Intelligence officials last week disclosed some details on two thwarted attacks - one targeting the New York subway system, one to bomb a Danish newspaper office that had published the cartoon depictions of the Prophet Mohammad. Alexander and Sean Joyce, deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, offered additional details on two other foiled plots, including one targeting Wall Street.
Under questioning, Joyce said the NSA was able to identify an extremist in Yemen who was in touch with an individual in Kansas City, Mo. They were able to identify co-conspirators and thwart a plot to bomb the New York Stock Exchange.
Joyce also said a terrorist financier inside the U.S. was identified and arrested in October 2007, thanks to a phone record provided by the NSA. The individual was making phone calls to a known designated terrorist group overseas.
It doesn't matter how much they disclose if you don't listen. Maybe they should send the stories to Wikileaks, maybe then it would get people's attention.
Both of those specific instances were calls made overseas, and many people are ok with the NSA looking at international calls. So remind me again why they are watching all of our domestic calls? If they see a call to a foreign terrorist organization, they can use a good old fashioned court order to get the phone records from the domestic end of the call. No need for the NSA to collect all of the data.
There's also exactly zero evidence that those plots were even real.
This is absolutely not true. The vast majority of industry trade shows look quite professional. A small minority of industries that attract people with developmental problems (automobiles, guns, and games) don't.
that at $700 (starting) it's not really a viable alternative to a $400 PS4. Yeah, yeah. I'm sure it'll be more powerful. But that didn't work out well this generation. Everything had to be toned down graphics wise so you could port it to the consoles. Even Crysis.
Good point, though even the $700 model looks to be a half generation ahead of the PS4.
Whenever I went by the San Jose (Valley Fair) Microsoft Store or the Denver MS (Cherry Creek), it was much busier than its Apple counterpart.
The Surface Pro can really benefit from additional attention. It looks great and it works wonderfully. The key to liking it is to see that it's an ultrabook with tablet functionality added on rather than the other way around. Its battery life beats most ultrabooks (and I'm sure the Haswell upgrade will mean the updated version will beat the next generation of ultrabooks) but is half what you'd expect from a tablet. It's a great laptop for a lot of usage scenarios and not ideal for others (if you want a large screen or want to actually type with it in your lap instead of on a flat surface, for example), and then when you switch to tablet mode it's arguable got a much more capable OS than iOS or Android. Like most devices, it's better for some people than for others, but for the large segment of the populace for whom it would work, it works great.
I'm struck by how much more accurate and responsive Dragon Naturally Speaking was in 1999 on my Pentium 2 than is Siri on my iPhone 5 and Apple's cloud servers today. Maybe it's a microphone problem, but in that case why was the $4.99 tiny microphone from Radioshack in 1999 better than the microphone in my iPhone 5 today?
The idea that you can share games with anyone on your list of 10 "family" members is honestly pretty useful. You can apparently also give a title to anyone who's been on your list for 30 days and it freely transfers permanent ownership. I've bought and sold a few games used and missing that will be a loss for some people, but for me the ability to buy a single copy of a game and share it between all ~5 xbox users I know will be a lot more useful.
That's right! This is Linux. Not that Apples or Microsoft shit. Nothing ever goes wrong in Linuxland. Any kind of "error" you have with Linux is because you're too inept to use a computing device. Any real user would have rooted this phone and installed CustomModXYZ 10.43222.8a.
...Ironically This is nothing to do with Linux(The Kernel) this is a *bug* in the stock browser, you can ignore it and simply use Opera or Chrome on Android, Would the same true for Apples or Windows Shit(sic).
Uh yeah, you can install other browsers in Windows.
I question the logic. It seems to me that developers who reach that status have tired old ideas and/or have blown their creative wad, so to speak, and tend to coast by on past achievements. Luminaries such as Richard Garriott, Will Wright, Bill Roper, Chris Metzen etc... have they really created anything notable after their breakthrough games?
It might be better to throw the project to a team of fresh developers full of exciting, new ideas and give their vision a chance to live.
Old hands are safe hands, but make for a dull journey.
