As long as Facebook doesn't give out anything that can be used to contact you - i.e., they retain control over the ability to target you with advertising, etc., they there are lots of things FB could do to solve much of this problem. I don't really care who sees the stuff I've shared publicly on Facebook - and, yes, I expected them to keep the stuff I share with friends limited to those friends. But face it, we're reading about all this because of the way Facebook allowed its data to be used to target deceptive political advertising. There may not (yet) be any Federal laws that govern political advertising on social media, but that does not mean that a site like Facebook can't adopt its own standards.
The idiotic Citizens United decision still left room to legislate transparency rules, and just because the Congress can't get that done (mostly because the Republicans in Congress think the money advantage is on their side, and don't want transparency), doesn't mean Facebook can't require it. Certainly in their paid advertising, their automated scanners can be smart enough to detect political content and require that somebody real take responsibility for it. And even in phony grassroots postings that spread 'organically', they can identify those postings as such and issue warnings about untrustworthy content. Unless something is posted by a friend, if Facebook's business model wants you to see it, they need to make sure you know this is in your feed for Facebook's moneymaking needs - not because you asked to see it or any of your friends asked that you see it. Even Cambridge Analytica said that the info they scraped from Facebook would've been of little use if the propaganda they targeted with it had to be labeled as propaganda. The Cambridge Analytica scandal is more about their fraudulent messaging than about their ability to target it. Sure, Facebook has to clean up its act in terms of keeping your data secure, but they also need to stop allowing slimy advertisers to disguise their messages as news. And if they care about it, they will. If they don't their users should jump ship.
Interestingly, Google's business model is less dependent on phony advertising than Facebook's. Oh, they use your data to sell to you, but their ads are clearly labeled. Don't know how that would've played out had Google Plus survived, but they certainly have enough ways to make money that they wouldn't have had to base their platform on deception. Maybe they should give it another go and make an honest pitch for an ad-supported service that is upfront about how it works.
Don't these lidar systems see in the dark? The one potential advantage of self-driving cars is that they would see somebody before they enter the range of the car's headlights. Total fail here.
Well, not that they did it for the right reasons, but the fact that the new tax bill makes it less beneficial to stash corporate profits overseas, at least that will be less of an issue in the future. Of course, no attempt was made to make up for the reduced corporate tax rates - and in fact, the expected one time windfall from repatriated foreign profits was used to portray the cost of the bill as lower than it really is (no dishonest rationale went unused).
Deficits be damned - or used as a reason to cut Social Security, etc., because Republican ideologues have no shame. They also have no genuine ideology - and what they have is merely a fig leaf to maximize the benefits to their donors. Sure, maybe some of them are stupid enough to believe that trickle-down economics works. But if you're smart enough to get elected based on lies, I'm gonna assume you're also smart enough to know you're lying. Not all of them are flat out psychopaths.
To tell the truth, the fact that Facebook is leaking this info isn't the worst thing about it. As others have said, you're putting it up there, and presumably if you didn't participate in the bogus 'study' (which is a case of flat out fraud that should be prosecuted separately from any punishment meted out to FB), then all they got was the stuff you posted as public. If I'm wrong about that, please let me know.
Anyway, the real problem is that they're so willing to take advertising money from anybody - and to allow their advertisers to disguise false, propaganda ads as legitimate 'news' content. All this admittedly stolen info would be useless without Facebook's ad platform existing to allow manipulative content to be targeted using it. And (as the Cambridge Analytics exec admits on video), propaganda is worthless without being able to portray it as real information. If all Facebook paid content were clearly labeled as such - and formatted as an ad (i.e. clearly not news), and if all political advertising were required (like everywhere else) to disclose its source, Facebook wouldn't be such a target.
Interestingly, this comes at the same time as the story about Uber's first self-driving traffic fatality. It's long past time to admit that what passes for artificial intelligence these days is not intelligent at all. All it is, is various mechanisms to allow these kids to run huge businesses with next to no employees. But the nature of those businesses is phony. Facebook claims to be a 'media' outlet that ends up being cat videos + the National Enquirer. And Uber claims to empower regular folks to make some cash on the side, when all they really are is a sweatshop working their hearts out to lay off all of their employees. And the worst part about it is that the shit doesn't work - it's all hype, for and by Venture Capitalists to pump up huge market valuations. How about this: We wait until artificial intelligence is truly intelligent (which will happen in about 50 years, give or take) before we let it loose piloting 2 ton machines on our streets. The only intelligence these things have is in their crummy ability to recognize objects almost as well as a toddler. The rest of it is a Rube Goldberg mechanism of maps and specific programming on what to do in the few thousand situations that their programmers have thought of.
