Snark if you want, but as someone who worked in the industry at the time I can tell you when Apple first showed off the iPhone in January 2007 it changed damn near everything (or at least it did when the other OEMs and carriers realized to their horror that people were actually buying the damned things). Full touchscreen-based UI, functional web browser, no carrier software deck and WAP store, real music player functionality and good video viewing, multitouch, visual voicemail... It all seems old hat now but if you don't remember what it was like, go pick up a contemporary BlackBerry or Windows Mobile 6 phone and tell me if it doesn't just beat the shit out of it in terms of usability.
you can hate Apple for what they have become, but you cannot dismiss how that original iPhone changed the wireless landscape. If they can do the same for TVs, it could be very very interesting.
Buddy, what is your deal? I have been reading your posts here and you seem to be on a singlehanded mission to convince the world that North Korea launching a busted-up old rocket is somehow the United States' fault. Your Occam's razor is dull and you may want to buy some more at the grocery store.
It's OK if you want to hate Americans. Lots of people all around the world do, and there are plenty of valid reasons to dislike many of the activities of the US government.
But please don't do it at the expense of trying to make North Korea look like saints or hapless victims of evil sanctions. The North Korean leadership is a nest of batshit crazy Stalinists, and evil to its people in a way that has not been seen on this planet since the Khmer Rouge. I know you will just claim that the National Geographic Society is just another mouthpiece of the CIA or whatever, but watch this and tell me honestly that the North Korean government gives a dead rat's ass about its citizens.
Hating Americans - well, I think that's overgeneralizing and a bit silly to say "all Americans are this or that," but hey, go ahead and do it if it floats your boat. Propping up the North Koreans - that's an insult to all the innocent people who suffer under that regime every day.
This exactly. It's a free market, and the market gets what it wants - cheap airfare. Too cheap, really - the airlines operate on razor-thin margins, can't pay their indirect costs (pensions, maintenance on aging airplanes) and keep going bankrupt to shed costs. The majority of us consumers get the cheap fares we want, but we pay the collateral cost of terrible service. (Southwest is the exception that proves the rule - they're always profitable, even on low fares, but have only a single aircraft fleet to maintain and are staunchly anti-union so they pay lower salaries/benefits. And I would argue that their service is still pretty crappy, even if they smile more while handing you the tiny bag of pretzels.)
This being a free market, you can pay more and get better service, by flying first class. But these days, the majority of flyers in the first class cabin (occasionally including me) are there because we're frequent flyers, not because we paid for it.So at least in the US, first class doesn't bring in enough revenue to justify the type of service you get in first class on Cathay, Lufthansa, etc.
So I think the bottom line is that the terrible quality of a flying experience in the US today is a direct result of the market getting what it wants. Everything else is an unintended but natural consequence.
This post is clearly extremely informative despite the fact that I did not understand any of it. But to the OP's question, though, what would some practical applications actually be?
the only guarantee any country can have of sovereignty, for some decades now, is nuclear capacity
I agree - every two-bit, four-bit or eight-bit nation state must pursue a nuclear program regardless of the cost in terms of international trade of humanitarian aid. The sovereignty of Canada, Australia, Mexico, Japan, Brazil and the rest of South America, most of Africa, all the Scandinavian countries and southern Europe, and Switzerland have been teetering daily on the brink for decades. How is it that these non-nuclear nations have not yet been annexed by the nuclear powers and overrun with McDonalds drive-throughs or Trabant factories? Or maybe bagel shops instead?
Okay, sorry if I misread your post. But what's the value of free fiber if nothing is connected to it? And how is that different than what happens today?
I used to live where Verizon had installed FiOS infrastructure (fiber) up to the NID on my house. However, I did not use any services from Verizon (Comcast for Internet, no home phone). So Verizon never charged me a dime for having run fiber to my house - it was in essence "free fiber for life."
My overall point is that the transport by itself is almost useless. What people want is cheap, superfast Internet and all a fiber deployment gets you is an extra trench in the yard with some glass in it. You need a provider, and nobody seems to be happy with those today so why would they be happy with their Internet service because they have a "free" fiber hookup to it now?
I've seen this referenced a few times on Slashdot but I have never seen an explanation of specifically how fiber was paid for and promised but never delivered. Do you have any links to good reviews of what this was and how it happened?
