... PT Barnum. You know the famous quote.

They started as a bookseller, then moved slowly into other merchandise. Now they are eating the lunch of all sorts of brick and mortar stores. Then they went into cloud services and are grabbing that market. And now they are producing their own entertainment a la Netflix. They are a force to be reckoned with.

What is probably the saddest is Microsoft. Their two biggest cash cows (Windows and Office) are under tremendous pressure. And they really have trouble innovating in ways that are replacing that income. They chase everybody else, late to the game: mp3 players, search, cloud services, online email, smartphones, etc. Their constant focus on Windows over the Ballmer years really blinded them to all else that was an opportunity in the computing world. And so companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google are there instead.

Thank goodness. But a long way to go for real competition.

Once you give government some power it is almost impossible to get it reversed. That's because the foot is in the door, so to speak. This is just like taxes - once in existence, very hard to kill. I'm hoping that this is defeated but am not holding my breath.

SpaceX is already printing rocket engines.

It's news because ULA has Congress all bought off, and SpaceX represents a disruptor. So it is better to make the incumbents look as high-tech as possible even as the scramble to catch up with what the upstart SpaceX is already doing.

They could have done the right thing here. Our entire vapourous internet security depends upon the root CA system. I'm glad Google and Mozilla have taken a hard stand.

Which TLA do you work for?

...which means "we thought about it in passing, but really never had any serious intention of changing. We are after all an intelligence agency and there is no way we are going to REDUCE the information we get (voluntarily)."

People said that it was bad to let Comcast (a cable company) buy NBC. THIS story is exactly the reason why. No NBC because "Apple would be competing with Comcast"? FCC, DO SOMETHING about this obvious conflict of interest.

My Tivo Series 2 was retired after 9.5 YEARS of continuous operation and use. It still works - only my cable went digital and the Tivo only has analog tuner, so it is now useless. But still functional with the original HD.

...only surpassed when I read Ender's Game.

It has been obvious for some time that the US is on the decline. As a worker in the late stages of my career, I find that saddening but I don't know what we can do about it. In the 60's it was all about technology and progress and science. Kennedy made a speech where he asked where the US would get all the Engineers that would be needed for the future. Nowadays it is all about financial instruments and inventing ways to manipulate the numbers to look like you have more money than you do. And it is also about rejecting science when it doesn't agree with your religious leanings (sort of sounds like some other religions in other parts of the world, doesn't it?). I don't personally see the will in this country to continue the leadership into the future. It will probably take a generation or two, but then we will be another Spain or UK which was once a dominant world power. Let's just hope that the next big power is benevolent, or it is likely not to be very pretty.

So somebody who has never done anything wrong writes an offensive cartoon. How is this different than a cartoon depicting a murder, also offensive? In fact, what about all those Hollywood movies depicting murder? Should the writers of those movies go to jail as well?

Seems unfair - TWIT.TV existed well before Twitter.. Leo Laporte let them take the name "Twitter" and never sued them. Now years after Twitpic was around, Twitter decides to go after trademark Seems like Twitter can dish it out but they can't take it. Ah, the glory of our broken legal system.