I'd feel a little safer with self flying quadcopter taxis than with self-driving cars. Those at least would only have to contend with buildings and other robot quadcopters (i.e. with similar, known algorithms that can be coordinated).
The kind of targeted advertising that was delivered via Facebook (outright falsities and incitements to violence, etc) would be illegal on just about any other medium. Certainly on Television, and certainly as relates to electioneering rules. That it wasn't illegal in 2016 - and that it was so widespread - is just more indication that Facebook needs to be regulated as an advertising medium. Ads and other commercial items clearly labeled as such - with their sponsors identities either shown or made available.
"Hi, I'm Vladimir Putin, and I approve this message"
It's not what they know about you - it's that they're using what they know about you to send you fraudulent 'news' items that make it increasingly hard to know what's real. The crime here, such as it is, is that they fraudulently got permission to use info about a set of Facebook users - by posing as academic researchers, and to use the info in that research. They most certainly did not disclose that they were a political opposition research firm.
And they they scraped the facebook accounts of all the friends of those original users - which is surely a breach of Facebook's terms of service, assuming they did it by opening Facebook accounts and then looking at the 'publicly available' info on those people. Of course, Facebook is guilty of 'leaving the barn door open' if they can't stop their site from being harvested this way. But that doesn't make it less criminal that Cambridge Analytics did this. Yes, they stole the data in violation of the FB terms of service - plain and simple. I'm sure Google scrapes Facebook too, but I assume they do it with Facebook's permission, and for the purpose of allowing people to find Facebook friends via Google search (Facebook's internal search capabilities are God awful).
There are a hundred things Facebook could do to mitigate all of this, of course. And they don't do it, because it would cost them money. That's why we the public need to cost them users if they don't...
The problem with Amazon is that their business model seems to be based on pricing all competition out of the market. Who knows how far down the line it will be before that happens - but nobody can say what happens then. Maybe it's benign - and even Bezos doesn't know where he's heading with this. After all, his loss-leader retail business has built a powerful cloud services business that's as cost-effective as anybody else's. Brick-and-morter retail may merely be collateral damage (see Toys 'R Us bankruptcy story, also on today's SlashDot front page), or maybe the model is to wait for them to fail and then make up for the years of near-non-profitability with big price increases.
Anyway, my point is that your points about Amazon's skill at their business and keeping customers happy are well taken, but they don't address the real threat Amazon poses. And that is that in terms of profitability, they've been operating a pyramid scheme with their investors for more than a decade now. Which gives them enormously valuable stock with which to keep expanding. Presumably those investors are counting on that not to continue forever - i.e., for profitability to come into line with the valuation. Do you think at some point they'll reach such a scale that that can happen without sharp price increases? Or will the stock just tank, leaving Bezos as the benign emperor of a giant, self-sustaining megabusiness based on a low-price model forever? I guess that depends on whether this has all been built by siphoning off value from the stock - or whether there's an enormous debt load that would bring the company down if it continued the current business model indefinitely.
I guess you're joking - but I'll reply to you so my reply is near the top of the page;-)
It's a cute coincidence that this story appears on the same day as "How Amazon Became Corporate America's Nightmare". Having a physical toy store (or clothing store, or electronics store) in the neighborhood is a wonderful convenience - as a real-world browsing opportunity for your online purchases at Amazon, where you get free shipping (no need to lug the thing home in a cab), and low-overhead prices that physical stores can't match without eventually ending up in bankruptcy.
Amazon's great (for what they're great for), but they're also essentially dumping product on the world at a near loss in order to achieve some kind of insurmountable market share. I only wonder what happens then? How long can the 3rd most valuable company in the world continue to operate at 400+ ranked profitability? If the purpose of this pyramid scheme is merely to bilk investors out of the money Bezos needs to build his empire - I guess I can think of worse things. But somehow, I think that one day the Empire will demand to be paid.
Perhaps. But by making it easy to run Linux (and it's not a full-blown Linux GUI, by the way) for Linux developers, they're making sure that the Linux desktop does not get traction with that set of users. Of course, savvy Linux developers could already install a Linux VM and get the whole system - assuming they didn't want to just install Linux directly and use it. So this ends up picking off some subset of those users.
I just went to a demonstration from a phone app company of their development environment, and they basically run on Mac laptops with all the backend stuff in a Docker container. But they need to be on MacOS in order to do iOS frontend development. Not sure what would force a web developer to be on Windows, now that Windows Phone is gone...
Some of the bikes in the NYC Citibike system have something like this. They project a bright green picture of a bicycle onto the road in front of you. I assume this is so cars can see you coming - not for you to look at. But it's super bright and annoying as hell. Now, part of that might be because the projector is mounted on the handle bars, so the image moves around as you swivel the front wheel. But still, imagine a road full of cars projecting bright lights onto the street. Uggh.