There are some. For instance:
Doug Church: Ultima Underworld, Ultima Underworld 2, System Shock, Thief, Deus Ex, Portal 2
Ken Levine: Thief, System Shock 2, Bioshock, Bioshock Infinite
Can anybody explain to me what do they mean with "pre-compute" or not updating every frame? And how they would achieve that? Or rather, a case where they could use it?
The fog example is kind of okay, because you *don't* need to update the fog every frame (frame of what? Logic Frame? Render Frame? Network Frame?). But the pre-computing a scene makes no sense at all because by then you might aswell just pre-compute once and slap it on every media. Unless I'm missing something and that's not what they meant at all for pre-compute?
TL;DR: can anybody explain it to me as if I was 5 years old?
Sure. The bad man at Microsoft is lying to us. He wants to convince you that something magical will happen in a special "cloud" that will make your game better. Sadly, there is no such magic. Instead, the cloud is going to make it so that sometimes at random you won't be able to play your games. He doesn't want you to know this, which is why he's lying.
and the PS4 will have faster system ram and better? cpu?
the PS4 will have sheared ram at video ram speeds. Xbox shared ram at only DDR3.
As Anand pointed out, the GDDR in the PS4 is actually a negative for the CPU side. GDDR has high latency to go along with its high bandwidth. That's fine for a GPU but bad for the CPU. This should put the Xbone on top for CPU performance, but luckily for Sony the PS4's GPU should have a 50% advantage in processing power on top of the benefit of the high bandwidth RAM and the GPU is usually a lot more important for game performance.
Always on. And what happens when you have a shit internet connection?
Exactly this. This whole approach is aimed at the elite (like me) who have an excellent connection and little concern about bandwidth usage.
Take a step back and remember that "this whole approach" is simply bullshit PR - there's 0% chance that any meaningful processing will be done in the cloud. MS has confirmed that the console only needs to check into the internet on the order of once a day, so they can't count on a constant connection. They therefore can't offload anything meaningful.
Furthermore, the implication that they'll offload something that requires a lot of processing that can't be done better on one of the 8 local cores or the local GPU necessarily means they're talking about graphics. Only graphics will stress this sort of system in a meaningful way. However, offloading any significant part of graphics processing isn't at all technically feasible.
Far too many of the comments on this story are taking MS at face value when it's obvious to anyone with any knowledge of games that the claim made by MS is simple obfuscation. As a few others have pointed out, this is the same thing as EA's vice president insisting that Sim City is highly dependent on vast server side resources even after it's been publicly demonstrated that the only thing servers do is enforce DRM.
The "cloud" will not and cannot have any meaningful affect on real time gaming beyond multiplayer or artificially imposed restrictions on single player.
architecture is complicated. but in terms of ops per mm^2, or ops per watt, ops per $, cycles per useful op, the x86 architecture is a henious pox on the face of the earth.
worse yet, your beloved x86 doesn't even have any source implications, its just a useless thing.
In TFA's slides 10 and 11, Intel i7 chips are shown to be more efficient in terms of performance per watt than ARM chips. However, they're close to each other and Intel's prices are significantly higher.
Yes, the games are less exciting and on a smaller screen, but the devices are nearly ubiquitous right now, and the games are a fraction of the price of a console game. People get used to paying $0.99 for Plants vs. Zombies, then wonder why it costs $20 for the same game on the Xbox? Add the possibility of similar bargains and freedom with the upcoming Ouya (but on a larger screen), and suddenly, these consoles and their respective games seem massively overpriced for what you get. Yes, they offer a richer experience. Is it worth 10 times of the cost of a similar iPad version? That's what consumers are grappling with right now. Add in the fact that the console makers treat their customers like garbage, and many people are saying, forget it. I'll just play games on my phone.
Or they're different markets entirely with very little overlap.
Wii showed its not about the polygons, its about the fun. DS showed fun can be portable, and Android tablets show it can be delivered on a tablet. Worse the current generation churn out last console standard graphics or better.
So will we even have a console this round?
More likely it will end up as a function of the tablets.
