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When I RTFA, it seems like there are 100s of millions of DCMA requests going out each year - 35 million in the "latter half of September 2016"?

Even if "detection" (I don't know how good their detection process is if 99%+ of the claims are not found by Google) filing costs came out to a dollar per then I would think the cost to the industry would be $250+ million.

Looking at Warner Music revenues (the first company I could think of: https://www.statista.com/stati...), I would think that the cost of filing all these claims amounts to around 5% or so of total revenue.

Two things came to mind thinking about this:
1. The music company accountants should be going apeshit over the cost of this program and the damage to the company's bottom line.
2. There's a whole bunch of money to be made creating an application for generating DCMA demands that reduces the number of DCMA requests (and the total cost of the requests) by 10x or more.

Like when accounting for "20 million active users" monthly to "between 300000 and 400000 jobs" every month.

Population of China: 1.357 Billion.
Out of which 359.14 million were employed in urban and 405 million in rural China, in 2011.

Meaning that those "monthly gigs" represent 0.039 - 0.052% of jobs in China.
While "20 million active users", would represent 2.61% of workers - if there actually were 20 million gigs too.
Instead of there only being enough "gigs" for about 1.5 - 2% of "workers".

Some of whom are significant enough percent of the whole to be singled out in the article as ""beautiful women"...between the ages of 18 and 28...working as live-streaming models to keep mostly-male viewers entertained" - for 70$ per day + tips.

I.e. The company offers either "sorting crates of milk at a supermarket or hand out pamphlets on frozen sidewalks" kind of "gigs" - or "gigs" which are not so cleverly disguised online prostitution.
Considering that regular prostitution can employ some 300000 in a single city those 80$ million look more and more like they are being made on the backs of prostitutes.

Also throughout 2016, there were numerous reports that claimed HTC would stop selling Flagship phones in America completely.

If 432 million smart phones are sold per quarter that is 1.6 billion per year. One group predicts around 4.77 billion cell phone users by the end of 2017, though that includes both smart phones and less sophisticated phones. If we said that half of those phones are smart that means the number of smart phones is somewhere around 2.4 billion. We already know we are closing in on saturation as the remainder of the world's ~6.8 billion people are not necessarily potential customers for cell service.

So if 1.6 billion of the 2.4 billion smart phones in use today were purchased in the past year, does that suggest that on average over half the world's smart phones last under a year?

Regarding the gap with the MacBook Pro, I quite agree that that's the biggest factor at play. I didn't realize you were getting at quite that point, so I apologize for arguing about something that we actually agree on.

That said, when I said the factors were the same, I was intending to speak primarily towards your comments regarding vendor lock-in. The lock-in has remained unchanged over the years, so it alone doesn't produce changes in sales. It does, however, enable other factors (e.g. pent-up demand) to drive changes in sales. That's what I was getting at when I said it hasn't changed. Put differently, they haven't improved their lock-in by a significant margin anytime recently, so it alone can't explain any growth we see in their unit sales.

the iPhone 6 had a lacklustre reception too

That's not at all backed up by the facts (see Q1 '15). Again, I'm talking about units sold, and in that regard it's unquestionably true that the iPhone 6 had anything BUT a lackluster reception. You can argue that some reviewers panned it, but that's true of every model and not at all relevant to anything I'm discussing. Up until the iPhone 6s, each model broke the unit sales record set by the previous model, but the iPhone 6 was a massive outlier in the degree to which it broke the record, and it's my belief that the iPhone 7 is benefitting from the uncommonly large number of iPhone 6 users looking to now upgrade.

So the quarter before the last quarter was shorter than average but I didn't see any articles saying that was misleading because it was a short quarter. No this is only brought up when the newas sounds good.

In reality what's being argues about here is the rate of growth of the rate of income. a second derivative. Apple's trend is actually growing in revenue steadily steadily.

Exactly. If you stand back a little ways, the "jaggies" start to blur together, and you start seeing the "Trend" a lot easier. And, overall, Apple's "trend" looks a LOT healthier than say, Microsoft's...

