OK, point taken, but you're splitting hairs. There's no way to know for certain that the contract written 4 years ago is still valid, so they're both speculation unless you happen to be an Apple exec. And what fund is Slashdot if we can't speculate?
To your point, it would be MORE rational for Apple to let the public know that they're locked up with AT&T till 2012. This avoids uncertainty for the folks holding out on buying an iPhone due to lingering doubts about Verizon availability. To my knowledge, there's no provision in the 2007 document requiring the secrecy, so either Apple is being stupid or something else has been signed in the meantime.
As far as I can tell, this assertion is speculation as well. According to court filings, it appears Apple and AT&T signed a 5 year exclusivity contract in 2007 as the iPhone was launching. It was not clear at all at the time how popular the iPhone would become. There's no reason to believe the contract has remained intact for 4 years. That's eons for consumer electronics contracts. It's much more likely that exclusivity, margins, etc. were all renegotiated as each side learned more about how the iPhone was performing in the market.
Unfortunately, that's just the way the world works. If you're a one person independent IT shop, you're not going to install 20 copies of Windows at a small company and then agree to take some percentage of the savings. It's their responsibility to exchange cash today in exchange for annualized operational savings in the future. I don't get why IBM should be any different. Unless they have the authority to get in there and actually do the hiring / firing, they shouldn't have to take the risk for failure on the execution side.
I completely agree- it's obviously a self-serving publication. But, everyone who's every interacted with Federal IT and Support Services knows they're some of the least cost-effective organizations on the planet. They have a responsibility to get their act together.
It's interesting that your Motel 6 story is about a local franchisee screwing you over, and the national office (the Megacorps!!!) solving the problem for you.
A nicely written argument, but I would go the exact opposite direction. Blizzard has to earn my $15 every month. When I get bored (run out of content) I unsubscribe. When they come out with great new expansions (and I think they are), I buy them. Blizzard is completely obligated to keep me happy on a month to month basis or I quit.
Contrast that with a boxed game. The standard process is to publish the game, max out sales, and then fire the dev staff. They never hear from me again, and my satisfaction is unimportant to them. THAT is the norm for video game publishing, and both Blizzard and Valve are wonderful exceptions.
The game's fine. It's got the exact same level of controls that every other kid-targeted MMO does. The people who are really disappointed with this game are adults who were hoping this was going to have the complexity of WoW/Eve/etc in a Lego-themed environment. I played the beta for a weekend and it really wasn't my cup of tea, but I can certainly see kids loving it the same way they love Lego Star Wars video games.
By the way, based on your other posts about Lego Universe and this one, I'm not surprised you were censored on the Lego forums. You have an extremely derogatory and insulting writing style.
When Steam goes out of business, whatever game you choose to buy instead of Civ V is also going to be on a useless plastic disc. I have GI Joe for the C64 and Pirates! for the Apple II on 5.25 disks. They're both equally useless to me even though they predate DRM because I don't have a C64, Apple II, or 5.25 drive.
Think about it like an engineer instead of a lawyer. As far as I can tell, you're drastically overestimating the probabilities that the following will all occur simultaneously: 1) Steam will go out of business before the game is obsolete and impossible to use for technical reasons. 2) You'll actually have an interest in reinstalling and playing Civ 5 (not Civ 6, 7, or 8). 3) Steam will not deactivate the DRM when they shut the product down. 4) A crack will be unavailable in the future.
Write down the probabilities you estimate each of those things happening, multiply them together, and then ask yourself "I'm willing to forgo buying this product because I estimate there is a X% chance of this scenario happening." I doubt you'll continue to hold onto this principle.
The State of Washington does not have personal or corporate income tax at this time. So to add a 5% income tax, which has very little deductions, would obviously sounds like a big change for the State.
WA does have corporate taxes, they are called Business & Occupation taxes and are between about.5% and 1.5% of GROSS receipts.
It doesn't have to be a practicing physician. In the same way that we have judges who are not practicing lawyers, perhaps there's room for medically trained jurors who are not physicians.
Bankruptcy court is an excellent example. We don't have average joes deciding on the extremely arcane law governing seniority of debt.
I wish I could point to a link, but I've read articles here and there that examined the results of jury-tried cases versus a blind analysis by panels of physicians. There's almost no correlation between who gets awards and who does not. It indicates that the legal system case is providing no service other than providing lottery tickets to people who got sick. Some win, some lose, and there's no real "fairness" in distribution.
It's hard to be objective about whether to want to protect my privacy or not given I have zero idea of what Google's profile of me looks like. I imagine everyone has some threshold level where they say "Enough is enough, I'm not willing to sacrifice THAT info for free services." I would guess we all probably fall into two camps- either dramatically underestimating or dramatically overestimating the level of information stored in the profile. Without better specifics in the hands of the populace about the level of personal details, it doesn't seem to me that a fair level of regulation can possibly be drafted by public officials.
