I'm going to to be terribly pedantic here, but GST, like all VATs, does not work like that. It is not an expense (as in it does not effect profit and loss). Like all VATs, GST collected on sales is subtracted from GST spent on purchases, and if the remainder is positive, then you pay that to the government, and if it is negative the government sends you the difference. The point is to make a fairer sales tax, where goods and services are not taxed at multiple points. All these financial operations happen on the balance sheet as changes to assets and liabilities, and have nothing to do with expenses at all.

I guess the point has to be, what has VMWare bought to the game. They've essentially grabbed the Linux kernel, stacked their own kernel extensions on top of it and called it their own. I've never heard of them as major contributors to the Linux kernel itself.

We've seen enough corporate sociopathy to accurately answer that question.

Why didn't they just go with BSD?

He didn't. This is a standard bit of Blackberry astroturfing. Instead of innovating, this is what BB does now.

Larry Niven as well. Was it the third or fourth Ringworld book that went on at great length about various humanoid species fucking?

What choice does Microsoft have at this point? If they simple cede the mobile market, they risk Google marching right up the middle with a series of devices that come to resemble a full computing platform. And that most certainly is Google's intent. That's why they're putting considerable resources into Google Docs; they want it to be good enough, and once it is good enough, then suddenly that Chromebook looks like a pretty decent competitor to a more expensive Windows laptop.

At the end of the day, Microsoft has to at least gain some market share or it will begin to see its most valuable market; Exchange-Office, begin to leak away.

Neither does saying "it is the greatest next thing", apparently.

As much as I need to access such documents on my phone, I can. I can't conceive of actually wanting to work on such documents on a smartphone, but to view them, Google Docs seems to a reasonably good job, and when I had an iPhone, Apple's ability to view Office files was good enough in most cases.

That's always been MS's problem, they bring nothing to the table that isn't delivered by Google or Apple, and the things that they could bring to the table, like AD integration, they don't. Coupled with an absolutely miserable app store that is a laughably stunted entity compared to the major Android and Apple markets, it's little wonder they've had such a problem.

So we need the Dr. Pepper of cell phones?

Heinlein wasn't the only one. Some of Philip Jose Farmer's later work had a pretty sexually bizarre bent

They can join BlackBerry in the "any day now, we'll be on top!" movement.

His later books got more than a little bizarre and disturbing. Strange things seem to happen to aging SF writers.

I'm sure it's true to a point, but considering the fauna that has lived there long before humans came along, I'd say the jungle predates human activity by a very long period of time.

Because mass surveillance doesn't exist in other economic and political systems.

Wrist you believe and what actually is at two different things. There is considerable prestige in overthrowing older views. But they are not overthrown by taking money from fossil fuel companies and writing pieces in the WSJ.