And it's the reason they bailed on it that's relevant here. Whether Silverlight was or was not great software doesn't matter. It's not cross-platform, so nobody wanted it. Microsoft sees that, and they're smart enough to not make that mistake again. And the marketplace isn't giving them many more chances to make that mistake again - so Metro's mostly a no-show too. That leaves servers and cloud services. Good move, Microsoft, but for you, not necessarily for us...
Mostly right. The thing is, the Windows desktop isn't going anywhere. It'll continue to be a cash cow for at least another generation - if only because of all the proprietary 3rd party stuff that's Windows only. Office document compatibility is only the tip of that iceberg - and one of the easiest to replace.
But for sure, the windows desktop is no longer a growth opportunity for the company. And in Capitalism, 21st century style, growth is all that matters. Most of the computer growth these days is in mobile - and Microsoft would love to be there. But they know they've mostly missed that boat. They still have a chance to the extent that the residual monopoly effect will translate continuing Win8 desktop sales into a healty app store for Metro apps - but that's gonna take time. So for now, they're concentrating on the cloud - where you don't have to win offer millions of customers, and if you provide nice dev tools, you can win over the audience that matters. And that happens to be an audience they were on the verge of losing outright.
So the new regime over there is smart, and it's a new game. Past behavior (and the lingering desktop monopoly) tell me I still don't want them to win it.
Except that the politics of climate change denial have a definite scientific/technological angle. So do the potential solutions to the problem. It's not as if Slashdot were covering abortion politics - or gun politics. This is about science folks - much as those who want to deny the problem don't want it to be...
For what it's worth, there's a lot of math/science in economics too. The much vaunted Laffer curve, for example, explicitly postulates that when taxes are too low, lowering them further just reduces revenue. Yet the right-wing think tanks that promoted the supply-side 'ideas' behind that curve only ever talk about the paradoxical part of the curve where raising taxes theoretically reduces revenue. What they don't say is that experience has shown that that part of the curve occurs with marginal rates north of the 70% range they were in when Reagan lowered taxes. Seems those tax cuts didn't pay for themselves - yet Republican pols almost unanimously assert that lowering taxes from today's much lower rates would pay for themselves - or create jobs - or make Jesus happy. There's a trade off between evidence-based policy and ideology-based politics, and that subject is perfectly appropriate for a science/tech site.
A fossil fuel tax (assuming it worked as advertised to bring consumption down) would have the added benefit of keeping oil prices down. When you spike consumption in response to lower prices, the prices just go back up. A well-designed ff tax would hold the prices steady at a level high enough to encourage conservation, but hopefully low enough to not be onerous. And the difference between the target price and the actual price is money that could be put to good use - or even simply returned to the public in the form of a rebate if politics dictate that's the only way. The point is to use less fossil fuels, not necessarily to make driving expensive.
Google's page ranking system might have been innovative enough to deserve a patent - if it was the first automated, algorithmic system of its sort. Once you've got page ranking out there, though, a new ranking algorithm is not a technical innovation at all. Sure, Disney should be allowed to create such a system - but why on earth should they be allowed to patent it? And why would they even care to patent it - other than to keep from being prevented from building it by somebody else gaming our lousy patent system to make them pay royalties on it.
...before some browsers are quite ready for it? Who says the Internet is ready for it? Seriously, why on earth should we even be thinking about routinely streaming stuff at 60fps over the internet. If net neutrality has any downside at all, this is it. It's bad enough that Netflix is eating up 30% (or whatever) of the available bandwidth. I'm not saying that ISP's should be instituting fast lanes, etc. But this is just asking for it...
And seriously, it reminds me of the push to put 4K displays on 5 inch cellphones. Really, why? Someday, the infrastructure (or battery tech on phones) will support this kind of thing without a hiccup, but that day is not today. You might say we need things that push the envelope in order to bring that someday into being - but Netflix is doing a pretty good job of that as it is.
Not quite. Microsoft has an immensely profitable business selling software to customers - but the stock price already reflects that. The perverse thing about Capitalism in America today is that being a hugely profitable business isn't enough. To satisfy the investor class, you need to generate an ever increasing stock price. And for a mature company like Microsoft, that means finding new revenue streams. So, while they could continue indefinitely with their software for cash business model, what they're trying to do is to copy other companies' models in addition. They're not particularly creative, so when they enter the search market, they do it by copying Google's business model as well as their technology - with the same incentives to mine your data. To think that they don't do that simply because they make a lot of money selling software is pretty naive. If they don't mine your data now, it's because they're not successful enough, and they're still in the loss-leader phase of trying to break into the business. But they probably mine you anyway...