The "powers that be" in this particular case is some guy in Florida who buys China Ubuntu boxes, slaps a Commodore sticker on them and sells them as Commodore machines. It's not some Fortune 100 company, it's a dude who runs the business out of his furniture warehouse. He hasn't even filed a suit or hired a lawyer, so it's the internet equivalent of "Take that back." I don't think this particular incident is terribly good proof that "He who has the gold makes the rules."
I mean, right now I could paste some legal jargon into this post demanding that you admit your statement was injurious to me, and it wouldn't really indicate anything at all about our legal system.
Stuff like this is fascinating as a thought exercise, but people don't really think with the math parts of their brains when it comes to safety. Even if you COULD conclusively prove that it would save more lives to remove the co-pilot and spend his salary on "Mechanical Safety Widget" or more flight controllers or mandatory 5 point belts on planes, people just wouldn't go for it. We humans have such a hard time estimating the cost/benefits of rare events (buying a lottery ticket/dying in a plane crash) that a tremendous amount of money is pissed away on irrelevant, nonsensical things.
Given the rare, rare incidence of these diseases, I'd say treatment makes more sense than a cure. If we're thinking cure, does it really make sense to spend health dollars on potentially vaccinating everyone for Ebola?
So actually... I did manage operations in a UAW plant. What I saw was a bunch of potentially awesome workers (smart, hardworking) turned into absolute slugs because of the union. That said, my family comes from a long line of craft union folks and I've also seen first hand how unions can save your butt in certain situations.
This is just Unions being Unions. The list of Union priorities goes something like this:
1) Compensation for Union Management 2) Benefits for Union Management 3) Ensuring the long term survival of the Union..) 99) Compensation for Union Members
Unions hate it when workers are pitted against each other via performance metrics because it leads to a lack of solidarity. The biggest threat to the NEA would be for the good teachers to splinter off and negotiate their own contracts (and the subsequent loss of dues).
Slashdot Mirror
It's too bad everyone always brings up Sherman when Clayton is such a cooler anti-trust act.
Anyways, Clayton specifically deals with tying and exclusive deals, whereas Sherman is more general in its nature.
OK, point taken, but you're splitting hairs. There's no way to know for certain that the contract written 4 years ago is still valid, so they're both speculation unless you happen to be an Apple exec. And what fund is Slashdot if we can't speculate?
To your point, it would be MORE rational for Apple to let the public know that they're locked up with AT&T till 2012. This avoids uncertainty for the folks holding out on buying an iPhone due to lingering doubts about Verizon availability. To my knowledge, there's no provision in the 2007 document requiring the secrecy, so either Apple is being stupid or something else has been signed in the meantime.
As far as I can tell, this assertion is speculation as well. According to court filings, it appears Apple and AT&T signed a 5 year exclusivity contract in 2007 as the iPhone was launching. It was not clear at all at the time how popular the iPhone would become. There's no reason to believe the contract has remained intact for 4 years. That's eons for consumer electronics contracts. It's much more likely that exclusivity, margins, etc. were all renegotiated as each side learned more about how the iPhone was performing in the market.
Unfortunately, that's just the way the world works. If you're a one person independent IT shop, you're not going to install 20 copies of Windows at a small company and then agree to take some percentage of the savings. It's their responsibility to exchange cash today in exchange for annualized operational savings in the future. I don't get why IBM should be any different. Unless they have the authority to get in there and actually do the hiring / firing, they shouldn't have to take the risk for failure on the execution side.
I completely agree- it's obviously a self-serving publication. But, everyone who's every interacted with Federal IT and Support Services knows they're some of the least cost-effective organizations on the planet. They have a responsibility to get their act together.
It's interesting that your Motel 6 story is about a local franchisee screwing you over, and the national office (the Megacorps!!!) solving the problem for you.
A nicely written argument, but I would go the exact opposite direction. Blizzard has to earn my $15 every month. When I get bored (run out of content) I unsubscribe. When they come out with great new expansions (and I think they are), I buy them. Blizzard is completely obligated to keep me happy on a month to month basis or I quit.
Contrast that with a boxed game. The standard process is to publish the game, max out sales, and then fire the dev staff. They never hear from me again, and my satisfaction is unimportant to them. THAT is the norm for video game publishing, and both Blizzard and Valve are wonderful exceptions.
Oh please... That is exactly what I'd expect to hear from a Poopocrat.
Zero Day Exploits don't seem to have anything to do with Social Media, even though thrown thrown in as a subcategory.
African or European?
The game's fine. It's got the exact same level of controls that every other kid-targeted MMO does. The people who are really disappointed with this game are adults who were hoping this was going to have the complexity of WoW/Eve/etc in a Lego-themed environment. I played the beta for a weekend and it really wasn't my cup of tea, but I can certainly see kids loving it the same way they love Lego Star Wars video games.
