I think it’s happening, just on a slower schedule. For my circle of friends, FB peaked as an online social construct 10 years ago, then declined in the wake of Cambridge Analytica. This accelerated after last November, with even promiscuous posters bailing. I started using FB P****y and with the ads and AI slop filtered out it takes under 15 minutes to catch up, which I only need to do every 2nd or third day.

This is asymmetric assholery: the blast radius of a cell phone extends several rows behind the offender. The annoyers always sit near those they are annoying and could not care less. I still go to movies and am usually one of maybe 6 people in the auditorium. There will be one fewer if this catches on

I think it's more a vicious circle of Google being unable to get a good price for licensing the content owing to an extremely low customer base. I suppose Big Cable "won" in holding off a challenge to their declinging Bundle, but it was a pretty feeble challenge. Whether it makes sense for Google to be in a pipes business is an open question, but compared to their "moonshots" it's a pretty grubby arena to be playing in. The bigger battle unfolding is how "Big Content" will recover the revenue being lost as the Bundle melts away. The beast must be fed: under the old system the majority of American households were forking over upwards of $100/month, whereas even a promiscuous streamer is kicking in maybe a third as much. At some point investors (e.g. NFLX) will tire of subsidizing end-users, and then it will get ugly.

I ride BART several times a week, and completely agree its current state is parlous. However a few factoids (some dredged up from memory as they pre-date the modern internet):

1) Indian Gauge: I have heard the motivation was primarily stability in the event of a major earthquake occurring during e.g. rush hour

2) antiquated controller system: at least one attempt was made to upgrade it, during the 80's. One of the companies was a software contractor Logica (sp?). It was a classic large-systems cluster: over budget, late, never worked, subsequent litigation. I believe the original system used Westinghouse computers and at one time the number of trains during peak hours was limited by RAM exhaustion (measured in KB IIRC, might have still been magnetic core that far back)

3) the current problems have surfaced in part because they waited too long to replace the fleet; new cars not showing up until 2017 and they really were needed a year or two ago.

4) Aside from lack of maintenance (very real), a good argument can be made CapEx has been misdirected. Some alternatives to going south of Fremont that would have been more useful: removing SPOF at Oakland Wye; going out Geary (allegedly the busiest transit corridor in USA without rail); crossing the bay roughly where Dumbarton Bridge is. Alas the funding model for BART (and various intra- and inter-county rivalries) make all these political non-starters.

5) could be worse... consider any sprawly sunbelt city.

Perhaps coincidence, but News Corp is selling its stake in NDS to Cisco, whose pockets are certainly deep enough to attract litigation.

You are like someone trying to start a restaurant who is asking the web for advice on the menu when you should be focusing how good the location is and the rent. Your lack of business acumen (even compared to your technical expertise!) is what is going to kill you. Is your idea anything more compelling than getting hits on pages decorated with adsense crap? On the evidence you're going to get fucked either way. LAMP is probably the better bet but if you go into the cloud you'll be paying for those clicks: dearly if only a small percentage are revenue generating. MSFT is not necessarily inferior technically, but it's targeted at Enterprises with deep pockets, not 1-person startups: you will go broke with the up-front costs.

Don't let me stand in the way of your dislike of Apple... my point was evolving handheld technology tends to become quickly available to all manufacturers, so many spec advantages are transient. As for PowerPC, in retrospect that would be judged a failed strategy. Those machines were never price or performance competitive, and served to marginalize the platform. And all because (legend has it) Intel pissed off Jobs in the 80's and he held the grudge for 20 years.

The market will decide iPhone vs Android, but there's another reason "specmanship" is pointless. It is a leapfrog game for things like screen size, memory, etc. The Android phones came out nearly half a year later than 3GS... do you really think the next iPhone won't likewise advance? Ditto for RiM, Palm (if they stay in business), etc. For the most part other companies are developing the most fundamental technologies, and handheld manufacturersare just riding the curves.

...only let them read the San Francisco Chronicle

This is what Zuckerberg should be having nightmares about. http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_17/b3626167.ht m