It's exactly the opposite. You seem to assume Google wants to do bad things. They don't want to have as much information from everyone. Their business model isn't to be Big Brother and use this information to control us. They've built useful services that by their very nature need that information to work. Google Now would have nothing to show you if it weren't monitoring your email. Where this gets dicey is that Google has chosen to make these services 'free' by funding them with advertising. They don't want your information, they do want to place those ads. It's not evil - you're getting useful services, and the advertisers are getting ads that are theoretically more effective. But it can get creepy. That's why a non-ad supported option might be nice. Google gets their money from you, and the only thing they use your info for is to provide you with a great service that you're willing to pay for.
Certainly worth a thought experiment - and no need to derail that by indulging your paranoia.
Maybe if this works, Google could offer a version of all of their services that no longer tracks your individual activity for ad revenue.
Of course, Google insists that their tracking is only done to make their services work better - and beyond targeted ads, which would go away, there are still many aspects of Google services that wouldn't work as well without tracking you. But at least the tradeoff would be clearer - and if you paid them, but still allowed tracking for the purpose of providing more appropriate search results, maybe they could re-establish a trust relationship where it's been lost (or deliberately eroded - e.g. the "Scroogled" ad campaign).
And as passive income that billion a year is taxed at a 15% rate after all of his other deductions and loopholes. Whether or not you think a $70 mil writeoff is insignificant to a hundred billionaire, it's just this kind of insult to injury loophole (available only to the hyper rich) that makes a travesty of the notion that we're all in this together. But, of course, we're not - and apparently CrimsonAvenger is fine with that...
Perhaps - but that's exactly why Ballmer's trying to dis them. The only business Amazon is in that Microsoft wants to be in is cloud hosting services. And for now, Amazon's beating them. I don't know whether Amazon makes any money off of their cloud or not. They're spending everything they take in on expansion (and perks like free shipping) - but is that expansion of warehousing facilities, or is it the build-out of their data centers? Either way, Amazon cloud hosting could be a moneymaker. Their online store probably could too, but so far it's relied on low (money losing) prices, cheap shipping and skipping out on sales taxes - none of which are going to hold up much longer.
More often it's a patent on the "all new time-release capsule version of Medication A". Essentially the same stuff, packaged differently. The stuff's not new, the packaging's not new, but putting the stuff in the packaging gets awarded a new 20 year monopoly. The worst case I've read of for this was when asthma inhalers were forced to be reformulated to take out ozone-depleting propellants. So they used a new propellant and got a new monopoly, and a cheap, established medication became very expensive again, since the generics were monopolized off the shelves. No invention, per se. Just abuse of the patent system.
It's not quite the same, since any Dell machine can be upgraded by its owner. The problem with Android devices and upgrades is that the devices tend to be locked down so that only the manufacturer can provide updates. And because of all the modifications they make, it's not that easy to do. Plus, in the US at least, planned obsolescence is the standard. Only now is the competition becoming stiff enough that timely upgrades are a possible selling point.
it seems to me that there are 3 viable models. 1. Stick with vanilla Android and generate sales based on the promise of rapid updates - Moto seems to be following this model. A variant would be to sell unlocked devices and let Cyanogenmod do the work of providing the OS. 2. Skin the hell out of it, make your changes actually useful, and charge a premium. Samsung? Don't know how useful their changes are, and they're starting to lose the ability to charge that premium. Perhaps they should course correct and move to a model where they charge less upfront, but make timely updates available - for a nominal price. 3. Go for the lowest possible price and assume your devices are more or less disposable. Stinks, but seems to be happening. Maybe Android One devices will do an end run around this model and provide low-cost, modest performance devices with timely upgrades.
It's not just the cost. Nobody wants their streets dug up 30 times in order to let those 30 potential competitors lay their wiring. That said, my Manhattan building has 3 cable providers - Time Warner, Verizon and RCN. They all try to charge you essentially the same outrageous prices, but you can play them off one another to get a better deal.
