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A couple companies are making them, but no one is actually selling any.

There is that little company called HTC...

Sorry if it rains on your parade or something.

The point is that resources are actually scarce, government systems make the treatments more expensive by putting government money there, and this ends up costing lives at the end, while in a free market the medical costs would be coming down, not going up all the time

The USA pays more than double per capita what the UK does for it's healthcare, for much worse outcomes (and far more inequity).

What you get with the system you have is a vast twisty apparatus designed not to provide as much healthcare as possible for the money it is given, but to provide as little healthcare as possible, and extract as much money as possible. And this has been the intention right from the outset.

One of the many reasons the UK NHS, is suffering is because technology tends to make the costs of healthcare increase, not decrease. New technology means that you save more lives that need more care. New technology costs more, because it's patented. And these costs increases are very much driven by the corporate side of the equation ; drug companies are not adverse to lobbying to get existing generic treatments off the market, simply so they can make a buck selling exactly the same medicine at 10x the price.

The medical sector considers 15% a low profit margin. Wal-Mart operates at a profit margin of around 3.8%

Quite aside from the ethics of making profits from healthcare, when those resources could be diverted into more healthcare instead ; if corporate involvement in healthcare was really operating to introduce competition and drive costs down, you'd expect a margin more like Wal-Mart. Instead they have margins closer to Gucci and Hermes.

Why are you paying for a luxury healthcare system and getting a Wal-Mart healthcare system?

32 Billion US dollars say it's called Football here.

Any time someone suggests letting the public handle anything important directly, I think of 4chan.

Right, because crowdsourcing never works. For instance, it could never solve a complex protein-folding problem and get an article published in Nature

You can bag groceries, that's one area the humans have defeated the machines. "Supermarkets bag self-service checkout"

Flying drone can crack wifi networks and snoop on cell phones

They would be handy if there is a power outage, then you could fly a whole squadron of them over a city and create a new cellphone network.

Big Corporations is not where most of the wealth is. Nor is it where most of the Jobs come from. Nor is setting policies in such a way that target them going to fix whatever problem you think they have.

If wealth is defined by income or net worth, you are way off base. If that net worth and income is not due to affiliation with Big Corporations, please enlighten me. The wealthiest 1% of the population control 34+% of the net worth, the wealthiest 10% control of 73%. That leaves 27% of the value in the US for the other 90%. I don't have any ready links regarding jobs, I'd be glad to check them out.

Of the first 100 entries on the Forbes 400 wealthiest americans seems to be mostly populated by Corporate execs and investment bankers. I'll grant you the few with a source of income listed as "diversified", but there are not many. I also didn't bother digging through the 200-400 pages.

The problem for you is you make no distinction between HUGE MEGA CORP and Mom N Pop Corp. And so, the policies that liberals put in place to "stick it to the man" affects people who are definitely not "the man". And you will never admit it.

I did not make that distinction, and it is a valid one. I don't know why you think so, but I will be the first one to admit the difference. The fact that legislation that is supposed to limit Corporations (howabout I use the cap-C to notate large, multinational corps for the sake of simplicity) but ends up a burden on small business is no surprise at all. I don't know if you are referring to any specific legislation, but I would expect lobbyists from Corporations to spend heavily to push any such legislation, if not writing it directly.

so are the policies mandated by your friends

My friends? Do you have some mistaken belief that I am a fan of the govt in general, or any specific party?

and UNTIL you can admit that Government Interference had partial blame in the matter, then we can't fix things.

UNTIL I can admit it? I never said government wasn't to blame, government interference is certainly part of the problem. In fact, a big part of the problem is the merger of Corporations and government. Movement of executives between government agencies and the Corporations they are supposed to regulate is nothing more than the fox guarding the hen house. "Too big to fail" should cause anyone claiming to be a capitalist to burst a blood vessel.

I have scorn for a long list of facilitators of the current economic clusterfuck.

Clinton - signed the The Grammâ"Leachâ"Bliley Act (GLB), also known as the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999. This removed the separation between investment banks, savings banks, and insurance companies that was institued by the Glass-Steagall Act.