By the way, based on your other posts about Lego Universe and this one, I'm not surprised you were censored on the Lego forums. You have an extremely derogatory and insulting writing style.
When Steam goes out of business, whatever game you choose to buy instead of Civ V is also going to be on a useless plastic disc. I have GI Joe for the C64 and Pirates! for the Apple II on 5.25 disks. They're both equally useless to me even though they predate DRM because I don't have a C64, Apple II, or 5.25 drive.
Think about it like an engineer instead of a lawyer. As far as I can tell, you're drastically overestimating the probabilities that the following will all occur simultaneously:
1) Steam will go out of business before the game is obsolete and impossible to use for technical reasons.
2) You'll actually have an interest in reinstalling and playing Civ 5 (not Civ 6, 7, or 8).
3) Steam will not deactivate the DRM when they shut the product down.
4) A crack will be unavailable in the future.
Write down the probabilities you estimate each of those things happening, multiply them together, and then ask yourself "I'm willing to forgo buying this product because I estimate there is a X% chance of this scenario happening." I doubt you'll continue to hold onto this principle.
The State of Washington does not have personal or corporate income tax at this time. So to add a 5% income tax, which has very little deductions, would obviously sounds like a big change for the State.
WA does have corporate taxes, they are called Business & Occupation taxes and are between about .5% and 1.5% of GROSS receipts.
http://dor.wa.gov/Content/FindTaxesAndRates/BAndOTax/BandOrates.aspx
It doesn't have to be a practicing physician. In the same way that we have judges who are not practicing lawyers, perhaps there's room for medically trained jurors who are not physicians.
Bankruptcy court is an excellent example. We don't have average joes deciding on the extremely arcane law governing seniority of debt.
I wish I could point to a link, but I've read articles here and there that examined the results of jury-tried cases versus a blind analysis by panels of physicians. There's almost no correlation between who gets awards and who does not. It indicates that the legal system case is providing no service other than providing lottery tickets to people who got sick. Some win, some lose, and there's no real "fairness" in distribution.
This was your big opportunity to throw FIFO out there and you blew it.
It's hard to be objective about whether to want to protect my privacy or not given I have zero idea of what Google's profile of me looks like. I imagine everyone has some threshold level where they say "Enough is enough, I'm not willing to sacrifice THAT info for free services." I would guess we all probably fall into two camps- either dramatically underestimating or dramatically overestimating the level of information stored in the profile. Without better specifics in the hands of the populace about the level of personal details, it doesn't seem to me that a fair level of regulation can possibly be drafted by public officials.
The "powers that be" in this particular case is some guy in Florida who buys China Ubuntu boxes, slaps a Commodore sticker on them and sells them as Commodore machines. It's not some Fortune 100 company, it's a dude who runs the business out of his furniture warehouse. He hasn't even filed a suit or hired a lawyer, so it's the internet equivalent of "Take that back." I don't think this particular incident is terribly good proof that "He who has the gold makes the rules."
I mean, right now I could paste some legal jargon into this post demanding that you admit your statement was injurious to me, and it wouldn't really indicate anything at all about our legal system.
Stuff like this is fascinating as a thought exercise, but people don't really think with the math parts of their brains when it comes to safety. Even if you COULD conclusively prove that it would save more lives to remove the co-pilot and spend his salary on "Mechanical Safety Widget" or more flight controllers or mandatory 5 point belts on planes, people just wouldn't go for it. We humans have such a hard time estimating the cost/benefits of rare events (buying a lottery ticket/dying in a plane crash) that a tremendous amount of money is pissed away on irrelevant, nonsensical things.
Couldn't agree more. I would limit the boundaries of my opinion to very rare needs like Ebola treatment, not endemic problems like Malaria.
Given the rare, rare incidence of these diseases, I'd say treatment makes more sense than a cure. If we're thinking cure, does it really make sense to spend health dollars on potentially vaccinating everyone for Ebola?
For all intensive purposes, I'm reclined to agree with you.
So actually... I did manage operations in a UAW plant. What I saw was a bunch of potentially awesome workers (smart, hardworking) turned into absolute slugs because of the union. That said, my family comes from a long line of craft union folks and I've also seen first hand how unions can save your butt in certain situations.
This is just Unions being Unions. The list of Union priorities goes something like this:
1) Compensation for Union Management ..)
2) Benefits for Union Management
3) Ensuring the long term survival of the Union
99) Compensation for Union Members
Unions hate it when workers are pitted against each other via performance metrics because it leads to a lack of solidarity. The biggest threat to the NEA would be for the good teachers to splinter off and negotiate their own contracts (and the subsequent loss of dues).
This is known to be fake.
Do you care that the ecosystem rebounds in a few million years?
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! I mean Bayes' Theorem!