Slashdot Mirror

Nope. Per TFA:

essentially a two-door Chevrolet Volt with a handsome exterior and a leather-lined cabin.

Exactly.

Comparing it to the Tesla S is patently ridiculous.

16.5 kWh lithium-ion battery pack in the Volt finds its way underneath the creased sheet metal of the ELR, as well as its 1.4-liter gasoline-powered range-extending engine. That allows the Caddy to motor along on electric power alone for up to 35 miles before the gasoline engine kicks in to juice up the pack and keep the ELR going for a claimed range of 300 miles.

Claimed range of 300 miles is when you run out of gas.
You get 35 miles on battery.
Its Volt technology in a much heavier car.

Comparing that to real world Tesla range makes for pretty depressing reading.

It really depends on your local power company, its solar laws lobbying skills, NET/FIT rates, federal solar panel import protections and state/city building/code regulations.
Some areas ensure you get real cash back for feed in back to the grid. Others do not offer much export cash to homes with solar.
City building/code regulations can also be costly in some areas.
http://freeingthegrid.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_metering#United_States
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/solar-panel-next-granite-countertop-161321343.html
http://www.fool.com/how-to-invest/personal-finance/home/2013/09/15/net-metering-how-a-little-known-policy-can-shave-h.aspx
With energy prices going up, you get a FIT, if the cost of a solar install in your state is fair, your home has newer appliances... the pay back period is not so unaffordable over many years.
Power cost 30c per unit, you get 60c back for every unit exported from tax payers and/or power company.
Power cost 30c per unit, you get 15c back for every unit exported from tax payers and/or power company.
Power cost 30c per unit, you get 4c back for every unit exported from the power company.
Power cost 30c per unit, you get a time limited credit back for every unit exported from the power company.
Power cost 30c per unit, you get taxed for having solar. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24272061
Mix in NET, tariffs with off-peak power rates, smart meters and it gets more interesting :)
The whole electrical load can be reduced with new appliances, efficient home design (heating~cooling, materials used), better orientation when building, roof slope, understanding tree shading.

Brand value != market cap. Good primer: http://beta.fool.com/chrismarasco/2012/08/31/inventing-brand-value-market-cap-ratio/10815/

Make a prediction. Any prediction.

If you're wrong, no one will remember,

Except if you're Jim Cramer in which case people did, and do, track his predictions so he can't forget and claim otherwise.

If you take notice, there's an awful lot of red on his predictions.

It really depends on your local power company NET/FIT rates, federal solar panel import protections and state/city building/code regulations.
Some areas ensure you get real cash back for feed in back to the grid. Others have do not offer so much export cash to homes with solar.
City building/code regulations can also be costly in some areas.
http://freeingthegrid.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_metering#United_States vs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed-in_tariff#United_States_2
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/solar-panel-next-granite-countertop-161321343.html
http://www.fool.com/how-to-invest/personal-finance/home/2013/09/15/net-metering-how-a-little-known-policy-can-shave-h.aspx
When energy prices going up, you get a FIT, the cost of a solar install in your state is fair, your home has newer appliances... the pay back period is not so unaffordable over years.

I don't believe there is enough profit for MS in software for tablets. The apps are cheap and there is no upward pressure on prices.

Apple makes billions of dollars a year off of app sales, at least $3.4 billion. Selling hardware is a one time thing, customers buy it and keep it for a long time, but apps can be purchased everyday. Just like the console model, customers buy one console, but keep buying games for years, and Microsoft makes the money on the game sales not the console sales.

Also if the hardware is not in the hands of customers then there is no one to make apps for so developers don't make apps. So it works like this:
1) sell hardware cheaply so everyone buys its
2) developers will come when they see there are customers to buy the apps
3) when customers see there are apps, more customers will buy hardware
4) Profit!!!

This business model has worked for Apple, Google, every console (Sony Playstation, Nintendo, etc), even selling razors, where the razor is cheap but the blades are expensive

You might want to keep up with the news... You really don't want to be a stale iHater. Makes you look more stupid(er).

