I actually have a Blackberry Playbook (I realize you don't know me, so it doesn't invalidate your claim). It is really nice hardware. The OS is a little weird in places, but it is very fast. The killer is there are so few apps that I want to download. Discovery of useful apps in their store is not very easy either.
It is sad. Mostly use it for email and web surfing.
Isn't the Amazon Kindle Fire supposed to use the same/similar hardware as the Playbook used? I know I've seen both in person and they looked similar... if that's the case, then the Playbook hardware lives on spiritually in the (original) Kindle Fire, of which there are millions out there.
Just look at all the features they've included and focused, and added recently and ask yourself if it's improving your browsing experience or if it's replicating something you'd expect to be in the operating system itself (e.g.: bulitin pdf reader, builtin flash runtime, webtrc, cloud password store, logging *into your browser*, ability to cast to Chromecast, etc). While not mutually exclusive, Google is focusing on Chrome being almost independent of the underlying OS.
These moves are very indicative that Google is positioning Chrome as a replacement to the desktop operating system. In fact just today I saw an indiegogo for an opensource mail app [1] that is completely bypassing Windows and simply targeting OSX/Linux (natural given the audience). This is becoming more and more the case as apps are built for OSX, Android, iOS and the web (where Chrome is now dominating).
Google's intentions re: Chrome are not 100% aligned with users' needs.
I think to call it the 'safest car ever' is quite a bold lie. Clearly there are safer vehicles out there ( Tanks, Semi-Trucks, even airplanes). These NSHTA safety ratings are done for ludicrously slow speeds as well! Don't expect a lot of safety at 70mph...
Meanwhile the likelyhood, given the Hummer is no longer sold in large numbers, that you'll run into a Hummer with a Tesla is much lower than if you happened to own a Hummer and had a rollover.
The biggest danger for SUV drivers is the SUV itself.
The problem with class actions is that nobody has faith in them. Anytime I get a notice about a class action I might be eligible to be part of, I summarily ignore it. Why? The only payout is for the lawyers, and occasionally the class members get coupons for pizza. I like pizza, but I don't like being slapped in the face.
Even if that is the case, which I don't doubt in many cases, the fact remains that there needs to be some check to the immense powers that corporations have today. The US Government is completely captured. Without a legal fallback you would expect to see contract requirements and clickthroughs when you buy gas for example.
adhesion contract (contract of adhesion) n. a contract (often a signed form) so imbalanced in favor of one party over the other that there is a strong implication it was not freely bargained. Example: a rich landlord dealing with a poor tenant who has no choice and must accept all terms of a lease, no matter how restrictive or burdensome, since the tenant cannot afford to move. An adhesion contract can give the little guy the opportunity to claim in court that the contract with the big shot is invalid. This doctrine should be used and applied more often, but the same big guy-little guy inequity may apply in the ability to afford a trial or find and pay a resourceful lawyer.
In essence, the "lawyer" in this case for students would be a class-action lawyer, and now you understand why major corporations and the wealthy (who, in general control them through stock ownership) hate the idea of class action suits and have done their best to have forced arbitration, banning class actions and the like.
I'd rather we have class actions that slap down these corporations rather than have these sociopaths-by-design run amok. Call me a socialist if you will.
Seriously, that's tinfoil-hat-grade reasoning. Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of PRISM or similar either, but the only way you're going to stay out of it is either to go completely off the grid (way, way too late for that) or get it ended via policy. That's the approach I'm taking.
Nice strawman - since PRSIM exists, you assume all information is being gathered, and just assume that getting off the grid is the only way out. That's highly simplistic - while I agree that my pseudonym here on/. is probably tied to my profile in social networking sites easily which may have a good representation of me, I pretty much draw the line at privacy invasions directly in my home.
It's not paranoia or tin-hat territory if you already know they're profiling you (and everyone else).
Instead, all insurance is a poor financial decision, because you will statistically make more by not having it. But people buy it anyway because we are more risk averse than we are gain oriented.