It's a good thing then that Internet bandwidth is all free and doesn't actually cost anything. Or infrastructure upgrades. Or tech support. Or spares and maintenance. Or customer service. Or... you know, all the things that make Internet service cost money.
Seriously, where do people get these ideas about what things should cost? Just because your Gmail is paid for by advertisers (it's not free!) you think that if Google is involved it somehow just magically becomes free to provide services?
The future is millions of amateur reporters who collectively do a better job of reporting the truth than the old line newspapers ever did... The future is [...] crowd-sourced news...
No. No it is not. It never ever will be.
To use your example from above, "think about the real people on the ground in Syria reporting the verifiable truth, and directly uploading it to Youtube." How is somebody's Youtube video verifiable truth? Just because you hear bullets in the background? OK, but who is shooting them? At whom? Why? In any conflict, you will get 50% of the "real people" uploading to Youtube saying the other guys started it and they're the villains... and the other 50% saying the opposite. Who is correct here, and how are you ever going to find that out by videotaping yourself on the street? Why should I expect that you have insight or information that other people don't? How do I know you're not making shit up about what's happening, and how are you held accountable for not speaking the truth? If I don't know you, why should I believe you instead of anyone else?
I love the idea of democratizing expression, and there is a role for the zillion citizens and their Youtube feeds out there. But you cannot have an informed citizenry without known persons or media sources who are willing to stand behind the truth of their reporting. Otherwise we have 7 billion "news" sources out there and no reasonable idea which to believe.
Crowd-sourced news as a source or supplement to "real" journalism? Invaluable. Crowd-sourced news as a replacement for professional journalism? A terrible, terrible, awful idea.
You know how news is, like, free on the Interwebs? It's because somebody (not you) is paying for actual, trained reporters to investigate issues and write things. In this case it's the media outlets who pay for and contribute content to AP/UPI/etc. This whole arrangement was created a century ago so that a newspaper in Cleveland for example wouldn't have to send a reporter to Washington DC for politics, to New York for financial news, etc. It was a collective action among these newspapers to share costs so they could offer their local readers with national/international news coverage while paying a fraction of the price. AP/UPI wire coverage news would be the same in every newspaper basically... but local readers (and advertisers!) would choose based on the quality of the stories and value a LOCAL newspaper provides to LOCAL readers. So far so good.
But then come the Interwebs. Newspapers are used to the ad-driven model so they figure they can still pay for their local reporters and AP/UPI content through a mix of paper subscriptions (and ad rates), then put their newspaper online for free. Not so much, since online ads pay a heck of a lot less than print ads do. And the classified ads and local advertising that have effectively subsidized the business of paying actual reporters for decades have largely vanished to Internet advertising houses like Google with better localization algorithms and more pervasive user tracking. So what you end up with is newspapers trying to pay for the old style of journalism with a mix of declining print revenues (which could pay the bills) and online revenues (which aren't enough to pay the bills).
Far more damaging to newspapers: businesses like Breitbart, NewsMax, etc. that do no original reporting themselves (or at least none of value) just pay the wire service fees and are actually able to squeak by on online ad revenues, unlike the newspapers that pay for actual reporters and contribute net new content. End result: nearly all newspapers are in decline, and many if not most will go down the drain. So eventually there will be just one or two syndicated wire services and every news outlet will reprint exactly the same content, and the market for local investigative journalism will pretty much dry up since the AP wouldn't pay a reporter to spend three months exposing local corruption in the Fargo North Dakota mayor's office... whereas a Fargo newspaper might, if there still were one.
The kinda sorta flip side is that quality newspapers (or blogs or whatever) will win... once there is no "free lunch" on news, pretty much all news will have to be for-pay again. That will suck for those of us who currently don't pay for news, but the surviving outlets will have to distinguish themselves on the quality of their local or specialty reporting. Personally, I read the Washington Post online each day for free but probably wouldn't pay for it... I do however pay for a subscription to The Economist that I read on my Kindle (and throw out the weekly paper version). Maybe this is good in that in the future - after free commoditized news is dead - all news outlets will need to make their content good enough for users to be willing to pay for.