So the quarter before the last quarter was shorter than average but I didn't see any articles saying that was misleading because it was a short quarter. No this is only brought up when the newas sounds good.

In reality what's being argues about here is the rate of growth of the rate of income. a second derivative. Apple's trend is actually growing in revenue steadily steadily.

Exactly. If you stand back a little ways, the "jaggies" start to blur together, and you start seeing the "Trend" a lot easier. And, overall, Apple's "trend" looks a LOT healthier than say, Microsoft's...

FF started its precipitous drop in market share around the second quarter of 2009.

So you mean Firefox started losing marketshare to Chrome not until after Chrome was released? Thanks for clarifying that.

It's not like there's a single cause but people who are pretending that getting a guy fired because of his private political views didn't matter are insane. Of course it did. Firefox had been mostly stagnant until then, undergoing a slow but sure decline.

http://infographic.statista.co...

As you can see most of Chrome's growth was at the expense of IE. Not only that, but it didn't seem to start a decline until almost Q2 2011.

> Much like there's no real "tablet market", just an iPad market.

Nonsense, Android sold more units. Just like the phone market is really an Android market.

Who did what?

Android didn't move a single thing. Android is an operating system. You could drill down further and say "Linux sold more units" which is still as apt a comparison.

iPad on the other hand is a product, the vendor is Apple. Did Samsung move more tablets? LG? Google? They are all competitors so lumping them together is hardly a valid argument. But you would still need to pick any two other vendors to align with Apple's share.

Anything is a valid "iProduct" the sheep buy it and think its cool. Then the rest of the market tries to reproduce and fail because there actually is no real use case. The sheep then loose interest and move onto the next cool "iProduct" rinse repeat. https://www.statista.com/stati...

By giving away stuff for free for so long, we've created an ad economy that is bigger than it should be.

Create the next SnapWhat'sInstaTwitFace, make it free so it becomes popular, then profit on all the ads. Media advertising in the US is around $200B. How many unicorns can fit in that corral?

Not surprised to see you have a UID of less than six digits, as your understanding of technology is a decade outdated. https://www.statista.com/chart... might be illuminating. Basically, it shows that P&S cameras aren't popular anymore.

But to respond:
1) How often you do you see people using digital cameras instead of phone cameras? Enough that every computer needs to accommodate them?
2) Every camera over $200 will have Wi-Fi, and it's been that way for years now. It's very easy/automatic to use. Every DSLR has WiFi, even the cheap ones.
3) Low end p&s cameras have sensors barely any larger than a smartphone. Regardless of their merits, though, empirically people have transitioned away.
4) By that reasoning, why did they get rid of the VGA port, or the DVD drive? Having little-used ports be available as a cheap dongle seems like an intelligent compromise.
5) Micro-SD cards are sometimes used for phones, and this makes them more popular than SD cards.

My wife has the pro and it's awesome. I agree that they should have had a USB 3.0, but really it doesn't get in the way of her work

Couldn't find an exact figure, but this got me an approximate figure.

Which goes to show that tons of people don't mind going through minor hoops to get into the app store.

Does the OP have any proof that "Fewer people have the opportunity to write code and share it"? If anything, it's easy these days to get a professional development environment for pretty much any programming task, be it a pro version of Visual Studio for free or a free professional game engine. And people use them, as is evidenced for example by the huge growth in the number of PC and mobile games being published. Not to mention that consoles are a lot more open than they were in the past, with lots of indie games being available, and a normal Xbox One can be used for console development.

So even disregarding the sensationalist "PC is dead" angle, I feel that pretty much everything in the OP is not only unsubstantiated, but the opposite of the truth.

Nobody sensible predicted that Apple fans would reject the iPhone because of the lack of 3.5mm jack.

Reject would be a bit strong, but didn't pull iPhone out of its slump either. At least part of that would be the headphone jack.

I dunno. Amazon has seldom been very profitable, but it could have been if it wanted to be. For example Amazon has wielded effective monopsony powers in the publishing wholesale market for years now. If it had merely stuck to being an online bookseller it'd have been a lot more profitable than it has been, but a lot less valuable.

