The NRA is a group of people, a large group composed of several million people.
While this may be true, the NRA is funded primarily by corporations [1], including many large gun companies. There is no way the gun companies live in fear of the NRA, they dictate what it does, because they fund it.
If I want a platform that has 50% FPS, then I'll go with one of the majors. I think Nintendo didn't learn the right lessons from the Wii and DS - they could've cornered niche markets of non-hardcore gamers, but failed to execute after years of visionary leadership.
Let's see some really innovative games that torture the myth that games require bleeding edge hardware power and a hefty investment north of $500. iOS really opened up the casual market, now it's time for the console to shine again.
Don't compare "socialist" Europe to "capitalist" US. It just ain't fair.
Sorry, but that's exactly what privatizing some sectors get you. [...]
The UK Rail system is a great study in this [1]. Their railways weren't shitty, but then rails and cars got privatized, and now the UK rail sucks serious ass. With the massive investment required to get clearance to lay rail, and maintaining rails and cars, it's a natural barrier to entry for competitors... allowing companies that do operate to have regional monopolies or operate as a cartel to comfortably ignore their customers and sometimes even their own charter.
The way I understand it, it only records or takes a photo when you tell it to, and you can be a lot more discrete with a mobile phone camera (pretending to text) if you really want to record people without their permission.
Read the review on TheVerge [1] The author clearly describes how they went to a Starbucks and all the other recording equipment was asked to be turned off, but the cashier didn't know about the Glass, and so that portion got recorded. From my link:
At one point during my time with Glass, we all went out to navigate to a nearby Starbucks — the camera crew I’d brought with me came along. As soon as we got inside however, the employees at Starbucks asked us to stop filming. Sure, no problem. But I kept the Glass’ video recorder going, all the way through my order and getting my coffee. Yes, you can see a light in the prism when the device is recording, but I got the impression that most people had no idea what they were looking at. The cashier seemed to be on the verge of asking me what I was wearing on my face, but the question never came. He certainly never asked me to stop filming.
So just like the Macbook with it's green light when the iSight camera came on, Glass shows a green light when recording. I wonder what laptop was abused by middle school admins to take illegal photos of kids in their bedrooms? [2]. If the only indicator on Glass is a green light, it will be hacked away (or covered up) the first time someone wants to take a spy photo/video.
I would most certainly ban Google Glass on any company premises for which I was responsible for securing. I'm not sure I'd allow someone with Glass to enter my house.
Vulture capitalism at it's finest. Are leveraged buyouts ever a good idea for anyone other than the "management company" that rapes and pillages the public company? Why is it legal to take a loan out on a company using it's own capital reserves as payment?
As I remind my students, "Beta" to Google means they haven't figured out how to profit on it. If they can find a way to profit on it, it then becomes one of their many appliances. If they can't, it gets killed. Clearly, Google didn't have a way to profit on Reader, as they couldn't on Wave, as they couldn't on Health. If they can find a way to profit from Keep, it'll keep. Otherwise it'll be gone like the rest.
The only issue I have with Google is that their core mission (free services for most people) seems to inherently be unprofitable unless they have another profit stream (which they do, to sell Ads). If you can't imagine how Google will serve more Ads through a given product, it will likely go away at some point in the future (that or you need to exercise more creativity, which the folks at GooglePlex have a lot of).
It's just like with Microsoft (product must extend Windows/Office monopolies in a way that doesn't diminsh them), or Apple (must look and feel Apple-ish, and promote the iTunes ecosystem). For Google, this is Ads. This isn't bad, but you better get used to being sold to advertisers and to have adverts being presented to you.
The real plot is the establishment reaction to the revolution of 3D printed items. Complex machinery can now be printed and manufactured without large workforces (it's not as easy as printing your boarding passes, but it's probably an order of magnitude in workforce reduction).
Guns? What happens when you can print a simple boat? How about a car? At some point, we're reaching Diamond-Age [2] matter-compiler complexity. Seemingly safe industries will be upended when the revolution of 3D printing comes fully into the fore.
And you think the establishment will sit by and let their investments and control go up in the air (like what happend to so many industries with the Internet)?
