I tend to agree. I would amplify one of your remarks, though: Internet advertising is in any case a race to the bottom. Advertising in our local dead-tree newspaper is now quite expensive. Why? Because although the circulation has shrunk, it has shrunk to people who (a) can read, (b) are prepared to pay money and (c) are likely to be older and, by implication, richer. It's the same process by which real targeted advertising is very expensive in terms of cost per mail shot, but for high value goods it is cheaper per sale than anything else.
So: If I had to pay for Facebook (as I pay for my Dropbox account) how much would it be worth to me? Well, to me it's worthless and I don't use it. Currently the UK paid-for nearest equivalent is BlackBerry services which cost around $5/month. But that includes an internet allowance, so the incremental cost is about $2/month. If 800 million users were prepared to pay $24 a year, that would come out to around $20 billion a year in revenue, maximum. Most people are unlikely to be prepared to pay that much. My guess is that realistically on present numbers that puts a limit on Facebook of about $10 billion, which suggests that it has nowhere to go except flat or down.
Whenever I see an IT person writing "it's trivial to..." I see someone who doesn't get out of the basement much. Google doesn't care if you root your Nexus device. Why? Because you represent a tiny fraction of the market. So long as more than 90% of users don't do it - because they aren't interested in IT, don't care, or are worried about the consequences - the threat to their revenue is nonexistent.
On a more general point, you are making a very typical mistake of IT people. You think the world revolves around you, your desires, and what you can do. It doesn't. Understanding this and seeing the bigger picture is what keeps people like me still earning far more than the median late in our careers. Thinking that someone doesn't know what he's talking about because you can only see a tiny part of the picture and imagine the whole picture revolves around you is what will ensure that you, Mr. 2 million plus UID, don't progress very far.
Because CFCs and acid rain were dealt with because there weren't enough neocons around at the time to prevent action being taken by governments, they were a phony manufactured crisis? It strikes me that you're one of those people who won't believe in taking precautions until the disaster has happened.
I remember CFCs well. We eliminated them from our manufacturing in the UK, but we weren't allowed to report it in the company newspaper because the US end of the operation was still arguing that it couldn't be done, and we (and our Swiss technical partner) weren't allowed to be first.
That's why Saul of Tarsus very rapidly made a takeover bid for the new religion and got it back on track, and why the Protestants are always quoting "Saint" Paul "I hate faggots. Give me money" and not all that awful stuff about loving your neighbor (which is pure socialism).
The Bell Curve was not written by people who were qualified to write about taxonomy. As statisticians, they used the word "race" in a way that no modern biologist would countenance and no geneticist would agree with. Even someone who has done first year university level biology should know that there is only one human race, since the Neanderthals died out. So what is the point you are trying to make? That a pair of Americans could still write a book, in 1994, that seemed to be a covert attack on black Americans and Jews?
Anecdotal, but over the last 10 years the number of women I see driving far too fast, carelessly, talking on mobile phones and running red lights is now up there with the men. And young women seem to be the worst; they drive just as fast as the male idiots, but with less attention to the road.
I suspect the insurance companies didn't argue the toss with the EU because the statistics were trending towards equality anyway.
It's hardly worth being a technical specialist in the British secret world. The real reason that Thatcher wanted Spycatcher banned was because it revealed just how badly technical experts were treated in comparison with the Old Etonians, and might have dampened recruitment. Here's a hint: If you are any good, you can easily earn more teaching maths in a UK secondary school than you can being a codebreaker for the Secret Services. No, I can't prove it, but I have good reason to believe it.
Very, very few British MPs have to resign because of their goings-on, as the GP article reveals. It is almost always the associated crime that does them in. In the Profumo case (not mentioned) Profumo's mistake was to lie to Parliament. If he'd said "OK I was bonking Christine Keeler. Here's a picture. No, I didn't discuss secrets. Would you be thinking about the Navy budget, if you were shagging someone like that?" the Cabinet would have said "Ooh, yes, see what you mean old boy, lie low for a bit and we'll fix it." Thorpe got into trouble because he (allegedly) tried on some threatening blackmail. But, until Rupert Merdreck (Australian/American) came along, the Press used to leave alone MPs who weren't hypocritical or just obnoxious.