P.S. Please do not give me this "we don't need reporters or LAMESTREAM MEDIA anymore because of bloggers" BS because the world needs organizations that will actually vouch for the work of their reporters (against the threat of expensive libel suits) and provide some seal of QA on the veracity of reportage. Imagine a world where the only sources of news are a million different jackass versions of The Drudge Report or The Huffington Post... except with no "real" news to link to.
equipping our police with surplus military gear (including combat-ready heavy assault tanks), and reading about government agencies like the Social Security administration purchasing hollow point bullets by the ton
[citation needed]
I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely interested. Please don't say "Google it!" Can you show me a link to any non batshit crazy source with reliable information confirming the above two items? Because if so then I will be much more concerned about my country than I ever have before, and I'm sure many others will too.
Sales figures measure popularity and little more. You need to look at the big picture.
Yes... but back to my original question. What numbers are available to tell the big picture?
If there aren't any, then the "big picture" is invisible because there is no way to reasonably construct it. Everything except the sales numbers are speculation.
Not trolling, genuinely curious... what statistics (i.e. actual numbers with verifiable sources) do you have that are a better representation than sales figures? Or can be quantifiably used to meaningfully modify the value of sales figures? I agree that those sales figures sound incomplete but unless there are other "real" numbers out there, how do we know whether they're only marginally inaccurate or way off base?
This reminds me of a story. In 2003, I was at a family gathering with my brother, father and grandfather - all of whom served in the military (unlike me, though not for any lack of respect for military service). The topic of war came up as it was then pending with Iraq.
My brother - who would be expected to go fight the war if it happened - said basically, "I don't want to go fight but if Iraq won't back down I understand we have to." My dad - who fought in Vietnam - said in essence, "if they force us to fight, we should." Then my grandfather chimed in. A decorated WW2 veteran bomber pilot, I might have expected him to be the most hard-line and belligerent of the family.
Instead, he said, "You never start a war. Period. If you start the war, you are not the good guy." While his viewpoint might seem almost naive to some - I'm sure Neville Chamberlain said the same thing - it struck me as a great reminder of the attitude of when the US had an unassailable moral compass. I wish more people thought like my grandfather.
To be fair, I do know that his attitude was redolent of a time prior to ICBMs, cyberwar and global strike capabilities when the US could afford to be attacked first. Just as the Israelis in the Six Day War were unquestionably the aggressors but not unquestionably wrong, I admit there are times when being the aggressor may make sense. But all in all, I do badly miss America having the moral clarity that my grandfather's generation did in the first two World Wars, and I hope that someday my country - which I love - makes its way back to that position of moral strength.
This is the price of allowing 10,000 independent journalistic voices to be consolidated into 2 or 4 mega-media-conglomerates
The problem with this thesis is that you DO have 10,000 voices out there, in fact many more - it's called the Internet, and there are no shortage of outlets for people to make their voices heard. (Most of them are not even remotely "journalistic," but that's a different issue.) There are a few scarily large media mega-conglomerates out there today as you point out. But doing actual polling, research and man-on-the-street interviewing is very time and money/resource intensive, so there only going to be a few organizations out there that can afford to do this work anyway.
So even if there were ten thousand independent Real Journalism outlets out there, the East Kenosha Advertiser-Bee and the Bloom County Beacon are not going to be doing independent national election polling or adding substantive new data to the discussion... they will only be repeating the numbers from the few Big Guys, which is what all the 10,000 bloggers are doing anyway.
As to your other points about nobody reporting the "FAKE" economy, impending apocalypse, naked emperors and such, I humbly submit that there are many like-minded souls with your same beliefs on the aforementioned Internet. You may wish to subscribe to their newsletters. If the "mainstream media" is not reporting these topics, it may be because they do not honestly see them as existing in the same way you do, and the majority of Internet-literate news consumers - who are free to visit any of those 10,000 websites for their news and commentary - would appear to agree.
You can disable the camera using the Enterprise management features.
Unfortunately, that won't work for most of the users that need camera-less phones. You may know your camera is disabled, and your administrator may know the camera is disabled... but how do you convince the security guard at the Federal courthouse of that? Or the person guarding entry to the SCIF, or the restricted NOC, or the other [insert camera-barred facility here]? That's why companies ask for phones with no camera at all, so it can be verified at a glance.
When the market is saying "This is the best company to ever exist!", start selling.
There's a risk to that, too. I did exactly what you describe and sold most of my Apple shares back when I started thinking that investors were overhyping the stock. That was at around $185/share. It seems I missed out on just a little bit of money that way.