So competition helps, but cable TV is also a natural monopoly. Originally, cable was a highly regulated natural monopoly - like other 'last mile' services (water, electricity). Somehow, big cable has convinced the regulators to lay off, citing satellite as competition. But satellite broadband sucks, so today's cable, which is also the ISP for most households, is every bit the monopoly they originally were - minus the regulation. Opening up the market to 30 competitors is impractical, but governments should grant at least one cable competitor equal access and keep the regulators on their toes until there's true competition in their markets.
It's not big brother if you don't point it at Google sites either. Whether or not you think Google is Big Brother, it doesn't much matter what browser you use - if you use their sites, they get what they get. And yet the meme lives on:
1. Google sells your info to third parties (it doesn't)
2. Chrome somehow gives more of your info to Google than other browsers do (it doesn't)
3. Somehow the alternatives are better (they're not)
Why, it's almost as if a huge company had mounted a multimillion dollar "Scroogled" ad campaign to get that idea out there...
The goal of Capitalism is to make money merely by virtue of having money. Work in a Capitalist society produces income, but that's almost beside the point. It's 'putting wealth to work' that Capitalism is all about.
And yes, our perverse tax code has been written by the Capitalists to maximize that effect. Minimal taxation on capital gains and dividends, higher taxation on wages (including social security and medicare taxes), regressive taxation on consumption, and non-taxation of most inherited wealth.
And in our particular flavor of Capitalism, we bailout the speculators if they fail massively enough. That's not Capitalism. That's cronyism at its best. Putin-worthy, even...
The tax code already encourages people to go into debt. And to speculate, and to set up shell corporations around the globe. Apple borrows billions rather than re-patriating the billions they already have parked offshore. Because they can deduct the costs of borrowing, but have to pay taxes when they re-patriate.
And that's not an argument for not taxing corporate profits, it's an argument for closing stupid loopholes. Governments need revenue (yes, they do), and somebody's got to provide it. How much revenue is not relevant to this discussion of inequality - sure, you should spend more than you take in, okay. What matters is the best way to generate the money you spend in order to have a society that works well for the biggest portion of the population.
Gates' idea of a progressive consumption tax may address the issue as he sees it, but it's completely impractical to implement - as well as not really being very progressive, because as noted by others here, the richest people consume the smallest portions of their wealth. Perhaps the most efficient and fairest form of wealth taxation is the estate tax. To ask how that tax has been recast as the murder of all that's American (think of the family farms!!!! what family farms?) is to ask what's wrong with the corporate, think-tank formulated framing that the corporate, lazy media spit back unfiltered.
But at least Gates is acknowledging the problem, and laying blame where it belongs - at the feet of unregulated Capitalism.
Is that true? If so, it makes incognito pretty useless, and I suspect it's not true. Again, Google doesn't want you to mistrust them. The collect what they collect, but they also allow ad blockers, etc. I can think of no business justification for not respecting your specific request to not be tracked during an incognito session that would outweigh the downside of such a breach of trust. Even if you think Google's evil - they're not stupid.
I doubt PETA rages on an on about fur coats in the arctic (though i guess I wouldn't be that surprised if they did - my point isn't to defend PETA, who are being dicks in this case). In any case, to bring up an outlier like the arctic in the context of a general discussion about the morality of wearing fur is not to discuss the practicality of wearing fur at all. It's just an attempt to deflect criticism - much as bringing up the need for rescue vehicles with huge wheels and high ground clearance in the context of a discussion about what ordinary people should be driving is an attempt to change the subject. In that sense, my analogy holds.
Yep, that's the creepy part. And I guess if someone were looking over your shoulder (your wife, perhaps), it could get more than creepy. i didn't say there weren't tradeoffs. But there's always incognito mode...
I'm sure that at 62, I'm a lot older than you - and was fully sentient throughout the browser wars. I think I lived my history... Yes, Firefox did a great deal of good in halting Microsoft's march toward domination of the web - and marginalization of web technologies that didn't jive with their priorities. I still use Firefox on Windows, but on Linux, Chrome just works better there, so I use it there. The same is likely true of Macintoshes (though I have no direct experience of that). In any case, I know nobody who is using Chrome that didn't install it themselves (or have it installed by a family member who recommended it). And Android would not have existed (or at least succeeded) without Google, so Opera's potential as the Android browser is kind of moot. Had Android not succeeded, it would have been Apple vs. Microsoft in mobile, and we'd have been back to IE dominance in no time. Opera and Firefox are better off with Android around than without it.
