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Did anyone notice that Microsoft already has an Android phone? Not "Android compatible" but 100% Android?

http://www.businessinsider.com...

.

Just like with the Linux kernel, it's a high time the Wikipedia community gave up the futile resistance to paid editing. It's already happening, and denying it is only embarrassing with "revelations" like this IBM case. What goes to the whole Wiki-PR debacle, turns out all the company was doing was correcting errors, libel and defamation that anonymous Wikipedia editors hiding behind pseudonyms and IP addresses have been adding to Wikipedia.

As it stands, Wikipedia is essentially an anarchy where anyone can publish all sorts of lies and propaganda, and companies like Wiki-PR are needed so that those, who are damaged by misinformation that anonymous Wikipedia editors publish, can hire neutral editors to fight the anonymous hoaxers. Wikipedia's own volunteer community has been since long overwhelmed by the sheer amounts of vandalism and biased information added every minute, and only the most obvious cases of misinformation and fraud are ever caught. But instead of celebrating the work that Wiki-PR was doing for the people and companies who have fallen victim to the terror of Wikipedia misinformation, the company behind Wikipedia instead chose to demonized Wiki-PR to media and threatened to sue them.

What's really worrying, is that Google gives Wikipedia a "boost" in its search rankings. So for example, any hoaxer can easily use Wikipedia to publish misinformation about people, products and companies that they don't like. Then anyone searching Google for the name of the person, product or company are immediately served the Wikipedia page on the subject. This page is often full of misinformation and propaganda, while those concerned (like the employees of the said company or the person being defamed himself) are forbidden from correcting the article. Previously, Wikipedia admins were satisfied with just banning those fighting the misinformation under the "conflict of interest" doctrine. But now, the company behind Wikipedia has demonstrated that they are ready to sue you if you want to correct the lies that are being distributed through their platform.

they didn't ignore the data, they had bad data

the last couple of decades has seen the rise of conservative news sources. which is good for morale. you fudge the truth a little, make things look rosier than they really are, and you galvanize your base

the problem is when you start believing your own bullshit

romney was fed the fudges the conservative echo chamber feeds itself, and was kept in the dark. so they were overconfident

there's a respected solid analyst called nate silver at the new york times, who is very good at forecasting elections with his methods

he called the election early, in september, for obama

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.n...

this analysis was pilloried on the right as a propaganda. even though he was just applying cold hard analysis

http://www.nationalreview.com/...

when in fact, the right was the one creating propaganda, and silver called them out on it:

http://www.businessinsider.com...

the decision makers around romney chose to ignore cold analysis as liberal propaganda. romney had a chance to buckle down and maybe do something with his message in october and maybe eke out a win

but just look at rove on election night: he couldn't believe the news about ohio. because the right wing media echo chamber was operating on its own bullshit, and kneejerk rejecting bad news as liberal propaganda

again, conservative media is great for the morale of the average conservative voter. but when the conservative media is depended upon by the decision makers on the right, the right loses, because decisions based on lies are bad, losing decisions

It is an objective fact that watching only Fox News makes you less informed than watching no news at all and that people who vote Republican are less educated than people who vote for Democrats.

Check this out

http://www.businessinsider.com...

for a glimpse of what they think the future should be.

I somehow missed seeing that Business Insider article when it appeared.

The scary thing is that apparently they believe all that stuff they're saying about how much better it will be.

What evidence do you have that teachers are underpaid in America relative to other countries?

America spends more per student on education than most countries.

http://www.businessinsider.com...

That's one link, but almost any other will show the same result.

Even comparing teacher salaries to other jobs results in them being paid well in the United States.

Your link shows per pupil spending, not teacher pay. I have no figures and am not looking them up now, but while I know the mid-high end teacher pay is pretty good, the low end in lower paying states (read: mostly the south) is low.

I'd also like to mention that teaching supplies and materials (curriculum's the big one) and insurance are big chunks of that $/student ratio in the US -- most countries use old books or "open source" materials which cost very little, and spend most of the money on teachers and teacher training. A good teacher can teach well out of pretty much any material -- good material is useless if you've got overworked and underpaid people teaching to the test. Kid's don't read the material; they are walked through it by the teachers. Only the kids that discover they can read the material themselves and learn what's needed, and ask questions, will excel. And that's not taught in most schools.

What evidence do you have that teachers are underpaid in America relative to other countries?

