You pretty much got it - the core of Microsoft's argument was 100% vindicated by history. It's one of the little quirks of nature:

1. Bundling DOES help the consumer. Apple is the proving point. The users crave a unified bundled approach. Even to the level MS never envisioned, hardware, service and software.

2. An upstart competition could arrive at anytime and take MS's market share, because unlike natural monopolies on resources, the human capital needed to fight MS was readily available to competitors. Google, Apple, Blackberry, all came from nowhere to drink MS's milkshake.

3. The browser is a natural part of the operating system and it's unfair to force MS to accommodate competitors who someday would be more profitable or powerful than MS.

4. MS doesn't have the ability to set prices which is a critical part of the monopoly power. This is so obviously true. MS exerts almost no price pressure on the market these days.

Your politics are backwards. Nationally, the car dealers are associated strongly with the conservatives in the GOP. Many, many, many car dealers are owned by Republicans.

Nate Silver correlated the data nicely back when the major makers were on the verge of bankruptcy.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com...

It's better than 8-to-1 correlation (i.e., a fairly strong correlation).

The problem is that, adjusting for inflation, it should be dramatically less. That's the trend. The major outlier is for raw materials which are more costly to extract and process for use.

In the 1950's a decent Westinghouse consolve TV cost about $1000. Inflation adjusted to today, that's about $9000. You'd be hard pressed to spend $9000 on a TV today unless it was a big theater setup or was quite exotic. That's because technology has replaced the need for many expensive raw materials, improved production (including moving it overseas), and driven out the excess.

Auto manufacturers have a problem, and they are the ones driving cost inflation, trying to convince Americans to spend more and more of their income each year on automobiles. For the last two generations this has been through fictionalization of automobiles - you are buying a payment, not a product. That has started to lessen, but record low interest rates have prevented a major crash in sales, and actually led to some good years against a trend of decline.

There is a large untapped market for a car marker who builds the same model of car, with no changes other than manufacturing refinements, for 7-15 years, direct to consumers. From a manufacturing theory perspective, there are something like 7,000-10,000 drivers in an auto production line. 10 years is about what you could expect to optimize the supply chain for each driver, maybe half that if you are very good at managing supply chain. This type of company is stymied by three things:

a. cheap credit money which makes it cheaper to buy a new car than to maintain and run older cars,
b. regulatory creep which increases requirements continually and
c. consumers willing to spend a large slice of their income on flashy cars and status symbols.

And in the end, car dealerships do deserve to undergo a radical change in their structure. They are inherently bad for customers.

For one - they make money in ways that customers are not aware of. The most insidious being "point spread". You walk in, buy a car, and they make money selling the car (fair), future service either under warranty or direct to the consumer (fair), and more importantly, on the financing. You might qualify for a certain rate, but they get a big chunk of the difference between your best qualifying rate and what they convince you to pay. So you qualify for a 3.5% rate, but they get you sign on the line for 9.9%, and they get roughly 50% of the point spread between 3.5% and 9.9%, which on many financing arrangements, is far more than the profit involved in selling the car to begin with.

Second, they do an only okay job with service. They do not typically do as a good job as independent shops, and for warranty work, face little competitive price pressure.

Finally, they are effective local monopolies and do not always respond to market pressure. Because of brand monopolies, there is not as much competition as they would have you believe. The car market is deeply segmented, and so there are not as many brand choices in a price/demographic band as you might think. On paper there are 15 manufacturers selling through dealerships in a market. But for a single random consumer, there are likely 3 or 4 options that meet the basic criteria of type and price range.

In many small towns or areas, the local car dealer is the wealthiest person in town. There is a lot of profit standing between the car maker and the consumer. And in the end, this excess is needs to be wrung out of the system. Manufacturer's should not be able to prevent car dealers from selling and servicing cars, but long-term, the concept of a franchised car dealership needs to be scaled back. Channel conflict is inevitable.

The problem with variability is that when you can generate it, you may not have a need for it. The conventional solution to this is fungible energy storage, some way of storing the energy generated so it can be reclaimed as energy -- batteries, pumped hydroelectric, compressed air, some way of capturing the energy as energy and then using the captured energy as means of generating energy to smooth out variable output to get a consistent production that can be used more as a base load generation.

