Self-driving cars will be an unbelievable resource saver in the transportation space as well. Not only will families that currently have two cars need at most one because commuting won't be required, but they won't even need one. They'll just call an automated taxi whenever they need to go somewhere. Hit a button on your phone and a car shows up in 30 seconds, drives you where you need to go and drops you off for substantially less cost than what you pay per mile owning your own vehicle today. Consider a world in which we need only 1/10th of the number of automobiles -- even assuming the same level of local travel -- because the cars that exist are nearly always in motion rather than being parked most of the time. Eliminate nearly all of the parking lots and driveways and garages and suburban sprawl becomes considerably more compact and efficient, even without shifting to high-density housing, which means even less need of automobile travel, because walking and cycling are more feasible.

It's a struggle to see a huge difference between these "driverless cars" and taxis. I notice taxis haven't produced the outcome you describe.

I don't see it that way....who decides? The self serving government who collects and benefits from the taxes? The politicians in charge?

You live in a democracy. You and your friends decide.

Can you be a little more specific ?

Interesting. It certainly wasn't cheaper than beef in Switzerland when I was living there. Not even close.

The only question is when will the producers stop producing.

And the answer is never, because the proportion of people with the ability to do better that choose not to is vanishingly small.
This is what we know happens in the real world, not what some hypocritical loony thinks will happen in her sadistic fantasy world.
Try reading this if you want something with a more positive and morally agreeable outlook on the future.

Taxes in Australia have been steadily dropping for thirty years. They're nearly as low as America's now, and (thanks largely to policies implemented during the last Conservative Government's tenure) we're also running deficits.

Lets say top end rates go back to some of the historically high ones that have existed.. say 70% to 90% on income above $X, what possible incentive would there be to earn that money in the US? Someone with the ability to earn that money will choose to do it in a region where its not taxed like that.

So *that's* why no-one lives in the ~90% of countries in the OECD with higher taxes than the USA !

Look at Google, Starbucks, etc, that are doing just that by taking that income in places like Ireland. So no they dont say "I just wont make more", they do it outside the US where they dont pay taxes on it and that money leaves our economy.

And it sure did Ireland a lot of good, didn't it ? Or haven't you been paying attention for the last five years ?

The problem is we continue to take from the top 50% and give it away to the bottom 50% who pay essentially nothing and in many cases get a refund check anyway for various credits. This does little to motivate anyone to try and make more money.

Then why isn't everyone just sitting around claiming welfare ? Why do the vast majority of people work and try to earn more money ? Why is this true even in countries with dramatically more liveable welfare systems than the USA's ?

I'll help you: It's true because reality is in direct conflict with right-wing rhetoric.

Xbox is probably the closest they've ever been to being genuinely competitive. Beyond that it's all monopoly or failure.

Office and Exchange are two fairly obvious examples.
The Slashdot anti-Microsoft crowd also forget that Internet Explorer, also, did actually beat Navigator by being a better browser. That's why its marketshare really exploded with IE4, in the six months before that was integrated into Windows 98 (and the year or so after that before Windows 98 displaced Windows 95).

How can it? They buy a PC it comes with Windows. It's already factored in and can't be factored out. Not without a significant amount of effort anyway. It's simpler and usually no more expensive to just pay the fucking Windows Tax, wipe, and reload with your OS of choice. MS still gets the sale in most cases even if you don't use their OS.

It is, and always has been, easy to buy a PC without Windows if you really want to. Most people simply don't want to. Get over it.

They tried.

And failed. That was my point.

This time around, Microsoft's doing it in stages, and making their own hardware, so that OEM participation isn't necessary. Same goal: they own the whole PC. Not the OEM. Not the consumer.

OEM participation is always going to be necessary. Microsoft don't have the size to address the entire x86 market, any more than Apple does.

Nobody is preventing MS from bundling anything as long as they don't abuse their monopolistic position in the market. There are many ways to remedy this or to avoid this in the first place - I suggest you read up on this if you are serious in participating in a debate related to antitrust and competition law.

I have. Or, rather, I did a decade ago when this was actually relevant.

BTW, a quick search on Google gives you plenty of references to the Winsock issues and also some history on how Winsock came to be. I take it that you know how to search on the a internet for information.

Certainly, but I have no way of knowing what "references" *you* are using.

Let me explain. Nobody advertises vegetables, so they are less popular. Everyone knows that vegetables are good for us, but we still by processed crap foods instead because they are easier to ship and keep for months and years. Veggies go bad quick

The mere fact your false dichotomy is between "vegetables" and "processed crap foods" says all it needs to.

I spent six of the last ten years as a Linux sysadmin and the three before that as a FreeBSD sysadmin. There's nothing you can tell me about Linux I don't already know.

Then there is Android with 68% of the portable device market. Surely THAT isn't any indication of how easy Linux can be. It is amazing what happens when there is marketing. Linux wins. It beats Apple and it trounces anything from Microsoft.

Thanks for supporting my point.

Surface is DOA. Sure, we will see it used in movies and TV shows and in millions of dollars of ads, but humans have learned - we don't **need** a proprietary product from Microsoft anymore. I look forward to when MS realizes they need to make compatible, open-format, OSes, and software products.

If you think anyone but a tiny minority (seriously tiny - as in fractions of one percent) give a flying fuck about "proprietary", or "compatible, open-format, OSes", you're in no position to make a comment about anything, because you're completely disconnected from reality.

The only thing that matters was whether the monopolist was hindering competition at the time by abusing its monopoly position.

It's funny that you mentioned Winsock. Back in the day Microsoft created a winsock library that detected and overwrote the proprietary winsock DLLs included with the software from the leading online service providers of the day (AOL and Compuserve) [...]

Source ?

[...] and, surprise surprise, conflicted with the software of those services. Many speculated this was to push Microsoft's new (at the time) online service - MSN

Except - before even contemplating how completely different those things were - winsock was Windows 3.xx era and MSN came in with Win95.

So for Winsock, yes, there was a definite point to answer regarding monopolistic practices when they started bundling it in Windows 95. It also killed Trumpet Winsock, but that was another matter entirely.

So you would argue Windows shouldn't have a TCP/IP stack today because it's anti-competitive ?

How far back do you want to go here ? Will you argue Windows shouldn't have Explorer because back in the day the whole GUI was a separate product ?

A large part of that was leveraging its OS and bundling it with different products in other markets (such as web browsers) and making it difficult, if not impossible to separate them (thinking back to the IE debacle).

Yet today the idea of not having an embedded browser component in your desktop OS is laughable.

Used to be your desktop OS didn't even come with a network stack. Was it monopoly abuse when Microsoft put one in Windows ?

It's MY hardware. Once I buy it it becomes MY personal property to use any way I see fit.

Knock yourself out then, no-one prevents you from doing so.

Zonda won't stop you taking one of their cars down to the beach. However, nor will they help you turn one of their cars into a dune buggy.