If you look at the last 20 quarters of profits, clearly Amazon is run to break even when it comes to profits, but over the same period its market capitalization has grown from $81 billion to $370 billion. And it's not because investors are naive. They aren't worried about profits because Amazon revenues continue to grow.

Any time management wants it can make Amazon profitable, but at present it's spending all that money coming in on a bid to become the pre-eminent retailer of everything. When you buy Amazon stock, that's the vision you're investing in. Even if Amazon fails, what remains will likely be profitable and (this is somewhat different) generate lots of cash.

The box office is up only because the average ticket price continues to rise. Both because of inflation, and because an increasing percentage of total ticket sales are for premium theaters. The number of tickets being sold has been falling for a number of years; after the peak year of 2002 there was a big dropoff in 2005 and a slow decline since. (But not steady; years go up and down a bit.) Source: https://www.statista.com/stati...

2002 featured movies in three of the biggest franchises ever: Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter. But the #1 film in the US wasn't any of those; it was Spider-Man. My Big Fat Greek Wedding was fifth. LOTR: The Two Towers was #1 globally. Source: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/y...

Nobody wanted to buy a Ford

Except the people who buy cars, I guess. Ford's US market share (14.5%) in 2015 trailed GM, tied Toyota for second place, and beat Honda and Nissan handily.

Number of tickets sold peaked in the early 2000s at over 1.5 billion, and has been on a very gradual decline to around 1.3 billion per year since then (for North America).

The inflation-adjusted cost of a movie ticket soared in the 1960s. So you could argue this either way - that the new price is the new norm, or that the theaters have been gouging us for 50 years. I wasn't around in the 1960s so can't really speculate as to what caused the rise in prices then. But in the last 40 years I suspect the advent of cable TV and VCRs/DVDs, and now streaming has forced theaters into a higher-priced niche. They're now more about a viewing experience (e.g. IMAX, THX, 3D) rather than merely watching the movie.

Which brings us to an important point. You can't judge how well the movie industry is doing solely on theater ticket sales. Subscription services (e.g. HBO), and disc and digital sales and rentals are an important part of their revenue today. From what I could gather, theater ticket sales only account for about a third of the industry's revenue.

How many jobs? I keep hearing big numbers like this thrown around but never any job figures. It's starting to make me nervous...

Another useless number is the production estimate: a gigawatt of production? Is that per month? Per year? Total?

I assume it's annual production.

The US consumes/produces roughly 4000 terawatt hours annually. Assuming the article refers to gigawatt production and not something else (like gigawatt-hours equivalent), and assuming 4 hours of production for 250 days per year (average), that's 1/4,000 of the US electricity demand produced each year.

Of course that's additive. After 20 years there will be 20 TWh of solar panels installed from this factory alone, at which time they can begin replacing the older units.

So we would need roughly 200 of these factories to ramp up to producing all of our electricity using solar panels.

Of course, there's lots of installed generation that we won't need or want to replace (hydro, such as Niagra Mohawk), so the actual number needed will be a lot less. Also, installed solar will displace gasoline instead of other electricity generation.

Overall I think this is excellent news.

On the subject of automation, it seems reasonable that a largely automated factory could be paired with automated deployment in remote, uninhabited areas such as Western Utah or the Great Basin area. Robots building support structures and installing solar cells seems like something a DARPA challenge could solve.

The only obstacle of doing this is the financing under our current economic model. It's something that could be done under the government model, such as was done with the interstate highway project.

I eagerly await our solar future.

one by one, these "social media" companies should be drained -- of their dollars -- by responsible individuals who refuse to use (be used) by their service

The problem here is that "responsible individuals" of the type to which you refer, are in the minority. Although social media companies would be ecstatic if 100% of the population would bend over for them, they seem pretty satisfied with the 78% -and-growing market penetration they currently enjoy.

• Surface sold ~1.5 million/quarter in 2015
• MacBook sold ~5 million/quarter in 2015

• http://pocketnow.com/2016/02/0... https://www.statista.com/stati...

Another one is that life expectancy has gone down because more people are impoverished.

No. Try again.

https://www.statista.com/stati...

Oh, this is really juicy as well...