For whatever reason (probably the cash-rich, high profile parent), Chrome has become a very good browser that people want to use. And Google remains the search engine that most people want to use - despite Microsoft's continued efforts to make it confusing to set Google as the default in IE (maybe it's easier now, but I've had it simply not work in the past). If people use Google services, Google gets whatever info they glean from that. Chrome makes it easier for people to get those services, and does it by providing the same standards-compliant browser on multiple platforms - a pretty neat trick if you ask me. Firefox does much the same - I'm a fan. Anyway, if you don't use Google services, Chrome doesn't "spy on you" (to use the hysterical interpretation of the facts).
None of this puts Google in the Microsoft category of "not your friend". Google is a business, with its own priorities. Those priorities just happen to sync up more with mine than Microsoft's do. My priorities as a unix deveoper have to do with the continued robust health of the unix/linux server platform - which continues despite Microsoft's attempts to crush it. My priorities as a Linux fan (and confirmed cheapskate) have to do with the continued forward progress of the open source movement - ditto. And my priorities as an awed observer of the emergence of Tivo/Android/Chromecast/etc devices that would not have been possible with a Microsoft tax attached, are to keep it coming. Google's priorities line up pretty well with those, Microsoft's don't.
That is simply not true. Google does not sell your private information. And yet the notion that they do is repeated ad infinitum. I wonder why. Google's business model is pretty straightforward. They use your information in order to sell ads that are more effective (and less annoying) than other sellers of ad space can do. It can get a little creepy around the edges, I suppose, to see what ads they think you'll click on - and if you're seriously uncomfortable about that, then you should stay away from their services. But they definitely do not sell your information to anyone. Apparently some people would like you to believe they do. Believe it if you want - but it's not true.
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And it's the reason they bailed on it that's relevant here. Whether Silverlight was or was not great software doesn't matter. It's not cross-platform, so nobody wanted it. Microsoft sees that, and they're smart enough to not make that mistake again. And the marketplace isn't giving them many more chances to make that mistake again - so Metro's mostly a no-show too. That leaves servers and cloud services. Good move, Microsoft, but for you, not necessarily for us...
Mostly right. The thing is, the Windows desktop isn't going anywhere. It'll continue to be a cash cow for at least another generation - if only because of all the proprietary 3rd party stuff that's Windows only. Office document compatibility is only the tip of that iceberg - and one of the easiest to replace.
But for sure, the windows desktop is no longer a growth opportunity for the company. And in Capitalism, 21st century style, growth is all that matters. Most of the computer growth these days is in mobile - and Microsoft would love to be there. But they know they've mostly missed that boat. They still have a chance to the extent that the residual monopoly effect will translate continuing Win8 desktop sales into a healty app store for Metro apps - but that's gonna take time. So for now, they're concentrating on the cloud - where you don't have to win offer millions of customers, and if you provide nice dev tools, you can win over the audience that matters. And that happens to be an audience they were on the verge of losing outright.
So the new regime over there is smart, and it's a new game. Past behavior (and the lingering desktop monopoly) tell me I still don't want them to win it.
Except that the politics of climate change denial have a definite scientific/technological angle. So do the potential solutions to the problem. It's not as if Slashdot were covering abortion politics - or gun politics. This is about science folks - much as those who want to deny the problem don't want it to be...
For what it's worth, there's a lot of math/science in economics too. The much vaunted Laffer curve, for example, explicitly postulates that when taxes are too low, lowering them further just reduces revenue. Yet the right-wing think tanks that promoted the supply-side 'ideas' behind that curve only ever talk about the paradoxical part of the curve where raising taxes theoretically reduces revenue. What they don't say is that experience has shown that that part of the curve occurs with marginal rates north of the 70% range they were in when Reagan lowered taxes. Seems those tax cuts didn't pay for themselves - yet Republican pols almost unanimously assert that lowering taxes from today's much lower rates would pay for themselves - or create jobs - or make Jesus happy. There's a trade off between evidence-based policy and ideology-based politics, and that subject is perfectly appropriate for a science/tech site.