Wii's incredibly low software attach rate and low sales after the initial explosion showed it's not about fun, it's about hype. The data paint a pretty clear picture that people liked to buy the Wii but they never liked to play with it as much as on the other consoles. That's a great sign for business but a bad one for fun.
Really? I've been looking and what I was able to find over the past 15 minutes is that both have what is likely the same AMD x86 8 core 1.6GHz processor, same generation AMD GPU, the same amount of memory (XBoxOne DDR3, PS4 DDR5), same 500GB disk space, same BluRay optical disk format, same 802.11n WiFi, similar cloud-based execution off-loading strategies (Azure vs Gaikai)...
Even in terms of MIPS, these new console CPUs are a fraction slower than the previous generation, even though their GPUs are orders of magnitude better than the previous generation.
Specs wise, they appear identical to each other aside from the Xbox being Windows 8 at it's core and Sony *likely* continuing down their Linux-ish roots.
The only differences appear to be in the form of the User Interface and Peripherals.
I am being completely honest here and would like to hear what would make the PS4 significantly more powerful than the XBoxOne as to help impact my purchasing decisions.
Tumblr isn't a photo sharing site, it is a micro blogging platform. Flickr has photos and I think video (upload). Tumblr has photos, video, audio, and finally text, which further breaks down in to posts, quotes, and links.
So please, tell me how a five day sprint to reskin Flickr is going to add all of those additional features.
No, Tumblr is a crappy niche site used almost exclusively for photo sharing and operating at a significant loss.
100m in projected revenue / 40m in cost of goods this year = 60m in profits. (40m is from wiki's original source, numbers are projected, so....) 1.1b market cap / 60m profit = Price/Earnings ratio of 18.
P/E ratio for the S&P is 14.
It looks like it has high growth, that would push the numbers up. Huge risk / numbers are projections / I am doing the numbers on the fly without all of the accoutning number - would push the numbers down.
Ah yes, we should always base P/E ratios on the "hoped for" earnings over the next year, especially when they're about an order of magnitude higher than the real world numbers from right now.
This was predicted back in the 1930s, too. How did that work out for them?
Go on the tour of Greenfield Village at the Ford Museum in Detroit and you'll hear the story of this same prediction being made in the 17th century regarding textile manufacturing technology.
Don't we have ads on Bing? Don't we ads on Hotmail/Outlook.com? Don't we have ads on every service out there from Microsoft that's free? If you can't trust Google, you will never trust Microsoft either. Birds of a feather...?
I think it's fairly notable that Eric Schmidt regularly expresses his disdain toward the concept of privacy and the people who want it. Microsoft CEO may have a bad image, too, but since this discussion is about privacy I think that Schmidt is basically asking us to condemn Google in that regard and laughing at us when we do.
You might think that comment was "skeptical" or that it demonstrates your "critical thinking" but really, it was just plain ignorant. Based on this comment, one might reasonably assume you fall in with the kind of douchetards that yell out "42! Haha!" every time a mathematical discussion takes place.
To answer your question, you might start by reading the article. It talks about isotopes and geochemistry.
Then you could do some reading at the library to find out more about isotopes and geochemistry, and why these things are interesting and important. If you want to go further, you could take an undergraduate degree in geology, where you will learn all kinds of strange and wonderful things about the Earth, and how we can know about things that occurred billions of years ago.
In his defense, he was making a joke about ignorance.
Its not amusing at all. Amazon dominate by competing on old fashioned things like price, Not being corrupt. I find it sick that your defending a mega corporation (again), when the illegal corrupt actions affect everyone.
It's quite... fascinating, how you can defend a monopoly and demonize the company that broke the monopoly, doing the very thing you just defended the monopoly for doing in the first place!
Apple entered the book market and competed against Amazon doing the very thing you laud Amazon for doing: they competed on price!
That's some highly potent fanboy fanaticism in action!
Apple did compete on price - they competed by demanding that every publisher raise the price of all ebooks by 50%. Publishers were happy to oblige. Amazon wasn't hurt - they still dominate the market. The only people who lost were consumers (like you!). People like you lost big time. Go cheer for the people who beat the shit out of you some more. It amuses them.