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/08/03/apple-is-once-again-the-worlds-most-valuable-compa.aspx

a) his Wife prods him to donate his wealth

More likely his financial adviser. You don't have to pay capital gains on donated stock, but you get to deduct the current market value. He'd be a fool not to take advantage of this tax rule. The rule makes it possible for millionaires to join the 47% who pay no federal income taxes, but it also causes lots of charitable donates.

Apple, Microsoft and Google don't need to grow to survive. They can continue to operate profitably at their present size. AAPL has a P/E ratio of 10. MSFT, 18. GOOG, 26. Those are all reasonable price/earnings ratios for successful mature companies. F (Ford Motor) is at 10, and IBM is at 13. Both are century-old companies, still doing well.

Now look at Facebook, P/E of 514. And that's after the stock declined 37% since "the world's most hyped IPO." Facebook just doesn't generate much profits. Facebook's traffic and revenue peaked in 2012. In revenue terms, Facebook was never that big. It's in the class with Adobe, not the big boys like Microsoft, Google, and Apple. If Facebook didn't have a two-tier stock structure that gives most of the votes to Zuckerberg, he would have been fired by now.

That's Facebook, the biggest success in "social". Everybody else is doing worse. Zynga just had a big layoff. Social looks like the first dot-com boom and crash - the players were talking about "clicks now, worry about the revenue later". Well, "later" is here.

The fundamental problem with "social" is that the revenue model is to crank up the ad density, which annoys the users. In the last year, Facebook introduced "sponsored stories" and Twitter introduced "sponsored tweets". Myspace tried that strategy. It didn't end well.

A very important and sensitive meeting? More important than Berkshire Hathaway's?

Q1 2013 - cars sold
    BMW Group (BMW + Mini + Rolls Royce): 448,200
    Audi: 369,500
    Mercedes: 341,511
    Tesla: 4,750

http://beta.fool.com/sarfarazis/2013/05/08/audi-vs-mercedes-who-is-winning/33384/
http://www.bmwblog.com/2013/05/02/bmw-group-reports-first-quarter-revenues/

I'm getting tired of hearing about Elon Musk. Just what we needed, another white South African with an inflated ego.

When one is being referred to as "the next Steve Jobs", you gotta wonder.

Contrary to popular myth, one doesn't get a Worldwide reputation by just being great - you need PR and self-promotion (Even Mother Theresa was heavy into self promotion.). I mean really, what has he done? Part of the folks who started PayPal (black mark). Tesla? Yet another entrepreneur trying his hand at an electric car - BFD. Yet another billionaire wanting to open up space tourism? BFD.

Is he doing anything original? Is he stealing anything original?

If Musk were the next Steve Jobs, there'd be a Tesla dealer down the road from me and we'd be seeing many many more of those cars on the road - actually, I don't think Ive ever seen one on the road where I live. I did see a competitor's - Fisker - though.

Motley Fool:

Sure, the swine flu didn't send revenue skyrocketing, but it was some nice extra bacon that far exceeded what most companies would have gotten for just the seasonal flu. For instance, AstraZeneca's pandemic sales were more than 2.5 times that of its seasonal FluMist vaccine; Glaxo[SmithKlein] quadrupled the revenue seen for its seasonal vaccines Fluarix and FluLaval.

There's definitely a correlation between flu scares and sales of flu vaccine, as every source I looked at specifically mentioned swine flu as a driver of vaccination recommendations.

My take: There's a real problem here, but it's blown way out of proportion. The flu vaccine manufacturers have every reason in the world to make it sound like "We're all gonna die! Panic! Get vaccinated right away!" when what actually happens is that the people who die tend to be elderly or otherwise already sick, while healthy adults fight it off pretty easily. And those same manufacturers are major advertisers on television networks, so they could very easily say to their sales rep at the network "You know, we'd really like to see more coverage of the flu problem. Here's some information about it to get you started."

Not a grand conspiracy, just this business model:
1. Find a problem
2. Figure out a solution to this problem.
3. Help news organizations convince the general public that this problem presents a lethal threat.
4. Sell the solution.
5. Profit!

Exactly. And my entire point is that whoever is counting on an inefficient market to somehow support Apple's stock price is a fool.

USPS might not be so bad in terms of general performance if Bush hadn't been lobbied so hard to nearly destroy it.

