Slashdot Mirror

And since you are going on about production, what exactly has Israel produced for the world except a continued source of strife in the middle east?

You forgot irrigation expertise, which they export to many other countries. Not exactly bananas, though.

"Then again, people are that stupid."

Celebs don't really help crappy stuff:
http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/brandnewday/archives/2008/08/microsofts_turn.html?campaign_id=rss_daily

Okay, we need to hammer a few things out here with regard to this post. I'm not here to make excuses for anyone, I just try to strive for balance. Even though I am a registered Republican, I am going to probably going to be switching parties to the Democrats for logistical reasons. I align with the Libertarians the most, but not being able to participate in the Democratic primaries in Philadelphia is basically ensuring that one's voice is not heard. Now, let's go to line-by-line.

I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but I see a lot of this around. I don't understand how people can be so dumb as to think that Democrats are the heavy spenders.

I have to ask you if this comment is serious or not. Is it? There is no way to say this nicely. To assert that Democrats are not heavy spenders is just absurd, naive, and probably a result of being force-fed your party's propaganda. And we can throw some cognitive dissonance in there for good measure. Entitlement programs make up a monstrous percentage of the Federal budget and most of these programs are championed by Democrats. As a recent post of mine has shown, Social Security and Medicare alone make up 42% of the Federal budget. Democrats' spending is so big in these two programs alone that they have their own deductions from one's pay. That's huge and it does include other huge programs like Medicaid and Welfare. And it does not include the national healthcare program that the Democrats have been wanting so badly.

The Republicans have, ever since Reagan, been trying to outdo each other by lowering tax but raising spending. See here for a discussion. It is the Republicans, not the Democrats, who are the big spenders.

Do you have a source or any kind of evidence for these assertions? While that article may sound nice, it is light on data with only two numbers and leans heavily on anecdotes. It's also ironic that you later criticize McCain while the article defends him as being one of the last of the old guard in terms of fiscally responsible Republicans.

Saying that Republicans are big spenders without pointing out how they spend is pointless. It is no secret that they love spending on defense, but what else do they spend money on? Historically, wars are expensive. So much so that taxes are sometimes levied to pay for them. I am not a fan of how Republicans have been spending in general, but what I want is to find out if Republicans spend like Democrats do when one strips out defense.

And if you believe that you can run a deficit for decades without harming anything, then you're a fool.

I agree. But with a prospective program like national healthcare, how can you possibly shield Democrats from making the very problem that you decry so much as becoming much, much worse? The Democrats continue to stonewall Social Security reform. Social Security and Medicare are simply unsustainable and supporting the programs in their current form implicitly approving more spending.

And McCain has admitted that the economy isn't his cup of tea, as evidenced by his proposed cuts to the fuel tax.

So you would rather have someone who is able to admit that they are not strong in an area or instead have someone who lies about it, only have to deal with repercussions of that later down the road?

At least Obama knew enough economics to oppose that.

That is almost totally wrong. While he did oppose it recently on the federal level, he voted for such a measure on the state level and was so patronizing as to joke (at least I was assuming he was joking) that they should have recognition signs put on the gas pumps that would note the legislature's role in the suspension of the tax holiday. When Obama tried to act so econom

I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but I see a lot of this around. I don't understand how people can be so dumb as to think that Democrats are the heavy spenders. The Republicans have, ever since Reagan, been trying to outdo each other by lowering tax but raising spending. See here for a discussion. It is the Republicans, not the Democrats, who are the big spenders. And if you believe that you can run a deficit for decades without harming anything, then you're a fool. And McCain has admitted that the economy isn't his cup of tea, as evidenced by his proposed cuts to the fuel tax. At least Obama knew enough economics to oppose that.

Given the current crisis, I'd vote for Obama on that alone. What economic knowledge he's demonstrated makes him far more qualified a candidate than McCain or Clinton, despite some of his other failings.

Infineon.

But the problem may lie with the way Apple's software uses the radio.

"'I said to myself, either she's a good actor and a good liar, or what they have done to her is really crummy,' Lybeck says. He took the case on contingency, meaning he gets paid only if Andersen collects damages from the recording industry." http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_18/b4082042959954_page_3.htm Seems like a nice guy, i doubt he would've taken all the money.

