Nutmog

You wouldn't just be running away from the president. You'd be running away from a whole country full of hysterical people afraid of an imminent communist invasion and blaming it on you.

You might think the technology sucked, but all the competition sucked worse, much worse. Nobody else could be bothered maintaining so much backward compatibility. Apple kept changing their CPU architecture and resetting the clock on developing apps. Other platforms like Amiga also pursued their own platform blind to the fact that their products couldn't interoperate with the most popular and cheap software and hardware. There was OS/2 Warp which for some reason failed in the market. Probably more of the same incompatibility problems.

It's hard to see that the world would have been better without MS. It could very well have been more fractured with people having to buy two computers because they would never know which one would run the software or hardware they might want to use. Or it could have been like the disaster we have today with native mobile development - you have to program everything twice, for two different platforms! What a waste of developer time.

The gist of what you say about MS now applies to Apple today. It keeps a similar grip over iPhones, and people love them for it. It's that grip that makes Apple successful, just as Microsoft's grip over PCs made them successful. The smartphone world would surely be worse off today without Apple too.

Let's not lose sight of the fact that their cold wallet was untouched and all they lost was on the order of a hour's worth of turnover. That's more than can be said for a lot of the other bitcoin hacks.

This surprises me about America. Other countries have national criminal record databases. Is it that America hasn't spent the money to build one, or that counties/states/police stations don't want to share information, or that they're not allowed to share information?

I'd say it's fair for candidates to break promises. If voters keep voting for them and their party despite seeing that happen, then it means voters don't mind broken promises. This is what's nice about democracy - you don't have to argue about too many rules, the rules evolve naturally. For some reason it turned out that keeping promises wasn't a natural rule that voters wanted. The same goes for resigning. If they don't resign and are still re-elected or their party is still re-elected then that reflects what their constituents want, not some artificial rules that some unelected rule-maker (who would that be?) decided on.

The US system seems to be doing quite well. The majority of the population doesn't care at all, and their votes don't count. Those are people who either always vote for the same party or don't vote at all. The important decision then comes down to the minority of people who are most interested in the policies - the swing voters. Isn't that quite an efficient division of labor?

That won't happen unless American voters want it. They don't want it, as evidenced by their not voting for it, so they won't get it.

If it wasn't the US, it would be classified as a human rights violation. This is worse than imprisoning or torturing political prisoners because of the scale of it. At least political prisoners knew they were breaking the law. They're also usually fewer in number except during revolutions/etc.

Nor do eyewitness stories. Nor does recognizing someone from a single photo instead of a proper lineup. These are cases where there's already no reliable evidence in the first place. Really, they should go to court and it would be clear they're not guilty but the polygraph just helps shortcut it. Even better would be no polygraph and just release people when they find they don't have any reliable evidence.

Why not let it download fully and run the virus scanner on it? You won't get a virus just downloading a file in up-to-date Chrome.

Taking more trips to get to places they want to be. Traffic is a good thing, not a bad thing.

No middleman and no competition? No business is really altruistic, despite their public image of being the good guys.

Excellent, except it's half missing as the article mentioned. This turned out to be a dramatic demonstration of how difficult it is to preserve data even when you're trying and you're as big as the BBC.

"You may remember collecting data for the 'National Disc' which, unfortunately, we have not been able to re-publish at this time."

How do you explain all the single people who've been on many dates and are still single? There's a lot of them who'd rather not be. They evidently don't have this skill that you claim to.

Some protectionism helps poorly developed industries grow locally until they're competitive enough to compete globally (eg postwar Japan). However, other protectionism maintains inefficient industries at the expense of poor people in other countries who could do the same job cheaper (eg US agriculture)