It's not being "more risk averse" if the potential downside is so great... $10k for a broken leg, if you aren't prepared to pay it can often bankrupt folks. That insurance companies find ways to dump you in certain circumstances doesn't discount the insane hospital/medical supply pricing that makes *not having insurance* a budget breaker.
You mistake me. I'm not saying Sony is any better, in fact, I do think they're worse. However, both are offering shit sandwiches for sale. PC gaming is still where it's at, and for consoles, there's a whole slew of new possibilities coming to light (maybe the next Ouya, or the Amazon console, perhaps?).
Nope, another announcement in an interview yesterday said you'll be able to physically disconnect it so if you're really paranoid that they're watching you then just unplug the thing.
It must suck to work in the XBox decision when marketing/PR mishandles this kind of information perfectly - I mean, WTF couldn't they have thought this through before spouting their mouths?
Perhaps it's because the real customers are the NSA and you are the product. Yes, you will pay to be a product as well - even sadder.
Refusing to order, or canceling pre-orders, based on the initial restrictions it would have? That's totally reasonable. But when they reverse on those restrictions, before even a single customer was affected (you haven't bought it yet - you can't, it's not available yet - so by definition you are not yet a customer of this product), that behavior should be rewarded.
This is ridiculous reasoning. Microsoft spent *months* willfully thumbing their nose at the public and declaring outright "my way or highway".
This is not some simply apology after the backlash, but Microsoft's understanding that the public's perception of the XBOne is fatally flawed, and *finally* after all the hue and cry, deciding to "tone down" some of those aspects. If you were going to buy one anyway, now you'll feel better about it. If you really cared about the privacy aspects of Kinect especially after the PRISM exposure, this would do little to sway your decision.
Reality: Kinect will be required for any decent games, otherwise, it's a waste of the hardware. When enough games require it, the console pretty much does as well. My guess is that when you turn on Kinect, it will stay on even when it's not needed. Microsoft can say it's not required when it essentially is.
Have fun at your friends' parties who own XBOne's where everyone in the room will have their skeletal structures scanned and sent to a microsoft datacenter for PRISM access.
I priced it out using that calculator for 4 lines (unlimited voice, unlimited messaging, 2GB data per line). T-Mobile costs $140/month for a shared plan vs. $240/month for 4 individual plans. For 2 lines it'd be $100/month shared vs. $120/month for 2 individual plans. I see exactly the opposite of the claim: the shared plan is more economical than individual plans for everything but the most limited usage. And that T-Mobile's plans are more economical than anybody else's, which may explain why T-Mobile had such a good quarter.
T-Mobile had a great quarter because of all this, and... it got the iPhone, finally. Many folks like myself who wanted a GSM iPhone, unlocked and cheap data plans for my family. No overage on data, flat-rate unlimited international calls/texts, tethering built-in and working flawlessly. Oh, and still the only US carrier with HD voice - amazing difference between our VZ/ATT experience in calls between me and my wife (who bought new HD voice capable iPhone5's)
Only downside is that tmobile is still building out their data network, and coverage is not that good in rural areas. On our recent trip up the west coastline, we encoutered many spots where we had no service. However, we travel very infrequently and I get 4G or LTE at work, home, and through out my commute.
if it doesn't even allow playing a musical recording that I composed, performed, and recorded myself, I don't see much potential for "hackable".
Sure you can - just upload it to YouTube first - oh, you mean playing without joining Google's "share" program? Yeah, not possible right now. But if you insist on.ogg, neither do the AppleTV nor Roku without transcoding.
How can I get a piece of this action - it's probably not impossible to impersonate the Fed to get companies to cough up their entire user credential stores... just a few large-bag hit and runs could net millions in CC#.
The premise of the article is completely wrong. Apple isn't Google's rival at all. Apple sells devices to end users, Google sells end users to advertisers.
What will happen however is that Apple will do more and more to upset Google's business, just as Google has been working hard to upset Apple's and Microsoft's business. The first step is Apple's maps, which meant that Apple isn't paying anymore for licensing maps from Google, and Apple is destroying Google ad revenue (Apple maps comes without adverts). iWork in the cloud is another step. Apple switching to Bing is another one.