Oh yea, and their new iPhone is a great toy, nice fun! But in the work world where I have a job to do - F the iPhone. It's a great fun toy - but fails to do important stuff, you know, like handle phone calls well. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_34/b4097000494697.htm

I was QUITE surprised at the scheming behind the scenes when I read this article some time back. They *know* what they have and aren't holding back. It is interesting just how little they try to hide it and how no one really cares how much they are milking the franchise.

Some odd FORCE really drives the market. I have a collection with items dating as recent as 1981, valued between $5000 and $7500. The original prices for the items summed to no more than $670!

Which solar cell company was it, does anyone know?

NanoSolar.

Falcon

Prove it! And prove there will be no dangerous radioactive waste left.

He admires the European model of Government so much why doesn't he see they were wise in using nuclear power?

Even "Businessweek" admits it can take 10 years to build a nuclear power plant in Europe. Like that's going to help us now.

Falcon

People aren't going to be driven to working for $50 a month. Especially if you want to talk about $50 in terms of American buying power instead of in terms of Chinese buying power. Wages for skilled workers in China are well above $50 a month:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_13/b3977049.htm

And it isn't as if there are a whole lot of people left when you move past the West, China and India (basically, the only cheap, unskilled labor forces left are the rest of the Middle East/Asia and Africa, and that's only a couple billion people).

As it is, talking about nominal income is a lot less interesting than talking about standard of living, and the standard of living is skyrocketing in China, not declining. If you analyzed it, you would see that the gains in China are more than offsetting the losses 'caused' by the 'exploitation' of Chinese workers.

There isn't a shortage at all, in any industry - if you're willing to pay a fair and competitive wage.

This is true in IT, true in agriculture, true in housing, true anywhere.

Where the US worker is getting fucked over is by countries that lack our labor protections and environmental protections, that treat their people like slaves, who then sell "services" to fat-cat CEOs and undercut what ought to be a fair market wage. And of course, this actually amounts to the real inflation we've been feeling for years - instead of monetary, we get shit for services when jobs are moved to third-world crap countries.

Bought a new home and found that all sorts of repairs - roofing, supports, improperly laid foundation - were needed? Congratulations. An illegal mexican built your house, and you paid the price: money out of YOUR pocket on repairs, plus YOUR inflated tax bill to pay for his illegal family's medical bills in the emergency room, his anchor baby's birth in the local hospital, his illegal kids' schooling (stealing directly from YOUR kid's education), the crimes committed by his illegal friends and his kids in gangs, and of course the fact that HE and HIS ILLEGAL FAMILY are stealing someone's social security number to run up debt in their name.

The person whose SSN he stole, who will have their lives and credit ruined when he skips out on the bills later? Congratulations - that could be YOU or YOUR kid. The kid killed by his friends or his kids in gangs? Congratulations - that could be YOUR friend or family member.

Tried to call tech support any time in the past few years? Got nothing but idiot Indians with accents thick enough to strangle a moose and who can't actually address the problem, just keep yammering from a script? Congratulations, you're a victim of this.

They're wasting your time, and giving you substandard service. Oftentimes, I call in for a warranty only to run into the cultural problem that the indians don't understand what a warranty is or, worse yet, they are simply instructed to ignore the warranty terms. And forget asking for a supervisor - they just hand you off to someone else from the cubicle next to them, who then hangs up. Getting their name? Good luck - they all give lying fake names, to avoid someone actually managing to complain about them specifically should someone get to the person in the US who's supposed to check up on customer service.

Similarly, instead of being able to get a human (or substandard indian variant thereof) at all, I usually spend 20 minutes on hold with a looped tape of "you can get self service on our website"... well guess what sherlock, if your website was any good, if my question was actually answered, I wouldn't be on the phone calling.

But remember - "open borders" and "free trade" are good things. And you can keep repeating that to yourself as YOUR job gets shipped out to trash heap india, communist china or mexshithole.

If you think YOU'RE a slave, try working in a iPod factory in China for a while. And be glad Apple at least hasn't outsourced you....yet.

Here is an example of the rate of patents being used as a surrogate for rate of innovaction

And here is an example where they are not:

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/apr2007/id20070420_997596.htm?chan=innovation_innovation+%2B+design_top+stories

And that examples shows what the position of the US government, US academics, and leading US businesses is.

In different words, you're full of shit.

Just a week ago BusinessWeek had a piece about health care insurance companies buying your prescription drug history onto which they base your insurance premium.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_31/b4094000643943.htm

Health care probably needs more an element of solidarity. Insurance is a business and as such it is legitimate for them to aspire for higher profits. Cynically, it is also legitimate for an insurance company to deny services to higher risk individuals. It is legitimate for a business but it points to deep deficiencies in how health care finances are set up in US.

