You know, like you get a higher electric bill if you use more electricity, a higher water bill if you use more water, like you used to get a higher phone bill if you would make more phone calls, and like the ISPs have higher costs if their customers consume more bandwidth.
Let's see the equivalent of the public utility commissions, or FERC, and then we calk talk about metering. I don't trust AT&T to play straight with metered billing.
AT&T is the same company that was alleged to have randomly pushed data usage on iPhones that were off [1]. My wife who was until recently on AT&T had several months where her account would get slapped with a data charge late due to unexplained usage late in the cycle. After a year or so of this abuse and a couple of hundred dollars later we finally all switched to TMobile non-contract, and strangely (hmm) have never seen the data usage with the same pattern (not that it would matter now - at worst she'd be bumped to 2G speeds, not billed for an extra allotment of data). Couldn't be happier since the switch. TMobile is great, and compared either ATT or VZ, has much better service and aren't jerks. If you get decent TMO signal where you are, I highly recommend the switch.
To this day, AT&T still won't explain to you the data specifics - it's hard to correlate what's on the bill detail vs. what's on the phone log.
Other details were scarce, but you can bet that Haswell-E will be Intel's fastest desktop processor to date when it arrives sometime in the second half of 2014. Intel also gave a quick nod to their upcoming 14nm Broadwell CPU architecture, a follow-on to Haswell.
Does anyone else find it kind of weird that Intel seems to have gotten into a pattern where their supposed top of the line CPUs are perpetually a generation behind their supposed commodity CPUs in terms of technology?
Not at all - the commodity CPU customers can do beta test for the more risk-averse enterprise server CPU customers.
Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis said she'd rather see companies pay more in taxes and fund schools that way, rather than relying on their charity or free software."
She is making a dangerous assumption that if tax revenues increased the extra would be spent on schools
Conversely, when a company says that, by lowering taxes, they'll reinvest into the community, that's to be taken without any grains of salt at all.
Actually, what it likely means is that they'll just spend that untaxed money on campaign contributions (western world speak for bribes) and executive bonuses.
a state with 2 parties that are basically 2 wings of one party, a party of the rich (how much money does it take to run for office and how do they acquire that money)
To add to your point, a majority of the members of congress are millionaires [1]. Keep in mind that reporting rules don't require disclosure of amounts above $1M, just that they are "over $1M". So it's getting harder to track the wealth and it's corruptive effects.
OpenFL is a code library written in Haxe. You use OpenFL, and then you can output a truly native (C++) app, but can still use the flash API. It doesn't embed the flash player, or Adobe AIR, or anything like that, in your generated C++ app.
So is this a possible migration path for those who were using Adobe AIR? If it's C++, could it tie in with Apple's ObjectiveC framework and thus create deployable apps in the Mac App Store?
Old-school diesels are a menace to air quality. You can tell the latest ones in cars in the US are a difference in kind, as the back bumper is no longer stained black around the exhaust. There's really no excuse for particulate emissions with current tech.
This quite a non-sequitur - most of europe's diesels are as clean as the new diesels you see in CA - the reason CA disallowed them for years was the lack of availability of low-sulfur diesel fuel..
Tailpipe emissions are exactly why France's cities stink. I know, the number of cars on the road there has multiplied, while the capacity to meet them has not (and likely cannot).
Yes, as I deal in data interchange all the time, XML is great as it allows schema definition/sharing (XSD) and XSLT is a mature transformation language, that, after many years in the woods, is now available with functional capabilities (XSLT v3.0).
The only problem we have is that often, endpoint partners/vendors don't provide the XSD, nor do they share how they plan to validate files we send them. Or they ignore our XSD. But I still can't imagine things would be better if JSON were the interchange format.
If I control both endpoints (i.e., our browser script talking to our server through XHR), then JSON is an acceptable format. If not, I prefer XML.
A modern ULEV vehicle (which is most of the smaller imports available in America) has effectively no pollution, and certainly no particulate matter. The old joke was that driving a ULEV car through LA would actually clean the air (and that was likely true on a bad day).
Banning older vehicles solves a real problem. Imposing emissions standards on lawncare equipment solves a real problem. This is just feelgood nonsense.
So why then has the EU and CA established even higher restrictions on emissions? Could it be that SULEV, PZEV, or ZEVs actually make a tangible difference?