And the counter attacks from Google are also straining that relationship - Chromecast as a competitor to AppleTV/Airplay, Play Music as a competitor to iTunes, Google-branded devices directly competing with all offerings from Apple (price disruption), Chromebook Pixel as a nascent rival to the Macbook Air...
Google is fighting back against Apple's attacks on it's revenue stream as well by trying to strangle Apple's revenue in turn - personally I think Apple has more to fear from Google than the other way around.
I wish the civic duty sentiment were more common today
That bears repeating. A very large fraction of society's ills can be laid ultimately at its door; too many asses thinking only what the world can do for them.
The standard corporate charter has no clause for "civic duty". When the largest flows of money into campaign funding comes directly from anti-social a-moral entities like, just about every corporation in existence, your government isn't going to be very "civil". Until campaign financing laws and the fallacy of "money = speech" are seriously reformed, there's going to be no "reversion to the mean" - things will continue to suck and get worse for non-corporations (and their owners, of course).
A SWAT team is a powerful tool that takes a large budget to maintain and requires use in order to justify it's existence
Yeah, the fact that it exists means it will be used, if only to justify it's purchase and existence (and possible future increase) in the first place. Everything else is collateral damage.
For example I live in a county with an impressive number of assaults and propertly crimes, but I don't live in the "bad part" of that county. I've never had a problem in thirty years.
That sounds great. I truly hope the "lines of battle" don't wander into your neighborhood. Also hope you never have to happen to wander into a "bad area". Finally, given broad jurisdiction, I hope you don't have to deal with LEOs who are battle-hardened from those "bad areas" and just a touch too trigger-happy handling a simple domestic issue in your "good area".
As long as the cost of living disparity exists as dramatically as it does now, you'll never see salary parity between overseas labor and local labor. That has nothing to do with shortages of qualified workers
Not sure if you were intending it this way, but the root of all our current problems are the insane housing prices and market rents in places like the Silicon Valley. I've had rockstar analysts pass up a major promotion because they'd have to move back to HQ in an area where equivalent housing is 3x what they're currently paying.
What's causing all this insane housing pricing, well some of it is crazy housing codes and another part is areas developers aren't allowed to develop for (mostly environmental regs), but the majority is the industry built up around housing: the FIRE economy. Like in healthcare costs, the only way it's going is up, because all the industry players involved benefit from higher prices (in the short term), until it's saturated, then a precipitous drop occurs. Sprinkle in some liberal foreign investment, massive corruption (ie, regulatory capture) and you have a market that completely prices out a large portion of actual residents.
When this occurs, cost of talent has to go up to match. And that also adds to the cycle of price increases. The only ones who win are the money changers.
I just judge a neighborhood by the number of black and hispanic people in it.
And so do you. But YOU won't say it.
No, I judge by the following, based on the images I saw and my previous thoughts:
Amount of greenery
Road wear and graffiti
Signs of curation, ie, trimmed hedges, cut lawn, etc
Height of buildings divided by population visible for given time of day
number and condition of vehicles parked
If you've read this far, you can probably tell that all of these point to how affluent/rich the area is, but as a non-rich person myself, I find over-opulence off-putting and prefer the more upper-middle-class look. Amazingly, it would be pretty simple to codify the above in a hueristic and probably get it 80-90% accurate in a comparison test (given adequate sampling factor). Anyone got other hueristics they were using in the pulse website?
As a matter of principle I understand where you're coming from, but from a practical standpoint I just don't see it. I find it much easier to share stuff and interact with family members, especially the less tech savy, then I could if the services were separate.
As long as you don't mind sharing all that stuff with the NSA via PRISM, more power to you and your family.
They could try selling them without warranty or with a very simple 30 day exchange warranty for defective products, but that could leave them with a PR problem when people run into problems with no way to resolve them and the blogs start filling up with complaints about how Microsoft sucks because they won't stand behind their products.
Then why do you see all this happening on eBay and the like all the time. Hell even Apple was doing it at one point [1]. No one cares about warranty at that price, which is a significant discount. If they do, they get "corrected" and there's fuck all they can say about it (see what happens with other gray-market sales).