Well, of course the MacBoook Pro "outsold" all other laptops this year... it's the only line of laptops with MacOS that was updated after an extremely long time, versus a huge number of options that are constantly being updated with Windows 7,8,10 or any flavor of Linux. It'll obviously outsell any other single brand as long as it keeps it's ecosystem enclosed into a walled garden giving anything from a single option to a handful for desperate users needing an upgrade.

Wanna get a new Windows 10 laptop? Well, here's a huge choice of options you have to fit whatever needs you have, coming out every single month, with all sorts of prices and specs, from a huge list of brands you can choose whichever is more reliable for you.

Wanna get a new MacBook? Well, I guess Apple could perhaps release a new revision to replace it's 4 year old Macbook Pro, I'm not sure how much better it'll be since the company has been giving a shit about professional customers anymore, with specs that could be kinda underpowered and outdated, but it's still guaranteed to be Apple priced. It`s your only option though, so you better kneel down and pray to our lord Jobs.

People who are invested, used to, like and/or have the money to be into the Apple ecosystem will buy a new MacBook Pro - if only for the hardware upgrade and because they have no other option. Not everyone hated the lack of ports, but even those who did just have no other option.

But hey smart guy, want some statistics? There:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.statista.com/stati...
http://www.w3schools.com/brows...
https://www.netmarketshare.com...

Nothing new under the sun. MacOS is still around the 10% mark which it has been keeping for around 2 to 3 years now, with different versions of Windows going somewhere between 60% to 80% when added up. There's the plain hard truth of this game: the whole OS preference has been pretty much fixed for quite a while now. And despite Microsoft making some very horrible decisions for Windows 10, I also don't see much incentive for people to go MacOS either.

According to https://www.statista.com/topics/1001/google/, Google had 247 million unique US visitors in the month of November 2015.

Total income in the US is about $15T. If that were divided evenly between all US citizens, we'd get about $45K each, annually.

Number of fulltime workers in US: 124.73 million. Source.

Pot to be divvied up: $15 trillion.

Share per worker: $120,259. That's a tad more than $45k.

There are about 3 citizens per worker, what's you point - that some people, kids, elderly, ect don't work?

Number of fulltime workers in US: 124.73 million. Source.

Pot to be divvied up: $15 trillion.

Share per worker: $120,259. That's a tad more than $45k.

People say this a lot, but I still wear sunglasses whenever I'm outside, and I see a lot of other people doing the same. None of us afaik are raging against it, although irises that have dynamic built in polarization and light filtering would be nice.
Glasses are the most accepted method of modifying your vision, be it sun, near/far sighted or night vision.
To people posting comments like the above, feel free to complete your assertion by letting us know what vision products should be if not worn over your eyes..... or just stfu, you're not adding anything at all.
Previous "glasses" have failed, such as google glass. Many concept products fail, regardless of if they are glasses. Many glasses products succeed, such as, well, this'll be a long list that goes from HTC Vive through to Oakleys, and probably further. Claiming Google Glasses failed because they were glasses is borderline imbecilic - there's a whole hell of a lot more to it than that. Google "google glass failure" you'll learn a little bit.
Perhaps you're right though, the global eyewear market isn't that big: https://www.statista.com/stati... (excerpt: In 2013, the market value of the global eyewear market amounted to 90.3 billion U.S. dollars.)

Just realised I'm replying to an AC, usually wouldn't bother, but now I've written it....

most smartphone manufacturers barely break even or operate at a loss. add the losses to apple's share of the profits and you get over 100%

until a little while ago only apple and samsung took home something like 95% or 99% of all profits. samsung's loss pushes apple over 100% in profits

all those cheap android phones sold all over the world that make up for 85% of all phones sold don't really make any money

I think Android counts for more than 85% of smartphone sales now, more like 99%. Which just goes to show what a price-gouger Apple is.

In other words, when they added up all of the P&L from all of the phone manufacturers Apple's share was 104% of the industry total.

For example, Samsung makes $1 in profits, Company Y has a loss of $5, and Apple makes $104. The industry total would be $100.
- Apple would have made 104% of the overall industry P&L.
- Samsung would have made 1% of the overall industry P&L.
- Company Y would have made -5% of the overall industry P&L.