Printed guns are like terrorist funding - an issue to get everyone all worked up about it and the big boys can criminalize the future (at least until you completely control it).
I had problems start with my Samsung TV. It would take 10 minutes to turn on. Just sit there clicking on, off, on, off. I called Samsung and it was a known problem. They contacted a local repair shop and had the shop come out to my house and fix it THAT NIGHT. Zero cost to me.
Similar problems with my Samsung monitor - it has serious issues switching between input sources (HDMI, D-SUB) and sometimes would get confused to where it required a shutoff and cooldown for a few min before reuse - a major pain switching between my work and home laptops which use different sources respectively.
As it will cover all Ebay sales and Craigslist sales.
They want to charge you tax on even items you are not making money off of. Next up, Evil Garage sales and Flea Markets, how can we tax this scourge to the economy?
Ebay yes. Craigslist no. Craigslist does not make sales, the people interacting directly do, and the overwhelming majority of these are local.
I personally preferred the military method 27FEB2013 - no delimiters necessary as the numeric/alpha boundary is adequate. Of course, in other languages this varies (ie, francais = 27FEV2013).
So there you go folks, Google have decided RSS is dead.
From a monetary standpoint, they're probably correct. RSS is as dead as SMTP, in that 99% of people using RSS don't run their own aggregators or feel comfortable with the format, but still benefit from it (i.e., podcasts). In other words it is part of the basic infrastructure of the Internet at large.
Of course, what do you expect from an organization that tried to defeat RSS earlier by supporting ATOM instead (Reader was cool as it supported both, and so did many other
Let's look at all the things Google gains by killing Reader: * Non-savvy users are pushed back to the content website, which are probably displaying Google's display ads ($) * Savvy users who like "social" are pushed to G+ * The remainder are just using resources and not giving them anything (and the probably block ads too) - so let them pay for their own aggregator/reader.
Two of the three things above are about money and the other one is a dig against their competitor (Facebook). Long-gone are the days of "don't be evil", but it's questionable whether that premise was ever rally valid or workable. Hate the playa or the game, Google's all about the money now.
UK Govt is now manned by a bunch of corporate whores (even more so than the last bunch) who just want to ensure that the software they're using to discover fraud can be "friendly" to those who are "on the inside".
Last thing a corrupt government wants is any real transparency. The best is some form of translucency, like a shower door or rose-tinted glasses - so what you think you see hides what is really happening.
It isn't secret anymore -- when they actually vote on it. But then there's no time to examine it, much less get public commentary, much less habe 6 months for people to think it over.
These are the same people who brought you the "we have to approve the health care bill to see what's in it."
You think the healthcare bill was bad? The same shit was pulled back in 2001 with the Patriot Act, you know, the one that basically shredded the constitution? The "surprise legislation" and "pass major bills through must-pass budget bills as amendments" are just two of the sleazy things "lawmakers" use to strip-mine our rights for their funder's profit
My all-time favorite sleazy trick is the last-minute amendment that changes the entire nature of the bill, sometimes a 180-degree reversal.
Now not having a Facebook account is treated by HR departments as suspicious behavior.
This, I fear, is quite believable given some of the looks of incredulity I have had when asked by HR for my mobile (cell, for our American brethren) number. I politely decline on the grounds that I neither own nor want a mobile phone. One HR drone even accused me of being dishonest because it was so far beyond her youthful experience as to be unbelievable that one could survive without a mobile. Heck, our home phone when I was a child was made of bakelite and had a handle on the front you turned vigorously to get the operator's attention: our complete phone number was "78". (For the record I am only 45.)
Of course, the workaround in this day and age is to give out your Google Voice (or CallingVault / Phonebooth ) number. You can whitelist callers or just turn off ringing and have a cloud voicemail (as I did when I was hiring - all calls went to VM and got transcribed, so I could just grep the messages). I never give out my cell to business relationships, unless I really know the person. This way I can give out my number but ignore inbound calls if I choose.
Does that make me a bible thumper? Wow. Amazing to find that out.
