He’s trying to make the deal look as good as possible to preempt regulatory antitrust objections. If the deal manages to get approval, will Microsoft really do all of these feel-good things?

I can’t help thinking these TikTok “challenges” are orchestrated by someone who stands to gain from the school closings and loss of faith in public schools. Sure, there’s an obvious gun safety component, but I think it’s more than that. I think kids are being duped into shitting where they eat for someone else’s gain. That makes it doubly awful and sad.

Difficult to define, but you generally know it when you see it. If this looks like an ad, it probably is.

I keep thinking the Amazon Echo and Google Home should be free because Amazon and Google are getting far more benefit from the devices than the purchasing consumers are. As it is, they're building Trojan horse devices for our living rooms *and* they're getting consumers to pay for them. If the devices were free, however, I suspect fewer people would want them because they would have less perceived value. By charging a substantial price for them, Amazon and Google make consumers think they're getting something valuable while also making more money. Making them free would effectively be admitting what they really are.

Smartphones are complex. A few examples of any given model will have problems. iPhone, Galaxy, Pixel, all of them. Does anyone know what typical problem rates are? Are the problem rates for Pixel phones close to typical? If so, there's nothing notable to see here.

Any chance LG could be trying to force Apple to build an 8K iMac and use LG as the panel supplier by leaking this? Maybe LG is hoping the rumor will force Apple to deliver in order to avoid disappointing analysts and shareholders.

You don't understand ESX licensing. The $5000 ESX license is for a VMWare host, not for a virtual machine inside. So you pay a total of $13000 for an ESX server that can host as many virtual servers as the hardware will handle. Also, blades are generally a bad idea as ESX hosts because you're putting all of your eggs in the one blade center basket. One of the main reasons to go with ESX is to get the ability to VMotion virtual servers to different ESX hosts in the cluster if one ESX server dies. You lose some fault tolerance if multiple ESX servers are in the same blade center.