Actually, the packet mail delivery industry isn't suffering. FedEx, UPS, and DHL are all doing fine - it's only the US Postal Service that's having problems. A big part of their problems are caused by government regulation, which many see as being designed to try to get rid of the USPS. See http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/03/04/how-the-postal-service-is-being-gutted.aspx for fuller explanations.

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/03/04/how-the-postal-service-is-being-gutted.aspx

cell phone subsidies drive up cost T-mobile is dropping them and even when you pay full price for a iPhone over 2 years you pay less with T-mobile and get more data.

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/12/07/cell-phone-subsidies-rip.aspx
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/12/t_mobile_end_smartphone_subsidies_paying_more_for_your_phone_is_good_for.html

I suspect it isn't such a big deal, really. "Fiscal cliff" has started to sound like fingernails on a blackboard to me.

What would probably happen can be found here (caution - graphs with data).

Ironically RIM is one of the few companies that forced Dolby Laboratories to sue them over patent infringement. Dolby is often touted at being very fair with its patent licensing.

Care to provide a citation with that?

If Google doesn't work on your machine, sure.

"AMD is aware that these very chips Intel produces are found in around 95.5% of servers around the world, as per Mercury Research. AMDâ(TM)s share of the server processor market is around a dismal 5%."

Graph at bottom shows AMD at 4.5%

"AMD lost server processor unit market share (now down to just about 5%)"

"The Intel x86 architecture has clearly won the server segment, and within the x86, Intel has 95% market share and AMD has 5% market share and is declining."

The more "official" source is probably IDG, but they only provide yearly figures. For 2011 they listed AMD as having a 5.5% server market share, and Bulldozer isn't going to improve that for 2012 but still a few months until you get those numbers... Oh yeah and that is x86 servers, not all servers just the Intel-AMD turf war.

Sony:

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/08/02/sony-loses-312m-in-last-quarter_n_1731696.html

Sony Loses $312m In Last Quarter On Weak Gaming And Mobile Sales

ZTE:

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/10/15/zte-warns-of-upcoming-quarterly-and-9m-loss.aspx

ZTE Warns of Upcoming Losses

Huawai:

They don't report profits AFAIK.

If it's a strawman, what is the hint that you said you were sending them? What Kjella said boils down to that you want all the benefits of the sites you like to be provided to you for free. That seems to be the case - if not, what message are you trying to send by visiting sites that cost money to provide and then blocking the ads?

A much better strawman is your penultimate paragraph:

People will provide content. The internet existed before its "monetization".

I'm sure people will provide content and that the internet existed before it carried adverts. Frankly, though, that's pretty irrelevant. I don't want the 1990s internet, I want the 2012 internet, and I don't just want random peoples' blogs I want videos, music and professional journalism, and whether you like it or not those things cost money.
It's good of you to recognise that YouTube differs "somewhat" from your website, but I don't think you realise quite how different it is. You can run a website for $10 a year as long as it doesn't do much and few people visit it. A popular website costs a little more. Estimates for YouTube's operating costs run to $700 million a year, including over $1m per month for bandwidth.
You may be inclined to claim that that is a ludicrous overestimate - but it isn't. Since they recently floated, Facebook's financial statements are in the public domain. Their prospectus lists their total expenses for 2011 at almost $2 billion dollars, including $388 million spent on R&D. To put it mildly, using your $10 website as a baseline for the modern internet is ridiculous.

I'll be blunt: I don't want your website - I want YouTube, I want Slashdot, I want quality journalism, I want music. Providing those costs money which either means people have to pay or they have to show adverts. If your vision is to replace that with the sort of content that can be provided for $10/year - no thanks. Almost every website that's cheap to run is cheap because it's bad and because nobody cares.

In history? I don't know. I imagine the South Sea Company or the East India Company are among the contenders. Companies like Standard Oil would also crush Apple. General Electric, Microsoft, Intel and Cisco both hit, in modern times, higher market caps than Apple.

Here's what I got from a quick Google.
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/08/22/a-history-of-ridiculously-big-companies.aspx

The Fool has a great article on this. You simply can't compete. http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/08/10/the-terrifying-graphic-that-shows-stock-trading-r.aspx

Wrong. Read the whole article you linked to... this chart shows high-frequency quoting, not trading. There's also have a link to the people who created the chart, which is worth a read.