A fossil fuel tax (assuming it worked as advertised to bring consumption down) would have the added benefit of keeping oil prices down. When you spike consumption in response to lower prices, the prices just go back up. A well-designed ff tax would hold the prices steady at a level high enough to encourage conservation, but hopefully low enough to not be onerous. And the difference between the target price and the actual price is money that could be put to good use - or even simply returned to the public in the form of a rebate if politics dictate that's the only way. The point is to use less fossil fuels, not necessarily to make driving expensive.
Google's page ranking system might have been innovative enough to deserve a patent - if it was the first automated, algorithmic system of its sort. Once you've got page ranking out there, though, a new ranking algorithm is not a technical innovation at all. Sure, Disney should be allowed to create such a system - but why on earth should they be allowed to patent it? And why would they even care to patent it - other than to keep from being prevented from building it by somebody else gaming our lousy patent system to make them pay royalties on it.
...before some browsers are quite ready for it? Who says the Internet is ready for it? Seriously, why on earth should we even be thinking about routinely streaming stuff at 60fps over the internet. If net neutrality has any downside at all, this is it. It's bad enough that Netflix is eating up 30% (or whatever) of the available bandwidth. I'm not saying that ISP's should be instituting fast lanes, etc. But this is just asking for it...
And seriously, it reminds me of the push to put 4K displays on 5 inch cellphones. Really, why? Someday, the infrastructure (or battery tech on phones) will support this kind of thing without a hiccup, but that day is not today. You might say we need things that push the envelope in order to bring that someday into being - but Netflix is doing a pretty good job of that as it is.
Not quite. Microsoft has an immensely profitable business selling software to customers - but the stock price already reflects that. The perverse thing about Capitalism in America today is that being a hugely profitable business isn't enough. To satisfy the investor class, you need to generate an ever increasing stock price. And for a mature company like Microsoft, that means finding new revenue streams. So, while they could continue indefinitely with their software for cash business model, what they're trying to do is to copy other companies' models in addition. They're not particularly creative, so when they enter the search market, they do it by copying Google's business model as well as their technology - with the same incentives to mine your data. To think that they don't do that simply because they make a lot of money selling software is pretty naive. If they don't mine your data now, it's because they're not successful enough, and they're still in the loss-leader phase of trying to break into the business. But they probably mine you anyway...
It's exactly the opposite. You seem to assume Google wants to do bad things. They don't want to have as much information from everyone. Their business model isn't to be Big Brother and use this information to control us. They've built useful services that by their very nature need that information to work. Google Now would have nothing to show you if it weren't monitoring your email. Where this gets dicey is that Google has chosen to make these services 'free' by funding them with advertising. They don't want your information, they do want to place those ads. It's not evil - you're getting useful services, and the advertisers are getting ads that are theoretically more effective. But it can get creepy. That's why a non-ad supported option might be nice. Google gets their money from you, and the only thing they use your info for is to provide you with a great service that you're willing to pay for.
Certainly worth a thought experiment - and no need to derail that by indulging your paranoia.
Maybe if this works, Google could offer a version of all of their services that no longer tracks your individual activity for ad revenue.
Of course, Google insists that their tracking is only done to make their services work better - and beyond targeted ads, which would go away, there are still many aspects of Google services that wouldn't work as well without tracking you. But at least the tradeoff would be clearer - and if you paid them, but still allowed tracking for the purpose of providing more appropriate search results, maybe they could re-establish a trust relationship where it's been lost (or deliberately eroded - e.g. the "Scroogled" ad campaign).
And as passive income that billion a year is taxed at a 15% rate after all of his other deductions and loopholes. Whether or not you think a $70 mil writeoff is insignificant to a hundred billionaire, it's just this kind of insult to injury loophole (available only to the hyper rich) that makes a travesty of the notion that we're all in this together. But, of course, we're not - and apparently CrimsonAvenger is fine with that...
Perhaps - but that's exactly why Ballmer's trying to dis them. The only business Amazon is in that Microsoft wants to be in is cloud hosting services. And for now, Amazon's beating them. I don't know whether Amazon makes any money off of their cloud or not. They're spending everything they take in on expansion (and perks like free shipping) - but is that expansion of warehousing facilities, or is it the build-out of their data centers? Either way, Amazon cloud hosting could be a moneymaker. Their online store probably could too, but so far it's relied on low (money losing) prices, cheap shipping and skipping out on sales taxes - none of which are going to hold up much longer.