In contrast, Germany's system (and probably others in Europe) has an element of solidarity. Healthier people subsidize sicker people. American system is an insurance, set up for calamity but actually used as pre-paid service.

Frequently companies have tried to charge different prices in different parts of the EU. In some cases, they have tried to keep dealers from selling across borders inside the EU. Which is illegal and leads to news like this:
http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_43/b3652195.htm

Foreign countries paying Americans to build arms for them brings in capital that didn't exist here.

No it doesn't. It brings in goods. The only way for foreign countries to get American dollars is to send us goods (or get us to give them the money for free). All exporting does is give us more money to buy foreign goods. Since the American dollar is the de facto world currency (and the world economy is growing), we run a trade deficit. Increasing our exports does not reduce that trade deficit; instead, it increases our imports.

Ironically, the thing that brings foreign capital to the US is Americans buying foreign goods. Because there is an advantage to holding one's money in the world currency, foreign investors take their import profits and invest them in the US. This tends to cause bubbles (dot com, housing, etc.) when times are good, as foreign investors have a lot of US dollars to invest then. Later, when times are bad, the US imports less and foreign investors have less money to invest, causing a bust.

This is why the US should consider a national wealth tax. Currently, about $13 trillion of $50 trillion in US wealth is held by foreigners. A modest 1% (10 mill) tax would raise about $130 billion from foreigners and could be offset by income tax reductions (or a conversion from an income tax to a consumption tax) for domestic investors. Thus, something revenue neutral for domestic tax payers could still add an additional $130 billion in tax revenue. A wealth tax also makes more sense as a revenue source for defense spending than an income tax does.

A wealth tax would discourage foreign investment, increasing the US's internal investment. Further, it would reduce the loopback effect of booms by increasing the tax as the value increases (rather than waiting until the profit is taken via a sale). Note that foreign investors do not pay taxes on their US capital gains to the US (and may or may not pay it in their own country) but would still have to pay the wealth tax.

For all that I pay around 200$ a year for the whole family.

You pay more than that, but the rest is confiscated as taxes. Business Week" has a short article on it, and while it says France has more hospital beds and doctors per capita than the US does, it also says "France is wrestling with runaway health-care inflation" and is raising taxes because of it. Now I'm all for increasing the number of health care professionals, I believe it would lower prices for one thing as there'd be more competition. But I do not agree government should control health care and medicine. Actually I'd like to see the FDA eliminated. I'd also like to see government give people who buy private health insurance the same tax breaks employers get for offering employees insurance. Doing this would open the floodgates of people trying to get health insurance, and insurers would do what they could to lower costs so they could get as many people to sign up with them as they could.

Falcon

Many in the science industry work with Macs. Many in computer security work with Macs. They offer the stability of Unix and a nice GUI. The reason these people buy Macs instead of buying commodity hardware and installing BSD, Solaris, Linux, etc is that they don't want to. These people have the expertise but if they're like me (I've installed Unix, Linux, Windows, systems), they just don't want to deal with more complications than they have to.

Now, it hasn't made a dent in corporations as much. Pricing and customization are major factors neither of which are Apple's advantages. I would say that Apple right now isn't ready to deal with the complications of corporate support as well. They do have some corporate customers but not many.

Businessweek however has started to see a rising trend where companies are starting to adopt more Macs at the request of their employees and other factors. MS has really helped Apple with Vista as companies upgrading to Vista might find they need to upgrade hardware as well. With Apple running virtualization software, companies who buy Macs don't have to fully transition to OS X right away.

It's better than the American health care system, so that would be a plus compared to going to the USA.

Ebay's growth doesn't have to be by squeezing the sellers.

Exactly my point. EBay would do a lot better in the long run if they treated their sellers like genuine partners instead of cows to be milked. They cannot and should not try to please everyone but their solution to increasing profits so far has just been to raise prices on sellers and frankly they're just about at the point they cannot do that much more.

For example, they bought Skype and they could do something with it to grow their company.

Skype to my mind is the most retarded thing eBay has done to date. It has zero fit with their current business model or with their skill set. It's probably the clearest signal that the eBay management is seriously lacking in talent or discipline. Of course that's why they had a $1.4 billion write down on their purchase of Skype.

You'd have thought Taco would be linking to the print version whenever possible by now...