I visited France again (Paris, Tours and Grenoble) a three years ago, and the one thing I remember is feeling that the inner parts of cities (centre-ville and environs, or most of metro Paris) literally stank of exhaust - likely because turbo-diesels are so popular in Europe (if I didn't own a high-mpg hybrid here already, I might have bought one stateside). I don't remember this impression 10 years ago. I'm sure the problem has steadily gotten worse.
If you think it's a bad experience when you have a single OS (plus first-party apps) vendor, and a separate manufacturer (e.g.: my Lenovo and it's bevy of task-tray items), try it now with two fully supported OSs out of the box.
While I agree that it sucks that Google and Microsoft both are trying to defeat this initiative, I can also say with a 95% certainty that even if the both condoned it, it would still be a really bad experience.
Google's hypocrisy with android being "Open" is what's really exposed here - in honesty, both Microsoft and Google are as bad as Apple in desiring closed platforms. It's just that Apple seems better at delivering said platform.
I'm suspicious she has institutional support and funding - perhaps from some right-wing Christian fun die groups or perhaps from the corporatoracy class that wants to sell more vaccinations.
But putting her on trial would certainly uncover the rock and send the cockroaches scrambling.
Would the electric car still work? Could you easily find a place to charge up in that event? A car for the president has some different considerations than me in Suburbia who works from home 3 days a week and doesn't drive much. (For the record I'm a Chevy Volt owner)
I drove 5-ton dump trucks in the military, most of systems were redundant including air-pressure brakes and the like. Your Honda, unless it's 30+ years old, will not survive the EMP either.
One answer - Common Core + No Child Left Behind = ways to screw over schools, teachers and children.
Remove the funding based on mandatory tests (i.e., NCLB) that have been proven to be gamed, and the ideas of Common Core might make sense to implement.
If NCLB is a pit trap, Common Core for many schools becomes the punji stakes hiding in it.
Not going to discuss content, but if your entire sourcing is from the "Tea Party News Network", everything looks like liberal/socialist/marxist conspiracy.
You don't happen to have any non-biased news sources, or corroborating links do you?
My biggest complaint about the mp3 music player industry is: Why are they still over selling 1/2/4GB devices!?!?!?!?!? Honestly, I can't even imagine why Apple, Sony, Philips and other large brands that I find in my average tech store even bother to have/sell, but actively promote these minuscule devices. At least 128GB approaches a reasonable size for today's music collections. To me it is similar to Linus' rant about laptop monitors.
A nano/shuffle's entire purpose is to support your workout (shuffle = music, nano adds radio, podcast, and recently BT headphones). It's for folks who have a decent but not large selection of music that just want to use it for a specific purpose.
Nowadays, with streaming radio and decent data plans, the smartphone is definitely better and doesn't even need more than 32 much less 128GB.
In fact, I would go so far as to say it quite literally changed computing by showing that a low power non-windows laptop could work (crank charger? hell yes). The form factor was closer to what made the Asus eeePC 701 famous - and get this, the even the name seems to derive from the OLPC mission [1]
According to Asus, the name Eee derives from "the three Es", an abbreviation of its advertising slogan for the device: "Easy to learn, Easy to work, Easy to play".
I wasn't looking for it to go anywhere really other than pointing out the absurdity of saying that taking a bluray rip down to a 800MB divx rip results in just an acceptable loss of quality.
I'm by no means a audio/videophile snob, but you either have a blind and/or deaf if you can't see a MAJOR quality deficiency with a 800 bluray rip. What's the point of having a bluray movie if the first thing you normally do is make it look like crap?
No your analogy was horribly flawed and hyperbolic. Movies are never re-encoded if you're just interested in watching them and all your devices support the format (like JeffSH, I also encode, but to an apple friendly h.264 of a decent bitrate). If you really want the quality for a given movie, make an exception and upload the blue ray image.
Photos however, often require post processing, and are often resized to fit smaller form factors (i.e., avatar pics, MMS sends, uploaded to get printed). A larger "reference" does make sense (again, 30MB is ridiculous - not everyone has a digital medium-format camera).
Clearly the proper metric that used here is to charge for LTE data use per individual (or even per GB).
You get free tethering with tmobile's simple choice plan. For a family plan you can get tethering of 1G (recently upgraded from 500MB) data for free for each line, for $22/line (sans fees/taxes). I'm doing exactly that - it's quite good.
Common mistake. You have been used to the "truth in labeling law" "truth in advertising law" etc for so long, you have assumed it applies to everyone. Sorry my dear friend, the politicians are exempted from those laws. They can label themselves "free market loving libertarian right wingers" or "mother earth worshiping tree hugging beer-can-recycling post-cosumer-waste-reconsuming environment loving left wingers". But there is absolutely no guarantee the politician you find under those labels are truly what the label says.
