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Not buying it without some sort of citation.

http://www.salon.com/2014/04/0... http://qz.com/127861/its-time-... http://usatoday30.usatoday.com... http://fortune.com/2013/09/20/... http://www.mhpbooks.com/indepe... Those were just the first few results from a simple google search. Why is it that every time someone asks for a citation, the "proof" is the first hit from a simple google search? In this case: "number of bookstores in the USA".

Hrrm. Pretty much all only deal with what seems to be opportunistic growth after the fall of Borders since 2009, and based on the same American Booksellers Association data. Assuming these numbers reflect the reality and are a constant percentage of all total bookstores in the USA, it still only deals with a recent phenominon with obvious cause, and even then "The current total is less than half the 1990s peak of around 4,000." Although amounts vary, everything else I've seen says the same thing, the number of bookstores is going down.

Not buying it without some sort of citation.

http://www.salon.com/2014/04/0...
http://qz.com/127861/its-time-...
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com...
http://fortune.com/2013/09/20/...
http://www.mhpbooks.com/indepe...

Those were just the first few results from a simple google search. Why is it that every time someone asks for a citation, the "proof" is the first hit from a simple google search? In this case: "number of bookstores in the USA".

I'm not losing a whole lot of sleep over the countries in the visa waiver program. Quoting from here:

there is a long list (pdf, p. 5) of requirements countries need to meet in order to qualify. They must have “effective border controls,” “political and economic stability,” machine-readable passports, and exhibit a close degree of cooperation with US law enforcement.

The EU, Iceland, Australia, Japan, and Chile don't keep me up at night. Neither does Canada. Saudi Arabia on the other hand....

The top 1% paid 35% of the tax(2011), and not 70%, and they pay less in all other taxes.
Look at this:
http://qz.com/74271/income-tax...

See home far down the 500+ income tax as dropped compared to every one else?

The should go back to the 1966 rate.

Frankly, I thing all income over 10 Million should be taxed at 90%
Also, business should only be allowed to write off employee pay and RnD, and taxed at 100% for profit over a billion dollars.

And no, that isn't economic socialism, as defined in the last 100 or so year; which is a post-capitalism version of socialism.

iPhone sales continue to grow

Actually iPhone sales have been falling. I'm afraid you fell for a classic misleading graph.

Ooooh, the iPhone's sale drop from quarter to quarter after the release of a new one - until a new one is released. That's a phenomenon only Apple is affected by! And don't look on year-to year growth! That's only a trick to fool you! 17%? That's far below the 100% needed to stay on the same level!

iPhone sales continue to grow

Actually iPhone sales have been falling. I'm afraid you fell for a classic misleading graph.

>In terms of how much control they had on the industry they absolutely did.
IBM never had a 90%+ stranglehold on the market. MS did.


>They never had the sort of installed base that MS has with Windows because there were never any where near
>as many mainframes as there are PCs, but guess what, there are already more mobile devices out there running
>Android than there are PCs running Windows.

There are also more ios devices being sold then windows PCs out there = more competition in mobile space than in the PC space.
http://qz.com/176643/its-offic...

Or seeking to inhibit other phone companies from making *any* good smart phones, thereby giving the consumer less choice and increasing the odds that they will buy an apple device.

Sounds like a worried manufacturer to me. Since SJ has gone there haven't been any significant innovations from the Apply camp.
If this graph is anything to go by, the executives/lawyers will be looking to justify their existence: http://qz.com/120917/the-smart...

Well you bring up another good point.

Satellite is really only good for Television, and it makes a terrible internet access route.

But big cable companies like Comcast make their bread and butter selling TV access, its more lucrative than internet access.
Some think this is likely to be replaced by intenet tv. Others dispute this.

But the prospect for internet TV, where every single viewing results in a separate TCP/IP feed, scares the hell out of cable companies because even if they manage to get some revenue out of it by hosting things like Netflix on their own plant, they simply do not have enough bandwidth in the ground using old school (coax) cable plants to accommodate the demand. Every TV in the house, and every computer streaming separate programs at different times. GAH!!! The load will kill your typical coax plant.

They are staring an entire infrastructure replacement in the face. Uprooting every front lawn in the country stringing new fiber.

This is another reason I don't believe big cable fights municipal fiber too strenuously.

Yes, let us revisit history.

The U-boat peril

Winston Churchill once wrote that, '... the only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril'. In saying this, he correctly identified the importance of the threat posed during World War Two by German submarines (the 'Unterseeboot') to the Atlantic lifeline. This lifeline was Britain's 'centre of gravity' - the loss of which would probably have led to wholesale defeat in the war. ... Britain might have been starved into submission,...