The bottom line of the stock market is that professional investors will throw money at anything that is growing its revenues/profit, and run away from anything that's shrinking - regardless of the health of their balance sheet. If you can pick who's going to grow a lot, and who's done growing, then you will do just fine in the stock market. Avoid everything in the middle, since that's wholly unpredictable and more or less just an exercise in chaos theory with some game theory thrown in for fun.
Why aren't they polling well? I expect it's because they cannot get media coverage for love nor money.
Why isn't MeeGo taking over the world of smartphones? I expect it's because the media gives all the coverage to Android and iOS.
Why isn't Neal Stephenson taking over the world of literature? I expect it's because the media gives all the coverage to Jennifer Weiner and Michael Chabon.
Why isn't my favorite Norwegian speed metal band taking over the world of popular music? I expect it's because the media gives all the coverage to Justin Bieber and Rihanna.
Why isn't Hurd taking over the world of PC operating systems? I expect it's because the media gives all the coverage to Windows and OS X.
...or maybe... just maybe... some things are simply not as popular as others. It's not that evil, awful "mainstream media" that's at fault, it's that some things just are not what the vast majority of people are looking for.
And "the media" is going to report - shock horror - on the things people are actually interested in. I know it's a "chicken and the egg" scenario, and some things that deserve to be popular aren't... but especially in the Internet age, well, let me put it this way: if "Gangnam Style" can gather tens of millions of hits, if your idea is good enough and well presented on the Internet, there's no excuse for saying "I'm not popular because nobody knows about me!"
Don't get me wrong, I agree that including some 3rd party candidates would have made this a MUCH more interesting debate... it would have been great! But there are dozens if not hundreds of small-base candidates out there, and the debate organizers wanted to give as much of a limited time as possible to the candidates voters collectively were most interested in. If a line had to drawn in where to include or not include candidates, ">40% of the US voting population vs. <3%" seems like a reasonable place to draw the line.
P.S. - just so you know, you can ALWAYS get coverage if you have enough money! You just buy your own TV commercials, newspaper ads, web banners, etc. "Love" - meh, not so much.
now [Linux is] used in probably a billion devices around the globe... phones
I hope you aren't talking about Android here. Android should no more count towards "Linux" marketshare than OS X should count towards "BSD Unix" marketshare. It's in there all right, but all the parts that make it what people want to use are put on top by somebody else.
that's the thing.. running it successfully doesn't seem to have been much of a chore - BUT everything he's gotten involved and has grown with dollar spending has lost ms money over the last 10 years.
Spot on, I think. But to give the devil his due, very very few large companies are able to reinvent themselves such that they are able to continue their dominance of one technical field or era into another. (Apple of course being the most obvious exception, but one also that proves what kind of exceptional visionary CEO you have to have to pull it off.)
Microsoft has continued to be good at what it did in the PC era, and has more or less flopped at everything they've tried to branch out into after that. (An argument can be made that the Xbox is an exception to this.) Keeping the existing businesses humming but trying and failing at the much harder task of dominating new markets is the kind of thing you probably give a "C" grade to for a CEO. I think you reserve the "D" and "F" grades for the CEOs who actually take their successful business down the tubes as well.
I prefer living in a country that wastes money trying to find non-lethal weapons that don't work out vs. countries that take the cost-effective, pragmatic approach of "f**k em, bullets are nice and cheap."
There are plenty of reasons to criticize the US Department of Defense, no question. But the fact that they are spending money on non-lethal weapons means they at least care about a future war where not everyone has to get killed. Or even if you want to indulge your most Reynolds-wrapped tinfoil-clad conspiracy theories, a future where US domestic political protestors don't meet the same fate as those in the Prague Spring, Tienanmen Square or Syria.
gov should protect us and our rights from the ignorant masses...not pander to them.
Sorry, pal. That's called "democracy" and it cuts both ways - the majority gets what it wants; sometimes that's you, sometimes it's not. There's a reason that they say democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the other ones.
Because more people using desktop Linux helps you out too. Commercial hardware and software vendors follow the money, and the money follows the users. Greater installed base/market share for desktop Linux means more drivers and compatible peripherals; more commercial software and games to choose from; and more PCs with Linux preinstalled.
More users creates a virtuous circle (e.g. increased end user demand and availability of corporate standard software like MS Office results in more corporate IT depts allowing it on desktops, introducing more users to it, driving more commerical software development, driving increased user demand...), just as losing marketshare creates a vicious cycle. Just ask Apple about the former this decade and the latter in the late '90s...