That's because you're making two straw men and knocking them down. I guarantee you that folks like Alan Greyson on the left and Rand Paul on the right would support Tesla here and they're not the most extreme on either end - however, we're talking about super-corrupt NJ who still think bridgegate-Christie is a decent governor. You know, the one that gave out pieces of the 9/11 wreckage as political gifts to crony mayors (both Dem and GOP)?
Yeah, that's one corrupt state. I'm certainly not surprised they'd shut out Tesla, in favor of their political-machine-supporting good-op-boy network of car dealers and manufacturers.
In the end, it's all about the money, and NJ has a ton of money mucking with it's politics.
To my (admittedly untrained) eye, I'm not sure what Microsoft could have done differently. It had put forward mobile operating systems before; Windows Phone and Pen both had longstanding iterations. So while I think it's easy to blame Ballmer, it strikes me to some extent that Microsoft suffered a lot of bad luck. It's timing was wrong on some products, and after having won the PC wars it simply didn't know where to go.
It's not *what*, it's *how* and *what for*. Microsoft had everything they ever wanted - complete dominion of the computer industry at the time. At the dawn of the millennium, no one made a move if they weren't sure Microsoft wouldn't or couldn't compete in that arena. A few years earlier, a stray remark from Ballmer brought the tech market stocks down 5% in a single day. They have everything to lose, and nothing to gain.
Apple, Google, and RIM were *hungry*. They each had a vision that didn't necessarily involve dominating the market and instead was more customer focused. They cared about the finer points of their customer's issues. They iterated rapidly.
Microsoft's attempt to grow the computer industry ran into their real desire to simply dominate what existed. If they couldn't dominate it they wouldn't grow it. And that attitude persisted for over a decade, so they became incapable of competing - they didn't have to for years. They still don't have to in their core markets. It's just that those markets don't comprise "all of computing" anymore.
I can't wait for a true '3rd option' (not apple and not android) to come on the market. I don't enjoy or trust either of the two existing choices.
What, WindowsPhone isn't good enough to qualify as that "3rd option"? Seriously, you can still get a blackberry, WinPhone or just a plain ol dumb phone that tethers really well (my TMO plan has free tethering) and run an iPod touch or equivalent.
When you need That Part on a Sunday afternoon, you're not going to get it from Digi-Key or Mouser.
Are you serious? It's a friggin hobby. You can wait a couple of days, hell, probably a couple of weeks without any real impact.
Sure, you can sell cables at outrageous markups, but honestly, those could be done without for a couple of nights unless you're an addict. It's very hard to compete with an online seller where the user can search, call, and/or chat with the vendor, and likely get it shipped the same or next day, with express delivery.
Retail does best when users don't know what they want, or want to be talked through their purchase (i.e., big ticket items do very well), but for people who know what they want, and don't need (or even want) to talk to someone to make a purchase, online is preferable.
I'm surprised they lasted this long - in fact, i remember seeing/. posts wondering how the hell they were making their margins with all this competitive pressure.
As long as the FIRE (finance, insurance, real-estate) economy rewards those who collect rents (literally and figuratively) over those who work to produce profit, we'll have these issues - the cost of having retail presence is not going down, and looks like it won't, absent another financial crisis when the government refuses to bail out the banks.
I think it's more realistic that poor security measures will be set in place, thereby making it easy for malicious crackers to disable peoples phones remotely.
s/malicious crackers/the security state/
Well, disregard that, they're essentially the same thing.
1. Take some issue and blow it out of proportion 2. Get a pet legislator (preferably in an easily corruptible state) to introduce legislation mandating some feature or restriction 3. Introduce similar bills in the Federal space to "harmonize" the legal framework 5.... 4. Suppression capabilities fully operational.
"It costs money to develop and keep a game running, just like those fancy decorations and free drinks at a casino; whales, like gambling addicts, subsidize fun for everyone else.'"
Except video game players are more accurately described, than even casino players, as whales.
