... that I was so special (eye roll).

Or, just maybe, you aren't counting everybody, just large companies.

I really wish Windows had something like a "# service network restart" command. I don't want to have to reboot my computer every time I wake it but find that the internet connection is dead. I googled, and found a kludge of commands that don't do the same thing (release and renew your ip address, but what if you're offline?)

For the future, I'm considering getting a Mac Pro trashcan, maxxing the memory and storage, and then having on top of it VMware ESXi. Then on top of that, have a bunch of alternatives - probably Windows, given legacy stuff, but also FreeBSD, Kali Linux, OS-X (for an old iPod that only works w/ a particular version), and some fringe OSs like OS/2, KolligraOS, Minix and so on. Then use whichever I find most appropriate for a job. Some of those VMs won't have internet connection at all

The Dems are bought and paid for by all the Tech companies - Microsoft, Apple, Google,.... and the overwhelming number of FOSS projects are manned by people on the Left. Essentially, you're talking about an internecine war if you want Democrat politicians to pick sides - they'll have to check out their biggest donors

The GOP, by contrast, believes in the sacrament of market forces, so it's just as well that nobody's greasing them

Even if MS Office weren't there, Apple's own alternatives - Pages, Numbers and Keynote - is an existing alternative. On the games front, the Apple store has a good set of games, but if one wants the type of games one gets on Steam or Xbox, then yeah, there is work to be done

For Linux, SteamOS already exists. Incidentally, it used to exist for Debian, before the SteamOS for Steam Dock was re-designed using Arch. One thing I wonder - what changes? If one is running Debian, will Steam still install on that, or is it lost?

On a different note, I wish Steam was available on FreeBSD, maybe as a jail or something

More precisely, a disciplined group at Google gave it a strict definition and went along w/ it. It wasn't thrown open to everybody to tinker w/ its code. Yeah, one can jailbreak, and void the warranty of the phone in question

BSD is sorta different, especially if it stays w/ XLibre while desktop environments like GNOME, KDE, et al abandon X11 en masse in favor of Wayland. In which case, Lumina is the only thing I can see for the BSDs, and whatever OpenBSD uses

...Agree w/ Bryan Lunduke on this

Why doesn't NIST have backup NTP servers in other parts of the country, where the weather is likely to be different and the same issues won't necessarily strike. From what I understand, there is one in Hawaii, but how about a few others - in Florida, Pennsylvania, Washington state and Arizona, in addition to Boulder? That way, even if Boulder had lost its power, the other stations would still enable the time to be available globally

Unlikely. If it proves to be a total disaster, they'll back out. It's happened before, as with their attempted complete rewrite of Word in 1991.

Slashdot is an AmeriKKKan site, that's why you can speak freely. If it were an Australian site you wouldn't be able to say "globalize the intafada."

Try that on any of your country's sites. I dare you. I double dare you.

AmeriKKKan freedom doesn't come from any government. It comes from God. The Constitution merely states that the government may not infringe on this God-given right.

What you have isn't freedom. It's loose handcuffs. I suggest China instead of Japan, it will be good when you become a province later this century.

After all, you told the AmeriKKKans to fuck right off with their Navy ships and disbanded your air force as a useless expense. Zai Jian!

Good! Stay out! We don't want you. AmeriKKKa is closed tell all your friends not to come, too. We suck and hate freedom.

Your freedom of speech to shit on AMeriKKKa was brought to you by the Constitution in and the First Amendment. In Australia people can't even speak out against Jews without being arrested. Good example you set.

You are an incurable optimist. Things can *always* get worse.

Yep, first thing I thought of was Joel's diatribe against rewriting your codebase from scratch.

That's the thing we observe: unassailable titans of industry get disrupted all the time. Just look at the list of companies on the DJIA 50 years ago versus today: the lists are almost entirely different.

Here's the thing I don't understand about your argument though. Do you think large, old companies are super efficient or very badly run? You assert they focus on the most profitable opportunities, which means they'd have to limit their expansion, and that they grow unduly large, which implies they're doing too many things which they're not particularly good at. Which is it?

My assertion is the market is far better at replacing today's giants with new giants tomorrow than regulators are. Amazon looks unbeatable today. In 50 years we'll be wondering why anyone cared about them.

You know what's kind of like sex? Companies merging and splitting up. You know what's like ecological change which forces species to evolve? Changing technology and social organization. The world is not static. Companies need to evolve to survive. Mergers are one way they do this.

You want an example? I used to work at HP at the end of the Bill and Dave era. I think it was 49 on the Fortune list, a large company by any measure. It prided itself on its stability. Several large acquisitions, breakups, and unfortunate leadership changes later and the company isn't even recognizable.

I'm sure every greedy businessperson wants this. But that's the interesting point, you can't actually achieve that, just like all children can't be above average. As soon as a company tries to exercise market power, they open the door for competitors to arise. The bright sparks in Econ can show how it's impossible for any one company to swat down every single competitor which pops up.

And practically speaking, it would be virtually impossible to achieve. There are lots of greedy business people who want to run GlobalCo and who won't merge.

Think about the complementary situation: lots of people would like one world government. How likely are we to achieve that?