Prices couldn't go down; Amazon was selling below wholesale as a means to control the market. Apple's got deep pockets too, so they probably could've done the same, but it's not really a sustainable business model.
Nonsense - these are digital files we're talking here. They are not physical goods with manufacture and shipping costs. How they accounted for it, allocate cost, and spend that revenue is a different story, but any business selling millions of copies of files for $10 apiece is raking it in.
It appears they have successfully convinced a lot of people they're not making enough money.
Cash flow is where depreciation helps, and that itself is typically most important for a company at the end of the day.
You spend a lot of capital, but your expenses are classified differently. A bitcoin farmer would spend a lot of money on his computer gear in the first year, but his balance sheet wouldn't change. If he buys $10k in equipment, he now has $10k less cash but a $10k "asset".
The expenses to run the gear (power, etc) are different - they are true operating expenses, paid with cash and show up on an income statement as an expense.
Depreciation shows up the same as those expenses, but the beauty is that it's a non-cash expense. The point is to match costs with revenue, so that the reported profit is correct. Otherwise he would spend $10k this year, then next year could report great profit because he basically used "free" gear - from an accounting perspective.
And the real beauty of a non-cash expense, to put it bluntly, is you get to report less profit that you have to pay tax on, and thus get to keep more of your cash.
Because very few companies are in the business of running an entire country. This is why you pay taxes - outsourcing the work to the government. I guarantee it's cheaper..
Microsoft's entire current business is based on servicing IBM's 1981 attempt to prevent Apple from taking over the small computing market.
No, you can hate Microsoft all you want, but this isn't grounded in reality.
Microsoft's meat and potatoes is the enterprise market. Very few large companies pay per desktop for Windows, they negotiate master agreements with Microsoft to provide a certain set of software, and these are very lucrative contracts. Some companies I've worked for would pay a small fortune in SQL Server licensing. Sorry, what's Apple's enterprise RDMS product again?
Never mind their consultants, and there's an army of them, bill at rates that make the "small computing market" almost irrelevant.
This whole attitude that game makers have to push 500MB to 5GB of data WEEKLY just to play their game is going to push people right out of the market. It's like 25% of Anericans that don't have bandwidth Avalible for things like always-on games... Or not at REASONABLE prices.
I have a better reason: updates.
I have a PS3, but I don't game anywhere like I used to in my younger days. In fact, the only game I still regularly play is Rock Band (I play instruments), and the urge strikes me every few months. Every time I fire that thing up, I figure I'll check the online store to see if any good new songs are out, and then I remember..
Oh yeah! Not only do I need to download the latest game patch, I also need the system update to be able to access the store! Screw it - I used to do it but these two combined take over 20 minutes and by then I'm disinterested. Sony's lost a lot of money on what would otherwise be impulse purchases at that point of a few dollars each time.
Now I just leave it disconnected, because every game I have, every time I pop it in, ask to download and install an update - it's ridiculous. Some don't even give you an option to say no and just play the dame game.
You are truly hurting yourself by not attending school if you are brilliant. The only human trait that would make such a claim is arrogance, not intelligence. There is always a way to create better thought processes through university. Learning is a life-long process, and only those who stop get stuck.
I found work to be more intense (and valuable) "learning", but I wouldn't by any means write off the benefit of university. Or insult those that go there.
Are you sure? The last glacial maximum was between 19-25000 years ago (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Maximum) during which time vast portions of North America and Europe were covered in ice sheets.
19,000 years is a pretty short period of time in the grand scheme of things. To think the location I'm currently living was underneath a kilometer of ice less than 20,000 years ago, and no there are no glaciers anywhere close, the logical conclusion is the earth has been warming up for a lot longer than just the time since the industrial age. In fact, from what I understand about earth's history, we've been a majorly tropical planet for most of the time and ice cover is somewhat rare.
There's no doubt we have some effect on the changing climate (in regards to temperature via the greenhouse effect), but to say that is the mechanism causing the earth to warm seems like a huge jump from basic logic.
I'm curious, has any of these petitions resulted in anything besides a form letter response from a head of some department, as obviously the task of writing a response but doing nothing rolled down 4 levels of bureaucracy?