And what was a critical factor in keeping the shipping losses by German submarine threat from growing out of control? Signals intelligence, breaking the enemy codes, Ultra intelligence decoding the messages encoded on the German Enigma code machine. With that the Allies could read the orders and reports of the German U-boat fleet.

Enigma and Ultra - the Cypher War

From the second half of 1941 onwards, information from Enigma was one of the key factors enabling the Royal Navy to divert convoys away from waiting wolf packs. Decoded messages went initially to the Royal Navy section at Bletchley Park, then, if relevant, were passed on to Submarine Tracking Room in the Admiralty and later to the HQ Western Approaches, in Liverpool. ... The gist of the information contained in the signals, carefully edited to conceal its source, was passed on to operational commanders, only a very few of the most senior of whom were let even partially into the secret of Enigma .

The Enigma material, known as Ultra , was, of course, combined with intelligence from a wide variety of other sources, including HF/DF and wireless intercepts and reconnaissance reports, into a body of information known collectively as "SIGINT".

The effect of the improved flow of intelligence information was apparent during the second half of 1941. Increasing numbers of convoys were being diverted away from waiting U-boats. In July, for example, not a single convoy was sighted by the Germans over a period of three weeks, and during July and August monthly sinkings went below 100,000 tons, the lowest for over a year.

It would have been fairly trivial for the Germans to have rendered Enigma unreadable, possibly for the duration of the war, by a number of means they had readily at hand and could have implemented with simple commands. The result would have been at best a much longer and bloodier war. The result could very easily have been either a stalemate, or even a loss by the Allies.

The position of the Allies, their ability to sustain their war effort and avoid Britain being starved into submission, was all dependent upon the people with knowledge of the Ultra program keeping the ability of the Allies to read the German codes a secret. The Allies were able to do that. It was a shock to the Germans when they found out 30 years later that the Allies had broken the Enigma codes. At times they had suspected, but they passed it off as unlikely, and did relatively little compared to what they could have done had they known.

Mao Zedong, leader of the Chinese Communist Party in its guerilla war struggle to take control of China, said, "The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea." Adjusted for current conditions* we could say that, "The terrorist moves amongst the people as a submarine moves in the sea."

The Western world is at war with al Qaida and its allies. The terrorists swim among the populations like submarines at sea. What Snowden has done is equivalent to telling the Germans in 1941 that their submarine codes have been compromised. What will the consequences be? It will take years to see, but it seems quite likely that there will be much more of this:

Two bombs in

Ironically it will probably be China first, followed by Russia, then rest of Europe. The tide is likely to keep rising.

Two bombs in Volgograd, Russia, kill 32 and leave dozens injured

Maybe we should also mention something else, like the real real reason Solyndra failed. They had a very innovative idea that seemed like a winner at the time, but was based on a false premise - that the 2008 cost of polysilicon ($400/kg) would remain very high rather than collapsing to $30/kg within 4 years.

The biggest reason for the big breakthrough in polysilicon cost? Not Chinese dumping. US industry investments in production.

On the other hand, the collossal "anti-dumping" tariffs put in place against Chinese solar panels backfired. The reason? The US was actually exporting now-cheap polysilicon to China to be made into solar panels. But the Chinese imposed a retaliative tariff on those imports into China. That is not good news for the polysilicon manufacturers. Will the price of polysilicon zoom again?

http://qz.com/107970/scientists-discover-whats-killing-the-bees-and-its-worse-than-you-thought/
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0070182#authcontrib
-----
Scientists had struggled to find the trigger for so-called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that has wiped out an estimated 10 million beehives, worth $2 billion, over the past six years. Suspects have included pesticides, disease-bearing parasites and poor nutrition. But in a first-of-its-kind study published today in the journal PLOS ONE, scientists at the University of Maryland and the US Department of Agriculture have identified a witch's brew of pesticides and fungicides contaminating pollen that bees collect to feed their hives. The findings break new ground on why large numbers of bees are dying though they do not identify the specific cause of CCD, where an entire beehive dies at once.
When researchers collected pollen from hives on the east coast pollinating cranberry, watermelon and other crops and fed it to healthy bees, those bees showed a significant decline in their ability to resist infection by a parasite called Nosema ceranae. The parasite has been implicated in Colony Collapse Disorder though scientists took pains to point out that their findings do not directly link the pesticides to CCD. The pollen was contaminated on average with nine different pesticides and fungicides though scientists discovered 21 agricultural chemicals in one sample. Scientists identified eight ag chemicals associated with increased risk of infection by the parasite.
Most disturbing, bees that ate pollen contaminated with fungicides were three times as likely to be infected by the parasite. Widely used, fungicides had been thought to be harmless for bees as they're designed to kill fungus, not insects, on crops like apples.
"There's growing evidence that fungicides may be affecting the bees on their own and I think what it highlights is a need to reassess how we label these agricultural chemicals," Dennis vanEngelsdorp, the study's lead author, told Quartz.
Labels on pesticides warn farmers not to spray when pollinating bees are in the vicinity but such precautions have not applied to fungicides. ...
Bee populations are so low in the US that it now takes 60% of the countryâ(TM)s surviving colonies just to pollinate one California crop, almonds. And thatâ(TM)s not just a west coast problemâ"California supplies 80% of the worldâ(TM)s almonds, a market worth $4 billion.
----