...the GIF charts the rise of HFT trading volumes across all U.S. stock exchanges between 2007 and 2012. The initial murmur, the brewing storm, the final detonation: Not just unsettling, it's terrifying. ... we don't know is [sic] what the long term consequences are of all this hyper-volume as depicted by the Nanex GIF and the kind of systemic risks created from the market's ongoing evolution from human traders to rapidfire AI. Sometimes things go wrong, a software glitch, an algorithm gone rogue and the music stops, like last week when Knight Capital (NYSE: KCG ) lost $10 million a minute when it's [sic] trading platform went haywire...

"If your carrier doesn't have iPhones now, they aren't going to have them. It's just not cost effective."

So three of the four major carriers in the US are idiots? And as far as the fourth.....

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/05/13/t-mobile-wants-the-iphone-bad.aspx

CEO of T-Mobile.....

  "Not carrying the iPhone led to a significant increase in contract deactivations in the fourth quarter of 2011." With open arms, T-Mobile has always welcomed adventurous users who are willing to unlock their devices, but even then the iPhone is relegated to 2G data speeds because of frequency-band incompatibilities."

The typical iPhone subsidy is $400 for a two year contract. The lowest two year contract is $70/month -- $1680.

Misconception: Most of what Americans spend their money on is made in China.

Fact: Just 2.7% of personal consumption expenditures go to Chinese-made goods and services. 88.5% of U.S. consumer spending is on American-made goods and services

They [Microsoft] at least tried, sorta, to innovate and compete.

Here are some prime examples of Microsoft's idea of "innovation".

Oh, and as far as "compete" goes, I think you really mean "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish", don't you?

As opposed to innovating a little bit and then suing anyone who catches up with them and surpasses them.

Well, first: Apple has innovated a LOTTA bit; and

second: Suing people that have infringed your patents is what businesses, especially tech-driven ones, er, do...

Don't imply that Apple is The Great Satan(sm) when they are doing what they have to do to protect the interests of their stockholders, and what has unfortunately become the only way to defend patents.

It used to be that a patent-holder (even a little guy), could send a C&D letter to an alleged infringer, and the infringer (even a big guy) was loathe to continue to violate the patent once "on notice".

But then, I think in the late 1980s or early '90s, there was a Court (don't remember if it was SCOTUS, or not) decision that turned all that on its head. NOW, the (alleged) infringer is allowed to keep on infringin' UNTIL THE OUTCOME OF AN INFRINGEMENT ACTION (!!!)

Short digression: One of the worst things that came of that decision is that a "little guy" patent-holders basically have no chance with deep-pocket infringers; because the deep-pockets can keep on filing dilatory motions and discovery requests until the little guy runs out of money... [/digression]

But, the other thing that happened was that now, everyone felt pressure to "sue immediately"; because, as the patent-holder, the quicker you can get a decision, the quicker you can get injunctive (and/or monetary) relief. So, because of this, in patent disputes (esp. between TWO well-heeled parties) everyone immediately files suit these days.

Not really. The usefulness of Moore's law today compared to twenty years ago is much less. There's plenty of articles about this if you search for "the end of moore's law"

http://beta.fool.com/blackngold/2012/05/30/end-moores-law/5100/

Because it only makes sense to buy it back if you're reasonably sure it's going to go back up again. You buying a stock just because it's been tanking lately may just mean you've fallen into the Value Trap: http://wiki.fool.com/Value_trap

"Challenge Everything(TM)" EA

One of the biggest innovations the new board members could bring with them would be a time machine that would enable them to travel back to 1999 and prevent Yahoo! from squandering $5.7 billion in capital on its acquisition of Broadcast.com from Mark Cuban.

These time travelling board of directors could then safeguard this capital from other potential blunders by locking it up in Apple Computer stock, which according to this inspired 1999 Motley Fool article admits Apple is "a very meaningful distance away from being a top tier Cisco, Intel, Microsoft or Yahoo!. That said, Apple is directionally on target and looking quite strong among the pack of PC makers." It would have been a much cheaper buy than Broadcast.com and left Yahoo! with pockets full of cash in 2012.