The only thing standing between Microsoft and an eBay store auctioning or selling off the remaining stock is their pride and image. And that's a mighty hefty price even for Microsoft to pay.
why defund the NSA, the NSA actually has a legimate mission which of course has nothing to do with spying on U.S. citizens. The job it is supposed to be doing is securing the communications of the U.S. government
And if you take all the government employees, contractors and the like, and go 3 hops, you pretty much have the whole of the USA.
At this point I'm not sure you can actually yank funds from the NSA. Their budget is secret, and they have as secret court system who's records are secret that they could use to overrule pretty much any funding provision.
The NSA has positioned itself completely out of congressional and executive oversight. [snip]
Wait, isn't the NSA (and other three-letter alphabet soup of organizations) part of the executive branch anyway? Doesn't the POTUS have a say as to what's going on?
Perhaps the problem isn't that they're out of oversight - it's that they've completely corrupted it - spying on some companies (foriegn and domestic) to help their competitors who play ball - doing the same for Congress critters, and I bet they're not above threatening the POTUS himself if the soft-intimidation doesn't work (remember the outing of the MARINE1's specs? [1] )... hey a sitting President has been assassinated before - and we have no idea who did it. Surprised it took The agencies chartered with his protection were "above reproach" of course.
We have a shell of democracy over a seething cesspit of crony capitalism, backstabbing and all the dirty things we claim only happens in "corrupt 3rd world toilets".
The era of cheap netbooks is over and this Ultrabook + Windows 8 trend has brought plethora of very expensive devices to the market.:/
It's almost like the original tablet PC never died - except there's no digitizer or stylus this time around, but we're expected to pay the same premium.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you forget to clip on?.
"working 12- or 16-hour days"
"haven't taken days off in weeks"
Exhaustion results in errors.
All reasonable sacrifices to leave no profits behind.
I actually have a Blackberry Playbook (I realize you don't know me, so it doesn't invalidate your claim). It is really nice hardware. The OS is a little weird in places, but it is very fast. The killer is there are so few apps that I want to download. Discovery of useful apps in their store is not very easy either.
It is sad. Mostly use it for email and web surfing.
Isn't the Amazon Kindle Fire supposed to use the same/similar hardware as the Playbook used? I know I've seen both in person and they looked similar... if that's the case, then the Playbook hardware lives on spiritually in the (original) Kindle Fire, of which there are millions out there.
Just look at all the features they've included and focused, and added recently and ask yourself if it's improving your browsing experience or if it's replicating something you'd expect to be in the operating system itself (e.g.: bulitin pdf reader, builtin flash runtime, webtrc, cloud password store, logging *into your browser*, ability to cast to Chromecast, etc). While not mutually exclusive, Google is focusing on Chrome being almost independent of the underlying OS.
These moves are very indicative that Google is positioning Chrome as a replacement to the desktop operating system. In fact just today I saw an indiegogo for an opensource mail app [1] that is completely bypassing Windows and simply targeting OSX/Linux (natural given the audience). This is becoming more and more the case as apps are built for OSX, Android, iOS and the web (where Chrome is now dominating).
Google's intentions re: Chrome are not 100% aligned with users' needs.
[1] http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mailpile-taking-e-mail-back
I think to call it the 'safest car ever' is quite a bold lie. Clearly there are safer vehicles out there ( Tanks, Semi-Trucks, even airplanes). These NSHTA safety ratings are done for ludicrously slow speeds as well! Don't expect a lot of safety at 70mph...
Meanwhile the likelyhood, given the Hummer is no longer sold in large numbers, that you'll run into a Hummer with a Tesla is much lower than if you happened to own a Hummer and had a rollover.
The biggest danger for SUV drivers is the SUV itself.
The problem with class actions is that nobody has faith in them. Anytime I get a notice about a class action I might be eligible to be part of, I summarily ignore it. Why? The only payout is for the lawyers, and occasionally the class members get coupons for pizza. I like pizza, but I don't like being slapped in the face.