Well, this just clinches it. Apparently there is no principle behind 'conservative' positions today other than "we've decided where the lines are, and we stand on the opposite side from the people we don't like - no matter the issue or the practical implications". It's all - and only - about tribalism. And the tribes are being organized and defined by moneyed interests who know how to manipulate them. Congratulations, America.
The only use I can see for "engaging, interactive, and actionable email experiences" is for Spam advertisements with bells and whistles. It had better be disableable - or bye bye gmail. That's not what email is for, and I'm certainly not going to enable my email client to annoy me more than is absolutely necessary.
Not true. I'd be the first to agree with Trump if he said something obviously true (like "Donald J. Trump is a big fat liar"). I didn't believe him at first when he said "I could shoot someone in the middle of 5th avenue and get away with it", but I think maybe I do now...
Seriously, during the campaign, I agreed with some of his analysis of the state of blue collar manufacturing in this country. Of course, he was so sketchy in presenting solutions - if he presented them at all - that agreeing with him on those points was no reason to support him. He has no substance whatsoever and didn't even attempt to present substantial policy platforms - or didn't you notice when he finally realized "Health care is complicated" after running around the country calling Obamacare a disaster that he would quickly and easily replace with something much better... Pure con man. There is nothing more to him.
And judging from his willingness to trust an FBI that answers to Trump, I'd be willing to guess that our fascist friend would've been perfectly happy had the FBI indicted Hillary Clinton for something about her email server. I'm sure he's quite happy that those 'Democratic shills' at the FBI essentially forced (by threatening to leak the info) Comey to drop his Weiner bomb on the election - which turned out to have been 'nothing new to see here', but quite likely threw the electoral college to Trump. Along with rust-belt state voter suppression, which I imagine he also thinks is 'how the government is intended to operate'.
Even if that were true - and given the cherry-picked nature of the information in the memo, I doubt it's the complete story - the Steel dossier was just one more piece of information. It may have been the one that put them over the top (and it may not have been) - but there was plenty of reason to seek the FISA warrant. Page's past connections with Russia, along with his connections with the Trump campaign, along with multiple Russia concerns about that campaign, along with Popadopolis' admitted lies to the FBI about contacts with, wait, Russian agents.
Nunes is claiming (or at least hoping Hannity will make the convincing argument) that it's scandalous to use the Steel memo for anything at all. But that's not how intelligence works. Yes, some of the info you gather may come from dubious sources - and that gets taken into account. For all we know, the Steel dossier convinced the FBI to seek the warrant - but as confirmation of other sourced information they already had. In fact, the FBI has pretty much confirmed this in their arguments against releasing this bit of propaganda. But Nunes is refusing to allow the rest of the context for the warrant to be released - or at least not until Hannity has had the chance to play this out in the court of public opinion.
The ultimate goal is either to give Trump an excuse to fire Rosenstein - and by extension Mueller, or simply to cast enough doubt on the Russia investigation that anything it comes up with will be tainted, and Trump will be able to lie/power his way through the findings - and the House will have an excuse to do nothing about them. In any case, this memo is an act of political propaganda - not intelligence oversight. Who knows (well, maybe Mueller does) - there could be nothing more to the Russian collusion scandal then the obvious fact that the Trump campaign knew Russia was pulling strings for them, and thought that was fine. That's sleazy, but probably not illegal. And Trump probably could've left it at that - had he not tried to fight the investigation at every turn. But what's likely to be found is all manner of financial wrongdoing involving Russians that may well have been illegal. There's something there - or else they wouldn't be trying so hard to suppress it.
Oh. And then there's the little matter of actual direct interference in our election - about which nothing is being done. Slashdotters have been raising red flags for years about weaknesses in the voting systems - and indeed systems that handle our voter roles were broken into. But somehow enough Slashdotters have become 'anti-liberal' enough that running interference for the likes of Donald Trump is more important to them than, oh, the integrity of our democracy. As DJT would say, SAD!
I guess if enough cars are programmed to safely obey traffic laws, then the speed limits could be raised. Then again, weren't speed limits reduced for the sake of fuel efficiency? Do today's cars even operate more efficiently at 55MPH than they do at higher speeds?
Okay if you must. But irrelevant in terms of what I'm talking about. By 'mobile', I mean 'today's mobile' that's gradually taking the lions share of internet traffic (that isn't Netflix) and determining what new internet services will catch on. i.e. iPhone and Android.
