This is actually amazing, the 'Do No Evil' principle upheld by Microsoft! What an exciting and interesting development this is. Yes, you heard me right, USA courts and government are the agents of evil and Microsoft is now on the side of the individual rights.

Wrong. Supreme Court cannot make an Unconstitutional law into a Constitutional one. They render an opinion, which in many cases is wrong and in most of those cases is also politically motivated, but their opinion does not make a law Constitutional at all.

If that's all it could offer, then what would be the point?

True... but they have to demonstrate that they are safer by a margin that is large enough to be statistically significant, which is why how much safer they would be actually matters.

So you won't, in other words.

I mean sure... they'll eventually get to that point, but the number of years of statistics they are going to have to collect on millions of driverless cars driving, collectively travelling billions or even trillions of miles to determine exactly how much safer they are than cars that utilize human drivers is going to be enough that most people alive today probably won't see it happen.

Consider that without a price, a person doesn't even have the OPTION of buying one...

And of course, price *IS* important in the real world... most people don't pay more money for something if they do not genuinely believe that it carries a value that is worth the amount of time and energy that it took to earn that amount of money. That's all very well and good if you have infinite amounts of cash, but most of us do not, and have to do menial things like budget. That involves knowing what your expenses are likely to be, and what kind of time frame it would take to pay for things that you do get.

I would suggest that the much bigger problem with a lack of price means that it's currently impossible to get one at all, since the giveaway period has also expired.

There's no price yet because they're giving away the first production run to people who are going to do interesting things with them...

If that were actually the real reason that they don't have a price on it, then that would also imply that they do not want anyone to have one who doesn't already know what they want to do with it, and has an idea that *THEY* approve of.

Yes, people occasionally die of it, but for this or any jihadist to think Y. pestis is an effective way to wipe unbelievers from the earth is naive. The range of antibiotics that take care of it is pretty readily available, and the "plague" bacteria are not currently "medically resistant" to them. "When the microbe is injected in small mice, the symptoms of the disease should start to appear within 24 hours," is hardly rigorous clinical testing. You'd learn more about how to properly culture bacteria from any academic microbiology lab manual. "Use small grenades with the virus, and throw them in closed areas like metros, soccer stadiums, or entertainment centers ... Best to do it next to the air-conditioning. It also can be used during suicide operations." Means they're spitballing this stuff. This is no more instructive than watching a half season of "24".

Yup. Ain't no purple fringing on Velvia.

[nt]

It becomes pitch black. He is liable to eat himself.

*YOU* might not... but your great-great or great-great-great grandchildren might... I am presuming that you'd be living on a generational spaceship where the gravity can be slowly modified so that by the time they arrive, they would be fully acclimated to the higher gravity.

What's the old saying? There is no izvestia in Pravda, and no pravda in Izvestia.

What galls me the most is the panty-wetting over a government-granted monopoly trying to maintain its government granted monopoly when that very same government tries to compete using taxpayer dollars as a subsidy.

The outrage should be against government involvement period. If governments didn't grant local monopolies, there would be real competition among the real companies, and no perceived need for the government competition which is only competitive because it has the taxpayer subsidy.