I don't mean anything too dramatic, something like a 5% VAT with a credit for 30k/person (paid as a check, or done as a credit in tax season) would only amount to $1500/person. It's not charity, it's a progressive tax.
The VAT has the benefit of encouraging locally produced stuff (by taxing foreign companies that sell here the same as local companies that sell here, and not taxing local companies that export, the Corporate Income Tax is bad, because it does the opposite). Once the system is in place things can be adjusted when/if technology brings a cornucopia.
If families received $3000 (2 adults) up front every year it would allow for some micro entrepreneurship too ($3000 goes a long way towards a small grass cutting business for example). It's not really about welfare initially, but it builds a system that it can exist, and increases revenue in a non-regressive way that is less harmful to the economy than other taxes. It is a slight redistribution of income, but it's generally accepted in the US that a slight redistribution is OK to do with taxes (I am not intending to argue the right or wrong of that, it's to dogmatic and there is no right or wrong answer).
I also think the "jobless recovery" has a lot to do with basic computing skills becoming omnipresent, and the efficiency they provide hitting. It's good in the long-run, even though it really really sucks for 10%-20% of the population (the 10% not getting work, and their families). It's a similar situation to the industrial revolution in the loss of work due to efficiency.
As for the actual article, DUH computers took more jobs than they created, they wouldn't be used in business if they didn't.
The only effective HIV treatment that exists right now required government intervention, as it involves three companies patents.
I am sure there are other situations where this is the case, but the profile of the ailment is not high enough for intervention. But, it's not as bad as software, because many medicines are a single chemical, while software is a lot of parts put together, with the whole being better than the sum of the parts.
Lots of problems, but it all turns out in a generation or three.
I do think policy should start to look towards that future, with slow reduction of intellectual property, and a ramping up of a basic income guarantee (in the form of a refundable tax credit against a VAT).
Baby steps that could help now (VAT being the least destructive tax on the economy according to many, and more taxes are needed in the US it seems), and make the transition easier.
I don't know what their gross margin is, but even if it's 100% they'll need to sell 5000 of these things. Or twice as many as Tesla has manufactured (there goes the argument about small runs).
Rolls Royce sells about 1000 cars/year, I think think company is going to flop.
As for outsourcing, I'm willing to be they grabbed money from the Finnish government too.
They look as similar to me as the iPhone and Nexus One (the one Steve appears to have complained about based on timing), or the iPhone and G1.
More importantly, the idea of touch only/primarily, with a big screen appears to be a general market trend, not an Apple invention (I believe this is where the iPhone was relatively new to the general population).
The only vendor UI I've used that I have any love for is Sense. I eventually ditched it on my G2 in exchange for Gingerbread (switching from Visionary to CM7 ROM), but miss a few things from sense. I particularly liked the contact linking, their dialer, and the look of their clock/weather applets.
All the other custom UIs I've seen are worse than stock in every way, and tend to slow down upgrades of the OS. It's a shame everyone is trying to differentiate them-self with software rather than hardware and price.
I really like the left-hand vertical menu on my HTPC too (well about 90% of the time).
I imagine it has problems on dual screen setups though.
I don't like the way it crams stuff at the bottom, but then uncrams it in an animation immediately, that stuff is at no point recognizable, it's just unnecessary movement.
My biggest issue with Unity is I find myself using the keyboard shortcuts a lot, because the left hand bar is not so hot with large groups of Windows IMO (Windows 7 handles browsing through a large group of windows for a single task in the task-bar better than any other for my personal way of interacting).
It also has very limited space for tasks/launchers on by 720P TV.
I have in my house (three residents) 3 phones, 3 cameras, 5 computers, tv, 2 Bluetooth headsets (off the top of my head).
This is a quick estimation, I'm sure there are more. If we count peripherals as devices (and why wouldn't we, it actually makes more sense in the context pf the article) it is an easy 10 billion. Think of how many USB keyboards, and mice have been sold over the last ten years.
Ten billion is only 13/person for the EU and the US, certainly more than that have been sold over the years, thought many are probably in the landfills.
Both Borders and B&N had a firesale of computer books years ago.
It is an impossible thing to have a profitable inventory of locally, too many very narrow topics, much better suited for online sale. Unlike most books, computer books spoil.
Indeed, I remember reading a quote by the Borders CEO around 2000, she essentially said "We sell lots and lots of books, like tons of them, we don't need a website, we're happy to have a branded Amazon site without wasting money"
While Barns and Noble was shoveling money into their site.
B & N had a terrible selection of what I was interested in (primarily Vertigo stuff), which often compilations 1,4,5,6,7 or some such (often with 2 or three copies of some). It was a terrible place to find anything except the most recent random Sandman book.
Always better to just go to the comic book shop where they had one copy of everything.
CCK and Views gives it A LOT of flexibility one does not have in other CMS's.
You can make a content type of "photos", with a field for an image, caption,some tagging, etc.
And then in one area display links to galleries based on various fields put in. You can insert it into an article with a caption.
The ability to make an item contain all relevant info about itself, and display only the parts you want in various contexts is quite powerful.
If I was making a simple site with blog I would use Wordpress, but there are times where having articles pegged to locations and dates allows for some interesting things (map and calendar, without too much effort the two could be overlaid, giving pins on a map withing a date range, each pin linking to an article, or a photo, or whatever you feel like.
It wwas in the browser cache, so you are fine (it didn't infect anywhere else, and UAC makes sure it doesn't have the privledge to hide from your virus software).
If you visted the same site with out of date software, there would be a chance of infectio, but most likely the security essentials + uac would prevent it.
I first used Linux on a 486 with 66MHz 16 MiB RAM, and it sucked, I would never accept that level of performance on my phone.