It's a way to trend which company in a sector is making most of the profits and can be a way to develop an investment strategy.

Cell Phones is a $425 Billion dollar industry. Even making tiny profits can make it worth it.

https://www.statista.com/topic...

Any reasonably fast device running Android 6.0 or higher must enable encryption by default.

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.c...

I don't know how many devices that is, but I'd guess... a lot? Before Nougat was released, Marshmallow had around a 20% market share of Android versions:

https://www.statista.com/stati...

Worldwide, it looks like third place behind the Corolla and Golf/Rabbit:

https://www.statista.com/stati...

"...with one study reporting that 50% of American faces are already in a government database"

I'd be surprised if it was only 50%. Just between the DMV and Facebook (which the NSA admits they mine for data) I think it'd be higher than that.

There are about 214 million licensed drivers in the U.S. according to Statista (https://www.statista.com/statistics/191653/number-of-licensed-drivers-in-the-us-since-1988/). That's about 67% of the 319 million people in the US as of 2014.

If the NSA admits to mining Facebook, it's reasonable to think they're probably mining other social media sites like Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc etc.

Add Facebook and all the other social media sites that get mined and I wouldn't be surprised to find 80 or 85% of American faces are in a government database.

Gab.ai basically just recreated twitter on a shoestring budget... [emphasis mine]

Twitter had 8 employees in 2008, what's your point? Link Could any IT person worth his or her salary copy twitter's functionality with 7 other people's help? Yeah, I would hope so. Could those 8 people scale that company to from 0 users to a public company with 300 million users? No chance in hell. I'm not saying I know what all 3xxx people at Twitter do or if they are doing anything "useful", but I still question op's logic of how he came up with 100 workers. That seems a little light, and is most likely a number derived by someone who doesn't know what they are talking about.

According to this link, back in 2015 Twitter had 3900 employees. Yes, 3900! https://www.statista.com/stati...

What the hell do they need that many people for? Twitter at best could easily function with under 100 employees. 10 in sales, 1 engineer, 1 developer, and 88 managers. /sarc

Realistically, the company could downsize by 80% and streamline their system. They don't need that many people for "microblogging".

So if the majority of the population believed that the Earth is flat, does that make it so?

Strawman #1

A phone will never be the equivalent of a desktop PC.

Strawman #2

And if people cared so little about games, then why is the PC gaming industry so huge as to dwarf the console game industry, the movie industry and the music industry?

You should stop reading Gartner. US PC video game revenue is roughly 650M Movie revenue topped 11B Not sure what your definition of "dwarf" is.

If they rolled out iMessage for Android about 3 years ago, it would have actually worked as planned. Now, with Line (560 million monthly users), Whatsapp (1 billion monthly users), and in China WeChat (800 million monthly users), iMessage doesn't stand a chance. Those three are the big ones, that together make up complete saturation of the market. After all it is estimated there are around 2 billion active smartphones worldwide, and if you add up the numbers above you have more than 100% of the total smartphone market. Apple releasing an Android version of iMessage now won't do much of anything - it's already lost the battle.

If they rolled out iMessage for Android about 3 years ago, it would have actually worked as planned. Now, with Line (560 million monthly users), Whatsapp (1 billion monthly users), and in China WeChat (800 million monthly users), iMessage doesn't stand a chance. Those three are the big ones, that together make up complete saturation of the market. After all it is estimated there are around 2 billion active smartphones worldwide, and if you add up the numbers above you have more than 100% of the total smartphone market. Apple releasing an Android version of iMessage now won't do much of anything - it's already lost the battle.

If they rolled out iMessage for Android about 3 years ago, it would have actually worked as planned. Now, with Line (560 million monthly users), Whatsapp (1 billion monthly users), and in China WeChat (800 million monthly users), iMessage doesn't stand a chance. Those three are the big ones, that together make up complete saturation of the market. After all it is estimated there are around 2 billion active smartphones worldwide, and if you add up the numbers above you have more than 100% of the total smartphone market. Apple releasing an Android version of iMessage now won't do much of anything - it's already lost the battle.