• The "if you've done business with me in the recent past" loohole--A lot of credit card companies are essentially selling telemarketers the rights to call you on their behalf (if you have one of their credit cards). So now instead of getting calls that say "Hi, I would like to sell you product A" I'm getting calls that say "Hi, I'm calling on behalf of Discover. I would like to sell you product A." A new low even by credit card company standards.
• The "polls, research, charities" loophole--Now I get a lot of calls from companies claming to be doing market research or polls, when they're actually just trying to sell something. I also get calls from for-profit companies who've somehow scammed their way into 501(c)(3) non-profit status, trying to pass themselves off as a charity as they hawk their product to me.

Overall, things have improved a great deal. My telemarketing calls have probably dropped by about 75% since this law was introduced. But I still get WAY more than I should be getting (which should be none). Until they close these loopholes, a landline is still a bit of a pain in the ass.

Fortunately, both groups use computer autodialers which let me spot them very easily. If there is even the slightest pause after I say "Hello?" I know it's a telemarker (a normal person will respond immediately, an autodialer takes a little time to connect you with a live salesman). I've also found it helpful to always give my voicemail number at work as my "phone number" with any new company I do business with (telemarketers never leave messages).

I have a cousin who actually LOVES to get telemarketing calls, though. He has found all kinds of creative ways to screw with them. He will try to keep them on the line as long as possible, encouraging them with lots of questions and feigned interest, only to tell them "No" at the end (time is money for telemarketers). He will ask them "Hey could you hang on just a minute?" then put the phone down and go watch TV. My personal favorite is when he responds to them with "EXCUSE ME, but I'm trying to masturbate here!"

Nice post. This idea is already being implemented in Isreal. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_05/b4069042006924.htm?chan=search

I guess I misread the article, then. (No sarcasm there.) It's been a few weeks since I read it. Here's the portion, from the article, that I recall having led me to believe water was not privately owned: "The idea that water can be sold for private gain is still considered unconscionable by many," says James M. Olson, one of America's preeminent attorneys specializing in water- and land-use law. "But the scarcity of water and the extraordinary profits that can be made may overwhelm ordinary public sensibilities." (See http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_25/b4089040017753.htm for this quote in its full context.)

I wasn't implying anything desparaging, just stating facts. Yes, I'm a grumpy old bat but you mustn't take it personally. Anyway, I doubt very much they teach this stuff in most schools (it's "ancient history" now), but you can read a little about it here, here, and here.

You mean this article?

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_24/b4088048125608_page_2.htm

The leaders of OLPC believe the laptops must be much more than electronic substitutes for textbooks if they are to profoundly effect learning. The group, an offshoot of MIT's Media Lab, which Negroponte launched 23 years ago, has based its educational philosophy on the theories of Seymour Papert, a Media Lab professor who pioneered the use of computers in elementary education in 1967. Papert, now retired, developed a theory called Constructionism, which posits that young children learn best by doing rather than by being lectured to. So to create a tool that could deliver more than rote lessons and e-books, OLPC designed the machine and its software to enable collaboration, exploration, and experimentation. "We're hoping that these countries won't just make up ground but they'll jump into a new educational environment," says David Cavallo, OLPC's chief education architect.

CULTURAL IMPERIALISM?

While this philosophy is essential to the mission of OLPC, it's also a source of tension. Current educational leaders in Peru embrace Constructionism, but most countries base their education systems on the idea that teachers pass their knowledge to receptive students. That was a problem for OLPC in China as well as India. India's education department, for instance, calls the idea of giving each child a laptop "pedagogically suspect," and, when asked about it recently, Education Secretary Arun Kumar Rath barked: "Our primary-school children need reading and writing habits, not expensive laptops."

What's misinformed about it? It's skeptical coverage rather than the uncritical puff pieces you'd get in Wired or a blog but I don't think that's a bad thing.

