Everything. And at some level, society needs to be built around facilitating and accommodating business. Again... they pay for EVERYTHING.

Ultimately what pays for everything is labor. All value is created by the labor of human beings.

We've created a fscked-up system where the ability to exchange one's labor is dependent of the pretense of large businesses, powerful organizations under the control of a small ruling class of "owners". And the sort of labor one can exchange is subject to the desires of that owning class. There's plenty of work that needed to be done, cleaning up the planet, fixing the infrastructure, caring for children and the infirm and elderly, moving the production of food and energy on a sustainable basis...which has little or no value to the owning class.

So we either need to kowtow to that ruling class, building everything around facilitating and accommodating those large business, so that they can continue to be parasitic upon people who do the actual work and return some crumbs to the masses until the whole thing collapses from its inattention to the demands of physics and chemistry...or we need to fundamentally change the system.

Looks at Detroit indeed. That's what happens when your town builds its economy around a big business: if it leaves, you're boned. The lesson is not, "kowtow better".

And before someone talks about the evil corporations, lets get something straight... look around the country in more business friendly areas. Take texas or South Dakota or either of the Carolinas.

"More business friendly areas"...you are suggesting that California, where Silicon Valley and Hollywood and a tremendous amount of agribusiness is located, is not "business friendly"? Your facts are disordered, my friend.

Zune wasn't rejected because it was late to market.

It was rejected because Microsoft refused to give up on their lockin, and make the system open so that users could play any non-DRM'd format. Like it or not, the enforced DRM presents a serious usability issue for non-technical users. (Technical users don't care about usability problems - but they appreciate "slick" when it's there, and they appreciate ways to work around "only plays protected .WMV files"). When grandma's Zune won't play the files that little Johnny ripped off his CD or Napster, they don't give a fuck who's rights are being violated. All they know is "shit's broken".

Add to this; Microsoft was far-behind in terms of technical capabilities, compared to other players. (video, audio quality, etc - and later, iPod touch with apps and all that). Microsoft could have sunk enough R&D into Zune to do all that. But I think MS never really believed that they could succeed.

The worst part about metro is that it's straight-up ADWARE. Right there on the main screen of the computer, delivered by the OS developer.

You can remove it, you can change it, but by default, Microsoft decides what "tiles" are on your screen, and what gets displayed. The user wants an application-picker. Metro is like a billboard, when the user needs a dashboard - and it's no surprise that drivers go careening into the guardrails every time they sit down behind the Windows 8 wheel.

Gates was too meek to have ever fired Ballmer. And too powerful to let him come to harm, no matter what he did.

In general, CEO's are the "rock star" of the business world today.

But I would say that MS was an exception. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer founded that company. They were executives because they were there at the start. Not because they were charismatic, or even technically competent. All they did was oversee the OS's pillaging of IBM's former market dominance. (look at IBM now, lol!).

If you look at Microsoft's products, "charisma" is not a factor in the equation. There's lots of "attempted charisma" that falls far short of the self-scrutiny that is required to attain real charisma. Here and there, Microsoft does shine, technically. (like Active Directory). But the business-side of it was run basically like organized crime (lockin). And that put a nasty stink on everything that came out of Redmond. Ballmer was pretty handy with the gangster stuff. But that's about it.

"inherited" is right.

The only reason he was ever employed at Microsoft in the first place, is because he was Bill Gates' card-playing business-major friend in college. He was a co-founder of Microsoft. If Bill Gates didn't know him, I am pretty sure that this obtuse, bullying gangster would never have had the technical chops to get in to such a position. I have to say one thing about Microsoft is that they were so successful, even Ballmer's intimate involvement could not sink them.

You do realize that math covers everything in our universe and BEYOND. Accordingly, I would be careful about what constraints you put on it. . . as it is statistically more likely that your mind is just creating artificial constraints.

Ah, the irony.

Math is a creation of the human mind, and by its nature can never go beyond the limits of human ability to understand. The universe, on the other hand, is not bound by the limitations of the nervous systems of a group of balding apes, and I have to agree with J. B. S. Haldane's suspicion that "the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."

People do crazy things when money and power is involved.

Neither of which will be involved once the Bitcoin fad ends.

Sayeth TFA,

Video games are currently used in healthcare to teach some basic medical procedures, but as wearable and 3D surface technology improve, they will be used to practice complicated surgeries and medical methods.

Those are not games. They are simulations.

When I take a CPR class and use a mannequin to practice, is that a game? No. And it's no different than using a computer program to simulate a procedure. These are not games.

Based on the prices of some programs, I don't think that "too expensive" is an issue.

When killing people is concerned, I think that no price is too high for our military.

having a sick and dying workforce is not a way to grow an economy.

yeah - if it takes effort to draw-in breath, then you have a proper seal. (used to wear one spray painting).

150 years from now, we'll be saying that banning CO2 was the best environmental law we ever passed.
Or, we'll be saying, "maybe tomorrow, if we can finish crossing this wasteland, we'll find an abandoned town we can scavenge some food from"... "or at least some ammo."

ppp chat. It's the only way to be sure. Unless. . . TEMPEST. . . .

yeah. Basically, there are two use-cases. Civil Defense alerts. And spam.