But if we must discuss Microsoft's failure at 'today's mobile', it was in their assumption that all they needed to be successful was wait to see what others did that succeeded - and then copy it, counting on their ties to Windows / Exchange / Office to make them a success, however late they were to market.
It turned out that what allowed the iPhone to really succeed was for enough of personal computing to have already migrated to the web - and for web standards to have become widely enough followed that the combination of Safari and Google Maps could essentially be the killer app for a smartphone with location awareness, but no 3rd party apps (yet). And prior to the iPhone, Safari alone probably wasn't enough to beat IE's proprietary web. It took Firefox - and then Chrome, both running on Windows to allow for web standards to win the day. If the web had remained 'the Microsoft/IE web', Microsoft might have had time to react to the iPhone - and Android might not have taken off at all.
Then again, maybe the iPhone was compelling enough even without being able to run 'all of the web'. Remember that iPhones could never handle flash - and that didn't hold them back...
In my view, Siri's biggest weakness is that there's no reason for it to exist at all. Okay, I guess Siri was the first of the voice-activated digital assistants on mobile devices, so that complicates things. But seriously, Apple is a hardware company that sells nice-looking decently-performing 'luxury' hardware. And other than design, their big strength is integration. But was the iPhone any worse when Google provided its mapping service? Okay, I get that Google may have been restricting some mapping functionality in the iOS version - but chicken and egg? Apple was suing Android device makers.
I guess the question is - do all of these companies: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon really need to field an entry in every new technology area imagineable in order to survive? I'd argue that Amazon is not going to be put out of business by anything that any of the others do (except - big maybe - Microsoft throwing enough money at Azure to hurt AWS). So, if they want to start making hardware - fine. But why can't they use Android like everybody else - and even provide hooks into Android assistant to facilitate buying stuff from Amazon? Likewise Apple's mobile hardware business would continue to do fine if they were to negotiate with Google to provide their maps for them - and possibly even provide the search intelligence for Siri.
On the other hand, Google's search business faced a potential serious threat from Microsoft - back in the day when they were throwing a fortune into Bing. And the inevitable Microsoft entry into mobile would've surely become the Android of its day had Google not so completely beaten them to the punch. So they kind of had to go into mobile. Likewise, they kind of had to build the Chrome browser to make sure Bing wasn't the only choice for search (desktop still ruled at the time). But without Microsoft and it's goals of owning all software platforms, Google would've done fine without owning a mobile OS - or even a web browser. Of course, the same could be said for Microsoft's Office products without Google deciding to build a free web-based clone.
So... is this just normal competition - or is there something special about tech and its famous network effects that makes it 'necessary' to fight it out over every corner of the industry? And if so, can anything be done about it?
It's not the connection to the mother ship that's the problem. It's the mother ship's insistence on saving every interaction that you have with it - whether it improves the service or not. They don't even know what they want it for - they just figure that they might want it in the future. While I might not pay for an ad-free life, I might consider paying for an anonymous one. Where my online interactions, if saved at all, are only ever saved in aggregate form - to improve the overall service without intruding on my privacy.
Their barrier to entry is owning the ability to run Windows applications - which are still the lion's share of desktop apps. None of the competitors can reliably do that. Munich - for all their efforts - ultimately caved to that barrier as well. Of course, politics (and perhaps a touch of bribery) contributed there too. But seriously, after what? 10 years, they still had problems dealing with existing Windows apps for which there was no suitable substitute.
It's interesting that Microsoft isn't mentioned in your list. Have they become that irrelevant? Or have they just managed to slip just far enough below the radar to continue their monopolistic practices in areas nobody's looking at any more?
That was my question. I have a win32 app that runs on the Mac under WINE, and I've seen no reason to port it to be Win64 code. It still works fine on Windows and Linux/WINE, and to tell the truth, requests to run it on Macs have been pretty few and far between - though it works well there under WINE too.
Are you saying a 64-bit version of WINE will retain the ability to run 32-bit windows apps - or will this mean WINE can only run 64-bit windows apps in the future? What about Parallels? Will it run 64-bit Windows and retain Windows' ability to run 32-bit apps?
Who said FusionGPS paid the Russian government for info? Sure, Fusion was payed - but if you believe their testimony (and they're certainly a lot more believable than, say, Donald Trump Jr.), they did their research on the up and up - i.e. broke no laws, and did essentially what good OR people do.