America spends more per student on education than most countries.

http://www.businessinsider.com...

That's one link, but almost any other will show the same result.

Even comparing teacher salaries to other jobs results in them being paid well in the United States.

Your link shows per pupil spending, not teacher pay. I have no figures and am not looking them up now, but while I know the mid-high end teacher pay is pretty good, the low end in lower paying states (read: mostly the south) is low.

What evidence do you have that teachers are underpaid in America relative to other countries?

America spends more per student on education than most countries.

http://www.businessinsider.com...

That's one link, but almost any other will show the same result.

Even comparing teacher salaries to other jobs results in them being paid well in the United States.

Seems Steve Jobs really was pretty smart to tell Adobe to [expletive] off with their bloated malware

Or, maybe he was just smarting from Adobe's prior treatment of Apple, as Walter Isaacson and others have reported.

Somebody is just bitter.

Sure, there's a bunch of money sucking parasites in Wall Street, and then another bunch of them in Washington DC, but then, to claim that they are the "only" jobs that pay well, is bullshit. The richest people in the world aren't the ones that merely push money about (except maybe Buffett). If you're talking about being an employee at a large corporation kind of "job", how about 3 million dollars at Google? Not sure how productive he was, but I'm pretty sure he wasn't in the business of pushing money around per se.

Tech is generally as well paid as any other industry -- it's just disingenuous to whine about compensation in the tech industry when it's been outgrowing basically every other industry, and companies scrambling to hire anyone who has a hint of talent.

And this is a very good illustratration of one of the BIG problems with such registries: no matter how trivial the crime, people will assume (A) that you're guilty

If you've had your due process and been found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt the presumption of innocence is over.

Guilty of what? Sexting with a fellow high school student? That first childhood romance? Public urination? The words "sex offender" bring up images of rape - forcible, drug-aided, whatever - and other serious sex crimes, but the "sex offender registry" is a lifetime tattoo that puts everyone from serial rapists to "huggy" 10-year-olds in the same basket.

And it also shows why a national registry is an outrageously BAD IDEA. A person who was an offender in one state would face a lifetime stigma, even in other states where the "offending" activity was perfectly legal.

And? If I went to Amsterdam to smoke pot it's legal, if I do it at home I'm a criminal and I'd get a "drug offense" on my record.

If you smoke pot in the US and you're white, you get a ticket. If you smoke pot in the US and you're black, you get 30-90 days in jail. If you mastermind a network that imports and distributes tons of marijuana over the course of a decade, you get 20 years. After you've paid your fine or done your time, you get released and can rejoin society.

If you kissed your high school sweetheart and her daddy got upset, then you are never allowed to live within 1000 feet of a school or (in many areas) a school bus stop. If you kissed your high school sweetheart, your presence will reduce property values for any neighborhood you move into. The marijuana equivalent would be to put everyone from the kingpin to the weekend toker to the kid taking her own adderall on a "drug addict registry." After all, recidivism among drug offenses is nearly 70%, where recidivism among sexual offenders is more than 5%. (actually, if you break the sex-offenders into "high risk" and "low risk," then you can find recidivism nearly 70% within the 1-in-5 minority of sex offender registrants, but that already admits that there are identifiably different kinds of sexual offenders)

The point is that the sexual offender registry, as implemented is bad policy and bad law. Repeated studies have show it has no effect on recidivism or re-arrest rates. If your point is "It's the law: whether it's good or bad, you need to accept it because public opinion is irrelevant," then your point is ridiculous. The Law is supposed to represent a codification of common values. The Law can change based on the public's experience of it, and the way we make that happen is by pointing out the flaws in existing laws.

Just before DotCom became "DotBomb".

http://www.businessinsider.com...

Depending on the source, at the time of the incident the city owned between 10 and 40.

True enough. But the (Sun) Solaris open source stuff lives on as OpenIndiana.

As a former Sun employee whose job revolved a great deal around Solaris, it's sad to see it come to this. I understand that Oracle made "back" the money Sun had lost in its last years rather quickly, and that this sort of business practice was a part of that, but they're destroying whatever good faith Sun may have had in the FOSS Community in the process.

I won't deny that Jonathan Schwartz was named the worst CEO evar, but it was during his time as CEO that Sun open-sourced Solaris, OpenOffice, Java, made a great deal on contributions to a looong list of OSS in terms of cash donations from the company and man-hours from Sun-paid staff. It's sad to see all that gone.