Slashdot Mirror
Snark if you want, but as someone who worked in the industry at the time I can tell you when Apple first showed off the iPhone in January 2007 it changed damn near everything (or at least it did when the other OEMs and carriers realized to their horror that people were actually buying the damned things). Full touchscreen-based UI, functional web browser, no carrier software deck and WAP store, real music player functionality and good video viewing, multitouch, visual voicemail ... It all seems old hat now but if you don't remember what it was like, go pick up a contemporary BlackBerry or Windows Mobile 6 phone and tell me if it doesn't just beat the shit out of it in terms of usability.
you can hate Apple for what they have become, but you cannot dismiss how that original iPhone changed the wireless landscape. If they can do the same for TVs, it could be very very interesting.
Buddy, what is your deal? I have been reading your posts here and you seem to be on a singlehanded mission to convince the world that North Korea launching a busted-up old rocket is somehow the United States' fault. Your Occam's razor is dull and you may want to buy some more at the grocery store.
It's OK if you want to hate Americans. Lots of people all around the world do, and there are plenty of valid reasons to dislike many of the activities of the US government.
But please don't do it at the expense of trying to make North Korea look like saints or hapless victims of evil sanctions. The North Korean leadership is a nest of batshit crazy Stalinists, and evil to its people in a way that has not been seen on this planet since the Khmer Rouge. I know you will just claim that the National Geographic Society is just another mouthpiece of the CIA or whatever, but watch this and tell me honestly that the North Korean government gives a dead rat's ass about its citizens.
Hating Americans - well, I think that's overgeneralizing and a bit silly to say "all Americans are this or that," but hey, go ahead and do it if it floats your boat. Propping up the North Koreans - that's an insult to all the innocent people who suffer under that regime every day.
Air flight in the US is too cheap.
This exactly. It's a free market, and the market gets what it wants - cheap airfare. Too cheap, really - the airlines operate on razor-thin margins, can't pay their indirect costs (pensions, maintenance on aging airplanes) and keep going bankrupt to shed costs. The majority of us consumers get the cheap fares we want, but we pay the collateral cost of terrible service. (Southwest is the exception that proves the rule - they're always profitable, even on low fares, but have only a single aircraft fleet to maintain and are staunchly anti-union so they pay lower salaries/benefits. And I would argue that their service is still pretty crappy, even if they smile more while handing you the tiny bag of pretzels.)
This being a free market, you can pay more and get better service, by flying first class. But these days, the majority of flyers in the first class cabin (occasionally including me) are there because we're frequent flyers, not because we paid for it.So at least in the US, first class doesn't bring in enough revenue to justify the type of service you get in first class on Cathay, Lufthansa, etc.
So I think the bottom line is that the terrible quality of a flying experience in the US today is a direct result of the market getting what it wants. Everything else is an unintended but natural consequence.
This post is clearly extremely informative despite the fact that I did not understand any of it. But to the OP's question, though, what would some practical applications actually be?
the only guarantee any country can have of sovereignty, for some decades now, is nuclear capacity
I agree - every two-bit, four-bit or eight-bit nation state must pursue a nuclear program regardless of the cost in terms of international trade of humanitarian aid. The sovereignty of Canada, Australia, Mexico, Japan, Brazil and the rest of South America, most of Africa, all the Scandinavian countries and southern Europe, and Switzerland have been teetering daily on the brink for decades. How is it that these non-nuclear nations have not yet been annexed by the nuclear powers and overrun with McDonalds drive-throughs or Trabant factories? Or maybe bagel shops instead?
Okay, sorry if I misread your post. But what's the value of free fiber if nothing is connected to it? And how is that different than what happens today?
I used to live where Verizon had installed FiOS infrastructure (fiber) up to the NID on my house. However, I did not use any services from Verizon (Comcast for Internet, no home phone). So Verizon never charged me a dime for having run fiber to my house - it was in essence "free fiber for life."
My overall point is that the transport by itself is almost useless. What people want is cheap, superfast Internet and all a fiber deployment gets you is an extra trench in the yard with some glass in it. You need a provider, and nobody seems to be happy with those today so why would they be happy with their Internet service because they have a "free" fiber hookup to it now?
We paid for the fiber to homes back in the 90's
I've seen this referenced a few times on Slashdot but I have never seen an explanation of specifically how fiber was paid for and promised but never delivered. Do you have any links to good reviews of what this was and how it happened?
then free for life
It's a good thing then that Internet bandwidth is all free and doesn't actually cost anything. Or infrastructure upgrades. Or tech support. Or spares and maintenance. Or customer service. Or... you know, all the things that make Internet service cost money.