More often it's a patent on the "all new time-release capsule version of Medication A". Essentially the same stuff, packaged differently. The stuff's not new, the packaging's not new, but putting the stuff in the packaging gets awarded a new 20 year monopoly. The worst case I've read of for this was when asthma inhalers were forced to be reformulated to take out ozone-depleting propellants. So they used a new propellant and got a new monopoly, and a cheap, established medication became very expensive again, since the generics were monopolized off the shelves. No invention, per se. Just abuse of the patent system.
It's not quite the same, since any Dell machine can be upgraded by its owner. The problem with Android devices and upgrades is that the devices tend to be locked down so that only the manufacturer can provide updates. And because of all the modifications they make, it's not that easy to do. Plus, in the US at least, planned obsolescence is the standard. Only now is the competition becoming stiff enough that timely upgrades are a possible selling point.
it seems to me that there are 3 viable models.
1. Stick with vanilla Android and generate sales based on the promise of rapid updates - Moto seems to be following this model. A variant would be to sell unlocked devices and let Cyanogenmod do the work of providing the OS.
2. Skin the hell out of it, make your changes actually useful, and charge a premium. Samsung? Don't know how useful their changes are, and they're starting to lose the ability to charge that premium. Perhaps they should course correct and move to a model where they charge less upfront, but make timely updates available - for a nominal price.
3. Go for the lowest possible price and assume your devices are more or less disposable. Stinks, but seems to be happening. Maybe Android One devices will do an end run around this model and provide low-cost, modest performance devices with timely upgrades.
Scroogled was meant to get you to distrust Google in general. Chrome gets some spillover from that. Duh.
It's not just the cost. Nobody wants their streets dug up 30 times in order to let those 30 potential competitors lay their wiring. That said, my Manhattan building has 3 cable providers - Time Warner, Verizon and RCN. They all try to charge you essentially the same outrageous prices, but you can play them off one another to get a better deal.
So competition helps, but cable TV is also a natural monopoly. Originally, cable was a highly regulated natural monopoly - like other 'last mile' services (water, electricity). Somehow, big cable has convinced the regulators to lay off, citing satellite as competition. But satellite broadband sucks, so today's cable, which is also the ISP for most households, is every bit the monopoly they originally were - minus the regulation. Opening up the market to 30 competitors is impractical, but governments should grant at least one cable competitor equal access and keep the regulators on their toes until there's true competition in their markets.
I wonder who has the patent on 'two-tiered' just in time compilation...? You'd think it's worth at least as much as FAT32.
It's not big brother if you don't point it at Google sites either. Whether or not you think Google is Big Brother, it doesn't much matter what browser you use - if you use their sites, they get what they get. And yet the meme lives on:
1. Google sells your info to third parties (it doesn't)
2. Chrome somehow gives more of your info to Google than other browsers do (it doesn't)
3. Somehow the alternatives are better (they're not)
Why, it's almost as if a huge company had mounted a multimillion dollar "Scroogled" ad campaign to get that idea out there...
The goal of Capitalism is to make money merely by virtue of having money. Work in a Capitalist society produces income, but that's almost beside the point. It's 'putting wealth to work' that Capitalism is all about.
And yes, our perverse tax code has been written by the Capitalists to maximize that effect. Minimal taxation on capital gains and dividends, higher taxation on wages (including social security and medicare taxes), regressive taxation on consumption, and non-taxation of most inherited wealth.
And in our particular flavor of Capitalism, we bailout the speculators if they fail massively enough. That's not Capitalism. That's cronyism at its best. Putin-worthy, even...
The tax code already encourages people to go into debt. And to speculate, and to set up shell corporations around the globe. Apple borrows billions rather than re-patriating the billions they already have parked offshore. Because they can deduct the costs of borrowing, but have to pay taxes when they re-patriate.
And that's not an argument for not taxing corporate profits, it's an argument for closing stupid loopholes. Governments need revenue (yes, they do), and somebody's got to provide it. How much revenue is not relevant to this discussion of inequality - sure, you should spend more than you take in, okay. What matters is the best way to generate the money you spend in order to have a society that works well for the biggest portion of the population.