• Dilbert - do I need to describe this?
• Explosm.com - Cyanide and Happiness comic
• Fokke & Sukke - Dutch comic. Popular daily cartoon (yes, I'm dutch and the name is intentional)
• Little Gamers - gaming comic
• Penny Arcade - gaming comic
• FAIL blog - epic fail every day

Finance & Economy

• BusinessWeek Online -- Most Popular Stories
• Calculated Risk - general blog
• The Economist - News analysis and views
• NRC | EconomieDutch newspaper, economy section

Space

• Bad Astronomy - Phil Plait's blog about astronomy and skepticism
• Chris Lintott's Universe - Astronomer, Galaxy Zoo co-founder and co-host of BBC's The Sky at Night
• NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
• New Scientist, Space - Astronomy section of New Scientist
• Space.com - More space news...
• Starts With a Bang! - Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel, tries to answer some common but very complex astronomy questions.
• Universe Today - One of the most well known astronomy blogs

Tech

• Engadget - THE gadget blog
• Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories - making crazy electronic stuff (and drooling over niche market product catalogues)
• Gametrailers' ScrewAttack - funny gaming videos
• Kotaku - THE games blog
• Reuters Science
• Reuters Technology
• Slashdot
• The Brainy Gamer - in-depth articles about (the history of) games in general
• Tweakers.net - the dutch Slashdot

Misc

• Greggman - American gamedev'er who lived in Japan
• Jort Kelder - Dutch dandy. Ex-editor-in-chief of Quote, a magazine about entrepeneurs and the life of the nouveau rich. Co-host of the dutch Dragons Den.
• Scalzi's Whatever - Sciencefiction author.
• The Sartorialist - Fashion photographer. If you'd like to dress like a man with some class, instead of a fake tan metrosexual...look here for inspiration.

Maybe you could link these interviews you are talking about?

Best I could find was this: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_43/b3905109_mz063.htm

And they say that day in history is hazy at best.

I often wonder why Slashdot posts links to a version of the article formatted for printing rather than the main article.

Also, in what way has Paul Allen failed? Seems to me he's doing rather well for himself.

Overall, sure, but he has certainly had his share of losers. For example, "BusinessWeek magazine calculated he had lost $US12 billion in the previous five years.".

That's not really true. Their first de facto monopoly is in the OS market with Windows. When Windows first came to the market, it was more of a GUI for DOS and they managed to screw DR-DOS. And with the de facto monopoly in the OS market, MS illegally leveraged their monopoly to gain another monopoly, this time in the browser market. In the meantime, they also tied functionalities of their Office apps to Windows and practically gained a huge marketshare. With this position of Office, they tried to bully Apple to "knife the baby", i.e. kill QuickTime.

All in all, judging from their behaviors to abuse their monopolies to gain more monopolies, you can't honestly said that MS avoids monopoly and that they like to compete. Competing means having better products, service, prices. Not FUD, stealing, screwing partners, blackmails etc.

An interesting (if little known) fact about the guy (Edwin Black) who wrote that book is that he was a major proponent of OS/2 back in the 90's. At the time, he had absolutely NO PROBLEM with IBM's history, which IBM has always owned up to, and was more than happy to do a lot of business with the company. Around the time that Lou Gerstner announced that OS/2 was a "dead end", he started making noise about getting back at IBM for ruining his publishing business (he published books and magazines around OS/2). Shortly thereafter he wrote that book and launched a lot of high publicity lawsuits (all of which got thrown out almost immediately for lack of evidence and relevance). The guy made a LOT of money hyping a thin connection between modern IBM and the german nationalized subsidiaries that were involved with the Nazi's, and it is well known that he got a lot of the basic facts wrong. Still, because there is a lot of pent up anger at IBM for various reasons (you name it, the failure of OS/2, their previous domination of the computer industry, etc) this IBM-Nazi connection gets thrown around a lot as a sort of blood libel against the company.

I'm surprised there's even one semiconductor company in Massachusetts (it's about as far away as you can get from the tech centers in the US)

Obviously you don't read Business Week.

This isn't a Republican or Democratic issue, it is a societal one. Year after year, administration after administration, we as a society have been saying "we don't really consider science/education/research all that important."

Just look at the trends: companies are increasingly seeking out technical professionals overseas because they're churning out greater and greater number of graduates with science/engineering degrees with China pushing out 600,000 such graduates compared to the US' 70,000 per year; and how can we compete in biotech when the majority of our citizens can't grasp genetics nor do they even believe in evolution (we beat Turkey though!)?

With the way we've been funding education and paying our teachers, we collectively give educators the big middle finger tipped with stinky poo every year. We're making these choices as individuals so we all have a hand in this appalling state of affairs.

FWIW, Paypal is a bank in Europe. Reference.

Just as long as you plan on using T-Mobile, and it'll be more than a few months - more like the end of this year.

No other carriers plan on offering any Android-capable phones. And that includes Sprint, the only other carrier besides T-Mobile that's even signed on for Android.