How unlike, how very unlike, how the Republicans treated Clinton. Now that was a shameful episode.
Benign world controllers dealing with dissent by setting up island colonies where highly intelligent people can go and build their own societies, while running a strict hierarchical society which manages to keep almost all its citizens healthy and happy? I wish! My feeling at the end of reading BNW for the first time was "Helmholtz Watson, lucky bugger. How do we make this happen?".
Aristotle would be pleased. This thread is full of teleological arguments, all of which covertly presuppose that the reason for this planet being here is to bring about us (or even US).
The biosphere is to a degree self regulating because it has evolved that way. But there are no written guarantees that this will be true tomorrow.
This is also almost exactly how my mother in law died in a private hospital in the UK, except that at the "chaotic" situation she was rushed to a State hospital which had better facilities, but got there too late and was DOA.
Only a bonkers libertarian could seriously believe that private systems don't have screwups. Oh, and by the way, what exactly is the difference between "Obamacare" and what Romney approved for Mass? Without handwaving?
The toleration of years in a crate is not a problem. Victorian tin cans were substantial (they could not roll steel thin or plate thinly and reliably) and canned food has been found that was still edible after more than 50 years. I need hardly add that exposure to vacuum is not a problem with a hermetic can which is already at vacuum pressure inside (sealed while boiling). Vitamins and minerals could be carried on board so the loss of them in canned food would not be a problem.
No, storage is easily solvable. Recovery isn't if you have to land on the wrong side of Mars from your cache. Curiosity manages about 4cm/min, and although that's faster than London rush hour traffic often seems to be, nobody is going to land a Cayenne and a fuel dump on Mars.
When the fecal mass agglutinates, reaches the asteroid belt, agglutinates some more and comes back as a honking great comet which will crash straight into us. (No, I am not serious. A maker of feeble jokes yes, but not entirely ignorant of physics).
Did you just crawl from under a rock? I can see I'm going to have to spell this out for you, but do you really think that male astronauts (or sailors, or oil rig workers) manage to go for extended periods without getting intimate with one of their hands? Just because the subject isn't exactly widely discussed outside the inhabitants of single-male communities, doesn't mean it doesn't happen. If that little disposal problem can be coped with, periods should be the least of anyone's worries. Pregnancy, of course, is a different matter but doesn't carry the subtext of "female body, ooh gross".
The PB has, in a little section on the base, a micro USB, a micro HDMI, and a magnetic charging port. Except for the charging port (for which a hobbyist could make an adaptor, it is so simple) that's standard connections which provide everything you need.
And then there's the defunct Palm Pre 3 - with inductive charging and Bluetooth, the only time you ever need to plug anything in is for a system reinstall. That, to my mind, is the way it should be. The ideal mobile device does not require any connectors at all.
I know several people working in sales, marketing and PR who would ask you "So what do you want me to do? Find somewhere to park a laptop during a 10 minute customer visit? Spend all day in the office?"
These people are legitimate business users, and we have to support them.
Are you comparing like to like? Like to like is a Bold 9900 versus an iPhone, not a corporate 2010 model versus a 2012 phone. The last generation of BlackBerries are actually not hard to use, very configurable for business use (different notifications for different classes of incoming message, auto clock mode in dock, powerful security certificate handling), and the "third party server add on" is a messaging server - how well does your corporate iPhone work without one? Exchange is a third party add on from a phone point of view. I assume you mean that the BES is an add on to your Exchange server, but does your Exchange server provide secure XMPP or an equivalent out of the box?
Apple and Google have very carefully shifted the grounds away from considerations of message security and integrity, messaging flexibility, and privacy to - ooh shiny! Angry Birds! But I suspect that eventually people will realise that it's panem et circenses to keep the mass buyers happy. A phone is always a compromise as a media device, which is why screen sizes keep creeping up, and a media device is always a compromise as a phone (too big, battery life too short).
Indeed. It is noticeable that when I send emails from my phones, both of which have physical keyboards, the reply from iOS and Android users tends to be either very short, or a phone call. I recently had a message from a BB user on behalf of an iPhone user, presumably because the iPhone user didn't want to have to type two sentences on an iPhone.