Yahoo!'s biggest problem over the years has been their leaders who have been suckers for hucksters who can deliver a good dog-and-pony-show and their organization itself has been unable to successfully deploy any new business concepts.

Seth

How is this different

How is this different from when Google uses open source? There's a great article about the supposed openness by Google here

Some good points from it:

Where Google is losing you can count on them pushing the open label in order to build momentum & destroy the asymmetrical information advantages of existing market leaders. But where Google leads non-transparency is the norm.

- At the same time Google is trying to push social sites to offer transparent data, they decided to block some Google search referral data (unless you are paying for the clicks, then you get that data).

- When planning some of the features behind Google+ one of their employees wrote a book about the social circles concept with Google's blessings. Then, after he wrote the book, Google revoked permission to publish it!

- Android is open but internal Google emails revealed that carriers were getting wise to Google using compatibility as a club.

- The Panda update was needed to rid the web of garbage content. And yet Google is pre-paying Demand Media to post videos on YouTube. Since the Panda update downstream Google traffic to YouTube has more than doubled & YouTube is serving over a trillion streams per year!

- In spite of not having permission to do so, Google has been scanning books for nearly a decade now. Yet whenever Google goes to court they try to get the court documents sealed so that their statements couldn't be used against them.

If you only had to manage competing against other market competitors & staying inside Google's editorial guidelines then investment isn't that difficult, but if you have to stay within Google's guidelines in the short term yet try to build a business that is sustainable even after Google enters & destroys the market it is far more difficult.

A Self-serving Bias You Can Count On
When Google enters a market it might buy out a competitor, buy out a supplier, bundle, use predatory pricing, grant themselves superior search placement, adjust the relevancy algorithms and/or editorial guidelines, violate IP, scrape 3rd party content, work with sketchy advertisers & publishers to undermine competing business models, or any combination of the above.

They are rarely transparent with their interests when they enter a market. Almost everything is labeled as "a beta" and "just a test." They promise to "act appropriately" & you may not be aware of the steamroller until you are under it.

Google can bundle themselves into markets, but when others do the same it is a big no no:

A Google spokesman said "applications that are installed without clear disclosure, that are hard to remove and that modify users' experiences in unexpected ways are bad for users and the Web as a whole."

Google's founding research highlighted how bad ad-driven search engines were & then Google's core revenue engine of paid search was built on their violation of Overture's patent. They keep

big institutional investors who want to play the volatility game

Then why are they buying Microsoft (MSFT) of all things? Microsoft is a dividend safety play and has been for at least a decade now. It's not Microsoft's fault that these pension funds promised their members payouts based on 8%+ returns when the only way to get them these days is to go risk-on heavy into high yield bonds, small to mid cap stocks or options, futures and derivatives (aka the financial weapons of mass pension fund destruction). They should either man up and sell their shares so that they can make those plays and get those 8%+ returns (or not) or they should sit down, shut up and be happy that they still have their principal and the dividend was paid on time. This is the new reality of investing and personally, I don't think that things will ever get back to 8%+ consistently on average, or at least not here in the United States or Europe. We live in a world of increasing population, increased demand and increasing depletion of natural resources. We won't have another fossil fueled 20th century of growth and investors, just like everyone else, are going to have to get used to that and plan accordingly.

Haven't there been some pretty fat dividends on occasion? I really wish the Y! charts would include an option to represent present value of a DRIP investment at the beginning of the period.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjA3_Qlji1Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQL6Mus1nCQ

http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/the-ticker/2009/01/26/peter-schiff-right-on-the-crisis-wrong-on-investing

http://caps.fool.com/blogs/im-glad-that-someone-else/136598

Xerox received shares in exchange for rights to use intellectual property from PARC. The urban myth that it was stolen, is a lie.

False, as a number of other posters have pointed out. Apple did not receive rights to anything from Xerox - they only got a tour and a demo.

Also, Xerox wasn't given any shares in Apple, they were given an opportunity to buy shares.