Even if that is the case, which I don't doubt in many cases, the fact remains that there needs to be some check to the immense powers that corporations have today. The US Government is completely captured. Without a legal fallback you would expect to see contract requirements and clickthroughs when you buy gas for example.
See here: http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/contract+of+adhesion
adhesion contract (contract of adhesion) n. a contract (often a signed form) so imbalanced in favor of one party over the other that there is a strong implication it was not freely bargained. Example: a rich landlord dealing with a poor tenant who has no choice and must accept all terms of a lease, no matter how restrictive or burdensome, since the tenant cannot afford to move. An adhesion contract can give the little guy the opportunity to claim in court that the contract with the big shot is invalid. This doctrine should be used and applied more often, but the same big guy-little guy inequity may apply in the ability to afford a trial or find and pay a resourceful lawyer.
In essence, the "lawyer" in this case for students would be a class-action lawyer, and now you understand why major corporations and the wealthy (who, in general control them through stock ownership) hate the idea of class action suits and have done their best to have forced arbitration, banning class actions and the like.
I'd rather we have class actions that slap down these corporations rather than have these sociopaths-by-design run amok. Call me a socialist if you will.
Seriously, that's tinfoil-hat-grade reasoning. Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of PRISM or similar either, but the only way you're going to stay out of it is either to go completely off the grid (way, way too late for that) or get it ended via policy. That's the approach I'm taking.
Nice strawman - since PRSIM exists, you assume all information is being gathered, and just assume that getting off the grid is the only way out. That's highly simplistic - while I agree that my pseudonym here on /. is probably tied to my profile in social networking sites easily which may have a good representation of me, I pretty much draw the line at privacy invasions directly in my home.
It's not paranoia or tin-hat territory if you already know they're profiling you (and everyone else).
Instead, all insurance is a poor financial decision, because you will statistically make more by not having it. But people buy it anyway because we are more risk averse than we are gain oriented.
It's not being "more risk averse" if the potential downside is so great... $10k for a broken leg, if you aren't prepared to pay it can often bankrupt folks. That insurance companies find ways to dump you in certain circumstances doesn't discount the insane hospital/medical supply pricing that makes *not having insurance* a budget breaker.
You mistake me. I'm not saying Sony is any better, in fact, I do think they're worse. However, both are offering shit sandwiches for sale. PC gaming is still where it's at, and for consoles, there's a whole slew of new possibilities coming to light (maybe the next Ouya, or the Amazon console, perhaps?).
Why should I pay to be thrown into a PRSIM?
Nope, another announcement in an interview yesterday said you'll be able to physically disconnect it so if you're really paranoid that they're watching you then just unplug the thing.
It must suck to work in the XBox decision when marketing/PR mishandles this kind of information perfectly - I mean, WTF couldn't they have thought this through before spouting their mouths?
Perhaps it's because the real customers are the NSA and you are the product. Yes, you will pay to be a product as well - even sadder.
Refusing to order, or canceling pre-orders, based on the initial restrictions it would have? That's totally reasonable. But when they reverse on those restrictions, before even a single customer was affected (you haven't bought it yet - you can't, it's not available yet - so by definition you are not yet a customer of this product), that behavior should be rewarded.
This is ridiculous reasoning. Microsoft spent *months* willfully thumbing their nose at the public and declaring outright "my way or highway".
This is not some simply apology after the backlash, but Microsoft's understanding that the public's perception of the XBOne is fatally flawed, and *finally* after all the hue and cry, deciding to "tone down" some of those aspects. If you were going to buy one anyway, now you'll feel better about it. If you really cared about the privacy aspects of Kinect especially after the PRISM exposure, this would do little to sway your decision.
Reality: Kinect will be required for any decent games, otherwise, it's a waste of the hardware. When enough games require it, the console pretty much does as well. My guess is that when you turn on Kinect, it will stay on even when it's not needed. Microsoft can say it's not required when it essentially is.
Have fun at your friends' parties who own XBOne's where everyone in the room will have their skeletal structures scanned and sent to a microsoft datacenter for PRISM access.