Seriously, where do people get these ideas about what things should cost? Just because your Gmail is paid for by advertisers (it's not free!) you think that if Google is involved it somehow just magically becomes free to provide services?
The future is millions of amateur reporters who collectively do a better job of reporting the truth than the old line newspapers ever did... The future is [...] crowd-sourced news...
No. No it is not. It never ever will be.
To use your example from above, "think about the real people on the ground in Syria reporting the verifiable truth, and directly uploading it to Youtube." How is somebody's Youtube video verifiable truth? Just because you hear bullets in the background? OK, but who is shooting them? At whom? Why? In any conflict, you will get 50% of the "real people" uploading to Youtube saying the other guys started it and they're the villains... and the other 50% saying the opposite. Who is correct here, and how are you ever going to find that out by videotaping yourself on the street? Why should I expect that you have insight or information that other people don't? How do I know you're not making shit up about what's happening, and how are you held accountable for not speaking the truth? If I don't know you, why should I believe you instead of anyone else?
I love the idea of democratizing expression, and there is a role for the zillion citizens and their Youtube feeds out there. But you cannot have an informed citizenry without known persons or media sources who are willing to stand behind the truth of their reporting. Otherwise we have 7 billion "news" sources out there and no reasonable idea which to believe.
Crowd-sourced news as a source or supplement to "real" journalism? Invaluable. Crowd-sourced news as a replacement for professional journalism? A terrible, terrible, awful idea.
Winners: trees. Losers: senile billionaires.
Also losers: the American public.
You know how news is, like, free on the Interwebs? It's because somebody (not you) is paying for actual, trained reporters to investigate issues and write things. In this case it's the media outlets who pay for and contribute content to AP/UPI/etc. This whole arrangement was created a century ago so that a newspaper in Cleveland for example wouldn't have to send a reporter to Washington DC for politics, to New York for financial news, etc. It was a collective action among these newspapers to share costs so they could offer their local readers with national/international news coverage while paying a fraction of the price. AP/UPI wire coverage news would be the same in every newspaper basically... but local readers (and advertisers!) would choose based on the quality of the stories and value a LOCAL newspaper provides to LOCAL readers. So far so good.
But then come the Interwebs. Newspapers are used to the ad-driven model so they figure they can still pay for their local reporters and AP/UPI content through a mix of paper subscriptions (and ad rates), then put their newspaper online for free. Not so much, since online ads pay a heck of a lot less than print ads do. And the classified ads and local advertising that have effectively subsidized the business of paying actual reporters for decades have largely vanished to Internet advertising houses like Google with better localization algorithms and more pervasive user tracking. So what you end up with is newspapers trying to pay for the old style of journalism with a mix of declining print revenues (which could pay the bills) and online revenues (which aren't enough to pay the bills).
Far more damaging to newspapers: businesses like Breitbart, NewsMax, etc. that do no original reporting themselves (or at least none of value) just pay the wire service fees and are actually able to squeak by on online ad revenues, unlike the newspapers that pay for actual reporters and contribute net new content. End result: nearly all newspapers are in decline, and many if not most will go down the drain. So eventually there will be just one or two syndicated wire services and every news outlet will reprint exactly the same content, and the market for local investigative journalism will pretty much dry up since the AP wouldn't pay a reporter to spend three months exposing local corruption in the Fargo North Dakota mayor's office... whereas a Fargo newspaper might, if there still were one.
The kinda sorta flip side is that quality newspapers (or blogs or whatever) will win... once there is no "free lunch" on news, pretty much all news will have to be for-pay again. That will suck for those of us who currently don't pay for news, but the surviving outlets will have to distinguish themselves on the quality of their local or specialty reporting. Personally, I read the Washington Post online each day for free but probably wouldn't pay for it... I do however pay for a subscription to The Economist that I read on my Kindle (and throw out the weekly paper version). Maybe this is good in that in the future - after free commoditized news is dead - all news outlets will need to make their content good enough for users to be willing to pay for.