How about George Bush? Signed the TARP act, bailing out the banks that should have been buried by their poor decisions.

And don't forget that Obama voted for it while he was still in the Senate. He seems to think you can tax and spend your way out of a hole. It may look nice for a while but eventually the piper needs to be paid, and he is going to be paid by your children and grand-children

no amount of evil can be avoided when people excuse evil in the name of good intentions.

There is something I think we can agree on.

What is going to fix this?

• Bring back something similar to Glass-Steagall
• limit corporate power (so called corporate personhood)
• take the monetary power back from the Federal Reserve System and put it back in the hands of the Treasury, as described in the US Constitution.

Here's the link: http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidewalt/2011/09/19/neal-stephenson-reamde-video-games/ Don't everybody thank me at once.

But the moment that you start screaming about privacy in places where there isn't a reasonable expectation for it, a lot of people just tune out. They will either assume that you are an antisocial nutbar, a paranoid nutcase, or a criminal.

Right...

Unless you're a cop

If 8% of Americans (the number of millionaires) make more in interest then most do while working all year long, they can afford to pay a larger percentage on that income. If the 100 billionaires in the U.S. can make more than 50% of the populations combined earnings in a single year, they can afford to pay more too.

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

http://money.cnn.com/2011/03/16/news/economy/millionaires/index.htm

http://www.forbes.com/wealth/billionaires/list?country=225&industry=-1&state=

Do you have the full picture? Do you know what conversations have been going on for the past year (since they reserved the domain name)?

Yeah, you tell 'em! They reserved the domain name and the Twitter name and...oh.

Qwikster: Home of the Pot-Smoking Elmo.

Imagine if we would just take $200B from the DoD budget, send it to NASA, and tell them to balance their budget because that's all they're getting for 20 years. New efficiencies would be found and we'd see a lot more tourism.

There are 1210 people on this planet with over $1,000,000,000 in wealth. If each one would invest 10% of their assets in a program, 1000 people could get off the rock with current tech (Apollo-style moon visit), or we could have a small permanent outpost on the moon or Mars. Costs of space exploration need to be reduced by a factor of 1000 to be feasible for the masses.

There are two non-rocket solutions for cost reduction. Laser ablation, and railgun cargo launches. Railgun tech is almost at Mach 7. We need Mach 20 for orbital insertion (2.8 times faster).

who are the most productive people in our society

No, they're not. Look at the list of the Forbes 400 and notice how often "hedge fund" appears. Almost all income of hedge fund managers gets treated as capital gains.

Idiots. How does 'Google+' say 'Social Network'? In any way?

googles-eric-schmidt-says-plus-is-an-identity-service-not-a-social-network
now who looks like an idiot? stop trolling.

No, the recent years have shown that Microsoft has truly changed. Microsoft's antitrust cases are from the 90's, you know. Google is currently being investigated for a lot of shit in various countries, not Microsoft. And care to link some of those anti-google and anti-apple marketing or patent trolling Microsoft is doing? Because they are not. Microsoft has never patent trolled anyone, they have only used their patents when someone has attacked them or when there has been a good case. Patent trolling is completely different subject.

Check this : Microsoft's Android Shakedown

This story sheds light on the recent string of stories about Microsoft demanding royalty payments from various companies that produce smart phones built on Google‘s Android operating system. Intuitively, this doesn’t make much sense. Most people would say that Google has been more innovative than Microsoft in recent years—especially in the mobile phone market—so why is Microsoft the one collecting royalties?

The whole article is very interesting.

"maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?"

IBM likes their patents.

Given Cisco's history of federal cooperation, I do have to wonder if the deeper concern was that such equipment _lacked_ the backdoors Cisco provides for "legal" monitoring. Some examples are described at http://www.forbes.com/2010/02/03/hackers-networking-equipment-technology-security-cisco.html.

Yeah, that kind of threw me for a loop. Companies like Exxon "no honestly, we do pay income taxes, I swear" Mobil complaining about weird accounting? Go figure.

Labor agreements prohibiting layoffs...

