I know that "Get a Mac" seems like a trite statement to a lot of people, but in the case of professional audio and video production, there really isn't any reason to do otherwise. Your choices for professional studio compatibility are ProTools or Logic, and everything else (Abelton, etc.) is pretty much only used by hobbyists, not professional studios.

FWIW, my current home studio setup is still a Power Mac G5 Dual 2.0 GHz machine with 1 GB of RAM and a 160GB SATA-1 drive. I use a second 160GB SATA-1 drive for my recording deck. My interface is an M-Audio Delta 1010 (24-bit/96 KHz), the PCI-X version (this is the last Mac that actually works with the PCI-X card). I'm running Logic 7.2 still, because it works for what I need, which is for recording a small rock band. I have an M-Audio Octane 8-channel mic preamp fronting it, and the outtput goes through a Presonus Central Station before hitting my Sennheiser HD280 cans and M-Audio Studiophile BX8 nearfield monitors. My microphones are a pair of M-Audio Solaris large diaphragms with Shure Beta 57A and 52A dynamics. I use a LaCie Electron Blue 19 CRT monitor. All in all, a very respectable home studio setup, circa 2005, which is when I bought it.

I can easily record 16 tracks with a shit ton of software plugins including multiple convolution reverbs before running into CPU or disk speed problems. This workstation is not used for anything other than recording, and ten years later, it's perfectly functional, if limited to Mac OS X 10.6 (I keep it off the Internet, mostly). If I needed a bit more speed, I could run a RAID-0/1, add RAM, or add a tc electronic PCI DSP card to handle the reverbs and some of the other effects, rather than having the Mac calculate everything. But, the fact is, I rarely run into insurmountable problems with the amount of bandwidth in this machine. There have been times when I've needed to "freeze" certain tracks in Logic in order to avoid CPU snags, but I'm recording a four-piece rock band: drums, bass, guitars, vocals.

This whole system was literally plug and play. You are simply not going to find anything that works this simply or this well in Linux, not even now, in 2016. Eventually, this system will be replaced with something new and a Firewire or Lightning A/D/A box, and I'll upgrade to whatever version off Logic is current, but there's no need to fix what isn't broken. Logic is, to my knowledge, the only system other than ProTools that is capable of using Avid/Digidesign ProTools HD interfaces.

Of course all programming languages came from alien sources. All our computing technology came from outer space. Otherwise, how could Jeff Goldblum have written a virus and uploaded it to the alien mothership, thereby saving the entire human race?

1. You cannot buy anything from the App Store without having entered and stored a credit card account with Apple.
2. IOS has always had the ability to disable App Store purchases, both for apps, and for In-App Purchases.
3. Children should not be given such things without proper supervision.

Apple should countersue these stupid people for being such a nuisance.

Actually, DHT is far more potent an androgen than testosterone, and is the primary androgen responsible for masculinization. If you block the metabolism of testosterone into dihydrotestosterone, you have dramatically decreased the levels of androgens in your body, plus the testosterone gets metabolized through other enzymes into estradiol, the primary estrogen responsible for feminization.

Testosterone is far less potent than its DHT metabolite. Inhibition of 5-alpha reductase causes testosterone to be metabolized through other pathways into estradiol.

Yes, but it's DHT that's primarily responsible for the androgenic effects in your body. Blocking the 5-alpha-reductase enzyme which causes testosterone to be converted to dihydrotestosterone *does* leave more free testosterone in the body, but it get shunted to another metabolic pathway due to lack of 5-alpha-reductase, and is metabolized into estradiol, which is the primary estrogen in post-pubescent and pre-menopausal females.

Small wonder that long term usage of finasteride might cause permanent sterility and/or erectile dysfunction. Less androgens and more estrogens in the body eventually leads to exactly that.

Anyone who knows anything about transsexual transition-related hormone replacement therapy known this, but unfortunately, as very few studies have actually been undertaken regarding the administration of the drugs generally used for trans HRT specifically for that purpose, the information is pretty much only looked at by those of us who need to know it.

Basically, nobody's "allowed" to talk about this, because none of these drugs have ever been approved by the FDA for transition-related therapy. I wouldn't be surprised if that's the angle the defendants use to counter the lawsuit, and if that helps open up the channels for better research into trans healthcare needs.

No company can keep up selling polished turds for over 10 years and still have the whole world think their products are great while they aren't. You might be able to pull that off once, using sufficient hype and a big marketing push that distracts from the downsides of your product, but if it actually sucks and is not worth it's money, you'll be out of business within 1 or 2 generations of your product. Nobody buys a polished turd twice.

Please explain, given the above statements, the financial success of Microsoft.

They really ought too. We know where +1 came from.

It's rather more likely than the monopoly being open. How long does proprietary technology generally last in an open market?

The point really, is that because AT&T controlled the whole system, there was no need whatsoever for them to be open about the technologies they developed that were directly applicable to telecommunications, nor was there really much need for them to apply many technologies they developed that they could have capitalized upon, so the charge of stifling innovation is apt.

What's even more interesting is that we will never know if competition would have spurred the development and deployment of carrier transmission systems that are far more powerful, efficient, and flexible than the T system had competition been imposed on AT&T earlier. As you pointed out, the T carrier system was developed and deployed decades before the information on how it worked made its way to the open marketplace. It was never improved because AT&T had no need for efficiency, being a monopoly.

As an aside, I will note that having been involved in the installation of T carriers hundreds of times in my career since the mid 90's, I can tell you that the ways in which the physical assets comprising the telecommunications infrastructure are depreciated are an accountant's wet dream, or so it has be related to me by Bell personnel.

As someone who did a lot of work in the early-mid 1990's helping to commercialize the Internet, I have to say that I must respectfully disagree.

AT&T, as they were constituted, had a very long history of secrecy and obstruction of technological innovations reaching the general marketplace. Let me ask you this, have you ever seem any non-Ma Bell publicly available books prior to the 90's describing how T circuits work? No, you haven't, because they didn't exist. This information was guarded very carefully by AT&T as proprietary information and as trade secrets. Very, very few people understood how these things worked back then, and most of those were former AT&T and Baby Bell employees.

Did Bell Labs create new things? Sure they did, just the same as Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center created things, and IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center created things. The difference was, AT&T had a government protected monopoly and used their monopoly power to stifle competition, so they kept all these things in-house. The other guys only dropped stuff that they didn't feel had commercial potential, and they weren't monopolies, anyway. It wouldn't have mattered if other companies came up with technological innovations in telecommunications, unless they thought they could sell them to AT&T, because they wouldn't have be able to commercialize them with AT&T controlling the market. The real advantage of the break up was not price competition, but that AT&T had to start sharing the market with other companies, and because of that, they were forced to let other companies know how to make their systems interoperable with the existing infrastructure.