See:
  http://www.mac-history.net/the-history-of-the-apple-macintosh/rich-neighbour-with-open-doors-apple-and-xerox-parc

http://vectronicsappleworld.com/macintosh/creation.html

http://www.fool.com/news/foth/2000/foth000918.htm

(captcha: contrite)

If you believe in rational markets -- I do, if the time horizon is long enough -- the market is simply valuing the respective companies according to the net present value of their expected after-tax profit streams. (That's an oversimplification but only slightly.) Looking at profit growth, IBM has outpaced Microsoft for several years running now. If the market simply extrapolates that trend forward, at some point IBM's and Microsoft's valuations had to cross.

Sorry, forgot my source:

http://www.fool.com/news/1999/foolplate990910.htm

I should have also noted that other things effect the profit margin/price per can of Coca Cola such as sugar prices, shipping costs (gas prices) and other non-tax cost pressures that may effect profit drastically. Sure, per can they won't make much difference, but when you are selling billions of cans per day, the smallest price fluctuation makes a HUGE difference to the bottom line.

It's not the "making too much money" part that needs investigation, and really just correction. It's the "not paying taxes" part. Corporations, including rich tech corps, don't pay the costs the public pays for them to operate. In 2010, corporations paid only $176B in taxes; individuals paid over 100x that much. Corporations cost the public far more than 1% of our 2010 expenses. The $TRILLIONS spent by the public bailing them out of their failures, and of the failures of other corps they depend upon, is the bulk of our financial problems.

That they don't pay what they cost is the problem. That only about 50% of voters, the "liberals", even realize that's the problem is what keeps the problem getting worse. It's you Republicans who are to blame, which is why you're corporations' favorite suckers.

It's depressing how the debt ceiling is such a matter of contention right now, when it's been increased without much hullabaloo every six months or so since WWII. The reason for any artificial crisis is for politicians to threaten the public with doom and gloom in order to sneak something past them that the public normally would not accept. With Democrats and Republicans both playing along, what do both parties want to sneak by us? My guess is deep cuts to vital social programs, since the Obama administration started calling them "entitlement programs" at the start of the debate.

Actually there is another reason that this is a slightly bigger deal this time. The US is currently on the credit rating agencies negative watchlist. This has not happened before. If the US was downgraded to AA it would add about 0.7% to the interest rate the US pays when borrowing money, this would in turn cause more money to be spent on debt interest in future and make it harder for the next government to balance the budget without even deeper cuts.

The really interesting thing though is that the democrat plan is the only one that is likely to avoid a downgrade. The one just passed by congress seems to be recognised by many economists as a political tool designed to make this pop up during a presidential election, not exactly a prudent economic move. Interestingly the person who wrote the second article below thinks the debt ceiling is such a joke it should just be done away with altogether as it really just window dressing to the real issue.

Interesting articles used as partial sources (free registration required):
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2011/07/29/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-debt-ceiling-crisi.aspx?source=ihpsitth0000001
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2011/07/26/get-ready-for-a-us-debt-downgrade.aspx?source=isesitlnk0000001&mrr=0.50

It's depressing how the debt ceiling is such a matter of contention right now, when it's been increased without much hullabaloo every six months or so since WWII. The reason for any artificial crisis is for politicians to threaten the public with doom and gloom in order to sneak something past them that the public normally would not accept. With Democrats and Republicans both playing along, what do both parties want to sneak by us? My guess is deep cuts to vital social programs, since the Obama administration started calling them "entitlement programs" at the start of the debate.

Actually there is another reason that this is a slightly bigger deal this time. The US is currently on the credit rating agencies negative watchlist. This has not happened before. If the US was downgraded to AA it would add about 0.7% to the interest rate the US pays when borrowing money, this would in turn cause more money to be spent on debt interest in future and make it harder for the next government to balance the budget without even deeper cuts.

The really interesting thing though is that the democrat plan is the only one that is likely to avoid a downgrade. The one just passed by congress seems to be recognised by many economists as a political tool designed to make this pop up during a presidential election, not exactly a prudent economic move. Interestingly the person who wrote the second article below thinks the debt ceiling is such a joke it should just be done away with altogether as it really just window dressing to the real issue.