Speech is all very well, but there are many circumstances when it is inconvenient - for the hearing impaired (there are rather a lot of us), in meetings/lectures/seminars, or where ambiguity or being overheard must be avoided, as with user names, passwords etc.
It is almost trivially easy to identify water damage in wood or cold molding using an ultrasound scan. This kind of objection is rather easily engineered out, since all the problems of water entrapment and cavity corrosion have long been solved for steel bodies - on the face of it much harder to protect.
In fact the Marcos sports car was made with steam-bent marine plywood panels and has proved both robust and maintainable, just far too expensive for production use.
Far from it. Many boats are made by "cold molding", in which you start with a mold and build up your own plywood layers on top using thin veneers and epoxy resin. The result is light, strong, and very water resistant indeed if done properly. Some woods such as mahogany and utile are already extremely strong and stiff (comparing equivalent mass/area) compared to e.g. aluminum and fiberglass, and this looks like it would be more of the same, only much easier to form.
Did you know that in Victorian Cambridge and London (that I know about for sure) there were several mail collections and deliveries PER DAY, and if even a typical 4 hour turnaround wasn't fast enough there were messenger boys. Australian businessmen paid for underwater cable to allow the late Victorian equivalent of high frequency trading in the futures market of the day (wool, for instance). The Roman Empire depended on a network of staged horses and fast riders, so that in an emergency a message could get from Londinium to Aquae Sulis in a couple of days, when a cart would take a week. People have always wanted to communicate as fast as technology would allow, and there have always been people who would pay a premium for it.
Now it has been democratised. Indian peasants can use a mobile phone to find the market offering the best price for their produce. Nepalese herders can decide the best time to bring their goats to market. For a lot of people who don't live in the US, the cellular phone is literally transforming their lives. You can only take the attitude you do because you live in a rich society and are insulated from the factors that have held most people in the world back economically. One of those factors is lack of access to fast, reliable communications.
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So: If I had to pay for Facebook (as I pay for my Dropbox account) how much would it be worth to me? Well, to me it's worthless and I don't use it. Currently the UK paid-for nearest equivalent is BlackBerry services which cost around $5/month. But that includes an internet allowance, so the incremental cost is about $2/month. If 800 million users were prepared to pay $24 a year, that would come out to around $20 billion a year in revenue, maximum. Most people are unlikely to be prepared to pay that much. My guess is that realistically on present numbers that puts a limit on Facebook of about $10 billion, which suggests that it has nowhere to go except flat or down.
On a more general point, you are making a very typical mistake of IT people. You think the world revolves around you, your desires, and what you can do. It doesn't. Understanding this and seeing the bigger picture is what keeps people like me still earning far more than the median late in our careers. Thinking that someone doesn't know what he's talking about because you can only see a tiny part of the picture and imagine the whole picture revolves around you is what will ensure that you, Mr. 2 million plus UID, don't progress very far.
Google doesn't want you to opt out of ads on the Nexus, because a lot of their income comes from ads.
I remember CFCs well. We eliminated them from our manufacturing in the UK, but we weren't allowed to report it in the company newspaper because the US end of the operation was still arguing that it couldn't be done, and we (and our Swiss technical partner) weren't allowed to be first.
That's why Saul of Tarsus very rapidly made a takeover bid for the new religion and got it back on track, and why the Protestants are always quoting "Saint" Paul "I hate faggots. Give me money" and not all that awful stuff about loving your neighbor (which is pure socialism).
The Bell Curve was not written by people who were qualified to write about taxonomy. As statisticians, they used the word "race" in a way that no modern biologist would countenance and no geneticist would agree with. Even someone who has done first year university level biology should know that there is only one human race, since the Neanderthals died out. So what is the point you are trying to make? That a pair of Americans could still write a book, in 1994, that seemed to be a covert attack on black Americans and Jews?
I suspect the insurance companies didn't argue the toss with the EU because the statistics were trending towards equality anyway.