Seriously, anonymizing money transfers (which is one of the main functions of gambling and casinos) makes for easy money laundering and
Think of it this way: passing money through a casino or betting venue (online or offline) is effectively a one-way function - you can't trace the money to it's source. Ever wonder why James Bond is always hanging around casinos? Because that's how he gets paid to do his dirty deeds (at least that's the real story). His "day job" at MI6 is a convenient cover.
It's not about shielding your society from all gambling - this is a "avoid the chasing bear by being faster than your friend" - you want to keep this kind of activity from corrupting your society as much as possible - let the contract killers hang out in Macau or Monaco. By making it more difficult to launder money you keep the government just that bit cleaner.
Which is why you need to have noscript or face-blockers to read the net. Of course this assumes that Disqus, Intensedebate or other forum software aren't as insidious/snooping.
Wouldn't the "highest intelligence indicator" be applied to those who don't "do" facebook, twitter, etc?
Or did I just miss something flying over my head?
You aren't missing it, but aren't seeing the totality of Facebook's insidious nature. Now not having a Facebook account is treated by HR departments as suspicious behavior. Also, Facebook made it easy for people to "tag" you - if you don't have an account, you can't repudiate it (or prevent tagging by default). You are literally forced to play their game unless you want your good name being abused. So best move is to have one that's effectively empty, and turn all privacy settings down to the most private.
Of course this defeats the purpose of having a Facebook account - but that's the purpose, right?
At my work, the people who do support got a new management structure. Their management is big on metrics. Sadly, their metric is "how many tickets did you close."
Unsurprisingly, service levels have gone to total shit. The people who actually solve hard problems take more time than the ones who bounce tickets to other people and only handle easy ones, and thus don't look good to the morons in charge. What used to take minutes now takes hours, but apparently it's "more efficient."
...
I used to work for a support organization (call center + developer support) back in the.com days and one of the big smart things they did was to properly produce incentives to reduce overall call time and increase quality.
Part of this was that the metrics were very well designed - you closing a support case quickly was good, but not if the customer just reopened another one which was similar or argued against closure. You were incented (heavily) to file resolutions to cases (ie, the solution to the problem), and again, if those resolutions were reused to close other cases, you got "assists"... effectively by creating very powerful, concrete resolutions that gave other support analysts the ability to look like a star for their customers, you could build some capital/cred (ie, passive work). This also applied to workarounds entires that were also heavily reused. Needless to say, some folks went for the quick call closure route and others spent hours building proper reusable resolutions, and often formed teams to improve overall department metrics.
Finally, support would work together with account and product management so that big pain points were fixed or turned into enhancements for future versions and also important customers were give a little bit of extra TLC... and all that kind of work was also well recognized.
Extradition does not decide guilt. It decides whether you are the person being sought to face charges in the other jurisdiction and whether the charges are extraditable to the other jurisdiction. Evidence of guilt is mostly irrelevant to those questions.
Extradition and Secret Prisons (aka black sites) = Who cares if you're guilty? We'll throw you in our clink and spend a few years mulling over what we're going to charge you with (see Bradley Manning). All of this is highly unconstitutional, but hey, the world has changed since 9/11, and that's all you need to know.
Dotcom's best hope now is to flee to another country that doesn't have an extradition treaty with the US.
Maybe Amazon should buy Groupon. Think of the synergies and new paradigms in losses!
I'm sure Amazon did want Groupon at some point in the past at a lower price. Instead Amazon backed LivingSocial, presumably when Groupon told them to pound sand with what Groupon saw as a substandard offer.
And let's not discuss Google's $6B offer that Groupon stupidly turned down. It may sound silly, but perhaps then Google would have bought (and made use of) a real sales/call center organization.
The "consumer market" is not what drives Office sales and use, it's business sales and use.
True. On the other hand... Chromebooks are more attractive to businesses than they are to consumers, because there's no administration to be done. Office is a big barrier to Chromebook adoption, but if Google can convince businesses that Quickoffice and Docs can accomplish the same purpose, that barrier falls.
I'm going to stop short of saying it'll happen, but it's far from inconceivable.