P.S. Please do not give me this "we don't need reporters or LAMESTREAM MEDIA anymore because of bloggers" BS because the world needs organizations that will actually vouch for the work of their reporters (against the threat of expensive libel suits) and provide some seal of QA on the veracity of reportage. Imagine a world where the only sources of news are a million different jackass versions of The Drudge Report or The Huffington Post... except with no "real" news to link to.
equipping our police with surplus military gear (including combat-ready heavy assault tanks), and reading about government agencies like the Social Security administration purchasing hollow point bullets by the ton
[citation needed]
I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely interested. Please don't say "Google it!" Can you show me a link to any non batshit crazy source with reliable information confirming the above two items? Because if so then I will be much more concerned about my country than I ever have before, and I'm sure many others will too.
Sales figures measure popularity and little more. You need to look at the big picture.
Yes... but back to my original question. What numbers are available to tell the big picture?
If there aren't any, then the "big picture" is invisible because there is no way to reasonably construct it. Everything except the sales numbers are speculation.
Sales figures alone are meaningless.
Not trolling, genuinely curious... what statistics (i.e. actual numbers with verifiable sources) do you have that are a better representation than sales figures? Or can be quantifiably used to meaningfully modify the value of sales figures? I agree that those sales figures sound incomplete but unless there are other "real" numbers out there, how do we know whether they're only marginally inaccurate or way off base?
This reminds me of a story. In 2003, I was at a family gathering with my brother, father and grandfather - all of whom served in the military (unlike me, though not for any lack of respect for military service). The topic of war came up as it was then pending with Iraq.
My brother - who would be expected to go fight the war if it happened - said basically, "I don't want to go fight but if Iraq won't back down I understand we have to." My dad - who fought in Vietnam - said in essence, "if they force us to fight, we should." Then my grandfather chimed in. A decorated WW2 veteran bomber pilot, I might have expected him to be the most hard-line and belligerent of the family.
Instead, he said, "You never start a war. Period. If you start the war, you are not the good guy." While his viewpoint might seem almost naive to some - I'm sure Neville Chamberlain said the same thing - it struck me as a great reminder of the attitude of when the US had an unassailable moral compass. I wish more people thought like my grandfather.
To be fair, I do know that his attitude was redolent of a time prior to ICBMs, cyberwar and global strike capabilities when the US could afford to be attacked first. Just as the Israelis in the Six Day War were unquestionably the aggressors but not unquestionably wrong, I admit there are times when being the aggressor may make sense. But all in all, I do badly miss America having the moral clarity that my grandfather's generation did in the first two World Wars, and I hope that someday my country - which I love - makes its way back to that position of moral strength.
This is the price of allowing 10,000 independent journalistic voices to be consolidated into 2 or 4 mega-media-conglomerates
The problem with this thesis is that you DO have 10,000 voices out there, in fact many more - it's called the Internet, and there are no shortage of outlets for people to make their voices heard. (Most of them are not even remotely "journalistic," but that's a different issue.) There are a few scarily large media mega-conglomerates out there today as you point out. But doing actual polling, research and man-on-the-street interviewing is very time and money/resource intensive, so there only going to be a few organizations out there that can afford to do this work anyway.
So even if there were ten thousand independent Real Journalism outlets out there, the East Kenosha Advertiser-Bee and the Bloom County Beacon are not going to be doing independent national election polling or adding substantive new data to the discussion... they will only be repeating the numbers from the few Big Guys, which is what all the 10,000 bloggers are doing anyway.
As to your other points about nobody reporting the "FAKE" economy, impending apocalypse, naked emperors and such, I humbly submit that there are many like-minded souls with your same beliefs on the aforementioned Internet. You may wish to subscribe to their newsletters. If the "mainstream media" is not reporting these topics, it may be because they do not honestly see them as existing in the same way you do, and the majority of Internet-literate news consumers - who are free to visit any of those 10,000 websites for their news and commentary - would appear to agree.
I would love to see Google block Apple from their search results and all of their services, but we both know that's not going to happen.
Umm... isn't that the exact same behavior we all hate Microsoft for having done? But if Google did it, well that would be OK?
You can disable the camera using the Enterprise management features.
Unfortunately, that won't work for most of the users that need camera-less phones. You may know your camera is disabled, and your administrator may know the camera is disabled... but how do you convince the security guard at the Federal courthouse of that? Or the person guarding entry to the SCIF, or the restricted NOC, or the other [insert camera-barred facility here]? That's why companies ask for phones with no camera at all, so it can be verified at a glance.