What was the point of this site anyway? What good is a petition of there's no action or even a vote as a result of it?
I'm not really sure how Musicians, Artists & Actors, etc can implement a similar system
Easy. Musicians only get paid when they are working (performing), not for recordings of them working.
Now, the line gets a little fuzzier when dealing with commercial purposes, which is what copyright was designed for and absolutely where it should be applied. For example, if using a musician's works to draw people to your business/event, they should absolutely be compensated for it. It's also much easier to enforce (since commercial endeavours need to be in the public eye to attract customers) than private copying.
For non-commercial purposes though, private copying (i.e. enjoying art) should be encouraged. I also think this is the one spot torrent sites should be asked to pay for (as much as I love 'em). They deserve income for the value they provide in aggregating results and searching, but really are making money (advertising) off other people's works, which is a commercial endeavour. The people downloading however are doing nothing wrong.
So, if it's so easy to get a site taken down with SOPA, and this law unfortunately gets passed, would it not be very easy to launch a counter-offensive against the media companies themselves?
Some sort of coordinated launch of complaints which could render any profit generating portions of the media websites inaccessible?
I live in Edmonton, and actually kinda like the new law. I take transit downtown but also drive pretty heavily.
I can't recall the number of times I've almost been hit trying to cross the street downtown by someone on a cell phone. Something I've noticed through observation is that a driver's peripheral vision is really affected when talking on a phone - perhaps some study found the same conclusion. This makes using them in high population areas, ie. areas with crosswalks, very dangerous.
When driving, you should devote your full attention to it, if not for respect of the lives of those around you. I think we've shown it's irresponsible enough to warrant a fine, as is the case here. I wouldn't really call anything with fines under three figures and no jail time "draconian".
Volatility has nothing to do with what direction a stock is currently moving, only the magnitude of moves. Most finance sites publish a measure of a stock's voltility called Beta (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_%28finance%29) which measures the volatility of the stock relating to movement of the market as a whole.
You'll see AAPL has a Beta of 1.3, which basically means AAPL's stock will have swing 30% greater in whatever direction the market is moving (up or down - a negative Beta implies an inverse correlation).
This definitely qualifies AAPL as a volatile stock compared to Exxon with a Beat of 0.5. While shareholders are enjoying a faster trip up, they will assuredly not enjoy an equally fast trip down should the business/markets force the stock in that direction. That is volatility.
Yeah, I'm beginning to wonder how many letters they did get. I don't write to my MP that often, but on this issue I did write my MP and the Industry Minister.
I had a chance to try both an iPad2 and PlayBook recently. They are very fancy devices. Video on the playbook looked incredible. The iPad is almost ridiculously large compared to the PlayBook, which seems a better size for a tablet.
I'm still not sold on the future of tablets at all. Apple has created a market for the iPad, not for tablets. People love it because it's an Apple product, and conveys that coolness people look for when buying Apple products. I think Apple's recent quartlerly sales numbers are starting to show this, a smartphone for mobile and a laptop for larger tasks makes sense, I still can't figure out a slam dunk use case for any of these tablet devices.
Exactly, and, to show that it is a game of skill, you only need to show that some players are better than others (make more money). This is easy to do, there's many sites which track results and individual player ROI's. If it were a game of chance, over time everyone would have the same ROI.
Yup, we're seeing the normal progression of hot, new technology. I remember 5 or so years ago, Blackberries were the hottest thing around. They were the ultimate cool, and everyone who was anyone had to have one. Sounds like another product currently on the market, eh?
Basing your investment decisions on the red hot product-of-the-day is a recipe for disaster, as every product loses it's day in the spotlight. It was about as silly to buy RIM stock a few years ago as it is to buy Apple stock today, when their main revenue source is a product at the peak of it's popularity.
I'm also going to throw SharePoint in the list of MS products you've never heard of but are wildly successful.
Having worked with a number of major corporate IT departments over the last few years, I've rarely seen such a fast adoption rate of a platform.
Not that I've used either to validate the rating, but I could see it being valid. It would only take a handful of applications to reproduce the small subset of those 60k apps which bring greatest value to the tablet.