This has been so obvious for many many years to the organic faring community... It is just another negative externality of conventional farming practice, and another example of market failure to account for systemic risk.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/162375-whos-killing-the-bees-new-study-implicates-virtually-every-facet-of-modern-farming

In general, safety studies are almost never done (including for human health) on *combinations* of chemicals (including human medicines). And studies of health effects of individual chemical's health affects often ignore secondary, tertiary, and further breakdown products.

The future of agriculture is probably indoors powered by cheap electricity (from fusion and solar) and managed by robots (including probably pollination).
http://www.howstuffworks.com/environmental/conservation/issues/farm-indoors.htm
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/TCHA

is that the people most affected by it - beekeepers and farmers who rent their colonies - aren't worked up over it. Colonies die off every winter, and always have. CCD means that more do, but replacing failed colonies is a routine part of the business.. The price of queen bees, which can apparently be produced on demand very quickly, hasn't gone up appreciably. The price of food that relies on rented bee colonies for pollination hasn't gone up appreciably. Almonds, one of the crops most sensitive to the availability of bees, have seen a price increase (attributable to increase cost of renting bee colonies) of less than 3 cents a pound.

CCD is a problem, but one that is well in hand. The only crisis is that there is taxpayer money that some researcher somewhere wants to do a study, and they haven't gotten it yet.

Bezos said in the new 60 minutes, it will handle payloads of 5lbs, enough for 86% of it's sold merchandise.

Second, this system could be used in China sooner than here, and being tested by a large package delivery:
http://qz.com/120654/china-could-become-the-first-country-to-legalize-parcel-delivery-by-drone/

The technology just isn't robust enough to be scaled up to meaningful numbers - crashes due to mechanical faults are inevitable

The thing has 8 rotors. It needs 4 maybe to fly with stability. It has redundancy out the ass.

Octocopters are good-weather toys. They cannot be flown in heavy winds. "Sorry, no deliveries today, it's too windy". Yeah. Right.

Well, I'm sure amazon will have a zip code system and weather tie-in to mark the where and when availability that shows are hides the "Delivery by Air" button. Since this will be purely a convenience feature with a corresponding fee, it's not a business breaker.

But for me, this type of system would make much more sense in fastfood delivery systems.

Who wouldn't pay a buck or two to have it delivered at the location marked by smart phone GPS, instead of fighting traffic and using up gas/time?

It should be noted that 'people smuggling' isn't related to slavery; it's the politicised term for the people who help refugees get to Autralia. The efforts to stop people smugglers are about the current Australian government's (xenophobic) anti-refugee policies; they're the result of domestic politics, not a cooperative effort to stop human trafficking.

It's not actually xenophobia when you attempt to enforce your national borders.

The situation between Indonesia and Australia is similar to the situation between Mexico and the U.S., where the Mexican government in some cases actually busses illegals to the U.S. border in order to aid their illegal immigartion into the U.S.. While most illegals are economic refugees, the bussing mostly involved "undesirables" in Mexico, which included Mexican criminals, but more frequently were refugees from Guatamala and El Salvador, which Mexico preferred to make "not their problem". PBS did a documentary on this a while back:

http://www.pbs.org/itvs/beyondtheborder/immigration.html

The "cooperation" being negotiated in this case is primarily dealing with people using Indonesia as a transit point, and less so export of Indonesian "bad apples", just as with the U.S. (although Indonesia will happily export locally grown Al Qaeda to get rid of them). A significant number of these come from the Middle East, including a large portion of them from Iraq, and to a lesser extent, Lebanon. Here are some examples:

http://www.niqash.org/articles/?id=3308
http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13920705000600