Of course it's not inconceivable, but is it worth a front-page./ post title? I'd say it isn't. You might as well ask if Apple plans on going into the search business. I'd say they're equally likely (in that both companies would like for these to be viable, but both assertions are very very bad bets).
If one side has to pay to participate in the "trial", and the other doesn't, then one side has an incentive to just suck it up, and the other side has no disincentives to stop.
Just like DMCA takedowns. If there is no penalty for filing, companies will just robo-spam.
Captcha: tedious, just like the appeals process will be.
And thus the purpose. MAFIAA wants to poison the well. It helps that they can get others to be the poisoners.
Oh yeah, and Keanu Reaves (Johnny Mnemonic) did it way before Tom Cruise (Minority Report).
Both Philip K Dick inspired movies, too. Though I do agree that JM did aspire to the abstract interface pattern better than MR. Personally I was reminded of Snow Crash when I saw JM (with Hiro P and the avenues of cyberspace).
None of the games you want to play are compiled for x86, nor will anything that that uses the NDK. They will not be until that is a popular architecture in this market. That will not happen until the games are there, classic catch 22.
Here's how it used to sound: "None of the games you want to play are compiled for Android, nor will anything that that uses the Cocoa Touch API. They will not be until Android is a popular OS in this market. That will not happen until the games are there, classic catch 22." So how did games get onto Android in the first place?
What happened was that iOS, (and then Android) started eating everyone's lunch in the mobile market by providing something that Palm, Microsoft, Blackberry and others found difficult to impossible: a true media-centric portable computer with near-first-class browsing and touch interface. A tantalizing canvas and paintbrush on which you could draw your masterpiece (or partake of someone else's). Developers saw virgin territory all while the incumbents said "PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.” [1].
The gordian knot is cut simply, but it takes a glittering, savage sharp knife and the requisite hand wielding it.
Slashdot Mirror
The NRA is a group of people, a large group composed of several million people.
While this may be true, the NRA is funded primarily by corporations [1], including many large gun companies. There is no way the gun companies live in fear of the NRA, they dictate what it does, because they fund it.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/gun-industry-funds-nra-2013-1
Bring it on.
If I want a platform that has 50% FPS, then I'll go with one of the majors. I think Nintendo didn't learn the right lessons from the Wii and DS - they could've cornered niche markets of non-hardcore gamers, but failed to execute after years of visionary leadership.
Let's see some really innovative games that torture the myth that games require bleeding edge hardware power and a hefty investment north of $500. iOS really opened up the casual market, now it's time for the console to shine again.
Don't compare "socialist" Europe to "capitalist" US. It just ain't fair.
Sorry, but that's exactly what privatizing some sectors get you. [...]
The UK Rail system is a great study in this [1]. Their railways weren't shitty, but then rails and cars got privatized, and now the UK rail sucks serious ass.
With the massive investment required to get clearance to lay rail, and maintaining rails and cars, it's a natural barrier to entry for competitors... allowing companies that do operate to have regional monopolies or operate as a cartel to comfortably ignore their customers and sometimes even their own charter.
[1] http://leavesontheline.tumblr.com/post/3487259985/why-privatisation-sucks
The way I understand it, it only records or takes a photo when you tell it to, and you can be a lot more discrete with a mobile phone camera (pretending to text) if you really want to record people without their permission.
Read the review on TheVerge [1] The author clearly describes how they went to a Starbucks and all the other recording equipment was asked to be turned off, but the cashier didn't know about the Glass, and so that portion got recorded. From my link:
So just like the Macbook with it's green light when the iSight camera came on, Glass shows a green light when recording. I wonder what laptop was abused by middle school admins to take illegal photos of kids in their bedrooms? [2]. If the only indicator on Glass is a green light, it will be hacked away (or covered up) the first time someone wants to take a spy photo/video.
I would most certainly ban Google Glass on any company premises for which I was responsible for securing. I'm not sure I'd allow someone with Glass to enter my house.