If iPad app quality is anything like it is for the iPhone, I could reasonably see 50,000 of those apps only counting for one point when it comes to application support. I'm sure I could write 60,000 variations of 'Hello world' for the Xoom in short order... would that put them on the same footing to you?
I'd bet there's far more critical infrastructure connected to the internet than you realize. In most cases, it's because:
(a) the systems are operated or monitored by remote personnel. This is common for infrastructure that is in remote locations.
(b) multiple components of the infrastrcture need to communicate with each other.
Creating private networks for these instances is usually cost prohibitive.
See, this is our problem with consumerism. Your purchase is driven by style and price rather than function. Why do you want an electric vehicle "just because"? For the smugness?
I'll gladly consider an electric vehicle when it costs as much as the same gas version, goes as far on a charge as a tank of gas, and can "recharge" within two minutes.
Capitalism would also dictate a farmer in this country should grow opium, marijuana, or some other drug they could sell to the US for huge profits rather than food to feed their own people.
I hate being tied to a huge hulk of oil-gobbling pollution-spewing metal that I must take everywhere I go (and always be sober to do so)
Don't be so full of yourself. Obviously some uses of vehicles, including basic commuting to work everyday, we've found to be really bad uses of valuable energy and emissions. However, this doesnt change that vehicles are miracles of modern transportation. I can go anywhere across my city in minutes, I'm glad we dedicated so much infrastructure to this.
Don't mix up a valid point with your ideological soup-de-jour that vehicles and their associated infrastructure are wrong.
Why should routine health care not be a personal responsibility like anything else in life?
Probably because some sort of public-coordinated health care system would be more effective and cost efficient. Public systems can track things like medical history, vaccines, mediations, allergies, etc. more reliably. Not to say there aren't implementations of this that have their own issues, but if handled properly a taxpayer-funded, single payer system is optimal.
Similar reason why we don't think policing or fire-fighting should be 'personal responsibilities'...
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Prices couldn't go down; Amazon was selling below wholesale as a means to control the market. Apple's got deep pockets too, so they probably could've done the same, but it's not really a sustainable business model.
Nonsense - these are digital files we're talking here. They are not physical goods with manufacture and shipping costs. How they accounted for it, allocate cost, and spend that revenue is a different story, but any business selling millions of copies of files for $10 apiece is raking it in.
It appears they have successfully convinced a lot of people they're not making enough money.
Cash flow is where depreciation helps, and that itself is typically most important for a company at the end of the day.
You spend a lot of capital, but your expenses are classified differently. A bitcoin farmer would spend a lot of money on his computer gear in the first year, but his balance sheet wouldn't change. If he buys $10k in equipment, he now has $10k less cash but a $10k "asset".
The expenses to run the gear (power, etc) are different - they are true operating expenses, paid with cash and show up on an income statement as an expense.
Depreciation shows up the same as those expenses, but the beauty is that it's a non-cash expense. The point is to match costs with revenue, so that the reported profit is correct. Otherwise he would spend $10k this year, then next year could report great profit because he basically used "free" gear - from an accounting perspective.
And the real beauty of a non-cash expense, to put it bluntly, is you get to report less profit that you have to pay tax on, and thus get to keep more of your cash.
Because very few companies are in the business of running an entire country. This is why you pay taxes - outsourcing the work to the government. I guarantee it's cheaper..
Microsoft's entire current business is based on servicing IBM's 1981 attempt to prevent Apple from taking over the small computing market.
No, you can hate Microsoft all you want, but this isn't grounded in reality.
Microsoft's meat and potatoes is the enterprise market. Very few large companies pay per desktop for Windows, they negotiate master agreements with Microsoft to provide a certain set of software, and these are very lucrative contracts. Some companies I've worked for would pay a small fortune in SQL Server licensing. Sorry, what's Apple's enterprise RDMS product again?
Never mind their consultants, and there's an army of them, bill at rates that make the "small computing market" almost irrelevant.
This whole attitude that game makers have to push 500MB to 5GB of data WEEKLY just to play their game is going to push people right out of the market. It's like 25% of Anericans that don't have bandwidth Avalible for things like always-on games... Or not at REASONABLE prices.