I believe Zuckerberg refers to users as 'dumb fucks'

To be fare Zuckerberg would have been talking about Facebook users.

Most users are idiots, Facebook users doubly so.

I believe Zuckerberg refers to users as 'dumb fucks'

Look at the Scandinavian countries and their level of per student funding.

As of 2012, the US spends more per pupil than Denmark, Sweden, and Finland.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/20...
That's an article about the value a hacked device can deliver to a bad guy. Most of those things won't apply, but a botherder could use your thermostat to send spam. He could also open a reverse command shell to act as a staging point to dig into your internal network from inside your router's firewall, and use it to launch an attack on your banking PC, perhaps.

In case you doubt this could happen, it just did. http://www.businessinsider.com...

Jim Farley knows what John Hoeven is up to... http://www.businessinsider.com/ford-exec-gps-2014-1

Are these third party companies the Israeli companies that are already working with AT&T and Verizon (Narus and Verint) in order to collect the data?

If so, then NOTHING is changing.

http://www.businessinsider.com/israelis-bugged-the-us-for-the-nsa-2013-6

The average number of texts per phone is higher than 10, I'm guessing it's somewhere in the 20-30 range based on:

Per this Business Insider article (by age group, and why no overall average!!!):
* 18-24 year olds send 67 texts a day
* 25-34, 37 texts a day
* 34-44, 28 texts a day
* 45-54, 17 texts a day
* 55+, 8 texts a day

Here are some stats (StatisticBrain.com) on daily text message numbers, for June 2012 the count was 14,100,000,000 per day (that's right, 14.1 billion).

200 million text messages captured per day would be around 1.4%.

Given this I figure they are using one or more filtering methods such as:
1. Exclusion: Ignore "non-data" phrases such as "OMW".
2. Inclusion: Include specific keywords, terrorist stuff and such.
2. Geographically: potentially based on leads or evidence or "chatter".
3. Person Of Interest: Person's of interest and 2-3 Bacons (communication links from target)

The real question, in my opinion, is what do they do with them? No one is reading 200 million texts every day. I'm assuming they have applications that look for associations and patterns of specific keywords, probably with Person of Interest as a driver.

That's what I would do... Probably should have posted Anon...

Where do you have got your numbers from? http://www.businessinsider.com/android-is-utterly-dominant-in-europe-2013-7 http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobile-phones/windows-phone-sales-in-europe-near-double-digits-begins-to-close-gap-with-ios-1185181

No, no they really don't. Here's a source for Software Engineers: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-worlds-highest-paid-software-engineers-work-for-these-25-companies-2013-4?op=1

Note that these are *averages*, not maximums. And maximums will be a multiple of the average.

Anyone working at a dog food or glue factory knows you can still make money on a dead horse. http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/4fd903b8ecad04a60a000014-960/chart-of-the-day-aol-vs-the-rest-june-2012.jpg

Competition is good. It shouldn't really matter if there is a playing field. If someone discovers an "unfair advantage" and that makes them more efficient, they should do it and others should petition for and be given the same benefit. A process of continual improvement and competition can only improve schools.

I do have to say that this article really isn't news. It is an opinion piece from an extremely statist, liberal publication. Out of thousands of publications:
http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-political-leanings-conservative-liberal-oreilly-msnbc-katie-couric-sean-hannity-2011-3?op=1

Well, he decided that *maybe* he didn't really mean what he said...

Ford Exec Retracts Statements About Tracking Drivers With The GPS In Their Cars. "The statement I made in my eyes was hypothetical and I want to clear this up."

Either he doesn't really understand what the technology his company is deploying does/how it works, OR he's a liar. Neither bode well for Ford.

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/03/middle-class-really-three-decade-slump

http://www.businessinsider.com/decline-of-theus-middle-class-2013-10

http://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/labor/news/2013/09/17/74363/latest-census-data-underscore-how-important-unions-are-for-the-middle-class/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/14/college-costs-median-income_n_3443806.html

http://www.aarp.org/research/ppi/security/impacts-of-rising-healthcare-costs-AARP-ppi-sec.html

I think quoting a single statistic without anything else to compare it to is disingenuous. More people surely are enrolling in college now than they were in my parents' generation. My parents, going to a state school, essentially carried no debt when they finished, and had good middle class jobs waiting for them. It was more likely in my parents' generation that one could be middle class all the way through to retirement without a college degree, as well.