Gates' idea of a progressive consumption tax may address the issue as he sees it, but it's completely impractical to implement - as well as not really being very progressive, because as noted by others here, the richest people consume the smallest portions of their wealth. Perhaps the most efficient and fairest form of wealth taxation is the estate tax. To ask how that tax has been recast as the murder of all that's American (think of the family farms!!!! what family farms?) is to ask what's wrong with the corporate, think-tank formulated framing that the corporate, lazy media spit back unfiltered.
But at least Gates is acknowledging the problem, and laying blame where it belongs - at the feet of unregulated Capitalism.
Is that true? If so, it makes incognito pretty useless, and I suspect it's not true. Again, Google doesn't want you to mistrust them. The collect what they collect, but they also allow ad blockers, etc. I can think of no business justification for not respecting your specific request to not be tracked during an incognito session that would outweigh the downside of such a breach of trust. Even if you think Google's evil - they're not stupid.
I doubt PETA rages on an on about fur coats in the arctic (though i guess I wouldn't be that surprised if they did - my point isn't to defend PETA, who are being dicks in this case). In any case, to bring up an outlier like the arctic in the context of a general discussion about the morality of wearing fur is not to discuss the practicality of wearing fur at all. It's just an attempt to deflect criticism - much as bringing up the need for rescue vehicles with huge wheels and high ground clearance in the context of a discussion about what ordinary people should be driving is an attempt to change the subject. In that sense, my analogy holds.
That's like saying because you need an off-road vehicle in the arctic/antarctic, it makes sense to have one in your suburban driveway.
Yep, that's the creepy part. And I guess if someone were looking over your shoulder (your wife, perhaps), it could get more than creepy. i didn't say there weren't tradeoffs. But there's always incognito mode...
I'm sure that at 62, I'm a lot older than you - and was fully sentient throughout the browser wars. I think I lived my history... Yes, Firefox did a great deal of good in halting Microsoft's march toward domination of the web - and marginalization of web technologies that didn't jive with their priorities. I still use Firefox on Windows, but on Linux, Chrome just works better there, so I use it there. The same is likely true of Macintoshes (though I have no direct experience of that). In any case, I know nobody who is using Chrome that didn't install it themselves (or have it installed by a family member who recommended it). And Android would not have existed (or at least succeeded) without Google, so Opera's potential as the Android browser is kind of moot. Had Android not succeeded, it would have been Apple vs. Microsoft in mobile, and we'd have been back to IE dominance in no time. Opera and Firefox are better off with Android around than without it.
For whatever reason (probably the cash-rich, high profile parent), Chrome has become a very good browser that people want to use. And Google remains the search engine that most people want to use - despite Microsoft's continued efforts to make it confusing to set Google as the default in IE (maybe it's easier now, but I've had it simply not work in the past). If people use Google services, Google gets whatever info they glean from that. Chrome makes it easier for people to get those services, and does it by providing the same standards-compliant browser on multiple platforms - a pretty neat trick if you ask me. Firefox does much the same - I'm a fan. Anyway, if you don't use Google services, Chrome doesn't "spy on you" (to use the hysterical interpretation of the facts).
None of this puts Google in the Microsoft category of "not your friend". Google is a business, with its own priorities. Those priorities just happen to sync up more with mine than Microsoft's do. My priorities as a unix deveoper have to do with the continued robust health of the unix/linux server platform - which continues despite Microsoft's attempts to crush it. My priorities as a Linux fan (and confirmed cheapskate) have to do with the continued forward progress of the open source movement - ditto. And my priorities as an awed observer of the emergence of Tivo/Android/Chromecast/etc devices that would not have been possible with a Microsoft tax attached, are to keep it coming. Google's priorities line up pretty well with those, Microsoft's don't.
That is simply not true. Google does not sell your private information. And yet the notion that they do is repeated ad infinitum. I wonder why. Google's business model is pretty straightforward. They use your information in order to sell ads that are more effective (and less annoying) than other sellers of ad space can do. It can get a little creepy around the edges, I suppose, to see what ads they think you'll click on - and if you're seriously uncomfortable about that, then you should stay away from their services. But they definitely do not sell your information to anyone. Apparently some people would like you to believe they do. Believe it if you want - but it's not true.