can still work on Win98 or even finding hardware that will run it can be more difficult than letting sleeping dogs lay. I didn't have a Win3.1 machine at my work, but I was supporting Win95 on Novell networking because of one system that used three barcode scanners that fell into such criteria. they eventually upgraded the system a few years ago and we could get rid of those Win95 machines and the Novell networking servers.

Ya, but if most places are like mine, the "good news" is that after one or two such migrations, everything will come to depend on one or two major road blocks and everything will be slowed to their upgrade schedule which will provide more than enough time for everything else and a fairly known roadmap for the future.

Not quite. They have firmly divided up polarizing wedge issues between the two parties to capture as many single issue voters as possible.

While shale and tar oils are the main reason that prices have dropped, most of what I have read says that OPEC wants to lower production to increase prices but the Saudis won't go along with it. They are wanting to hurt Iran who is their main opponent in the power plays of the Middle East and that it also hurts Russia which is friends to Iran and makes the US happy, is just a bonus. The Saudis have plenty of cash reserves and some of the lowest to produce cost per barrel for oil. It may hurt their profits a bit, but low period in pricing won't hurt them as much as the various people they don't like.

Yes, but it will die with you. We still have my grandparent's, great grandparents photos. However, nobody sat down with them to tell us and write down who or what they were of, so now, nobody knows.

They like a system that gives confirmation that the message has been received.

An actual fetish? Certainly. Having associated something external with sex to the point that sexual feelings are impossible without that item is pretty much a disorder and is what a fetish is. Being turned on by something, using something to increase sexual feelings, and liking to dress in leather or participate in games, is not really a fetish if you can sexual gratification without them.

Yes, but these days in the US, a ditch digger is expected to operate a $100k machine and work without constant supervision to the spec of some detailed plan. Event the trades are going to take extensive training or an apprenticeship. You don't have to go to college, but you'd better get some sort of an education, or you'll be fighting Mexicans for dish washing jobs at a restaurant the rest of your life.

Well, there is plenty of technology to invest in that would head us down that road that would be useful to our current endeavors. We still need the technology and engineering to build a long term space habitat for things like a manned mission to Mars. Given Apollo level funding, drive, and political will, we are still probably 30 years out from having such. Then there's mining and manufacturing in space to worry about. That will continue past the probably 50 years in getting things up and running in a useful manner. There's easily a century of full time work before we even need to worry about things like not having a warp drive.

1) Nah, started to, but it came up as a vice.com webpage, and decided it was better to close the page without reading as that is usually a net win.

2) Well, later, I clicked the later link and at least it was some wordpress page and it said "Civilization" but I an already intrigues with the idea of a life form that eats stars. It would start as any other life, just in a dust cloud around a star rather than in a sludge pit in a planet. All the elements that are found on a planet should also be there, and there in constant input of energy from the star. It forms something like the nano tech grey goo that some think is so much a threat. Evolution is done by some internal mechanism where more efficient mutations in individual parts eventually take over the entire body rather than through fission. Or it could replicate and be more like a dust cloud and probably considered a colony being. It needs to neither form it's own gravity well, nor be blown away by the solar winds that feed it in a time span that would allow it to grow and form. Perhaps in a galaxy where there is little if any heavy elements to nucleate planets. So we end up with a nebula that could be considered a life form. Now the real fun begins, how to make it eat a star? just harvesting energy isn't fun. We'd want it to actually affect the star somehow to get more energy. Perhaps iron bombing it to make it go super nova? Magnetic fields to induce solar flares? Eventually, it would split to leave the dying star for another star, pieces get torn away by passing asteroids, or it ejects smaller parts of itself to maneuver in the system and eventually parts end up in another solar system. Anyway, I'd love to think up some ways to crunch some numbers, but it's now time to go home.

1) Well, only certain types of stars might be 'digestible'. Some might be too small, too large, not the right type, etc for the type of feeding the creature wants. So, such life might not be in the market for all stars in the galaxy.

2) Considering that it is a hypothetical type of life that we know nothing about and is by definition much different from ourselves, I'd say it's about equal to say there might be one as opposed to a galaxy full. Not to say it might not reproduce, but depending on their food source, the type of star, and the availability of them, there will still be a certain population that a galaxy can support, which might not be one, but a very few.