The USPS isn't losing a battle against the "E-mail Age" - it's losing a battle against organized labor. As is every other productivity sector in the U.S. And so long as we have a government that unconditionally supports one side of that battle, productivity -- be it mail delivery, manufacturing, education, etc. - will continue to lose.

    If I recall correctly, that was the same company that tried to sue my company for something like 25% to 50% of their gross income. The had a stack of patents which basically covered any transmission of digital audio and/or video. So effectively the patent covered telephones, cable TV, satellite TV, and of course all those pesky Internet companies. Just think, they could nail every Geocities site that had the damned dancing baby, or some crappy song embedded on their home page. Too bad they picked the wrong targets.

    They hit the company I worked for. My company hit back, along with a bunch of other ones.

    [looking around] Yup, it was them.

    I wasn't following it too closely. Our lawyers got into it, teamed up with the lawyers for several other companies, and tore them a new one. I heard the occasional mention of it, but after the first week they were just a nuisance that would eventually be laughed out of court. I didn't follow it too closely. It was a few months later that they started making the news (like that Forbes story).

Spencer's results, conclusion or methodology anywhere near as much as how it was announced - in FORBES, of all places, by a senior shill for the Heartland Institute. I lost count of how many times "alarmist" was written in a half-page article.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2011/07/27/new-nasa-data-blow-gaping-hold-in-global-warming-alarmism/

That's exactly this analyst's take on the situation, from that dirty hippie magazine, Forbes:

What Solyndra's Bankruptcy Means For Silicon Valley Solar Startups

But as the companies finally begin mass production — Solyndra just flipped the switch on a $733 million factory here last month — they are finding that the economics of the industry have already been transformed, by the Chinese. Chinese manufacturers, heavily subsidized by their own government and relying on vast economies of scale, have helped send the price of conventional solar panels plunging and grabbed market share far more quickly than anyone anticipated.

One reader pointed out that Jobs had really directly responded to these points in a 1985 Playboy Interview: [1985 Interview] ...

So what do you do?

Jobs: That’s a part of my life that I like to keep private. When I have some time, I’m going to start a public foundation. I do some things privately now.

You could spend all of your time disbursing your money.

Jobs: Oh, you have to. I’m convinced that to give away a dollar effectively is harder than to make a dollar.

The average selling price for subnotebooks rose to $521 last july from $343 in July of 2010." The industry is desperately trying to stop generic $200 machines from taking over the industry.

So that is primarily due to the Macbook Air (2 successive releases of Air subnotebooks)? No wonder Intel is shitting bricks trying to clone the air with it's Ultrabook initiative.

The average selling price for subnotebooks rose to $521 last july from $343 in July of 2010." The industry is desperately trying to stop generic $200 machines from taking over the industry.

Didn't Musk say he as broke a little while ago.
http://www.forbes.com/2010/05/28/elon-musk-broke-tesla-business-autos-musk.html

I think Rutgers disagrees with you regarding how dangerous it is to be a Cop

Oh, looky there... Taxi driver is third most dangerous job for workplace violence... after police officer (1st) and private security (2nd)

Oh and this article on Forbes says Mining and Police/security are about tied as most dangerous jobs with 13 deaths per 100,000 workers

No, what I mean to imply is that said accounting practices, which were pretty much necessary, had dire unintended consequences. See here.

It seems that Apple has really been putting some steam behind using patents as weapons. Interesting article at Forbes about this whole Samsung vs. Apple mess: http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2011/08/24/why-apple-went-to-dusseldorf/

I think part of the problem is that Apple has an even larger headstart on tablets than they had on smartphones.

Why? I think that the introduction of the iPhone shook the phone industry to it's core and largely took them by surprise. I don't think that the Nokias and Motorolas of this world really would have thought that a PC/laptop maker like Apple would have been a serious competitor, especially after the ROKR, if you had asked them before the 9th of January 2007.
After that date all phone manufactures all of a sudden were scrambling to make something similar as they realised that Apple didn't just make a phone like they did, which they could compete against like they were used to. Apple was miles ahead and they were scrambling desperately to catch up as Apple had just eaten their lunch and was after their dinner as well.