I have a better reason: updates.
I have a PS3, but I don't game anywhere like I used to in my younger days. In fact, the only game I still regularly play is Rock Band (I play instruments), and the urge strikes me every few months. Every time I fire that thing up, I figure I'll check the online store to see if any good new songs are out, and then I remember..
Oh yeah! Not only do I need to download the latest game patch, I also need the system update to be able to access the store! Screw it - I used to do it but these two combined take over 20 minutes and by then I'm disinterested. Sony's lost a lot of money on what would otherwise be impulse purchases at that point of a few dollars each time.
Now I just leave it disconnected, because every game I have, every time I pop it in, ask to download and install an update - it's ridiculous. Some don't even give you an option to say no and just play the dame game.
You are truly hurting yourself by not attending school if you are brilliant. The only human trait that would make such a claim is arrogance, not intelligence. There is always a way to create better thought processes through university. Learning is a life-long process, and only those who stop get stuck.
I found work to be more intense (and valuable) "learning", but I wouldn't by any means write off the benefit of university. Or insult those that go there.
And of course, we understand the mechanism.
Are you sure? The last glacial maximum was between 19-25000 years ago (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Maximum) during which time vast portions of North America and Europe were covered in ice sheets.
19,000 years is a pretty short period of time in the grand scheme of things. To think the location I'm currently living was underneath a kilometer of ice less than 20,000 years ago, and no there are no glaciers anywhere close, the logical conclusion is the earth has been warming up for a lot longer than just the time since the industrial age. In fact, from what I understand about earth's history, we've been a majorly tropical planet for most of the time and ice cover is somewhat rare.
There's no doubt we have some effect on the changing climate (in regards to temperature via the greenhouse effect), but to say that is the mechanism causing the earth to warm seems like a huge jump from basic logic.
I'm curious, has any of these petitions resulted in anything besides a form letter response from a head of some department, as obviously the task of writing a response but doing nothing rolled down 4 levels of bureaucracy?
What was the point of this site anyway? What good is a petition of there's no action or even a vote as a result of it?
I'm not really sure how Musicians, Artists & Actors, etc can implement a similar system
Easy. Musicians only get paid when they are working (performing), not for recordings of them working.
Now, the line gets a little fuzzier when dealing with commercial purposes, which is what copyright was designed for and absolutely where it should be applied. For example, if using a musician's works to draw people to your business/event, they should absolutely be compensated for it. It's also much easier to enforce (since commercial endeavours need to be in the public eye to attract customers) than private copying.
For non-commercial purposes though, private copying (i.e. enjoying art) should be encouraged. I also think this is the one spot torrent sites should be asked to pay for (as much as I love 'em). They deserve income for the value they provide in aggregating results and searching, but really are making money (advertising) off other people's works, which is a commercial endeavour. The people downloading however are doing nothing wrong.
So, if it's so easy to get a site taken down with SOPA, and this law unfortunately gets passed, would it not be very easy to launch a counter-offensive against the media companies themselves?
Some sort of coordinated launch of complaints which could render any profit generating portions of the media websites inaccessible?
I live in Edmonton, and actually kinda like the new law. I take transit downtown but also drive pretty heavily.
I can't recall the number of times I've almost been hit trying to cross the street downtown by someone on a cell phone. Something I've noticed through observation is that a driver's peripheral vision is really affected when talking on a phone - perhaps some study found the same conclusion. This makes using them in high population areas, ie. areas with crosswalks, very dangerous.
When driving, you should devote your full attention to it, if not for respect of the lives of those around you. I think we've shown it's irresponsible enough to warrant a fine, as is the case here. I wouldn't really call anything with fines under three figures and no jail time "draconian".
Volatility has nothing to do with what direction a stock is currently moving, only the magnitude of moves. Most finance sites publish a measure of a stock's voltility called Beta (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_%28finance%29) which measures the volatility of the stock relating to movement of the market as a whole.
You'll see AAPL has a Beta of 1.3, which basically means AAPL's stock will have swing 30% greater in whatever direction the market is moving (up or down - a negative Beta implies an inverse correlation).