Nobody paid Fusion as an intermediary to funnel money to Russia. Fusion started looking at Russian connections and kept finding stuff. And what they found was disturbing enough that they went to the FBI with it. Hardly what you do if you were hired to secretly break the law and 'funnel money to a foreign government'.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as Facebook doesn't give out anything that can be used to contact you - i.e., they retain control over the ability to target you with advertising, etc., they there are lots of things FB could do to solve much of this problem. I don't really care who sees the stuff I've shared publicly on Facebook - and, yes, I expected them to keep the stuff I share with friends limited to those friends. But face it, we're reading about all this because of the way Facebook allowed its data to be used to target deceptive political advertising. There may not (yet) be any Federal laws that govern political advertising on social media, but that does not mean that a site like Facebook can't adopt its own standards.
The idiotic Citizens United decision still left room to legislate transparency rules, and just because the Congress can't get that done (mostly because the Republicans in Congress think the money advantage is on their side, and don't want transparency), doesn't mean Facebook can't require it. Certainly in their paid advertising, their automated scanners can be smart enough to detect political content and require that somebody real take responsibility for it. And even in phony grassroots postings that spread 'organically', they can identify those postings as such and issue warnings about untrustworthy content. Unless something is posted by a friend, if Facebook's business model wants you to see it, they need to make sure you know this is in your feed for Facebook's moneymaking needs - not because you asked to see it or any of your friends asked that you see it. Even Cambridge Analytica said that the info they scraped from Facebook would've been of little use if the propaganda they targeted with it had to be labeled as propaganda. The Cambridge Analytica scandal is more about their fraudulent messaging than about their ability to target it. Sure, Facebook has to clean up its act in terms of keeping your data secure, but they also need to stop allowing slimy advertisers to disguise their messages as news. And if they care about it, they will. If they don't their users should jump ship.
Interestingly, Google's business model is less dependent on phony advertising than Facebook's. Oh, they use your data to sell to you, but their ads are clearly labeled. Don't know how that would've played out had Google Plus survived, but they certainly have enough ways to make money that they wouldn't have had to base their platform on deception. Maybe they should give it another go and make an honest pitch for an ad-supported service that is upfront about how it works.
Don't these lidar systems see in the dark? The one potential advantage of self-driving cars is that they would see somebody before they enter the range of the car's headlights. Total fail here.
Well, not that they did it for the right reasons, but the fact that the new tax bill makes it less beneficial to stash corporate profits overseas, at least that will be less of an issue in the future. Of course, no attempt was made to make up for the reduced corporate tax rates - and in fact, the expected one time windfall from repatriated foreign profits was used to portray the cost of the bill as lower than it really is (no dishonest rationale went unused).
Deficits be damned - or used as a reason to cut Social Security, etc., because Republican ideologues have no shame. They also have no genuine ideology - and what they have is merely a fig leaf to maximize the benefits to their donors. Sure, maybe some of them are stupid enough to believe that trickle-down economics works. But if you're smart enough to get elected based on lies, I'm gonna assume you're also smart enough to know you're lying. Not all of them are flat out psychopaths.
To tell the truth, the fact that Facebook is leaking this info isn't the worst thing about it. As others have said, you're putting it up there, and presumably if you didn't participate in the bogus 'study' (which is a case of flat out fraud that should be prosecuted separately from any punishment meted out to FB), then all they got was the stuff you posted as public. If I'm wrong about that, please let me know.
Anyway, the real problem is that they're so willing to take advertising money from anybody - and to allow their advertisers to disguise false, propaganda ads as legitimate 'news' content. All this admittedly stolen info would be useless without Facebook's ad platform existing to allow manipulative content to be targeted using it. And (as the Cambridge Analytics exec admits on video), propaganda is worthless without being able to portray it as real information. If all Facebook paid content were clearly labeled as such - and formatted as an ad (i.e. clearly not news), and if all political advertising were required (like everywhere else) to disclose its source, Facebook wouldn't be such a target.
Interestingly, this comes at the same time as the story about Uber's first self-driving traffic fatality. It's long past time to admit that what passes for artificial intelligence these days is not intelligent at all. All it is, is various mechanisms to allow these kids to run huge businesses with next to no employees. But the nature of those businesses is phony. Facebook claims to be a 'media' outlet that ends up being cat videos + the National Enquirer. And Uber claims to empower regular folks to make some cash on the side, when all they really are is a sweatshop working their hearts out to lay off all of their employees. And the worst part about it is that the shit doesn't work - it's all hype, for and by Venture Capitalists to pump up huge market valuations. How about this: We wait until artificial intelligence is truly intelligent (which will happen in about 50 years, give or take) before we let it loose piloting 2 ton machines on our streets. The only intelligence these things have is in their crummy ability to recognize objects almost as well as a toddler. The rest of it is a Rube Goldberg mechanism of maps and specific programming on what to do in the few thousand situations that their programmers have thought of.
I'd feel a little safer with self flying quadcopter taxis than with self-driving cars. Those at least would only have to contend with buildings and other robot quadcopters (i.e. with similar, known algorithms that can be coordinated).