I priced it out using that calculator for 4 lines (unlimited voice, unlimited messaging, 2GB data per line). T-Mobile costs $140/month for a shared plan vs. $240/month for 4 individual plans. For 2 lines it'd be $100/month shared vs. $120/month for 2 individual plans. I see exactly the opposite of the claim: the shared plan is more economical than individual plans for everything but the most limited usage. And that T-Mobile's plans are more economical than anybody else's, which may explain why T-Mobile had such a good quarter.
T-Mobile had a great quarter because of all this, and ... it got the iPhone, finally. Many folks like myself who wanted a GSM iPhone, unlocked and cheap data plans for my family. No overage on data, flat-rate unlimited international calls/texts, tethering built-in and working flawlessly. Oh, and still the only US carrier with HD voice - amazing difference between our VZ/ATT experience in calls between me and my wife (who bought new HD voice capable iPhone5's)
Only downside is that tmobile is still building out their data network, and coverage is not that good in rural areas. On our recent trip up the west coastline, we encoutered many spots where we had no service. However, we travel very infrequently and I get 4G or LTE at work, home, and through out my commute.
if it doesn't even allow playing a musical recording that I composed, performed, and recorded myself, I don't see much potential for "hackable".
Sure you can - just upload it to YouTube first - oh, you mean playing without joining Google's "share" program? Yeah, not possible right now. But if you insist on .ogg, neither do the AppleTV nor Roku without transcoding.
How can I get a piece of this action - it's probably not impossible to impersonate the Fed to get companies to cough up their entire user credential stores... just a few large-bag hit and runs could net millions in CC#.
The premise of the article is completely wrong. Apple isn't Google's rival at all. Apple sells devices to end users, Google sells end users to advertisers.
What will happen however is that Apple will do more and more to upset Google's business, just as Google has been working hard to upset Apple's and Microsoft's business. The first step is Apple's maps, which meant that Apple isn't paying anymore for licensing maps from Google, and Apple is destroying Google ad revenue (Apple maps comes without adverts). iWork in the cloud is another step. Apple switching to Bing is another one.
And the counter attacks from Google are also straining that relationship - Chromecast as a competitor to AppleTV/Airplay, Play Music as a competitor to iTunes, Google-branded devices directly competing with all offerings from Apple (price disruption), Chromebook Pixel as a nascent rival to the Macbook Air...
Google is fighting back against Apple's attacks on it's revenue stream as well by trying to strangle Apple's revenue in turn - personally I think Apple has more to fear from Google than the other way around.
I wish the civic duty sentiment were more common today
That bears repeating. A very large fraction of society's ills can be laid ultimately at its door; too many asses thinking only what the world can do for them.
The standard corporate charter has no clause for "civic duty". When the largest flows of money into campaign funding comes directly from anti-social a-moral entities like, just about every corporation in existence, your government isn't going to be very "civil". Until campaign financing laws and the fallacy of "money = speech" are seriously reformed, there's going to be no "reversion to the mean" - things will continue to suck and get worse for non-corporations (and their owners, of course).
Welcome to the corporatocracy.
A SWAT team is a powerful tool that takes a large budget to maintain and requires use in order to justify it's existence
Yeah, the fact that it exists means it will be used, if only to justify it's purchase and existence (and possible future increase) in the first place. Everything else is collateral damage.
For example I live in a county with an impressive number of assaults and propertly crimes, but I don't live in the "bad part" of that county. I've never had a problem in thirty years.
That sounds great. I truly hope the "lines of battle" don't wander into your neighborhood. Also hope you never have to happen to wander into a "bad area". Finally, given broad jurisdiction, I hope you don't have to deal with LEOs who are battle-hardened from those "bad areas" and just a touch too trigger-happy handling a simple domestic issue in your "good area".
As long as the cost of living disparity exists as dramatically as it does now, you'll never see salary parity between overseas labor and local labor. That has nothing to do with shortages of qualified workers
Not sure if you were intending it this way, but the root of all our current problems are the insane housing prices and market rents in places like the Silicon Valley. I've had rockstar analysts pass up a major promotion because they'd have to move back to HQ in an area where equivalent housing is 3x what they're currently paying.