The price of a college education has risen at a rate entirely inconsistent with median income. That's not just for Harvard or MIT - that's for all American college education.

Similarly, health costs have gone up without regard to income levels. Likewise real estate anywhere where jobs exist. Likewise daycare, or elder care. Pensions that were commonplace a generation ago are nearly extinct now, and vilified by a large segment of the population.

Sure, people can afford to have computers and DVD players and game consoles that didn't exist a generation ago, but the essentials of a middle-class life are getting more and more expensive relative to a middle-class income.

Economists say otherwise.
More here.

In a nutshell, India is dropping their ruppe to the dollars to scam some jobs from the west, BUT, not enough is flowing there anymore. Now, they are allowing CHinese goods to flow in there, who is manipulating their money relative to India, and making theirs dirt cheap.
Unless India changes SOON, they will see rising inflation, combined with lose of work. For 3rd world nations, that typically leads to a different situation: civil war.

Sometimes it's a matter of transport. Iowa has no shortage of pork at all, but the cost of shipping it to China before it loses its freshness may sometimes be more than the Chinese feel like paying.

Its not like China has any problems raising pork of their own. Half the world's pig population is in China.
The problem is their back-yard farming techniques are inefficient. Its often more efficient to import from the US.
They are buying US Port producers lock stock and barrel simply to gain efficiency.

"A full decade before Jobs launched the iPad in 2010, Bill Gates launched Microsoft's touch input tablet computer. link

I thought Apple got there first with the Newton ..
--

Apple spoof of Microsoft

I knwe someone would bring up the sailing days explorers analogy. Here are reasons it does not apply;
1; it is not exploration.
When Columbus et all went out on ships they were going to unknown territory. They were looking for new lands and new people. We have already been to Mars with rovers, sattelites and telescopes. We have a pretty good idea what is there.
2. The exploration voyages had completely different reasons.
The main two reasons for sailing era exploration was to found new self sufficient colonies and/or return wealth to Old World. A small outpost on Mars would always be dependent on Earth for parts and supplies and there is nothing on Mars that could be economically returned to earth. Some people want to go to Mars because we can. Just because we can does not mean we should.
3. The sail era explorers had some hope of returning home alive. Mars dwellers have zero chance of returning alive.
4. The only way to explore in the sail age was by risking lives to do it. Our technology has advanced much further than that. We have rovers that can go to Mars and do almost all the exploration a person can do; all without spending exorbitant amounts of money and condemning people to death on another planet.

Would the next Chuck Yeager break the light speed barrier if some egghead said there was a proven 23.234% chance his nuts would shrivel up and fall off?

Maybe, maybe not but I bet he would have said no if they said there is a 95% chance you will die in 5 years and a 100% chance you will never be with your family again.

They're only going to go if they have met a minimum amount of safety standards and have access to some pretty impressive technologies to bring with them.

Which will cost billions of dollars. Since they are having trouble scraping together millions of dollars that makes Mars One a scam. They know the funding is not there but they will put as much money in their pockets until people stop believing their hype.

Telling somebody that has vastly more information and technology at their fingertips that they are morons for even attempting something like that is a little offensive,

I'm not the only one who thinks that. That is also the point. You are assuming that the objective of the people behind Mars One is to get to Mars. That is their stated objective. I think their objective is to line their pockets with as much money as possible before everyone realizes it is a scam. I think the people behind the project are smart; I think the people who fell for it and gave them money are the morons.

It was autographed postal covers, actually.

http://www.businessinsider.com/neil-armstrong-couldnt-afford-life-insurance-so-this-would-have-taken-care-of-his-family-if-he-died-2012-8

Why the hell would this scare Microsoft?

Microsoft is ALREADY making billions off Android royalties.

Plus these vendors are already contractually obligated to pay the Microsoft tax REGARDLESS of what OS they load onto a system.

This would be a perfect trifecta for Redmond. Microsoft will just look at this and go "We'll get a royalty? WIN! We'll still get our OS tax? WIN! We don't have to support it? WIN!"