It's hardly worth being a technical specialist in the British secret world. The real reason that Thatcher wanted Spycatcher banned was because it revealed just how badly technical experts were treated in comparison with the Old Etonians, and might have dampened recruitment. Here's a hint: If you are any good, you can easily earn more teaching maths in a UK secondary school than you can being a codebreaker for the Secret Services. No, I can't prove it, but I have good reason to believe it.
How unlike, how very unlike, how the Republicans treated Clinton. Now that was a shameful episode.
Benign world controllers dealing with dissent by setting up island colonies where highly intelligent people can go and build their own societies, while running a strict hierarchical society which manages to keep almost all its citizens healthy and happy? I wish! My feeling at the end of reading BNW for the first time was "Helmholtz Watson, lucky bugger. How do we make this happen?".
Come on, am I supposed to take seriously someone who is supposed to have read a scientific paper but can't spell one of the key words?
The biosphere is to a degree self regulating because it has evolved that way. But there are no written guarantees that this will be true tomorrow.
Drainage to river can cope with heavy storms - check
Able to supply food needs using mixture of conventional growing and hydroponics - check
Politically stable area which is a net food and energy exporter - check
Now I just need a few machine guns and a minefield and I'm all set to watch the fun.
Only a bonkers libertarian could seriously believe that private systems don't have screwups. Oh, and by the way, what exactly is the difference between "Obamacare" and what Romney approved for Mass? Without handwaving?
Yes, I do have karma to burn.
No, storage is easily solvable. Recovery isn't if you have to land on the wrong side of Mars from your cache. Curiosity manages about 4cm/min, and although that's faster than London rush hour traffic often seems to be, nobody is going to land a Cayenne and a fuel dump on Mars.
When the fecal mass agglutinates, reaches the asteroid belt, agglutinates some more and comes back as a honking great comet which will crash straight into us. (No, I am not serious. A maker of feeble jokes yes, but not entirely ignorant of physics).
Did you just crawl from under a rock? I can see I'm going to have to spell this out for you, but do you really think that male astronauts (or sailors, or oil rig workers) manage to go for extended periods without getting intimate with one of their hands? Just because the subject isn't exactly widely discussed outside the inhabitants of single-male communities, doesn't mean it doesn't happen. If that little disposal problem can be coped with, periods should be the least of anyone's worries. Pregnancy, of course, is a different matter but doesn't carry the subtext of "female body, ooh gross".
And then there's the defunct Palm Pre 3 - with inductive charging and Bluetooth, the only time you ever need to plug anything in is for a system reinstall. That, to my mind, is the way it should be. The ideal mobile device does not require any connectors at all.
These people are legitimate business users, and we have to support them.
Apple and Google have very carefully shifted the grounds away from considerations of message security and integrity, messaging flexibility, and privacy to - ooh shiny! Angry Birds! But I suspect that eventually people will realise that it's panem et circenses to keep the mass buyers happy. A phone is always a compromise as a media device, which is why screen sizes keep creeping up, and a media device is always a compromise as a phone (too big, battery life too short).
Speech is all very well, but there are many circumstances when it is inconvenient - for the hearing impaired (there are rather a lot of us), in meetings/lectures/seminars, or where ambiguity or being overheard must be avoided, as with user names, passwords etc.
In fact the Marcos sports car was made with steam-bent marine plywood panels and has proved both robust and maintainable, just far too expensive for production use.
Look up Wood Epoxy Saturation Technique.
Far from it. Many boats are made by "cold molding", in which you start with a mold and build up your own plywood layers on top using thin veneers and epoxy resin. The result is light, strong, and very water resistant indeed if done properly. Some woods such as mahogany and utile are already extremely strong and stiff (comparing equivalent mass/area) compared to e.g. aluminum and fiberglass, and this looks like it would be more of the same, only much easier to form.
Now it has been democratised. Indian peasants can use a mobile phone to find the market offering the best price for their produce. Nepalese herders can decide the best time to bring their goats to market. For a lot of people who don't live in the US, the cellular phone is literally transforming their lives. You can only take the attitude you do because you live in a rich society and are insulated from the factors that have held most people in the world back economically. One of those factors is lack of access to fast, reliable communications.