[1] http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/22/4013406/i-used-google-glass-its-the-future-with-monthly-updates
[2] http://boingboing.net/2011/06/08/lower-merion-student.html
Vulture capitalism at it's finest. Are leveraged buyouts ever a good idea for anyone other than the "management company" that rapes and pillages the public company? Why is it legal to take a loan out on a company using it's own capital reserves as payment?
As I remind my students, "Beta" to Google means they haven't figured out how to profit on it.
If they can find a way to profit on it, it then becomes one of their many appliances. If they can't, it gets killed.
Clearly, Google didn't have a way to profit on Reader, as they couldn't on Wave, as they couldn't on Health.
If they can find a way to profit from Keep, it'll keep. Otherwise it'll be gone like the rest.
The only issue I have with Google is that their core mission (free services for most people) seems to inherently be unprofitable unless they have another profit stream (which they do, to sell Ads). If you can't imagine how Google will serve more Ads through a given product, it will likely go away at some point in the future (that or you need to exercise more creativity, which the folks at GooglePlex have a lot of).
It's just like with Microsoft (product must extend Windows/Office monopolies in a way that doesn't diminsh them), or Apple (must look and feel Apple-ish, and promote the iTunes ecosystem). For Google, this is Ads. This isn't bad, but you better get used to being sold to advertisers and to have adverts being presented to you.
It's a macguffin [1].
The real plot is the establishment reaction to the revolution of 3D printed items. Complex machinery can now be printed and manufactured without large workforces (it's not as easy as printing your boarding passes, but it's probably an order of magnitude in workforce reduction).
Guns? What happens when you can print a simple boat? How about a car? At some point, we're reaching Diamond-Age [2] matter-compiler complexity. Seemingly safe industries will be upended when the revolution of 3D printing comes fully into the fore.
And you think the establishment will sit by and let their investments and control go up in the air (like what happend to so many industries with the Internet)?
Printed guns are like terrorist funding - an issue to get everyone all worked up about it and the big boys can criminalize the future (at least until you completely control it).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age
I had problems start with my Samsung TV. It would take 10 minutes to turn on. Just sit there clicking on, off, on, off. I called Samsung and it was a known problem. They contacted a local repair shop and had the shop come out to my house and fix it THAT NIGHT. Zero cost to me.
Similar problems with my Samsung monitor - it has serious issues switching between input sources (HDMI, D-SUB) and sometimes would get confused to where it required a shutoff and cooldown for a few min before reuse - a major pain switching between my work and home laptops which use different sources respectively.
As it will cover all Ebay sales and Craigslist sales.
They want to charge you tax on even items you are not making money off of. Next up, Evil Garage sales and Flea Markets, how can we tax this scourge to the economy?
Ebay yes. Craigslist no. Craigslist does not make sales, the people interacting directly do, and the overwhelming majority of these are local.
Little-endian (Day-Month-Year) is common to the vast majority of the world's countries.
xkcd #1179: ISO 8601
I personally preferred the military method 27FEB2013 - no delimiters necessary as the numeric/alpha boundary is adequate. Of course, in other languages this varies (ie, francais = 27FEV2013).
So there you go folks, Google have decided RSS is dead.
From a monetary standpoint, they're probably correct. RSS is as dead as SMTP, in that 99% of people using RSS don't run their own aggregators or feel comfortable with the format, but still benefit from it (i.e., podcasts). In other words it is part of the basic infrastructure of the Internet at large.
Of course, what do you expect from an organization that tried to defeat RSS earlier by supporting ATOM instead (Reader was cool as it supported both, and so did many other
Let's look at all the things Google gains by killing Reader:
* Non-savvy users are pushed back to the content website, which are probably displaying Google's display ads ($)
* Savvy users who like "social" are pushed to G+
* The remainder are just using resources and not giving them anything (and the probably block ads too) - so let them pay for their own aggregator/reader.
Two of the three things above are about money and the other one is a dig against their competitor (Facebook). Long-gone are the days of "don't be evil", but it's questionable whether that premise was ever rally valid or workable. Hate the playa or the game, Google's all about the money now.
UK Govt is now manned by a bunch of corporate whores (even more so than the last bunch) who just want to ensure that the software they're using to discover fraud can be "friendly" to those who are "on the inside".