I had a package put on a truck two days in a row (according to their computer anyhow) and it wasn't delivered either time. And this was in Austin, with no snow/ice to deal with. Clearly there was incompetency involved somewhere (e.g. if a package is on a truck and doesn't get delivered the day it was supposed to, why not reverse the route the next day so it can be assured to be delivered early? Oh yeah, because UPS trucks only turn right http://www.businessinsider.com/ups-efficiency-secret-our-trucks-never-turn-left-2011-3). Sorry, this has left me a little bitter about using UPS for anything. This isn't the first issue I've had with them, either. NEVER had a problem with FedEx.

http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-pickup-truck-2013-11

They get four years before it's mostly useless.

Thin Thread

http://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-whistleblower-william-binney-was-right-2013-6

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread

http://www.whistleblower.org/program-areas/homeland-security-a-human-rights/surveillance/nsa-whistleblowers-bill-binney-a-j-kirk-wiebe

Binney.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/backissues/2013/06/takes-the-nsas-surveillance-programs.html

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/20/exclusive_national_security_agency_whistleblower_william

http://publicintelligence.net/binney-nsa-declaration/

Reinstate him as DNI.

As far as I can tell, he lives off ramen because he has no money., not because he's into martyrdom.

I said software engineers, not software engineers at google.

Earth to girlintraining, earth to girlintraining: the two buses stopped by protesters were filled with Apple and Google employees on their way to their jobs in Silicon Valley. This fact isn't buried in body paragraph 10, it's in the headline of TFS. If you want to talk about lower paid software engineers elsewhere, who still work 80-hour weeks then you shouldn't use this article as the pretext, right?

Here's more on what those poor undercompensated Google employees have to manage with. It's not exactly a secret either. Yes they are under lots of pressure to perform, but in terms of creature comforts they are pampered.

No, but they don't seem to have qualms executing corrupt politicians / business people who have done great harm:
http://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-white-collar-criminals-death-sentence-2013-7
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14197485
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/11/business/worldbusiness/11execute.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

He's not listening. Having *finally* found what seems like a legitimate weapon to beat the DNC up with, it *must* be true that his healthcare plan is worse, and that there is *nothing* to be done about it, because of Obama tyranny, and benghazi, and the faked moon landings.

I mean, a conservative policy wonk who disagrees is just a RINO, and we know they are just democrats in disguise.

You called me on it, and I goofed. It was 45%. They also took 55% of cell phone profits, used to be 80% back in 2011. The point still holds, apple dominates even with a small market share.

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/04/16/apple-pc-profits-dediu/
http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-and-samsung-take-109-of-the-smartphone-industries-profits-2013-11

NSA claims to have foiled a cataclysmic cyber threat (likely from China) to exploit a BIOS attack.

First off, there are a number of bios manufacturers, not all will have the same bug. Second, there are numerous bugs still existent. And even when known it is extremely hard to get manufacturers to fix them.

This sounds like the NSA found someone in China using an exploit in a BIOS to hack computers. Alerted the manufacturer who was probably already aware of the fact after numerous Linux users had reported it years ago.

http://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-says-foiled-china-cyber-plot-2013-12

NSA claims to have foiled a cataclysmic cyber threat (likely from China) to exploit a BIOS attack.

First off, there are a number of bios manufacturers, not all will have the same bug. Second, there are numerous bugs still existent. And even when known it is extremely hard to get manufacturers to fix them.

This sounds like the NSA found someone in China using an exploit in a BIOS to hack computers. Alerted the manufacturer who was probably already aware of the fact after numerous Linux users had reported it years ago.

http://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-says-foiled-china-cyber-plot-2013-12

It talks about how revenues went up after DRM was removed.

It'd be nice if these articles were a little less narrow minded, [...] and would, at least, acknowledge the fact that piracy has been a huge problem for the industry.

You don't dispute TFA's study that piracy increases music sales, yet you claim "piracy has been a huge problem for the industry."
Which is it?

See this graph to understand what I'm talking about (and this graph is a few years old, I'm sure it looks even worse than this, now): http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/4d5ea2acccd1d54e7c030000/music-industry.jpg

On its own, that graph proves nothing besides the fact that people are spending less on digital music and CDs.
Your argument-by-assertion holds no water at all.