The kind of targeted advertising that was delivered via Facebook (outright falsities and incitements to violence, etc) would be illegal on just about any other medium. Certainly on Television, and certainly as relates to electioneering rules. That it wasn't illegal in 2016 - and that it was so widespread - is just more indication that Facebook needs to be regulated as an advertising medium. Ads and other commercial items clearly labeled as such - with their sponsors identities either shown or made available.
"Hi, I'm Vladimir Putin, and I approve this message"
It's not what they know about you - it's that they're using what they know about you to send you fraudulent 'news' items that make it increasingly hard to know what's real. The crime here, such as it is, is that they fraudulently got permission to use info about a set of Facebook users - by posing as academic researchers, and to use the info in that research. They most certainly did not disclose that they were a political opposition research firm.
And they they scraped the facebook accounts of all the friends of those original users - which is surely a breach of Facebook's terms of service, assuming they did it by opening Facebook accounts and then looking at the 'publicly available' info on those people. Of course, Facebook is guilty of 'leaving the barn door open' if they can't stop their site from being harvested this way. But that doesn't make it less criminal that Cambridge Analytics did this. Yes, they stole the data in violation of the FB terms of service - plain and simple. I'm sure Google scrapes Facebook too, but I assume they do it with Facebook's permission, and for the purpose of allowing people to find Facebook friends via Google search (Facebook's internal search capabilities are God awful).
There are a hundred things Facebook could do to mitigate all of this, of course. And they don't do it, because it would cost them money. That's why we the public need to cost them users if they don't...
The problem with Amazon is that their business model seems to be based on pricing all competition out of the market. Who knows how far down the line it will be before that happens - but nobody can say what happens then. Maybe it's benign - and even Bezos doesn't know where he's heading with this. After all, his loss-leader retail business has built a powerful cloud services business that's as cost-effective as anybody else's. Brick-and-morter retail may merely be collateral damage (see Toys 'R Us bankruptcy story, also on today's SlashDot front page), or maybe the model is to wait for them to fail and then make up for the years of near-non-profitability with big price increases.
Anyway, my point is that your points about Amazon's skill at their business and keeping customers happy are well taken, but they don't address the real threat Amazon poses. And that is that in terms of profitability, they've been operating a pyramid scheme with their investors for more than a decade now. Which gives them enormously valuable stock with which to keep expanding. Presumably those investors are counting on that not to continue forever - i.e., for profitability to come into line with the valuation. Do you think at some point they'll reach such a scale that that can happen without sharp price increases? Or will the stock just tank, leaving Bezos as the benign emperor of a giant, self-sustaining megabusiness based on a low-price model forever? I guess that depends on whether this has all been built by siphoning off value from the stock - or whether there's an enormous debt load that would bring the company down if it continued the current business model indefinitely.
I guess you're joking - but I'll reply to you so my reply is near the top of the page ;-)
It's a cute coincidence that this story appears on the same day as "How Amazon Became Corporate America's Nightmare". Having a physical toy store (or clothing store, or electronics store) in the neighborhood is a wonderful convenience - as a real-world browsing opportunity for your online purchases at Amazon, where you get free shipping (no need to lug the thing home in a cab), and low-overhead prices that physical stores can't match without eventually ending up in bankruptcy.
Amazon's great (for what they're great for), but they're also essentially dumping product on the world at a near loss in order to achieve some kind of insurmountable market share. I only wonder what happens then? How long can the 3rd most valuable company in the world continue to operate at 400+ ranked profitability? If the purpose of this pyramid scheme is merely to bilk investors out of the money Bezos needs to build his empire - I guess I can think of worse things. But somehow, I think that one day the Empire will demand to be paid.
Perhaps. But by making it easy to run Linux (and it's not a full-blown Linux GUI, by the way) for Linux developers, they're making sure that the Linux desktop does not get traction with that set of users. Of course, savvy Linux developers could already install a Linux VM and get the whole system - assuming they didn't want to just install Linux directly and use it. So this ends up picking off some subset of those users.
I just went to a demonstration from a phone app company of their development environment, and they basically run on Mac laptops with all the backend stuff in a Docker container. But they need to be on MacOS in order to do iOS frontend development. Not sure what would force a web developer to be on Windows, now that Windows Phone is gone...
Some of the bikes in the NYC Citibike system have something like this. They project a bright green picture of a bicycle onto the road in front of you. I assume this is so cars can see you coming - not for you to look at. But it's super bright and annoying as hell. Now, part of that might be because the projector is mounted on the handle bars, so the image moves around as you swivel the front wheel. But still, imagine a road full of cars projecting bright lights onto the street. Uggh.