This is what Zynga reported years ago (before the bloom went off their rose) [1] - this entire economy seems... ripe for abuse as a mechanism for laundering money in my opinion. In Zynga's case, I told one of my friends who worked there that if I was an investor, I'd love to be funneling money to Zynga, while my stock represented 100x the value of whatever I "donated". That's just one use case, it could be used simply to launder money from "users" to "developers" (what if they're both the same) - going through an app store runs the money through an reasonably effective one-way function at a basic cost of 30% overhead.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, like you get a higher electric bill if you use more electricity, a higher water bill if you use more water, like you used to get a higher phone bill if you would make more phone calls, and like the ISPs have higher costs if their customers consume more bandwidth.
Let's see the equivalent of the public utility commissions, or FERC, and then we calk talk about metering. I don't trust AT&T to play straight with metered billing.
AT&T is the same company that was alleged to have randomly pushed data usage on iPhones that were off [1]. My wife who was until recently on AT&T had several months where her account would get slapped with a data charge late due to unexplained usage late in the cycle. After a year or so of this abuse and a couple of hundred dollars later we finally all switched to TMobile non-contract, and strangely (hmm) have never seen the data usage with the same pattern (not that it would matter now - at worst she'd be bumped to 2G speeds, not billed for an extra allotment of data). Couldn't be happier since the switch. TMobile is great, and compared either ATT or VZ, has much better service and aren't jerks. If you get decent TMO signal where you are, I highly recommend the switch.
To this day, AT&T still won't explain to you the data specifics - it's hard to correlate what's on the bill detail vs. what's on the phone log.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/apple/2...
Does anyone else find it kind of weird that Intel seems to have gotten into a pattern where their supposed top of the line CPUs are perpetually a generation behind their supposed commodity CPUs in terms of technology?
Not at all - the commodity CPU customers can do beta test for the more risk-averse enterprise server CPU customers.
Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis said she'd rather see companies pay more in taxes and fund schools that way, rather than relying on their charity or free software."
She is making a dangerous assumption that if tax revenues increased the extra would be spent on schools
Conversely, when a company says that, by lowering taxes, they'll reinvest into the community, that's to be taken without any grains of salt at all.
Actually, what it likely means is that they'll just spend that untaxed money on campaign contributions (western world speak for bribes) and executive bonuses.
a state with 2 parties that are basically 2 wings of one party, a party of the rich (how much money does it take to run for office and how do they acquire that money)
To add to your point, a majority of the members of congress are millionaires [1]. Keep in mind that reporting rules don't require disclosure of amounts above $1M, just that they are "over $1M". So it's getting harder to track the wealth and it's corruptive effects.
[1] http://www.opensecrets.org/new...
OpenFL is a code library written in Haxe. You use OpenFL, and then you can output a truly native (C++) app, but can still use the flash API. It doesn't embed the flash player, or Adobe AIR, or anything like that, in your generated C++ app.
So is this a possible migration path for those who were using Adobe AIR? If it's C++, could it tie in with Apple's ObjectiveC framework and thus create deployable apps in the Mac App Store?
>
Old-school diesels are a menace to air quality. You can tell the latest ones in cars in the US are a difference in kind, as the back bumper is no longer stained black around the exhaust. There's really no excuse for particulate emissions with current tech.
This quite a non-sequitur - most of europe's diesels are as clean as the new diesels you see in CA - the reason CA disallowed them for years was the lack of availability of low-sulfur diesel fuel..
Tailpipe emissions are exactly why France's cities stink. I know, the number of cars on the road there has multiplied, while the capacity to meet them has not (and likely cannot).
You actually prefer XML???????
Yes, as I deal in data interchange all the time, XML is great as it allows schema definition/sharing (XSD) and XSLT is a mature transformation language, that, after many years in the woods, is now available with functional capabilities (XSLT v3.0).
The only problem we have is that often, endpoint partners/vendors don't provide the XSD, nor do they share how they plan to validate files we send them. Or they ignore our XSD. But I still can't imagine things would be better if JSON were the interchange format.
If I control both endpoints (i.e., our browser script talking to our server through XHR), then JSON is an acceptable format. If not, I prefer XML.
A modern ULEV vehicle (which is most of the smaller imports available in America) has effectively no pollution, and certainly no particulate matter. The old joke was that driving a ULEV car through LA would actually clean the air (and that was likely true on a bad day).
Banning older vehicles solves a real problem. Imposing emissions standards on lawncare equipment solves a real problem. This is just feelgood nonsense.
So why then has the EU and CA established even higher restrictions on emissions? Could it be that SULEV, PZEV, or ZEVs actually make a tangible difference?