Not that I will necessarily agree with the AC, but you wouldn't deny that the Russians, Chinese, Iranians, Cubans, al Qaida, and others, have access to the same Top Secret American, British, Australian, and Canadian documents leaked by Snowden that have found their way either into print or onto the web, would you? So that means that they assuredly have at least some of those Top Secret documents. That is before we get to the question of the already many and growing number of businesses (many newspapers, web sites, etc.) that have those documents, and the question of have been able to provide adequate security to prevent them from falling into the hand of nation states with sophisticated intelligence agencies that don't have to follow the niceties of American or British law such as Russian or Chinese agents operating overseas. Maybe you've heard, but Russian agents have assassinated people in the UK before. A little breaking and entering or other more subtle intelligence gathering would be inconsequential to them. And that is probably all it would take for them to get the complete trove of documents. That is assuming that they would even have to do that, that they don't have moles in those papers now. I'm pretty sure that newspapers and TV stations don't conduct 10-20 year background checks of their employees similar to those for Top Secret clearances (even if they are sometimes "imperfectly" done as they were in Snowden's case).

Experts Doubt Snowden Could Keep His Leaked Documents Safe From Spies

There is reason to doubt Edward Snowden’s claim that Russian or Chinese spies have not seen the NSA files he leaked.
.
In an interview with the New York Times published yesterday, document-leaking NSA contractor Edward Snowden made a bold claim in response to allegations that other nations may have got hold of his classified haul:

“There’s a zero percent chance the Russians or Chinese have received any documents.”

Many security and surveillance experts publicly questioned that claim. Google security engineer Justin Schuh tweeted that the remark showed “Snowden is divorced from reality,”

Now we can also add to that the fact that the UK government assesses the secrets that Snowden stole to have fallen into the hands of foreign intelligence agencies. I seem to recall that NSA, or at least some of its leaders, have a similar assessment.

Snowden leaks 'worst ever loss to British intelligence'

Sir David, the former head of the UK's communications surveillance centre GCHQ, told the Times: "You have to distinguish between the original whistleblowing intent to get a debate going, which is a responsible thing to do, and the stealing of 58,000 top-secret British security documents and who knows how many American documents, which is seriously, seriously damaging.

"The assumption the experts are working on is that all that information or almost all of it will now be in the hands of Moscow and Beijing.

"It's the most catastrophic loss to British intelligence ever, much worse than Burgess and Maclean."

You can also see the Russian response.

Snowden Inspires Russia to Boost Internet Spying

Less than three months after granting asylum to National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, Russia is preparing to implement the kind of electronic surveillance that Snowden uncovered in the U.S.

And you must admit that Snowden is in contact with FSB officials. (The FSB was formerly the KGB.)

It's Now Clear That

Yawn. Anther anti-DRM rant on Slashdot. The summary is boring and looks like Slashdot just randomly picked a comment from any article on piracy from within the past 15 years and reposted it. The article itself isn't even all that well thought out. Honestly, it looks kind-of amateurish. It talks about how revenues went up after DRM was removed. Of course, it ignores the fact that music has always had a giant analog hole, so there's an easy way to bypass any DRM.

It'd be nice if these articles were a little less narrow minded, a little less circle-jerkish, and would, at least, acknowledge the fact that piracy has been a huge problem for the industry. Looking at the industry's decline in revenue, I can't say that Jack Valenti's statement about the Boston Strangler looks all that silly anymore. See this graph to understand what I'm talking about (and this graph is a few years old, I'm sure it looks even worse than this, now): http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/4d5ea2acccd1d54e7c030000/music-industry.jpg

In case people don't know what you're referring to, The Star Trek OPs room Gen. Alexander had contractors make while he was in Army Intelligence

People who bring up growth to explain high turnover at Google are like those Apple marketing magicians who sweep their shrinking market share under the carpet and pretend that what matters is that average users spend more time using iPhones than Androids on a daily basis.

What matters to who? What matters to Apple -- a profit seeking entity --is how much money it makes selling iPhones. Which currently is more than the rest of the cell phone industry combined.

http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/11/14/apple-samsung-take-massive-109-of-mobile-industry-profits-while-competitors-lose-money

What matters to developers is where they can make the most money -- which is on iOS users.

http://www.businessinsider.com/google-play-revenue-pales-in-comparison-to-app-store-2013-10

So exactly who is market share important to?

How did "market share" help Dell, HP, Gateway, and the other titans of the PC industry? How are they doing now?

The PC market is not shrinking. What's happening is people and companies are going longer between upgrades, meaning the fewer PCs are sold in a given year. That combined with market share reports in percent (instead of raw numbers) gives the illusion that the PC market is shrinking. If you look at the raw number of PCs in use at any given time, you can see the PC market is still growing. There's a slight slowdown over the last year due to tablets, but the overall trend is still positive.