It's around 42% or so, although Android still holds the lead. Apple benefits from massive lock-in, and that means less attrition of users.

But with falling sales (see the other /. story), the complete stagnation of the US market (the only place to sell to new customers is in SE Asia, China, and India - which cannot afford iPhones), and the move to support Android, it's clear that Apple reads the future about Android's growth (80% worldwide and rising) and will pivot to a services company to try to stay allive on other platforms.

It's not just the trade deficit, it's the spending we have to support as well. Even though the Federal Government took more than $10,000 per man, woman, and child (about $26,400 per worker - about $13.20 per hour worked in the US), it still spent $1,423,000,000,000 more than it took in (an additional $5.69 per hour worked). We have a LOT of Government to support - there are career politicians and crony capitalists to support after all!

Sources: number of workers, 124.73 million. Federal revenues: $3.3 trillion. Federal debt added FY2016: $1.423 trillion

I am Swiss. Switzerland provides safe haven for plenty of refugees: https://www.statista.com/stati...

That chart only shows the percentage of asylum applications that were approved. There's no context on the total number of applications that were filed. If Switzerland only had 100 applications, they approved 70. 70% is high, but that may equate to only allowing 70 people into the country. I can't say that is "plenty" unless you put some context in there.

I am Swiss. Switzerland provides safe haven for plenty of refugees: https://www.statista.com/stati...

No, I don't apologize.

You are an idiot.

Germany has not 2 million immigrates in a single year. Where would we place them? Again: 2M immigration in a single year, that is one person per 40 citizens, that is a bit more than 2 per 100. You would simply see them on the street!!! That is a no brainer. The city would be "full with them".

https://de.statista.com/themen...
http://www.zeit.de/politik/aus...

OTOH we have numbers like this, same magazine :D
http://www.zeit.de/politik/deu...

Which support your claim but subtract the emigrations ...

Anyway. If every year 1 or 2 million would immigrate we had not a stable 80M population but would gain 7 - 10M over a decade: which we don't.

Yahoo! and AOL may be somewhat toxic amongst techies, but I'm not sure that's the case with the general public. Have a look at this, for example; they generally seem to have a pretty good rep. with Joe Public.

I highly doubt C64 is the best-selling computer of all time. Wikipedia estimates 10M-17M C64s were sold. It of course depends on what is a computer: for example, many smartphones have CPU(s), memory, storage, and even display. According to this page, in 2011 Apple sold 72M iPhones: https://www.statista.com/stati... . Also, 10M Raspberry Pi computers were sold till 2016: https://www.raspberrypi.org/bl.... I guess Arduinos have similar numbers, but they are hard to track because of clones.

132 billion in a single years profits (2015) including only the top ten companies combined.

Check your link - that's $132B in INCOME, not "profits" - they are not interchangeable.

You need some form of citation to show there is a lot of money in the oil business?
Try google.

https://www.statista.com/stati...

132 billion in a single years profits (2015) including only the top ten companies combined.

Nobody seems to be telling, which I think means there are way more 2K projectors out there than the industry would like you to know about. According to Wikipedia, all DLP projectors were 2K until early 2012 when 4K became available, and 2K projectors are still available. This graph of digital adoption in cinemas shows that almost half of the projectors were installed by the end of 2011 and so must have been only 2K (apart from Sony SXRD units). Maybe some have upgraded to 4K since then, but you can bet there are plenty of 2K venues out there today. I'd say that 99% of people are never going to notice the difference. As for those that say a 35mm print can beat 4K, yes that's true in the same way that vinyl can beat a CD.

Given that Android has about 80% global market share, you're full of shit.

http://www.statista.com/statis...

Because god forbid all those people use their phones for fun. Are you a fun-shamer? Or just an asshole?

nearly 71% of 250 physicians responding to an informal internet survey

Now who would be most likely to answer such a survey? Related, who would consider 250 responses - when we have over 800,000 active physicians in this country to be significant?

As I've said before, there are plenty of problems with Hillary. Why go with these silly ones?