There was an article linked from Slashdot a couple of weeks ago. It's called "Apples Retail Stores more than Magic" and explains one of the reasons why the others have such a hard time emulating Apples success. I found it very enlightening.

To quote the article:
"Most firms see themselves in business to make money. That’s “the bottom line”—the primary goal of management. By contrast, Apple’s goal is to delight its customers. Apple has grasped that making money is the result of the firm’s actions, not the goal."

It's a very interesting read, if you want to understand part of the success of Apple and why it has such a loyal customer base.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/06/17/apples-retail-stores-more-than-magic/

Yes, it's a funny thing. Marketing is the core function of iOS.

In a sense it's the core function of Apple. I recently read this interesting article called "Apple's Retail Success Is More Than Magic" on Forbes.com. It explains that Apple focusses on making customers happy first, and only making a profit second. From the article:

"Apple has grasped that making money is the result of the firm’s actions, not the goal."

"According to several employees and training manuals, sales associates are taught an unusual sales philosophy: not to sell, but rather to help customers solve problems. “Your job is to understand all of your customers’ needs—some of which they may not even realize they have,” one training manual says. To that end, employees receive no sales commissions and have no sales quotas."

I found it a very enlightening insight into why Apple is so successful and has such a loyal following.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/06/17/apples-retail-stores-more-than-magic/

You weren't paying very much attention then to what was being done with your data. Facebook Beacon was one of the worst privacy violations I've ever run into, bad enough for them to lose a class action lawsuit over it. The Face Recognition feature was also enabled by default, letting data collected from your pictures be used to tag your face in other people's pictures you appeared. If that doesn't seriously concern you, you should reconsider just what else could happen with that data.

Or reveal insight as opposed to whatever they feel rings true with their own marketing belief.

Take Forbes...
Thinking Of Buying A $99 TouchPad? Don't

Reasons for not buying a TouchPad, a more than capable piece of hardware that is perfectly functional, lets you browse the interwebs, run photo slideshows, play media files, etc. etc. so even if it's not exactly a Galaxy Tab it still makes for a kick-ass digital photoframe?

1. Hardware: Bulkier, lower battery life, just one camera.
2. Software: There's not as many apps for WebOS as there are for iOS or Android (note later adjustment*)
3. Not-an-iPad: If you already have an iPad, why bother?

When I read it, I didn't think he could be any more transparent in his love for the iPad and disdain for everything else - * but then I just looked up the article again for this post and he has adjusted it to glorify the iPad some more.

It's hilarious. I hope people get Android running on it, as he'll have to eat most of his words. But even if that doesn't pan out, at $99 it's still a steal. For a financial news site to have a staff member brush it off smacks of lack of insight. And if he really needed a financial gain reason, he need but look at the people selling their TouchPads on ebay, at > $99

See how these men got away with no punishment whatsoever? This is the exact reason why the government needs more power to choke free speech. After all, they are completely powerless to stop rioters who use Facebook, we need to give them the power to silence Facebook!

Exactly. As it has been pointed out Android has a patent fee. http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-ballmer-android-isnt-free-it-has-a-patent-fee-2010-10 And more recently http://www.forbes.com/sites/briancaulfield/2011/08/09/in-major-win-for-apple-galaxy-tab-10-1-banned-in-europe/ Now that Android has proven it's self and has a strong foot hold expect more and more companies trying to get some money off of it.

The "Terminator" scenario is, of course, a Hollywood vision. The actual scenario that will likely play out will be much more subtle. I recommend the book "The Artilect War", by Hugo de Garis, an AI researcher. (Here is a synopsis in Forbes.)

I do not focus mostly on the negatives of technology. I am a technologist myself. I have from the beginning been a proponent and fan of technology. I grew up in the heady technology go-go days of the 60s. I stayed home from school to watch every Gemini and Apollo launch. I taught myself calculus at an early age so that I could read physics books. I dreamed of the future with great anticipation. But now in my 50s, and having seen the accelerating rate of change, I can see the path we are on very clearly. We are heading toward the creation of technologies that we will not be able to control.