What's causing all this insane housing pricing, well some of it is crazy housing codes and another part is areas developers aren't allowed to develop for (mostly environmental regs), but the majority is the industry built up around housing: the FIRE economy. Like in healthcare costs, the only way it's going is up, because all the industry players involved benefit from higher prices (in the short term), until it's saturated, then a precipitous drop occurs. Sprinkle in some liberal foreign investment, massive corruption (ie, regulatory capture) and you have a market that completely prices out a large portion of actual residents.
When this occurs, cost of talent has to go up to match. And that also adds to the cycle of price increases. The only ones who win are the money changers.
I just judge a neighborhood by the number of black and hispanic people in it.
And so do you. But YOU won't say it.
No, I judge by the following, based on the images I saw and my previous thoughts:
If you've read this far, you can probably tell that all of these point to how affluent/rich the area is, but as a non-rich person myself, I find over-opulence off-putting and prefer the more upper-middle-class look. Amazingly, it would be pretty simple to codify the above in a hueristic and probably get it 80-90% accurate in a comparison test (given adequate sampling factor). Anyone got other hueristics they were using in the pulse website?
As a matter of principle I understand where you're coming from, but from a practical standpoint I just don't see it. I find it much easier to share stuff and interact with family members, especially the less tech savy, then I could if the services were separate.
As long as you don't mind sharing all that stuff with the NSA via PRISM, more power to you and your family.
They could try selling them without warranty or with a very simple 30 day exchange warranty for defective products, but that could leave them with a PR problem when people run into problems with no way to resolve them and the blogs start filling up with complaints about how Microsoft sucks because they won't stand behind their products.
Then why do you see all this happening on eBay and the like all the time. Hell even Apple was doing it at one point [1]. No one cares about warranty at that price, which is a significant discount. If they do, they get "corrected" and there's fuck all they can say about it (see what happens with other gray-market sales).
The only thing standing between Microsoft and an eBay store auctioning or selling off the remaining stock is their pride and image. And that's a mighty hefty price even for Microsoft to pay.
[1] http://www.redmondpie.com/apple-now-selling-refurbished-products-through-an-ebay-outlet-store/
why defund the NSA, the NSA actually has a legimate mission which of course has nothing to do with spying on U.S. citizens. The job it is supposed to be doing is securing the communications of the U.S. government
And if you take all the government employees, contractors and the like, and go 3 hops, you pretty much have the whole of the USA.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/07/18/2023207/nsa-admits-searching-3-hops-from-suspects
At this point I'm not sure you can actually yank funds from the NSA. Their budget is secret, and they have as secret court system who's records are secret that they could use to overrule pretty much any funding provision.
The NSA has positioned itself completely out of congressional and executive oversight. [snip]
Wait, isn't the NSA (and other three-letter alphabet soup of organizations) part of the executive branch anyway? Doesn't the POTUS have a say as to what's going on?
Perhaps the problem isn't that they're out of oversight - it's that they've completely corrupted it - spying on some companies (foriegn and domestic) to help their competitors who play ball - doing the same for Congress critters, and I bet they're not above threatening the POTUS himself if the soft-intimidation doesn't work (remember the outing of the MARINE1's specs? [1] ) ... hey a sitting President has been assassinated before - and we have no idea who did it. Surprised it took The agencies chartered with his protection were "above reproach" of course.
We have a shell of democracy over a seething cesspit of crony capitalism, backstabbing and all the dirty things we claim only happens in "corrupt 3rd world toilets".
[1] http://www.dailytech.com/Defense+Contractor+Leaks+Obamas+Presidential+Helicopter+Plans+to+Iran/article14446.htm
The era of cheap netbooks is over and this Ultrabook + Windows 8 trend has brought plethora of very expensive devices to the market. :/
It's almost like the original tablet PC never died - except there's no digitizer or stylus this time around, but we're expected to pay the same premium.