Energy storage is highly imperfect -- batteries are expensive and limited, pumped storage requires the right geology, etc.

But what if we looked at a simple finished product -- like fresh water -- as basically a second order form of energy storage? Since fresh water from sea water has an energy value, what if instead of looking at energy storage in terms of creating electricity, what if we looked at in instead as a finished product?

So build desalination plants tied to the grid in a way that they can scale up production to continuously absorb the amount of power generated by the variable source -- basically create the grid demand to match the power input instead of trying to match the power output to grid demand. Modern desalination plants using Vacuum Vapor Compression could be built scalable so that they could turn individual units up/down to meet available input power.

That's the point. You don't need for people not to be able to see to feel private. You just need to not be forced to acknowledge them. As illustrated by the people going to the bathroom, the people hanging the tie on the door, the reality television stars finding privacy while on camera and the Asian who finds privacy behind a translucent sheet of paper. When push comes to shove, it doesn't matter that they can see, as long as you don't have to acknowledge them.

I consider the current situation where we're working as a culture to create new taboo's to cope with "cyber-bullying" as the beginning of the process.

These under-the-table jobs are frequently not with normal employers. They might be with some guy who has a truck and runs a landscaping business, which consists of hiring day laborers or just guys he's familiar with, paying them cash, and driving them around to people's houses and having them cut the grass, trim the bushes, and weedwhack. They might just be regular individuals picking them up to do some random work at their house. If they speak English, they might just start their own "business", consisting of posting on Craigslist for various handyman-type work (landscaping, fixing block walls, drywall repair, etc.), which they do for cash at peoples' homes.

When you hire someone to paint some rooms in your house, you don't check their SSN (you'd have no right to) or have them fill out a W-2 form. You agree on a price for a job, they do it, you hand them cash, and that's it. Their taxes, as a sole proprietorship, are their business. This makes it pretty easy for people to work under the table without documentation.

How long until it is mandatory to have a data plan for your car to use any of the infotainment features, ie, their is a built-in incompatibility or missing feature to pair your car with whatever mobile data device you already own (phone tethering, MiFi-type device, existing municipal wifi, etc)?

Car maker makes data usage exclusive to one carrier, earns spiff for every subscription, carrier just ups data plan cost to cover spiff.

Total ripoff.

Sure, it's not useful in modern chips however. Following the theories on optical chips however, you don't need it to be directed when banks are set projected.

Meh why be shocked at this behavior from the left? Unless it's attacking the US for being the US like the liberals did when they were in power it's pretty much all the same. And while I'm not super impressed with everything Harper has done, the diversification that we've gotten under him as well as trade deals far outstrips what the previous governments did in the past. When they were content for Canada to be a one-trick-pony only selling our goods south.

Yes, it's true that lots of them work at restaurants and other service jobs this way. I'm not denying that. They're basically the tier above the day laborers, because working at McDonald's is much more reliable work than day labor. But there's also lots of day laborers and others working under the table.

Don't forget, those people paying taxes in ARE receiving benefits, since their income is reported against someone else's SSN, so they're free to claim no income and apply for benefits (WIC, etc.).

Throwing an object at near-lightspeed doesn't contradict our current observations of gravity at all. We're already able to overcome gravity and achieve escape velocity with rockets of sufficient thrust.

Do you have any examples which would contradict our current observations of gravity?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

In 2009, we were responsible for 40% of worldwide arms sales.

In 2012, we spend 18% of our budget on "defense", 7 times more than China.

Now consider that our "defense" department has been repeatedly found by the GAO to be unauditable because their accounting is so incompetent.

Also, I find it laughable that so many republicans are concerned about 'welfare' and 'entitlement' yet happily sign on for farm subsidy bills that cost trillions, to keep the votes from fat-ass, lazy, uneducated, corn-fed, bigoted midwesterners rollin' right in.

No, the landscapers where I used to live in Phoenix all worked under the table. They were paid in cash. You don't need an illegal ID to get paid cash for a job. Go pick up some day laborers from Home Depot on Thomas Rd. and ask them if they ever needed an ID to get a job that way.