I'm not about to click all of the links in the article, which isn't much of an article, but unless they were colluding with these publishers to charge higher prices everywhere, I don't see a problem. If Apple's customers are such zealots that they won't consider other sources for their media, let them pay the prices.
Uh...click the links. Or read any news story about this in the last several years. The point of the story is that Apple was "colluding with these publishers to charge higher prices everywhere." That's exactly what they did. We knew it at the time, even, because Amazon publicized it. Then ebooks from every single source went up in price by 50%. But somehow Apple fans think this is a great win for the consumer because breaking a monopoly (Amazon) is always good for consumers...right?
Aside from being Apple, which you hate irrationally, what exactly is your complaint? What do you think Apple did that was wrong? They used an existing model, which is legal. They broke a monopoly, which is not only legal, but generally considered beneficial. They brought eBooks to more people.
And in the end, Amazon is still the top eBook seller, so Apple didn't even take a controlling share of the market. So what did they do wrong?
The "generally considered beneficial" monopoly breaking makes Ayn Rand feel good but at the same time it instantly raised the price of every ebook by 50%. That's very bad for consumers. Amazon is still winning, yes, but why should we on/. care about market share? Generally, when it comes to books we're consumers, and every consumer was fucked over by Apple.
Slashdot Mirror
Because:
Officials from President Obama down have said they welcomed the opportunity to explain the importance of the programs...
But only to secret judges on secret courts.
Same story, different day. They are speaking publicly, but not everyone is listening, paying attention, or caring.
NSA director: Surveillance foiled 50 terror plots
FBI deputy director: NSA foiled NYC bombing plots
NSA director says surveillance foiled plot against Wall Street
Intelligence officials last week disclosed some details on two thwarted attacks - one targeting the New York subway system, one to bomb a Danish newspaper office that had published the cartoon depictions of the Prophet Mohammad. Alexander and Sean Joyce, deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, offered additional details on two other foiled plots, including one targeting Wall Street.
Under questioning, Joyce said the NSA was able to identify an extremist in Yemen who was in touch with an individual in Kansas City, Mo. They were able to identify co-conspirators and thwart a plot to bomb the New York Stock Exchange.
Joyce also said a terrorist financier inside the U.S. was identified and arrested in October 2007, thanks to a phone record provided by the NSA. The individual was making phone calls to a known designated terrorist group overseas.
It doesn't matter how much they disclose if you don't listen. Maybe they should send the stories to Wikileaks, maybe then it would get people's attention.
Both of those specific instances were calls made overseas, and many people are ok with the NSA looking at international calls. So remind me again why they are watching all of our domestic calls? If they see a call to a foreign terrorist organization, they can use a good old fashioned court order to get the phone records from the domestic end of the call. No need for the NSA to collect all of the data.
There's also exactly zero evidence that those plots were even real.
Every industry does the same thing
This is absolutely not true. The vast majority of industry trade shows look quite professional. A small minority of industries that attract people with developmental problems (automobiles, guns, and games) don't.
that at $700 (starting) it's not really a viable alternative to a $400 PS4. Yeah, yeah. I'm sure it'll be more powerful. But that didn't work out well this generation. Everything had to be toned down graphics wise so you could port it to the consoles. Even Crysis.
Good point, though even the $700 model looks to be a half generation ahead of the PS4.
Whenever I went by the San Jose (Valley Fair) Microsoft Store or the Denver MS (Cherry Creek), it was much busier than its Apple counterpart.
The Surface Pro can really benefit from additional attention. It looks great and it works wonderfully. The key to liking it is to see that it's an ultrabook with tablet functionality added on rather than the other way around. Its battery life beats most ultrabooks (and I'm sure the Haswell upgrade will mean the updated version will beat the next generation of ultrabooks) but is half what you'd expect from a tablet. It's a great laptop for a lot of usage scenarios and not ideal for others (if you want a large screen or want to actually type with it in your lap instead of on a flat surface, for example), and then when you switch to tablet mode it's arguable got a much more capable OS than iOS or Android. Like most devices, it's better for some people than for others, but for the large segment of the populace for whom it would work, it works great.