Well, this just clinches it. Apparently there is no principle behind 'conservative' positions today other than "we've decided where the lines are, and we stand on the opposite side from the people we don't like - no matter the issue or the practical implications". It's all - and only - about tribalism. And the tribes are being organized and defined by moneyed interests who know how to manipulate them. Congratulations, America.
The only use I can see for "engaging, interactive, and actionable email experiences" is for Spam advertisements with bells and whistles. It had better be disableable - or bye bye gmail. That's not what email is for, and I'm certainly not going to enable my email client to annoy me more than is absolutely necessary.
Not true. I'd be the first to agree with Trump if he said something obviously true (like "Donald J. Trump is a big fat liar"). I didn't believe him at first when he said "I could shoot someone in the middle of 5th avenue and get away with it", but I think maybe I do now...
Seriously, during the campaign, I agreed with some of his analysis of the state of blue collar manufacturing in this country. Of course, he was so sketchy in presenting solutions - if he presented them at all - that agreeing with him on those points was no reason to support him. He has no substance whatsoever and didn't even attempt to present substantial policy platforms - or didn't you notice when he finally realized "Health care is complicated" after running around the country calling Obamacare a disaster that he would quickly and easily replace with something much better... Pure con man. There is nothing more to him.
And judging from his willingness to trust an FBI that answers to Trump, I'd be willing to guess that our fascist friend would've been perfectly happy had the FBI indicted Hillary Clinton for something about her email server. I'm sure he's quite happy that those 'Democratic shills' at the FBI essentially forced (by threatening to leak the info) Comey to drop his Weiner bomb on the election - which turned out to have been 'nothing new to see here', but quite likely threw the electoral college to Trump. Along with rust-belt state voter suppression, which I imagine he also thinks is 'how the government is intended to operate'.
Even if that were true - and given the cherry-picked nature of the information in the memo, I doubt it's the complete story - the Steel dossier was just one more piece of information. It may have been the one that put them over the top (and it may not have been) - but there was plenty of reason to seek the FISA warrant. Page's past connections with Russia, along with his connections with the Trump campaign, along with multiple Russia concerns about that campaign, along with Popadopolis' admitted lies to the FBI about contacts with, wait, Russian agents.
Nunes is claiming (or at least hoping Hannity will make the convincing argument) that it's scandalous to use the Steel memo for anything at all. But that's not how intelligence works. Yes, some of the info you gather may come from dubious sources - and that gets taken into account. For all we know, the Steel dossier convinced the FBI to seek the warrant - but as confirmation of other sourced information they already had. In fact, the FBI has pretty much confirmed this in their arguments against releasing this bit of propaganda. But Nunes is refusing to allow the rest of the context for the warrant to be released - or at least not until Hannity has had the chance to play this out in the court of public opinion.
The ultimate goal is either to give Trump an excuse to fire Rosenstein - and by extension Mueller, or simply to cast enough doubt on the Russia investigation that anything it comes up with will be tainted, and Trump will be able to lie/power his way through the findings - and the House will have an excuse to do nothing about them. In any case, this memo is an act of political propaganda - not intelligence oversight. Who knows (well, maybe Mueller does) - there could be nothing more to the Russian collusion scandal then the obvious fact that the Trump campaign knew Russia was pulling strings for them, and thought that was fine. That's sleazy, but probably not illegal. And Trump probably could've left it at that - had he not tried to fight the investigation at every turn. But what's likely to be found is all manner of financial wrongdoing involving Russians that may well have been illegal. There's something there - or else they wouldn't be trying so hard to suppress it.
Oh. And then there's the little matter of actual direct interference in our election - about which nothing is being done. Slashdotters have been raising red flags for years about weaknesses in the voting systems - and indeed systems that handle our voter roles were broken into. But somehow enough Slashdotters have become 'anti-liberal' enough that running interference for the likes of Donald Trump is more important to them than, oh, the integrity of our democracy. As DJT would say, SAD!
I guess if enough cars are programmed to safely obey traffic laws, then the speed limits could be raised. Then again, weren't speed limits reduced for the sake of fuel efficiency? Do today's cars even operate more efficiently at 55MPH than they do at higher speeds?
Maybe - but at least the robots won't be so scared of a black male driver that they shoot him first and ask questions later...
Okay if you must. But irrelevant in terms of what I'm talking about. By 'mobile', I mean 'today's mobile' that's gradually taking the lions share of internet traffic (that isn't Netflix) and determining what new internet services will catch on. i.e. iPhone and Android.