Last thing a corrupt government wants is any real transparency. The best is some form of translucency, like a shower door or rose-tinted glasses - so what you think you see hides what is really happening.
ok, [/rant]
It isn't secret anymore -- when they actually vote on it. But then there's no time to examine it, much less get public commentary, much less habe 6 months for people to think it over.
These are the same people who brought you the "we have to approve the health care bill to see what's in it."
You think the healthcare bill was bad? The same shit was pulled back in 2001 with the Patriot Act, you know, the one that basically shredded the constitution? The "surprise legislation" and "pass major bills through must-pass budget bills as amendments" are just two of the sleazy things "lawmakers" use to strip-mine our rights for their funder's profit
My all-time favorite sleazy trick is the last-minute amendment that changes the entire nature of the bill, sometimes a 180-degree reversal.
Now not having a Facebook account is treated by HR departments as suspicious behavior.
This, I fear, is quite believable given some of the looks of incredulity I have had when asked by HR for my mobile (cell, for our American brethren) number. I politely decline on the grounds that I neither own nor want a mobile phone. One HR drone even accused me of being dishonest because it was so far beyond her youthful experience as to be unbelievable that one could survive without a mobile. Heck, our home phone when I was a child was made of bakelite and had a handle on the front you turned vigorously to get the operator's attention: our complete phone number was "78". (For the record I am only 45.)
Of course, the workaround in this day and age is to give out your Google Voice (or CallingVault / Phonebooth ) number. You can whitelist callers or just turn off ringing and have a cloud voicemail (as I did when I was hiring - all calls went to VM and got transcribed, so I could just grep the messages). I never give out my cell to business relationships, unless I really know the person. This way I can give out my number but ignore inbound calls if I choose.
Does that make me a bible thumper? Wow. Amazing to find that out.
Seriously, anonymizing money transfers (which is one of the main functions of gambling and casinos) makes for easy money laundering and
Think of it this way: passing money through a casino or betting venue (online or offline) is effectively a one-way function - you can't trace the money to it's source. Ever wonder why James Bond is always hanging around casinos? Because that's how he gets paid to do his dirty deeds (at least that's the real story). His "day job" at MI6 is a convenient cover.
It's not about shielding your society from all gambling - this is a "avoid the chasing bear by being faster than your friend" - you want to keep this kind of activity from corrupting your society as much as possible - let the contract killers hang out in Macau or Monaco. By making it more difficult to launder money you keep the government just that bit cleaner.
Which is why you need to have noscript or face-blockers to read the net.
Of course this assumes that Disqus, Intensedebate or other forum software aren't as insidious/snooping.
Wouldn't the "highest intelligence indicator" be applied to those who don't "do" facebook, twitter, etc?
Or did I just miss something flying over my head?
You aren't missing it, but aren't seeing the totality of Facebook's insidious nature. Now not having a Facebook account is treated by HR departments as suspicious behavior. Also, Facebook made it easy for people to "tag" you - if you don't have an account, you can't repudiate it (or prevent tagging by default). You are literally forced to play their game unless you want your good name being abused. So best move is to have one that's effectively empty, and turn all privacy settings down to the most private.
Of course this defeats the purpose of having a Facebook account - but that's the purpose, right?
At my work, the people who do support got a new management structure. Their management is big on metrics. Sadly, their metric is "how many tickets did you close."
Unsurprisingly, service levels have gone to total shit. The people who actually solve hard problems take more time than the ones who bounce tickets to other people and only handle easy ones, and thus don't look good to the morons in charge. What used to take minutes now takes hours, but apparently it's "more efficient."
I used to work for a support organization (call center + developer support) back in the .com days and one of the big smart things they did was to properly produce incentives to reduce overall call time and increase quality.