One of the agreements being negotiated has been buying unused boats which could be made sufficiently seaworthy to get from Indonesia to Australia:

http://qz.com/118198/australias-election-frontrunner-thinks-buying-broken-indonesian-boats-will-stave-off-asylum-seekers/ ...but it benefits Tony Abbot's opponents to find ways to undermine that plan as much as possible, and it benefits Indonesian politicians to be complicit in that, and seize on any excuse, lest the illegal immigrant refugees end up stuck in Indonesia instead (Indonesia doesn't want them either). So at this point, it's largely an argument between the mostly empty regions of Australia and the more densely populated regions (analogous to the red state/blue state U.S. division that had Arizona enforcing immigration laws that the U.S. federal government would not).

So basically, politics, not Snowden.

I absolutely love the ~1 year old news site Quartz. I forget how I found it, but it's been a great. The "While you were sleeping" sections in the email updates keeps you up to date on events around the clock.

Not my experience. Are you just typing in the garbage you're paid to type in?

Yes, they are.

Social Media Marketing companies like Burson Marsteller, Waggener Edstrom and others have teams posting FUD and moderating in all tech sites on behalf of Apple, Microsoift, Facebook etc.

And you're right:

"Contrary to what you’ve heard, Android is almost impenetrable to malware
Until now, Google hasn’t talked about malware on Android because it did not have the data or analytic platform to back its security claims. But that changed dramatically today when Google’s Android Security chief Adrian Ludwig reported data showing that less than an estimated 0.001% of app installations on Android are able to evade the system’s multi-layered defenses and cause harm to users. Android, built on an open innovation model, has quietly resisted the locked down, total control model spawned by decades of Windows malware. "
http://qz.com/131436/contrary-to-what-youve-heard-android-is-almost-impenetrable-to-malware/

Of course, Slashdot doen't consider this news bcause it's sponsors haven't paid it to.

Yes - (1) HFT has the potential to cause extreme volatility swings.

All the actual evidence says the opposite.

(2) HFT essentially introduces a tax on every other buyer and seller in the market (because it actually widens the difference between the post and the offer).

Nonsense. HFT reduces the spread, by reducing the risk inherent in holding the stock. If they didn't reduce the spread nobody would trade with them.

On point #2, I'll just leave this here: http://qz.com/95088/high-frequency-trading-is-bad-for-normal-investors-researchers-say/

This is not research on normal "market making" HFT. It is only research on arbitrage, where it shows that slow traders lose to fast traders, which is already pretty obvious. But for a normal person buying or selling a stock, a market making HFTer is going to offer a better price. If fact, nearly all exchange transactions are executed by HFT, because they offer a better deal to both the buyer and the seller.

"Because the effect of that would be to push even more transactions into unregulated "dark pools". Why do you believe that HFT is harmful? Do you have any evidence, other than fear of something you don't understand?"

Yes - (1) HFT has the potential to cause extreme volatility swings. (2) HFT essentially introduces a tax on every other buyer and seller in the market (because it actually widens the difference between the post and the offer).

On point #2, I'll just leave this here: http://qz.com/95088/high-frequency-trading-is-bad-for-normal-investors-researchers-say/

High Frequency Trading isn't new... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading This past June, a news article caused a $28million dollar gain: "If you’re a high-frequency trader, a few milliseconds is a big deal. And in this case, a 15-millisecond head-start meant that $28 million in shares traded hands before the number was even published, http://qz.com/91242/the-15-millisecond-head-start-that-led-to-28-million-in-trades/" This shouldn't come as a surprise that companies in the business of making money will do everything that they can to (drum roll...) make money

Where's the justice, where's the consumer choice, where's the deterrent effect of an appropriate penalty for breach of contract?

It doesn't cost Apple anything, and depending on the respective profit margins involved, it may actually increase their profits. But remember, what's good for Apple is good for the nation. (Apparently, Apple is the new GM. Otherwise, why did the US federal government back Apple over Samsung in the SamurIP Wars.)

Oh, the humanity!!

