Exactly. We would much rather not have to expend the time/energy/legal effort to file for and get patents. For many years we did not actively pursue this at all. Then a competitor sued for infringement and it became obvious that patents were another way of competing in the software business. Ideally we'd have a market where the best product could win on technical merits alone and we wouldn't need lawyers but we don't live in a perfect world. So now we have an active program to protect things we develop and ship using the patent system.

It's very much akin to the tax system. Companies get blasted for "not paying taxes", but in most cases, this is simply the corporation following the existing tax laws and minimizing tax expense, which is part of what a corporation does as part of its DNA ... minimizing expenses to maximize returns for stake/shareholders. A company who was paying taxes they don't need to is at strategic disadvantage to their competitors and has less money to do things like sell a product, pay employees, spend on R&D, etc. I'm not excusing companies that abuse the system with offshore tax havens and outright shady/fraudulent accounting, but skipping tax credits that are out there clearly called out in the tax code is quite literally wasting money ... does any individual filer not try and maximize their own deductions and credits?

If you don't like the above, you have to realize the system is broken from the "laws of the land" part ... the companies are just playing the game as it is presented to them

I think it's an "app" the young people use to send naked pictures to each other with the naive belief that they magically disappear from the other end, and that they can disguise themselves with cat noses. I believe it used to pride itself on being incomprehensible to old people. Somehow it has a valuation in the tens of billions despite losing $500M a year.

No, I don't get it, either

When life gives you lemons, ask to see life's manager!

At least that's an honest answer to what a publicly traded company is supposed to do, and what Apple consistently does. The rest of it makes me want to go vomit in a walled garden, it's just about as believable as Monsanto, the Koch Brothers or any other megacorp that's saying they are making the world a better place.

The Zentradi will be repelled by Lockeed-Martin Gundams powered by Monster Energy Drink, live streaming will be powered by GoPro and YouTube, and the pilots will be fueled by RedBull. Protoculture will be refined by ExxonMobil developed in partnership GMO Flower of Life modified and patented by Monsanto. Minmei will have a special presentation exclusively on Apple Music, and all hair gel and color is provided by the Revlon, the official grooming partner of the United Earth Forces.

My current car's instrument panel and infotainment are both screens and have the same ability to be dimmed/brightened in the same manner as the instrument panels of previous vehicles. Just as the mechanical speedo/tach/oil pressure/coolant temp/volts/boost gauges were replaced by a wire and got much better (no more lubing up the cable to keep the speedo needle from jumping around), I can't imagine auto manufacturers are going to go back from using screens (touch or not). You can do a lot more with a screen than you can with a dedicated instrument. You can display climate controls, audio controls, vehicle configuration menus, diagnostics, let the end user pick what they want to display, and so on, and it requires zero moving parts, just a data and power connection.

When I was a kid it seemed like it had so much promise. Nowadays it's just pretty much advertising.

The concent of Saunt Bezos?

Slashdot links to articles? Who knew?

To some extent, it's a fire that feeds itself. A company starts doing well, starts attracting more and more talent. The talent wants a decent life, so they buy up houses close to work. Company continues to do well, more talent wants to live there. Nobody is building new houses, and no way in hell the people already there want more traffic, denser housing, etc. So the cost of living goes up. But also, the area starts going upscale since you have all this well paid talent in the area. After some time, you end up with this vast concentration of built up talent that has zero interest in moving because they like their life. So if you want to start a new venture, it makes a lot of sense to locate it where the talent is, as you can hire the people you want and they don't need to relocate.

Case in point: me. I started with the company I work with a long time ago. I bought a house in the area. Had kids. Kids are now in local schools. Company still doing well. I like my job. My job has a lot of in demand skills. When recruiters call if they can match my pay rate, the next question is about the commute length, third is amount of vacation time, then it's to the actual job description and duties. If I'm not going to make more, there's little point. If I have to double my commute, why bother? If I lose vacation time, why bother? The area I'm in has appreciated in real estate value to the point that moving to certain locations is just out of the question, even if housing were available -- and it's generally not, we are in the "10 offers accepted above asking, 5 are cash with no inspection" part of the stupid real estate market.

First they copied the stupid "headphone jack delete" idea, now this nonsense. Guess I'll just keep putting batteries in my 6P as they wear since they are evidently out of fresh ideas and have started copying bugs made into features.

These boards come at a considerable cost premium versus the GeForce/Titan ones, and require the chassis to provide cooling, they have no onboard fan. A Titan XP is ~$1500 vs the P100 at ~$4600, a Titan V is ~$3000 vs the V100 at $8400. If you compare the non-Titan GeForce cards your money goes even farther. There are some more advanced features on the Tesla cards (memory, bandwidth, etc), and for the Pascal ones, the P100 does doubles math really well, the Titan V is nearly the same. As I understand it, these extra features don't matter to crypto miners. Why buy one card for $$$$ that can do X amount of processing when you can spend $ for one card end up with 3-4X the processing power for the same money?

From TFA: "Globally, however, Spotify remains in a league of its own, with nearly twice as many paid subscribers as No. 2 Apple, and slightly faster subscriber growth."

I'm a happy Spotify customer. It works on every platform we have in our house, including Linux

My company uses Linux, Windows and Mac across the enterprise. All of our email/calendar/messaging comes from Exchange/Outlook/Skype. Now if MS would release Outlook in this same format I could happily jettison the Windows VM I run Windows/Outlook/Skype on and not have to put up with its endless bullshit. Mac already has a client for all the MS stuff that people use.

It's about 6 steps above my pay grade to do anything about this choice, so the chances of swapping out the company's messaging platform for some open source thing, or switching everyone to Linux isn't going to happen because I open my mouth. Our customer base uses all platforms so it's not like we could drop one platform and stay solvent.

I've never heard of this company via advertising, I've never seen a billboard, I've never heard anyone I know talk about it, I've never heard it mentioned when someone asks about cutting the cable bill, etc. Upon further investigation, they were going after buildings with 10+ units only. That doesn't reflect a lot of the housing stock here. A lot of the housing is composed of 2 or 3 unit dwellings that were originally constructed in the early 20th century, largely centered on public transit stops, and built so someone could afford to own the whole building but rent the other units out (pre condo law). Nowadays, these have a mix of ownership styles, from a live in landlord who rents the other units to being a very small (2-4 unit) condo association. There are, of course, more modern apartment/condo buildings that have more units, but those aren't as common as you might find in other newer cities that had the places to build them. Of course, as you get out from the center of Boston you find more single family homes.

So according to the website, it sounds like the economics of bringing whatever equipment was needed to a triple decker was going to not work out, so that cuts out a huge part of the market for this technology. Given that a large part of renters here are students, who are going to be looking for cheap rent and move yearly, I can't imagine that the landlord is going to do anything beside the bare minimum to rent the units -- so if they are wired for a cable provider already, what's the incentive for the landlord? If they raise their rent they are likely to not be as attractive to the very price-driven college market.