Actually, waiting lists for surgery are as long in the USA as they are in Canada.

let's just declare this thread successfully finished

Highly skilled immigrants help keep America competitive.

They are no more highly skilled the US citizens they are replacing

However those immigrants are more entrepreneurial and are more likely to start their own business which creates more jobs. More immigrants means more jobs.

Why would you want to prevent our companies from hiring the best and the brightest?

I have heard that line few thousand times. Guess we stupid 'ol 'mericans can't do no nuffin' without all the genius Indians, is that it?

While I agree with the sentiment that those H1b holders take jobs away from Americans, there's a trend that immigrants are more entrepreneurial and start more businesses, which creates more jobs, than native Americans.

Actually, the PC market has had consistent ~15% growth since 2005 (with a dip to ~10% growth in 2006). Apple had a dip to ~20% growth in 2006 and is on track to grow significantly more than ~35% in 2008 if they keep it up (they've had an early boost from the MacBook Air and "silver" iMac sales).

For the first time in decades, Apple is revealing how absurd those figures are.

The fact is, despite Apple's impressive growth, Apple still has only ~7% of the US market. Their share of the worldwide market is way less. That doesn't mean Apple isn't doing great, but your paranoia is pathetic.

LG has a new phone that has touch screen and slide-out keyboard. One complaint is that the touch sliding isn't as graceful as the iPhone.

iPhone is like a luxury car. The Acura TSX (okay...not a Rolls Royce, I admit) does pretty much everything the Honda Civic does. But it's a more comfortable ride and if you're using it every day, that makes a big difference. A clunky interface is an inefficient interface = bad for work. Apple's iPhone GUI has no comptetitors at the moment. While GUI isn't everything, for email, web, maps, contacts, even calendaring if you use Google or iCal, I'd rather use the iPhone than Windows Mobile.

Oh, and the keyboard...you're right: I can't type without looking at the screen like some kids can with their non-touch phones. But I can type a page of real words in less time than a non-12-thumbed adult can type "omg we lost teh deal".

And again /. ate my reference. I know that is why they invented the preview button.

It's not just consumer stuff. There's a well publicized account of Chinese counterfeiters setting up a fake NEC in China which sold products that NEC never manufactured. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/01/technology/01pirate.html?pagewanted=all

How many products can only be made in the U.S. or E.U.? It really doesn't take that long to throw together a manufacturing plant. Honestly, with the huge numbers of educated engineers in China and its culture of IP theft, how long was it going to be before truly sensitive, high tech products were copied?

The FBI's fears remind me of a recent book, The Execution Channel. http://www.amazon.com/Execution-Channel-Ken-MacLeod/dp/0765313324

While it might be a lot of trouble to rewrite firmware in a legitimate product, what's to stop someone from writing malicious firmware into their own knockoff product?

Says who? O2/T-Mobile, or Apple... Apple is the one demanding a cut of the carriers' revenue. Hence, no carrier subsidized iPhones.

What I find interesting is.. oh wow, only 50 posts in the first 90 minutes? Where are the fanboys now? Seven months ago, when I predicted with prefect accuracy that Apple would fail, you couldn't get them to STFU. They were gaa gaa over the iPhad, and now look... They are nowhere to be found. Fair weather fanboys as always. Those fanboys aren't real Mac fans. They don't care if Apple is delivering great products. They buy Apple as a status symbol.

Apple has failed. Apple failed for reasons I outlined months... almost a year ago. I predicted it before the phone even launched. Apple is selling a locked product that is defective by design. Worse, Apple is spitting in the face of the Mac developers who are truly the most hardcore mac fans out there. That's bad business.

For those who have not read the transcript, here it is and it is a good but small taste of how nasty Microsoft was in the 90's. Lest we forget Microsoft actually had a lot of competition in the 80's and 90's and felt threatened. Now that Vista is seen by most of the public as a dud, and little computers like the EEE are taking off in areas MSFT never figured into their OS model I could see how they might feel threatened again. Which in Microsoft's case means we really need to watch out for underhanded tactics as it is their MO in those kinds of situations. But that is my 02c,YMMV.

Instead, prices are controlled by futures traders. Any potential disruption of oil supplies drive the prices up. When Bush threatens to crap on Venezuela, oil prices go up. The invasion of Iraq significantly destabilized the geographical center of the world's oil production, which has been a huge contributing factor to the artificial rise in oil prices.