I'm struck by how much more accurate and responsive Dragon Naturally Speaking was in 1999 on my Pentium 2 than is Siri on my iPhone 5 and Apple's cloud servers today. Maybe it's a microphone problem, but in that case why was the $4.99 tiny microphone from Radioshack in 1999 better than the microphone in my iPhone 5 today?
The idea that you can share games with anyone on your list of 10 "family" members is honestly pretty useful. You can apparently also give a title to anyone who's been on your list for 30 days and it freely transfers permanent ownership. I've bought and sold a few games used and missing that will be a loss for some people, but for me the ability to buy a single copy of a game and share it between all ~5 xbox users I know will be a lot more useful.
That's right! This is Linux. Not that Apples or Microsoft shit. Nothing ever goes wrong in Linuxland. Any kind of "error" you have with Linux is because you're too inept to use a computing device. Any real user would have rooted this phone and installed CustomModXYZ 10.43222.8a.
...Ironically This is nothing to do with Linux(The Kernel) this is a *bug* in the stock browser, you can ignore it and simply use Opera or Chrome on Android, Would the same true for Apples or Windows Shit(sic).
Uh yeah, you can install other browsers in Windows.
I question the logic. It seems to me that developers who reach that status have tired old ideas and/or have blown their creative wad, so to speak, and tend to coast by on past achievements. Luminaries such as Richard Garriott, Will Wright, Bill Roper, Chris Metzen etc... have they really created anything notable after their breakthrough games?
It might be better to throw the project to a team of fresh developers full of exciting, new ideas and give their vision a chance to live.
Old hands are safe hands, but make for a dull journey.
There are some. For instance:
Doug Church: Ultima Underworld, Ultima Underworld 2, System Shock, Thief, Deus Ex, Portal 2
Ken Levine: Thief, System Shock 2, Bioshock, Bioshock Infinite
Can anybody explain to me what do they mean with "pre-compute" or not updating every frame? And how they would achieve that? Or rather, a case where they could use it?
The fog example is kind of okay, because you *don't* need to update the fog every frame (frame of what? Logic Frame? Render Frame? Network Frame?). But the pre-computing a scene makes no sense at all because by then you might aswell just pre-compute once and slap it on every media. Unless I'm missing something and that's not what they meant at all for pre-compute?
TL;DR: can anybody explain it to me as if I was 5 years old?
Sure. The bad man at Microsoft is lying to us. He wants to convince you that something magical will happen in a special "cloud" that will make your game better. Sadly, there is no such magic. Instead, the cloud is going to make it so that sometimes at random you won't be able to play your games. He doesn't want you to know this, which is why he's lying.
and the PS4 will have faster system ram and better? cpu?
the PS4 will have sheared ram at video ram speeds. Xbox shared ram at only DDR3.
As Anand pointed out, the GDDR in the PS4 is actually a negative for the CPU side. GDDR has high latency to go along with its high bandwidth. That's fine for a GPU but bad for the CPU. This should put the Xbone on top for CPU performance, but luckily for Sony the PS4's GPU should have a 50% advantage in processing power on top of the benefit of the high bandwidth RAM and the GPU is usually a lot more important for game performance.
Always on. And what happens when you have a shit internet connection?
Exactly this. This whole approach is aimed at the elite (like me) who have an excellent connection and little concern about bandwidth usage.
Take a step back and remember that "this whole approach" is simply bullshit PR - there's 0% chance that any meaningful processing will be done in the cloud. MS has confirmed that the console only needs to check into the internet on the order of once a day, so they can't count on a constant connection. They therefore can't offload anything meaningful.
Furthermore, the implication that they'll offload something that requires a lot of processing that can't be done better on one of the 8 local cores or the local GPU necessarily means they're talking about graphics. Only graphics will stress this sort of system in a meaningful way. However, offloading any significant part of graphics processing isn't at all technically feasible.