This definitely qualifies AAPL as a volatile stock compared to Exxon with a Beat of 0.5. While shareholders are enjoying a faster trip up, they will assuredly not enjoy an equally fast trip down should the business/markets force the stock in that direction. That is volatility.
Yeah, I'm beginning to wonder how many letters they did get. I don't write to my MP that often, but on this issue I did write my MP and the Industry Minister.
I had a chance to try both an iPad2 and PlayBook recently. They are very fancy devices. Video on the playbook looked incredible. The iPad is almost ridiculously large compared to the PlayBook, which seems a better size for a tablet.
I'm still not sold on the future of tablets at all. Apple has created a market for the iPad, not for tablets. People love it because it's an Apple product, and conveys that coolness people look for when buying Apple products. I think Apple's recent quartlerly sales numbers are starting to show this, a smartphone for mobile and a laptop for larger tasks makes sense, I still can't figure out a slam dunk use case for any of these tablet devices.
Exactly, and, to show that it is a game of skill, you only need to show that some players are better than others (make more money). This is easy to do, there's many sites which track results and individual player ROI's. If it were a game of chance, over time everyone would have the same ROI.
Yup, we're seeing the normal progression of hot, new technology. I remember 5 or so years ago, Blackberries were the hottest thing around. They were the ultimate cool, and everyone who was anyone had to have one. Sounds like another product currently on the market, eh? Basing your investment decisions on the red hot product-of-the-day is a recipe for disaster, as every product loses it's day in the spotlight. It was about as silly to buy RIM stock a few years ago as it is to buy Apple stock today, when their main revenue source is a product at the peak of it's popularity.
I'm also going to throw SharePoint in the list of MS products you've never heard of but are wildly successful. Having worked with a number of major corporate IT departments over the last few years, I've rarely seen such a fast adoption rate of a platform.
If you want to not buy a product simply because you hate the company than admit that,
No problem. I'll do it the day the fanboys admit they only buy the products because they love Apple!
Not that I've used either to validate the rating, but I could see it being valid. It would only take a handful of applications to reproduce the small subset of those 60k apps which bring greatest value to the tablet. If iPad app quality is anything like it is for the iPhone, I could reasonably see 50,000 of those apps only counting for one point when it comes to application support. I'm sure I could write 60,000 variations of 'Hello world' for the Xoom in short order... would that put them on the same footing to you?
I'd bet there's far more critical infrastructure connected to the internet than you realize. In most cases, it's because:
(a) the systems are operated or monitored by remote personnel. This is common for infrastructure that is in remote locations.
(b) multiple components of the infrastrcture need to communicate with each other.
Creating private networks for these instances is usually cost prohibitive.
See, this is our problem with consumerism. Your purchase is driven by style and price rather than function. Why do you want an electric vehicle "just because"? For the smugness?
I'll gladly consider an electric vehicle when it costs as much as the same gas version, goes as far on a charge as a tank of gas, and can "recharge" within two minutes.
Capitalism would also dictate a farmer in this country should grow opium, marijuana, or some other drug they could sell to the US for huge profits rather than food to feed their own people.
I hate being tied to a huge hulk of oil-gobbling pollution-spewing metal that I must take everywhere I go (and always be sober to do so)
Don't be so full of yourself. Obviously some uses of vehicles, including basic commuting to work everyday, we've found to be really bad uses of valuable energy and emissions. However, this doesnt change that vehicles are miracles of modern transportation. I can go anywhere across my city in minutes, I'm glad we dedicated so much infrastructure to this.
Don't mix up a valid point with your ideological soup-de-jour that vehicles and their associated infrastructure are wrong.
Why should routine health care not be a personal responsibility like anything else in life?
Probably because some sort of public-coordinated health care system would be more effective and cost efficient. Public systems can track things like medical history, vaccines, mediations, allergies, etc. more reliably. Not to say there aren't implementations of this that have their own issues, but if handled properly a taxpayer-funded, single payer system is optimal. Similar reason why we don't think policing or fire-fighting should be 'personal responsibilities'...
Ummm.......