Every gov knows what Russia, the UK and US do with their "Consulate" floors

Oh come now A., the club is bigger than that! The majority of countries get in on the spy game at some level.
The Germans: The German Prism: Berlin Wants to Spy
Very involved in the current crisis: Assad did not order Syria chemical weapons attack, says German press
The Finns and Swedes can't be left out: Supo wants expanded net surveillance powers
Nor the French: France 'runs vast electronic spying operation using NSA-style methods'
The club is bigger still: Think US snooping is bad? Try Italy, India orCanada
Thousands of Russian spies in US: ex-CIA agent
Gordievsky: Russia has as many spies in Britain now as the USSR ever did
Chinese Spies Targeting U.K., MI5 Warns
But of course! Chinese use honeytraps to spy on French companies, intelligence report claims
Germany accuses China of industrial espionage
Germany targets Russian, Chinese spies
Spies in Sweden mostly from China, Russia, Iran
Number of Foreign Spies on the Rise in Finland
Austrian capital ‘filled with Iranian spies’
Foreign spies targeting Polish shale - Natural Gas Europe
Spain arrests three suspected of spying for Iran
Russia warns Ireland it will retaliate in spy row
FBI releases papers on Russian Irish spies in US - ‘Ghost Stories’

Sometimes the trails can get very complicated.

For some reason this video comes to mind: Its a Small World

For a time Vietnam's leading export was crude oil. Now the leading export is computers, phones, and parts, with textiles being second.

Actually sugar would be cheaper than corn syrup if it was no longer subsidised. You can read about the gory details here. Maybe we should stop subsidising the local farmers for our own health?

Thailand did not rule Bitcoin illegal. The head of the central bank of Thailand issued a preliminary ruling expressing that Bitcoin may be illegal because there are no laws that allow its use.

Think about that for a moment.

Read: http://qz.com/110164/thailands-infamous-bitcoin-crackdown-is-not-quite-what-it-seems/

One option is the ."51% attack". If a party has control of more hashing power than the rest of the network put together then they can arbitrarily block transactions they don't like from properly confirming. I'm quite sure if the US goverment chose to do so they could do this, it's a question of whether they would consider it worth committing those resources.

The computing power in the bitcoin pool today is 8 times the computing power of the top 500 fastest super computers in the world combined.

Even if NSA, Russia and China have more powerful setups than what's on the official Top 500 list (and I'm sure they do), it would take an immense effort to create something matching.

There is a new product in pre-production the does exactly what you described. It's nutrition shake, not a solid food though. They should be shipping regular orders by sometime this fall.

For something closer to what you described, and more relevant to this post, NASA is funding research on a complete daily nutrition solid that may use an insect source for protein. This may be licensed as a commercial product sometime in the future.

I so agree with this, absolute privacy is an illusion. Even if 'they' [tin foil hats on, guys and gals] can't get at the text of your stuff, they can use traffic analysis to get a little insight into some of your social graph. So I also use DDG, encrypt stuff where I can, use Tor, anything to increase the levels of difficulty and make the system run hotter.

Also, finally, they might work out that this is foolishness: http://qz.com/92207/simple-math-shows-why-the-nsas-facebook-spying-is-a-fools-errand/ and go back to some real work, as if that would happen.

http://qz.com/95994/amazon-is-staffing-up-for-its-600-million-cloud-for-spooks/

High-frequency trading is bad for normal investors, researchers say - Quartz

Also includes some details on how high-volume arbitrage (the actual issue at stake) works.

My quotes:

"Although the term “high-frequency trading” (HFT) is often used loosely to describe trading at high speeds by computers, in this case we mean something specific: high-volume arbitrage activity, which plays on small, temporary differences in price between, say, a security trading both on the New York Stock Exchange and DirectEdge.

[...] By anticipating future NBBO [National Best Bid and Offer price], an HFT algorithm can capitalize on cross-market disparities before they are reflected in the public price quote, in effect jumping ahead of incoming orders to pocket a small but sure prot. Naturally this precipitates an arms race [...]

[...] HFT doesn’t actually make markets more efficient. It’s great for those who practise HFT, but it reduces profits to everyone else, because in those few milliseconds before the NBBO is calculated and disseminated, the high-frequency traders carry out deals at a price that favors them.

In fact, [...] the difference between investor bids (offers to buy) and asks (offers to sell) is wider when arbitrageurs get into the mix, meaning neither sellers nor buyers in the non-HFT world are getting the best price they could."

It's already starting.

wow. I used to think that you were an ok guy. Now, I realize that you do not have a fucking clue of what you are talking about. Worse, the only thing that you have available to you, is to talk down to others when you have zero knowledge of something.

And since you do not have a clue, let me point out that the next president and prime minster of India are going to be VERY conservative due to this
It was not needed at this time, but, perhaps it is for the best.

But then again, you will not get it.

I've heard nothing on their sales so far, which means to me they are terrible. Much like the Surface production being halved.

I don't criticize MS for trying something different. It is a bold move. But, what they are putting out ISN'T the solution to the problem. They just can't figure out what to do it seems.