I left my BlackBerry on the dashboard of my car the other day. Some bastard broke into the car and left three more BlackBerries there.
When the market is saying "This is the best company to ever exist!", start selling.
There's a risk to that, too. I did exactly what you describe and sold most of my Apple shares back when I started thinking that investors were overhyping the stock. That was at around $185/share. It seems I missed out on just a little bit of money that way.
The bottom line of the stock market is that professional investors will throw money at anything that is growing its revenues/profit, and run away from anything that's shrinking - regardless of the health of their balance sheet. If you can pick who's going to grow a lot, and who's done growing, then you will do just fine in the stock market. Avoid everything in the middle, since that's wholly unpredictable and more or less just an exercise in chaos theory with some game theory thrown in for fun.
Why aren't they polling well? I expect it's because they cannot get media coverage for love nor money.
...or maybe ... just maybe ... some things are simply not as popular as others. It's not that evil, awful "mainstream media" that's at fault, it's that some things just are not what the vast majority of people are looking for.
And "the media" is going to report - shock horror - on the things people are actually interested in. I know it's a "chicken and the egg" scenario, and some things that deserve to be popular aren't ... but especially in the Internet age, well, let me put it this way: if "Gangnam Style" can gather tens of millions of hits, if your idea is good enough and well presented on the Internet, there's no excuse for saying "I'm not popular because nobody knows about me!"
Don't get me wrong, I agree that including some 3rd party candidates would have made this a MUCH more interesting debate... it would have been great! But there are dozens if not hundreds of small-base candidates out there, and the debate organizers wanted to give as much of a limited time as possible to the candidates voters collectively were most interested in. If a line had to drawn in where to include or not include candidates, ">40% of the US voting population vs. <3%" seems like a reasonable place to draw the line.
P.S. - just so you know, you can ALWAYS get coverage if you have enough money! You just buy your own TV commercials, newspaper ads, web banners, etc. "Love" - meh, not so much.
now [Linux is] used in probably a billion devices around the globe ... phones
I hope you aren't talking about Android here. Android should no more count towards "Linux" marketshare than OS X should count towards "BSD Unix" marketshare. It's in there all right, but all the parts that make it what people want to use are put on top by somebody else.
that's the thing.. running it successfully doesn't seem to have been much of a chore - BUT everything he's gotten involved and has grown with dollar spending has lost ms money over the last 10 years.
Spot on, I think. But to give the devil his due, very very few large companies are able to reinvent themselves such that they are able to continue their dominance of one technical field or era into another. (Apple of course being the most obvious exception, but one also that proves what kind of exceptional visionary CEO you have to have to pull it off.)
Microsoft has continued to be good at what it did in the PC era, and has more or less flopped at everything they've tried to branch out into after that. (An argument can be made that the Xbox is an exception to this.) Keeping the existing businesses humming but trying and failing at the much harder task of dominating new markets is the kind of thing you probably give a "C" grade to for a CEO. I think you reserve the "D" and "F" grades for the CEOs who actually take their successful business down the tubes as well.
No new weapons? What a tragedy.
I prefer living in a country that wastes money trying to find non-lethal weapons that don't work out vs. countries that take the cost-effective, pragmatic approach of "f**k em, bullets are nice and cheap."
There are plenty of reasons to criticize the US Department of Defense, no question. But the fact that they are spending money on non-lethal weapons means they at least care about a future war where not everyone has to get killed. Or even if you want to indulge your most Reynolds-wrapped tinfoil-clad conspiracy theories, a future where US domestic political protestors don't meet the same fate as those in the Prague Spring, Tienanmen Square or Syria.
gov should protect us and our rights from the ignorant masses...not pander to them.
Sorry, pal. That's called "democracy" and it cuts both ways - the majority gets what it wants; sometimes that's you, sometimes it's not. There's a reason that they say democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the other ones.
why should a user help spreading the project?
Because more people using desktop Linux helps you out too. Commercial hardware and software vendors follow the money, and the money follows the users. Greater installed base/market share for desktop Linux means more drivers and compatible peripherals; more commercial software and games to choose from; and more PCs with Linux preinstalled.
More users creates a virtuous circle (e.g. increased end user demand and availability of corporate standard software like MS Office results in more corporate IT depts allowing it on desktops, introducing more users to it, driving more commerical software development, driving increased user demand...), just as losing marketshare creates a vicious cycle. Just ask Apple about the former this decade and the latter in the late '90s...