Far too many of the comments on this story are taking MS at face value when it's obvious to anyone with any knowledge of games that the claim made by MS is simple obfuscation. As a few others have pointed out, this is the same thing as EA's vice president insisting that Sim City is highly dependent on vast server side resources even after it's been publicly demonstrated that the only thing servers do is enforce DRM.
The "cloud" will not and cannot have any meaningful affect on real time gaming beyond multiplayer or artificially imposed restrictions on single player.
architecture is complicated. but in terms of ops per mm^2, or ops per watt, ops per $,
cycles per useful op, the x86 architecture is a henious pox on the face of the
earth.
worse yet, your beloved x86 doesn't even have any source implications, its just
a useless thing.
In TFA's slides 10 and 11, Intel i7 chips are shown to be more efficient in terms of performance per watt than ARM chips. However, they're close to each other and Intel's prices are significantly higher.
Yes, the games are less exciting and on a smaller screen, but the devices are nearly ubiquitous right now, and the games are a fraction of the price of a console game. People get used to paying $0.99 for Plants vs. Zombies, then wonder why it costs $20 for the same game on the Xbox? Add the possibility of similar bargains and freedom with the upcoming Ouya (but on a larger screen), and suddenly, these consoles and their respective games seem massively overpriced for what you get. Yes, they offer a richer experience. Is it worth 10 times of the cost of a similar iPad version? That's what consumers are grappling with right now. Add in the fact that the console makers treat their customers like garbage, and many people are saying, forget it. I'll just play games on my phone.
Or they're different markets entirely with very little overlap.
Wii showed its not about the polygons, its about the fun. DS showed fun can be portable, and Android tablets show it can be delivered on a tablet. Worse the current generation churn out last console standard graphics or better.
So will we even have a console this round?
More likely it will end up as a function of the tablets.
Wii's incredibly low software attach rate and low sales after the initial explosion showed it's not about fun, it's about hype. The data paint a pretty clear picture that people liked to buy the Wii but they never liked to play with it as much as on the other consoles. That's a great sign for business but a bad one for fun.
Really? I've been looking and what I was able to find over the past 15 minutes is that both have what is likely the same AMD x86 8 core 1.6GHz processor, same generation AMD GPU, the same amount of memory (XBoxOne DDR3, PS4 DDR5), same 500GB disk space, same BluRay optical disk format, same 802.11n WiFi, similar cloud-based execution off-loading strategies (Azure vs Gaikai)...
Even in terms of MIPS, these new console CPUs are a fraction slower than the previous generation, even though their GPUs are orders of magnitude better than the previous generation.
Specs wise, they appear identical to each other aside from the Xbox being Windows 8 at it's core and Sony *likely* continuing down their Linux-ish roots.
The only differences appear to be in the form of the User Interface and Peripherals.
I am being completely honest here and would like to hear what would make the PS4 significantly more powerful than the XBoxOne as to help impact my purchasing decisions.
Whenever you want to talk about hardware, go to Anandtech. It turns out the GP was exactly correct. The PS4 GPU is 50% faster than the One: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6972/xbox-one-hardware-compared-to-playstation-4
I wonder whether that will translate to 50% higher framerates or more eye candy/resolution.
How long before HTC starts the trademark infringement action?
Right after Keanu Reaves.
Tumblr isn't a photo sharing site, it is a micro blogging platform. Flickr has photos and I think video (upload). Tumblr has photos, video, audio, and finally text, which further breaks down in to posts, quotes, and links.
So please, tell me how a five day sprint to reskin Flickr is going to add all of those additional features.
No, Tumblr is a crappy niche site used almost exclusively for photo sharing and operating at a significant loss.
So, to reorder your numbers a bit,
100m in projected revenue / 40m in cost of goods this year = 60m in profits. (40m is from wiki's original source, numbers are projected, so....)
1.1b market cap / 60m profit = Price/Earnings ratio of 18.
P/E ratio for the S&P is 14.