Interesting articles used as partial sources (free registration required):
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2011/07/29/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-debt-ceiling-crisi.aspx?source=ihpsitth0000001
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2011/07/26/get-ready-for-a-us-debt-downgrade.aspx?source=isesitlnk0000001&mrr=0.50

EA's actually been doing this exact thing for a while now (called "Project $10"). It hasn't backfired on them.

That'll be why their revenue has been dropping since 2009, right?

The 2006 median household income in the United States was $50,233, before taxes. That means that $7,200 is about 14% of the household before taxes.

Now factor in taxes which is roughly 21% of household income (married, filing jointly at 15% plus 6.2% FICA) and that takes out a chunk of income before you even see it.

When you consider that the rule of thumb is that you spend no more than 25% of your pre-tax income on housing that means for the median family income they generally are paying about $1000 a month on rent or mortgage. Depending on the market it might be more or less, but then the income would also be more or less, so it is a good number of illustrative purposes.

Thus, we are now up to about $2500 (insurance, taxes, housing) being taking up before the money is even in hand each month about $1600 left for everything else that you need to pay for. Granted that is enough for most people to cover the bills, buy groceries and the like, but it also doesn't leave much for savings which means that people tend to cut that in favor of other things. That in turn leads to how people find themselves in debt or living paycheck to paycheck without much margin of safety if something happens. Also, remember that health insurance rates have been going up the past couple years faster than most peoples salaries have been going up, although in some cases the companies are actually eating part of the cost of the health insurance on their end.

So, yes, to concede your point, it can be done, but on the same token, it doesn't leave the average family in a very comfortable position and they are very exposed if something catastrophic happens.

Munger said it, not Buffett. In fact, Munger was referring to the pay-per-click business model, with no mention made of Android, Chrome, or other free offerings. I stand by my original position that the /. article is nothing more than a Google shill at work.

this article makes a case that IBM would be a potential suitor to AMD given their history together.

I'm puzzled by the market cap of Apple being ~$0.3T ... when the company never issues dividends.

Right. The value of a stock is the present value of future dividends. (Maybe adjusted for stock buybacks.)

IBM pays dividends. Microsoft pays dividends. Disney pays dividends. Companies which pay diividends historically have a higher return than those which don't. Companies in their startup phase usually don't pay dividends. Apple is an old company, now 35 years old, and well past that point.

There's investor pressure on Google to pay a dividend. Google's growth phase is over. Their stock peaked in 2007. They're a mature company. It's time to start paying the stockholders back. Especially since Google is a one-product company. (97% of Google revenue is from search ads and AdSense ads. No other Google product has ever produced significant revenue.)

Being a cool company isn't enough. If you'd bought Playboy at the IPO, and sold when Hefner took the company private last month, you'd have lost 75%. Before inflation adjustment.

More like stolen from Xerox, who was inspired by Alan Kay's ideas, who probably was at THE demo : DOUGLAS ENGLEBART

By stolen, do you mean that Apple paid Xerox with IPO shares for a tour and a private demo with Q/A session with Xerox engineers? For most people, when you pay for something it's not "stolen". Xerox engineers did not like the idea but was directed by Xerox corporate to show their research with Apple. Even then, Apple did not blindly copy the Alto but took ideas and concepts from Xerox but made their own implementation with some of their own research.

Nice timeline.

So let's see...
In Sept 1998, Nokia makes the first call on a WCDMA trial network.

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W-CDMA, WCDMA was developed by NTT DoCoMo using CDMA (the channel access method, not the mobile phone standard abbreviation).

According to http://books.google.com/books?id=p631MJdn4XAC&lpg=PA25&ots=X2rRYLiVWN&pg=PA25#v=onepage&q&f=false, usage of CDMA (the access method) for mobile communications was widely believed be impossible except by Qualcomm.

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W-CDMA, "Qualcomm was the first company to succeed in developing a practical and cost-effective CDMA implementation for consumer cell phones."(wikipedia)

So Nokia made the first WCDMA handset using NTT DoCoMo's research, which built on top of Qualcomm's research/patent portfolio. And Nokia and NTT DoCoMo also tried challenging the patents and lost http://www.fool.com/portfolios/rulemaker/2000/rulemaker001124.htm

Did I miss anything?