I visited France again (Paris, Tours and Grenoble) a three years ago, and the one thing I remember is feeling that the inner parts of cities (centre-ville and environs, or most of metro Paris) literally stank of exhaust - likely because turbo-diesels are so popular in Europe (if I didn't own a high-mpg hybrid here already, I might have bought one stateside). I don't remember this impression 10 years ago. I'm sure the problem has steadily gotten worse.
If you think it's a bad experience when you have a single OS (plus first-party apps) vendor, and a separate manufacturer (e.g.: my Lenovo and it's bevy of task-tray items), try it now with two fully supported OSs out of the box.
While I agree that it sucks that Google and Microsoft both are trying to defeat this initiative, I can also say with a 95% certainty that even if the both condoned it, it would still be a really bad experience.
Google's hypocrisy with android being "Open" is what's really exposed here - in honesty, both Microsoft and Google are as bad as Apple in desiring closed platforms. It's just that Apple seems better at delivering said platform.
I see her as a mass murderer.
I'm suspicious she has institutional support and funding - perhaps from some right-wing Christian fun die groups or perhaps from the corporatoracy class that wants to sell more vaccinations.
But putting her on trial would certainly uncover the rock and send the cockroaches scrambling.
Would the electric car still work? Could you easily find a place to charge up in that event? A car for the president has some different considerations than me in Suburbia who works from home 3 days a week and doesn't drive much. (For the record I'm a Chevy Volt owner)
I drove 5-ton dump trucks in the military, most of systems were redundant including air-pressure brakes and the like. Your Honda, unless it's 30+ years old, will not survive the EMP either.
One answer - Common Core + No Child Left Behind = ways to screw over schools, teachers and children.
Remove the funding based on mandatory tests (i.e., NCLB) that have been proven to be gamed, and the ideas of Common Core might make sense to implement.
If NCLB is a pit trap, Common Core for many schools becomes the punji stakes hiding in it.
Not going to discuss content, but if your entire sourcing is from the "Tea Party News Network", everything looks like liberal/socialist/marxist conspiracy.
You don't happen to have any non-biased news sources, or corroborating links do you?
My biggest complaint about the mp3 music player industry is: Why are they still over selling 1/2/4GB devices!?!?!?!?!?
Honestly, I can't even imagine why Apple, Sony, Philips and other large brands that I find in my average tech store even bother to have/sell, but actively promote these minuscule devices. At least 128GB approaches a reasonable size for today's music collections.
To me it is similar to Linus' rant about laptop monitors.
A nano/shuffle's entire purpose is to support your workout (shuffle = music, nano adds radio, podcast, and recently BT headphones). It's for folks who have a decent but not large selection of music that just want to use it for a specific purpose.
Nowadays, with streaming radio and decent data plans, the smartphone is definitely better and doesn't even need more than 32 much less 128GB.
In fact, I would go so far as to say it quite literally changed computing by showing that a low power non-windows laptop could work (crank charger? hell yes). The form factor was closer to what made the Asus eeePC 701 famous - and get this, the even the name seems to derive from the OLPC mission [1]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
I wasn't looking for it to go anywhere really other than pointing out the absurdity of saying that taking a bluray rip down to a 800MB divx rip results in just an acceptable loss of quality.
I'm by no means a audio/videophile snob, but you either have a blind and/or deaf if you can't see a MAJOR quality deficiency with a 800 bluray rip. What's the point of having a bluray movie if the first thing you normally do is make it look like crap?
No your analogy was horribly flawed and hyperbolic. Movies are never re-encoded if you're just interested in watching them and all your devices support the format (like JeffSH, I also encode, but to an apple friendly h.264 of a decent bitrate). If you really want the quality for a given movie, make an exception and upload the blue ray image.
Photos however, often require post processing, and are often resized to fit smaller form factors (i.e., avatar pics, MMS sends, uploaded to get printed). A larger "reference" does make sense (again, 30MB is ridiculous - not everyone has a digital medium-format camera).
Clearly the proper metric that used here is to charge for LTE data use per individual (or even per GB).
You get free tethering with tmobile's simple choice plan. For a family plan you can get tethering of 1G (recently upgraded from 500MB) data for free for each line, for $22/line (sans fees/taxes). I'm doing exactly that - it's quite good.
Common mistake. You have been used to the "truth in labeling law" "truth in advertising law" etc for so long, you have assumed it applies to everyone. Sorry my dear friend, the politicians are exempted from those laws. They can label themselves "free market loving libertarian right wingers" or "mother earth worshiping tree hugging beer-can-recycling post-cosumer-waste-reconsuming environment loving left wingers". But there is absolutely no guarantee the politician you find under those labels are truly what the label says.