Part of this was that the metrics were very well designed - you closing a support case quickly was good, but not if the customer just reopened another one which was similar or argued against closure. You were incented (heavily) to file resolutions to cases (ie, the solution to the problem), and again, if those resolutions were reused to close other cases, you got "assists"... effectively by creating very powerful, concrete resolutions that gave other support analysts the ability to look like a star for their customers, you could build some capital/cred (ie, passive work). This also applied to workarounds entires that were also heavily reused. Needless to say, some folks went for the quick call closure route and others spent hours building proper reusable resolutions, and often formed teams to improve overall department metrics.
Finally, support would work together with account and product management so that big pain points were fixed or turned into enhancements for future versions and also important customers were give a little bit of extra TLC... and all that kind of work was also well recognized.
Metrics aren't the problem, it's management.
Extradition does not decide guilt. It decides whether you are the person being sought to face charges in the other jurisdiction and whether the charges are extraditable to the other jurisdiction. Evidence of guilt is mostly irrelevant to those questions.
Extradition and Secret Prisons (aka black sites) = Who cares if you're guilty? We'll throw you in our clink and spend a few years mulling over what we're going to charge you with (see Bradley Manning). All of this is highly unconstitutional, but hey, the world has changed since 9/11, and that's all you need to know.
Dotcom's best hope now is to flee to another country that doesn't have an extradition treaty with the US.
Maybe Amazon should buy Groupon. Think of the synergies and new paradigms in losses!
I'm sure Amazon did want Groupon at some point in the past at a lower price. Instead Amazon backed LivingSocial, presumably when Groupon told them to pound sand with what Groupon saw as a substandard offer.
And let's not discuss Google's $6B offer that Groupon stupidly turned down. It may sound silly, but perhaps then Google would have bought (and made use of) a real sales/call center organization.
..."Aaron Schwartz: reasons for him being persecuted by DOJ were political" ( as admitted by the DOJ itself ) - and many others.
US = nascent police state.
What's nascent about it? It's here and in-force. Welcome to your neo-feudalist future.
The "consumer market" is not what drives Office sales and use, it's business sales and use.
True. On the other hand... Chromebooks are more attractive to businesses than they are to consumers, because there's no administration to be done. Office is a big barrier to Chromebook adoption, but if Google can convince businesses that Quickoffice and Docs can accomplish the same purpose, that barrier falls.
I'm going to stop short of saying it'll happen, but it's far from inconceivable.
Of course it's not inconceivable, but is it worth a front-page ./ post title? I'd say it isn't. You might as well ask if Apple plans on going into the search business. I'd say they're equally likely (in that both companies would like for these to be viable, but both assertions are very very bad bets).
If one side has to pay to participate in the "trial", and the other doesn't, then one side has an incentive to just suck it up, and the other side has no disincentives to stop.
Just like DMCA takedowns. If there is no penalty for filing, companies will just robo-spam.
Captcha: tedious, just like the appeals process will be.
And thus the purpose. MAFIAA wants to poison the well. It helps that they can get others to be the poisoners.
Oh yeah, and Keanu Reaves (Johnny Mnemonic) did it way before Tom Cruise (Minority Report).
Both Philip K Dick inspired movies, too. Though I do agree that JM did aspire to the abstract interface pattern better than MR. Personally I was reminded of Snow Crash when I saw JM (with Hiro P and the avenues of cyberspace).
None of the games you want to play are compiled for x86, nor will anything that that uses the NDK. They will not be until that is a popular architecture in this market. That will not happen until the games are there, classic catch 22.
Here's how it used to sound: "None of the games you want to play are compiled for Android, nor will anything that that uses the Cocoa Touch API. They will not be until Android is a popular OS in this market. That will not happen until the games are there, classic catch 22." So how did games get onto Android in the first place?
What happened was that iOS, (and then Android) started eating everyone's lunch in the mobile market by providing something that Palm, Microsoft, Blackberry and others found difficult to impossible: a true media-centric portable computer with near-first-class browsing and touch interface. A tantalizing canvas and paintbrush on which you could draw your masterpiece (or partake of someone else's). Developers saw virgin territory all while the incumbents said "PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.” [1].
The gordian knot is cut simply, but it takes a glittering, savage sharp knife and the requisite hand wielding it.
[1] http://daringfireball.net/2006/11/colligan_head_stuck