They use the term "jailbreak" and the Forbes article refers to an app named MyWi that is available via Cydia. This terminology leads me to believe they are specifically targeting jailbroken iPhone tethering. Android phones like the Droid X and X2 tether "out of the box" (unrooted) with apps from Google's marketplace. No jailbreaking/rooting/evil hax0ring required.

Well, I was talking about the civilisation containing NASA - i.e. Western civilisation - and it has got much worse since the '80s.

There is no denying that science has improved life over the past few hundred years and that it is still bringing better things to the developing world. But that's far from what I was referring to.

The metrics of life expectancy (particular infant) and daily wage are also passionately overused. Ask instead: do people have the opportunity to be productive? Are they protected from personal risk? Most importantly: are they happy?

The metric of life-expectancy is used so much because it matters. People don't like dying early. And there are very few things that are more unpleasant for parents than for them to lose a child. So yeah, people who are having their kids die constantly aren't very happy. If you do insist on metrics that attempt to look specifically at happiness levels then in fact the US is one of the happiest countries (#14 by this ranking - http://www.forbes.com/2010/07/14/world-happiest-countries-lifestyle-realestate-gallup-table.html ), and Western Europe consistently lands in the top. So does that make it more ok for European space launches? Also, I'm a bit confused about how this claim relates to your primary claim about either civilization collapsing (happiness levels are not a good metric for likelyhood of civilization to collapse), and this also seems disconnected from your other claim about how these resources should go more to people who are suffering severely, since the people in the West who are not well off by Western standards are generally pretty well off compared to people in the developing world. So what is the claim you are trying to make here?

Yet another side effect of the bad economy.

Seeing as how 20% of the labor force has been replaced by machines, what are these people supposed to do to support themselves? They can't all be criminals...

This story is about a type of make-work employment too, it's just not funded by the government. It's not so different than organized crime, in that no true value is created for the economy by the actions of the parties involved.

If the government made money (instead of the banks), they could spend it into circulation to employ people who do valuable things. Community cleanup, public works, etc.

Jobs projects are totally different than make-work jobs. A job project is paying someone to do something that ought to be done, but which isn't profitable for the market to do itself. Make-work jobs put people to work doing pointless or harmful things: 1/2 digging ditches, 1/2 filling them in.

Laws criminalizing plants (Marijuana, coca leaf, etc) create make-work jobs in the prison industry, for example. Some of the other ones that come to mind are political sacred cows, so I won't mention them here.

The blog post I'm (slowly) working on links to some of John Harvey's blog posts. I found them last month, starting with Why You Should Learn to Love the Deficit: Federal Budget Fallacies:

... Nothing could be more foolish right now than policies that reduce government spending or increase taxes. We have nearly 14 million unemployed people in the United States, a number that undoubtedly underestimates the true magnitude of the problem since it ignores discouraged workers and the underemployed. Despite this, Messrs. Obama, Ryan, and Geithner tell us that we need to make sacrifices. Seriously? The American people already have, and what they are asking us to do will simply make it worse. ...

Well according to the publisher of Forbes the price of 3d printers has fallen by a factor of ten in the last five years, which seems to fall pretty squarely within Moore's Law and hardly seems to be "behind the curve of technological process."

Sadly i can't seem to find any exact timelines of price/performance. (Does anyone else know of one?) I don't want to just appeal to authority, but he at least actually provided figures while all you've done is trash talk the technology. So until i can find some figures to confirm or deny the claim, or unless you can refute his figures, i'm going to have to go with... you're incredibly wrong.

Except actual users don't, you know, give a shit about Flash. http://blogs.forbes.com/elizabethwoyke/2011/07/08/taking-the-pain-out-of-tablet-typing/?partner=yahootix From the article: The study, which polled 1,011 U.S. tablet users in June, found that typing large documents (more than 500 words) was the chief frustration among respondents, netting a 44% response. Other tablet features were also singled out as irritations, but less vehemently. Battery life, for instance, got a 36% response while “limited connectivity” earned 23%, “not enough apps available” got 19% and “no flash” 3%.