That's because you're making two straw men and knocking them down. I guarantee you that folks like Alan Greyson on the left and Rand Paul on the right would support Tesla here and they're not the most extreme on either end - however, we're talking about super-corrupt NJ who still think bridgegate-Christie is a decent governor. You know, the one that gave out pieces of the 9/11 wreckage as political gifts to crony mayors (both Dem and GOP)?
Yeah, that's one corrupt state. I'm certainly not surprised they'd shut out Tesla, in favor of their political-machine-supporting good-op-boy network of car dealers and manufacturers.
In the end, it's all about the money, and NJ has a ton of money mucking with it's politics.
To my (admittedly untrained) eye, I'm not sure what Microsoft could have done differently. It had put forward mobile operating systems before; Windows Phone and Pen both had longstanding iterations. So while I think it's easy to blame Ballmer, it strikes me to some extent that Microsoft suffered a lot of bad luck. It's timing was wrong on some products, and after having won the PC wars it simply didn't know where to go.
It's not *what*, it's *how* and *what for*. Microsoft had everything they ever wanted - complete dominion of the computer industry at the time. At the dawn of the millennium, no one made a move if they weren't sure Microsoft wouldn't or couldn't compete in that arena. A few years earlier, a stray remark from Ballmer brought the tech market stocks down 5% in a single day. They have everything to lose, and nothing to gain.
Apple, Google, and RIM were *hungry*. They each had a vision that didn't necessarily involve dominating the market and instead was more customer focused. They cared about the finer points of their customer's issues. They iterated rapidly.
Microsoft's attempt to grow the computer industry ran into their real desire to simply dominate what existed. If they couldn't dominate it they wouldn't grow it. And that attitude persisted for over a decade, so they became incapable of competing - they didn't have to for years. They still don't have to in their core markets. It's just that those markets don't comprise "all of computing" anymore.
I can't wait for a true '3rd option' (not apple and not android) to come on the market. I don't enjoy or trust either of the two existing choices.
What, WindowsPhone isn't good enough to qualify as that "3rd option"? Seriously, you can still get a blackberry, WinPhone or just a plain ol dumb phone that tethers really well (my TMO plan has free tethering) and run an iPod touch or equivalent.
When you need That Part on a Sunday afternoon, you're not going to get it from Digi-Key or Mouser.
Are you serious? It's a friggin hobby. You can wait a couple of days, hell, probably a couple of weeks without any real impact.
Sure, you can sell cables at outrageous markups, but honestly, those could be done without for a couple of nights unless you're an addict. It's very hard to compete with an online seller where the user can search, call, and/or chat with the vendor, and likely get it shipped the same or next day, with express delivery.
Retail does best when users don't know what they want, or want to be talked through their purchase (i.e., big ticket items do very well), but for people who know what they want, and don't need (or even want) to talk to someone to make a purchase, online is preferable.
I'm surprised they lasted this long - in fact, i remember seeing /. posts wondering how the hell they were making their margins with all this competitive pressure.
To me, that would be amazing. Alas, I can dream.
As long as the FIRE (finance, insurance, real-estate) economy rewards those who collect rents (literally and figuratively) over those who work to produce profit, we'll have these issues - the cost of having retail presence is not going down, and looks like it won't, absent another financial crisis when the government refuses to bail out the banks.
I think it's more realistic that poor security measures will be set in place, thereby making it easy for malicious crackers to disable peoples phones remotely.
s/malicious crackers/the security state/
Well, disregard that, they're essentially the same thing.
1. Take some issue and blow it out of proportion ...
2. Get a pet legislator (preferably in an easily corruptible state) to introduce legislation mandating some feature or restriction
3. Introduce similar bills in the Federal space to "harmonize" the legal framework
5.
4. Suppression capabilities fully operational.
Source: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Except video game players are more accurately described, than even casino players, as whales.
This is what Zynga reported years ago (before the bloom went off their rose) [1] - this entire economy seems ... ripe for abuse as a mechanism for laundering money in my opinion. In Zynga's case, I told one of my friends who worked there that if I was an investor, I'd love to be funneling money to Zynga, while my stock represented 100x the value of whatever I "donated". That's just one use case, it could be used simply to launder money from "users" to "developers" (what if they're both the same) - going through an app store runs the money through an reasonably effective one-way function at a basic cost of 30% overhead.
[1] http://www.businessweek.com/ma...