But if we must discuss Microsoft's failure at 'today's mobile', it was in their assumption that all they needed to be successful was wait to see what others did that succeeded - and then copy it, counting on their ties to Windows / Exchange / Office to make them a success, however late they were to market.
It turned out that what allowed the iPhone to really succeed was for enough of personal computing to have already migrated to the web - and for web standards to have become widely enough followed that the combination of Safari and Google Maps could essentially be the killer app for a smartphone with location awareness, but no 3rd party apps (yet). And prior to the iPhone, Safari alone probably wasn't enough to beat IE's proprietary web. It took Firefox - and then Chrome, both running on Windows to allow for web standards to win the day. If the web had remained 'the Microsoft/IE web', Microsoft might have had time to react to the iPhone - and Android might not have taken off at all.
Then again, maybe the iPhone was compelling enough even without being able to run 'all of the web'. Remember that iPhones could never handle flash - and that didn't hold them back...
In my view, Siri's biggest weakness is that there's no reason for it to exist at all. Okay, I guess Siri was the first of the voice-activated digital assistants on mobile devices, so that complicates things. But seriously, Apple is a hardware company that sells nice-looking decently-performing 'luxury' hardware. And other than design, their big strength is integration. But was the iPhone any worse when Google provided its mapping service? Okay, I get that Google may have been restricting some mapping functionality in the iOS version - but chicken and egg? Apple was suing Android device makers.
I guess the question is - do all of these companies: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon really need to field an entry in every new technology area imagineable in order to survive? I'd argue that Amazon is not going to be put out of business by anything that any of the others do (except - big maybe - Microsoft throwing enough money at Azure to hurt AWS). So, if they want to start making hardware - fine. But why can't they use Android like everybody else - and even provide hooks into Android assistant to facilitate buying stuff from Amazon? Likewise Apple's mobile hardware business would continue to do fine if they were to negotiate with Google to provide their maps for them - and possibly even provide the search intelligence for Siri.
On the other hand, Google's search business faced a potential serious threat from Microsoft - back in the day when they were throwing a fortune into Bing. And the inevitable Microsoft entry into mobile would've surely become the Android of its day had Google not so completely beaten them to the punch. So they kind of had to go into mobile. Likewise, they kind of had to build the Chrome browser to make sure Bing wasn't the only choice for search (desktop still ruled at the time). But without Microsoft and it's goals of owning all software platforms, Google would've done fine without owning a mobile OS - or even a web browser. Of course, the same could be said for Microsoft's Office products without Google deciding to build a free web-based clone.
So... is this just normal competition - or is there something special about tech and its famous network effects that makes it 'necessary' to fight it out over every corner of the industry? And if so, can anything be done about it?
It's not the connection to the mother ship that's the problem. It's the mother ship's insistence on saving every interaction that you have with it - whether it improves the service or not. They don't even know what they want it for - they just figure that they might want it in the future. While I might not pay for an ad-free life, I might consider paying for an anonymous one. Where my online interactions, if saved at all, are only ever saved in aggregate form - to improve the overall service without intruding on my privacy.
Unfortunately, sarcasm fails when many of your examples are pretty good ones for breaking up: The biggest banks, Comcast, consolidated airlines...
Their barrier to entry is owning the ability to run Windows applications - which are still the lion's share of desktop apps. None of the competitors can reliably do that. Munich - for all their efforts - ultimately caved to that barrier as well. Of course, politics (and perhaps a touch of bribery) contributed there too. But seriously, after what? 10 years, they still had problems dealing with existing Windows apps for which there was no suitable substitute.
It's interesting that Microsoft isn't mentioned in your list. Have they become that irrelevant? Or have they just managed to slip just far enough below the radar to continue their monopolistic practices in areas nobody's looking at any more?
That was my question. I have a win32 app that runs on the Mac under WINE, and I've seen no reason to port it to be Win64 code. It still works fine on Windows and Linux/WINE, and to tell the truth, requests to run it on Macs have been pretty few and far between - though it works well there under WINE too.
Are you saying a 64-bit version of WINE will retain the ability to run 32-bit windows apps - or will this mean WINE can only run 64-bit windows apps in the future? What about Parallels? Will it run 64-bit Windows and retain Windows' ability to run 32-bit apps?
Who said FusionGPS paid the Russian government for info? Sure, Fusion was payed - but if you believe their testimony (and they're certainly a lot more believable than, say, Donald Trump Jr.), they did their research on the up and up - i.e. broke no laws, and did essentially what good OR people do.
Nobody paid Fusion as an intermediary to funnel money to Russia. Fusion started looking at Russian connections and kept finding stuff. And what they found was disturbing enough that they went to the FBI with it. Hardly what you do if you were hired to secretly break the law and 'funnel money to a foreign government'.