It looks like it has high growth, that would push the numbers up. Huge risk / numbers are projections / I am doing the numbers on the fly without all of the accoutning number - would push the numbers down.
Ah yes, we should always base P/E ratios on the "hoped for" earnings over the next year, especially when they're about an order of magnitude higher than the real world numbers from right now.
Yahoo is also sitting in a nice pile of cash 4 bil i think.
RTFS. Yahoo has $1.2B on hand and are commiting 92% of that on this purchase.
This was predicted back in the 1930s, too. How did that work out for them?
Go on the tour of Greenfield Village at the Ford Museum in Detroit and you'll hear the story of this same prediction being made in the 17th century regarding textile manufacturing technology.
Don't we have ads on Bing? Don't we ads on Hotmail/Outlook.com? Don't we have ads on every service out there from Microsoft that's free? If you can't trust Google, you will never trust Microsoft either. Birds of a feather ...?
I think it's fairly notable that Eric Schmidt regularly expresses his disdain toward the concept of privacy and the people who want it. Microsoft CEO may have a bad image, too, but since this discussion is about privacy I think that Schmidt is basically asking us to condemn Google in that regard and laughing at us when we do.
You might think that comment was "skeptical" or that it demonstrates your "critical thinking" but really, it was just plain ignorant. Based on this comment, one might reasonably assume you fall in with the kind of douchetards that yell out "42! Haha!" every time a mathematical discussion takes place.
To answer your question, you might start by reading the article. It talks about isotopes and geochemistry.
Then you could do some reading at the library to find out more about isotopes and geochemistry, and why these things are interesting and important. If you want to go further, you could take an undergraduate degree in geology, where you will learn all kinds of strange and wonderful things about the Earth, and how we can know about things that occurred billions of years ago.
In his defense, he was making a joke about ignorance.
http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/299875-doj-accuses-steve-jobs-of-being-ringmaster-in-price-fixing-scheme "Under the old model, Amazon controlled about 90 percent of the market, but after the publishers instituted the new pricing scheme, Amazon's share fell to 60 percent."
Its not amusing at all. Amazon dominate by competing on old fashioned things like price, Not being corrupt. I find it sick that your defending a mega corporation (again), when the illegal corrupt actions affect everyone.
It's quite... fascinating, how you can defend a monopoly and demonize the company that broke the monopoly, doing the very thing you just defended the monopoly for doing in the first place!
Apple entered the book market and competed against Amazon doing the very thing you laud Amazon for doing: they competed on price!
That's some highly potent fanboy fanaticism in action!
Apple did compete on price - they competed by demanding that every publisher raise the price of all ebooks by 50%. Publishers were happy to oblige. Amazon wasn't hurt - they still dominate the market. The only people who lost were consumers (like you!). People like you lost big time. Go cheer for the people who beat the shit out of you some more. It amuses them.
I'm not about to click all of the links in the article, which isn't much of an article, but unless they were colluding with these publishers to charge higher prices everywhere, I don't see a problem. If Apple's customers are such zealots that they won't consider other sources for their media, let them pay the prices.
Uh...click the links. Or read any news story about this in the last several years. The point of the story is that Apple was "colluding with these publishers to charge higher prices everywhere." That's exactly what they did. We knew it at the time, even, because Amazon publicized it. Then ebooks from every single source went up in price by 50%. But somehow Apple fans think this is a great win for the consumer because breaking a monopoly (Amazon) is always good for consumers...right?
Aside from being Apple, which you hate irrationally, what exactly is your complaint? What do you think Apple did that was wrong? They used an existing model, which is legal. They broke a monopoly, which is not only legal, but generally considered beneficial. They brought eBooks to more people.
And in the end, Amazon is still the top eBook seller, so Apple didn't even take a controlling share of the market. So what did they do wrong?
The "generally considered beneficial" monopoly breaking makes Ayn Rand feel good but at the same time it instantly raised the price of every ebook by 50%. That's very bad for consumers. Amazon is still winning, yes, but why should we on /. care about market share? Generally, when it comes to books we're consumers, and every consumer was fucked over by Apple.