Being first to market can have advantages. Coming later to the market with an improved product can have advantages. Coming later to the market with a product that is no better than what is already out there has no advantages at all.

The cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have been roughly 1.4 trillion dollars. Yes, with a T. That completely ignores the lives lost on all sides and the ongoing social effects, also on all sides. When it comes to propping up the middle east to prevent a complete systemic and hostile collapse, which is exactly what would happen if the region was just left to its own internal feuding devices, there is almost no amount of money that is a bad investment. At 1 billion a year of aid/support money it would take 140 years to equal the cost of two screwed up and limited wars. That's a damn fine investment.

If America pulled all support from the Middle East/Africa so you think it would even be five years before the region had reached the point where enough American interests were threatened that stepping in would no longer be voluntary? Way to save 1.25 Billion in Egypt aid in exchange for conflicts that would make Iraq look like a kid's piggy bank.

Moron.

'Unsavvy' users can re-install the OS that came with the computer just as easily (or not) as they can right now. And, almost by definition, people who are installing their own alternate OSs are not unsavvy.

That's exactly what they do. Buy it up, run up a massive debt which is used to pay out the equity firm and shareholders and then leave the smoking corpse massively in the hole while they walk away with the profits. And once it's a private company again the books are no longer public so its easy to hide the financial situation until they have finished sucking it dry.

I think this is going to be a major one. You can't aim at mass support and then ignore camera and format compatibility. And there is an absolute mess of formats.

It's among the major reasons (and there are a few) that I've seen people ditching Avid over the years. Now there's a software package as uptight and rigid over ideological design decisions as any OSS project you can find. Very different ideological hangups, but just as strictly enforced on the users, like it or not.

You say Micro-ATX, but that just means you have more looked at SFF builds in the last couple years. Check out the Mini-ITX spec and some of the stuff available.

Yeah, but charging stations are effectively unnecessary in the city. The car holds enough charge for any amount of city driving and then gets plugged in at night.

Charging stations are only a factor on long trips. Purely urban use will rarely see any charging while on the go.

Calling it a lock-is a bit strong. Cameras from different manufacturers gave different dimensions and specs. Something sized for one will not fit another. But the specs are well documented and widely used. For example, many professional video cameras from many manufacturers are compatible with Canon lenses.

There can be a significant amount of markup work involved. Also many books include pictures or diagrams or chapter headers if some sort that need to be displayed properly. And many devices don't render quite the same.

Basically, it is significantly more work than just typesetting for print because it also has to be widely checked and modified for cross compatibility.

Ripping them off? By not working for free? Or by paying authors? Basically no one gets rich in the publishing industry. The JK rowlings and Steven Kings are such statistical anomalies that it makes 'Hollywood star' look like a practical career path.

And things like editing are not particularly hard to quantify. A manuscript of a particular length will require a general amount of hours put into it. Those costs need to be accounted for in the final sale price. If they are not editors (and everone else that make books) will stop working for the excelent reason of not being paid. At which point you will complain that there are no good quality books being made anymore.

Seriously, how much do do think materials and production add to the cost of a book? Look, you can get a good laser printer that will do a double sided page for $.05 and one double sided 8.5x11 is roughly equal to 4 pages of a hard cover book. So with consumer equipment you can print the equivalent of a 400 page book for about $5.

I'm not a publisher, but I've got to believe that they can do it cheaper than I can with a printer from Staples.

So ever with a nice hard cover and shipping and handling and everything the entire physical costs of a book are under $10. Probably under $5. And that's roughly in line with how much cheaper e-books are than new hardcovers.

The rest is profit, aka how the writer and publisher feed themselves. And publishing is an industry that is famous for how much money everyone doesn't make on average, so don't whine about them ripping you off.

The publishers need to do a better job of lowering prices as time passes and on older books. But this "digital should be basically free" meme is bullshit.

Not that long ago an exploit that only targeted 5% of smart phones would have a return so small it would not possibly be worth it. Now an exploit that targets 5% of smart phones represents millions of phones.

Of course population density matters. The cost of "handling twice as many calls" ought to be small compared to the cost of covering large swaths of empty countryside that only generate a few calls a day. In the former case, the infrastructure can be paid for by all those extra calls and customers. In the latter case, you have to maintain tons of infrastructure that is being subsidized by customers from higher-density areas.

You are saying the same thing. Think about what "become cost-effective to extract large amounts of oil from currently known locations that are simply not cost-effective to extract at today's prices" really means. It means that the cost of oil has become so high that even silly sources are profitable. The kind where you spend 19 barrels of oil worth of energy to extract 20 barrels of oil. We are rapidly approaching the really crappy end of that bell curve.

So if the cost of oil keeps going up, at some point it exceeds the costs of the alternatives. And if the price of oil goes high enough even 'expensive' alternatives become reasonable.

I don't think it's an issue of Linux vs. Windows. I think it's a case of you vs other people's use cases. For example, the Adobe suite clocks in pretty close to 10 gb all by itself. There are plenty of games that are bigger than 10 gb.

These are not unusual things to install on a computer.