Horseshit! The MMA was notorious for the underhanded, high-pressure way it was rammed through Congress by the Republican leadership. Perhaps this piece from Forbes will refresh your memory:

Consequently, when the legislation came up for its final vote on Nov. 22, 2003, it was failing by 216 to 218 when the standard 15-minute time allowed for voting came to an end.

What followed was one of the most extraordinary events in congressional history. The vote was kept open for almost three hours while the House Republican leadership brought massive pressure to bear on the handful of principled Republicans who had the nerve to put country ahead of party. The leadership even froze the C-SPAN cameras so that no one outside the House chamber could see what was going on.

Ursus Bogus. Just sayin'...

People get so worked up over this shit. This isn't science - the "science" is pretty inconclusive otherwise there wouldn't be so much name calling.

There's plenty of name calling over whether humans were created 6000 years ago. Do you think the science there is pretty inconclusive?

People get so worked up over this shit. This isn't science - the "science" is pretty inconclusive otherwise there wouldn't be so much name calling. Nah, this is politics. And politics has absolutely nothing to do with science.

If CO2 concentration continues to increase (as I'm sure it will) but the warming trend reversed itself, that would falsify the idea of CO2 as an overriding contributor to global warming.

Fair enough. Just to be clear, though, what kind of timeframe do you put around that? 10 years of no warming trend with rising CO2? 15 years of no warming trend with rising CO2? http://blogs.forbes.com/patrickmichaels/2011/07/15/why-hasnt-the-earth-warmed-in-nearly-15-years/

My observation has been that typically, believers in CAGW will take any lack of warming trend as simply a minor setback to be ignored - they come up with some ad hoc explanation that makes the cooling somehow anomalous. With this kind of approach, CAGW can be infinitely justified (30 years of cooling? must've been a volcano. 45 years of cooling? some orbital cycle. 75 years of cooling? A spurious trend caused by solar activity.).

As for myself, it's very likely that the climate is fairly insensitive to most factors, and that natural cycles dominate on nearly every timescale we can imagine. It will be interesting, though, if the solar minimum predictions of cooling till 2050 hold up.

VMWare's CTO Steve Herrod recently gave Forbes an interview that explained their new "MVP" (Mobile Virtual Platform) line. Soon you will be able to have phone images "delivered" to you, similar to their VMWare View product.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/world/asia/26china.html?_r=3

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-25/ge-healthcare-moves-x-ray-base-to-china-no-job-cuts-planned.html

http://blogs.forbes.com/raykwong/2011/07/25/friends-dont-let-friends-become-chinese-billionaires/

Enough of this drivel. What's fair? The 35% they pay now? The 39.6% they paid under Clinton? The 70% they paid under Kennedy? Or the 94% they paid under FDR?

The rich don't pay 35% of their income as taxes. That's the highest Federal marginal tax rate on ordinary income (e.g., salaries). For 2009, that rate applied to each dollar of ordinary income earned in excess of $372,951 for the year. The thing is that the truly rich avoid this 35% on most of their income by receiving most of their income as long term capital gains, which are taxed at 15%.

What you want to compare is effective tax rates, which is the true percentage of income paid as tax after all the math is done. Over the past few years, the 400 highest-income Americans have had an effective federal income tax rate of about 17-18%. For comparison, I make low six figures, and my effective tax rate is about 21%.

And their cronies like Abigail R. Esman, who condone these acts.
  And I quote "But I fear that, unless Europe begins demanding that its Muslim population live according to its Enlightenment traditions and the values of democracy, he will not be the last." She means this as a threat. She is very, very pleased at what has transpired in Norway, despite any protestations she might make in postscripts to the contrary.

Forbes Condones Terrorism

Yeah and too bad that K-Splice has 3 patents that cover splicing the kernel.

So go fork all you want. Within 24 hours you will have an army of lawyers claiming they own your FOSS project.

Knowing Oracle I figured there had to be a more sinister reason to purchase it. So I did a Google search and sure enough found that link and my suspicions were correct. The moral of the story is if you want to be bought out by Oracle then patent the hell out of your product. Oracle is after the patents and not the software and will be happy to sue anyone who needs this functionality. Unlike Goolge, Redhat does not have the resources to go up and defend itself agaisn't such a powerful litigant.