I never had a 266MHz, but I had a 233, and a 450, and used Netscape on both, and it sucked. If my phone browser ran comparably to that (as in a few times better), I would be very disappointed.
Computers used to be slow, and the expectations from a phone are much much higher. I want my browser to open like Chrome on my 3GHz computer, not like Netscape on a 486 or a Pentium.
As for the smartphones, you're not the target. The phone part is the least useful feature of my pocket computer, but I am happy to have it.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't mean anything too dramatic, something like a 5% VAT with a credit for 30k/person (paid as a check, or done as a credit in tax season) would only amount to $1500/person. It's not charity, it's a progressive tax.
The VAT has the benefit of encouraging locally produced stuff (by taxing foreign companies that sell here the same as local companies that sell here, and not taxing local companies that export, the Corporate Income Tax is bad, because it does the opposite). Once the system is in place things can be adjusted when/if technology brings a cornucopia.
If families received $3000 (2 adults) up front every year it would allow for some micro entrepreneurship too ($3000 goes a long way towards a small grass cutting business for example). It's not really about welfare initially, but it builds a system that it can exist, and increases revenue in a non-regressive way that is less harmful to the economy than other taxes. It is a slight redistribution of income, but it's generally accepted in the US that a slight redistribution is OK to do with taxes (I am not intending to argue the right or wrong of that, it's to dogmatic and there is no right or wrong answer).
I also think the "jobless recovery" has a lot to do with basic computing skills becoming omnipresent, and the efficiency they provide hitting. It's good in the long-run, even though it really really sucks for 10%-20% of the population (the 10% not getting work, and their families). It's a similar situation to the industrial revolution in the loss of work due to efficiency.
As for the actual article, DUH computers took more jobs than they created, they wouldn't be used in business if they didn't.
It does happen, and it holds medicine back.
The only effective HIV treatment that exists right now required government intervention, as it involves three companies patents.
I am sure there are other situations where this is the case, but the profile of the ailment is not high enough for intervention. But, it's not as bad as software, because many medicines are a single chemical, while software is a lot of parts put together, with the whole being better than the sum of the parts.
Look at the industrial revolution.
Lots of problems, but it all turns out in a generation or three.
I do think policy should start to look towards that future, with slow reduction of intellectual property, and a ramping up of a basic income guarantee (in the form of a refundable tax credit against a VAT).
Baby steps that could help now (VAT being the least destructive tax on the economy according to many, and more taxes are needed in the US it seems), and make the transition easier.
I doubt it will.
I don't know what their gross margin is, but even if it's 100% they'll need to sell 5000 of these things. Or twice as many as Tesla has manufactured (there goes the argument about small runs).
Rolls Royce sells about 1000 cars/year, I think think company is going to flop.
As for outsourcing, I'm willing to be they grabbed money from the Finnish government too.
They look as similar to me as the iPhone and Nexus One (the one Steve appears to have complained about based on timing), or the iPhone and G1.
More importantly, the idea of touch only/primarily, with a big screen appears to be a general market trend, not an Apple invention (I believe this is where the iPhone was relatively new to the general population).
Open Moko was doing it too.
The only vendor UI I've used that I have any love for is Sense. I eventually ditched it on my G2 in exchange for Gingerbread (switching from Visionary to CM7 ROM), but miss a few things from sense. I particularly liked the contact linking, their dialer, and the look of their clock/weather applets.
All the other custom UIs I've seen are worse than stock in every way, and tend to slow down upgrades of the OS. It's a shame everyone is trying to differentiate them-self with software rather than hardware and price.
My understanding is a lot of these systems look at depth of focus and use a video stream to establish some level of dementionality.
I think "media company" can work actually, but they aren't really.
Jelly
I really like the left-hand vertical menu on my HTPC too (well about 90% of the time).
I imagine it has problems on dual screen setups though.
I don't like the way it crams stuff at the bottom, but then uncrams it in an animation immediately, that stuff is at no point recognizable, it's just unnecessary movement.
My biggest issue with Unity is I find myself using the keyboard shortcuts a lot, because the left hand bar is not so hot with large groups of Windows IMO (Windows 7 handles browsing through a large group of windows for a single task in the task-bar better than any other for my personal way of interacting).
It also has very limited space for tasks/launchers on by 720P TV.
In America too
I just don't think it's a clear cut right or wrong, you want your phone to not be off when you turn it off, and I want mine off.
Though the dead battery working adds a new level that makes it more awesome.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcosmus
Though I agree, similar to the Kraken of Legend is probably more appropriate.
Why would I want it to work if I powered the phone is off?
I don't want my alarm clock to work if I power it off either, that's why I power it off.
I have in my house (three residents) 3 phones, 3 cameras, 5 computers, tv, 2 Bluetooth headsets (off the top of my head).
This is a quick estimation, I'm sure there are more. If we count peripherals as devices (and why wouldn't we, it actually makes more sense in the context pf the article) it is an easy 10 billion. Think of how many USB keyboards, and mice have been sold over the last ten years.
Ten billion is only 13/person for the EU and the US, certainly more than that have been sold over the years, thought many are probably in the landfills.
It happened in networking too, with faster and faster ethernet being good enough, and cheap.
The in-state part probably helps keep it in the hands of people that need it more too.
Both Borders and B&N had a firesale of computer books years ago.
It is an impossible thing to have a profitable inventory of locally, too many very narrow topics, much better suited for online sale. Unlike most books, computer books spoil.
Indeed, I remember reading a quote by the Borders CEO around 2000, she essentially said "We sell lots and lots of books, like tons of them, we don't need a website, we're happy to have a branded Amazon site without wasting money"
While Barns and Noble was shoveling money into their site.
Only one is around now.
B & N had a terrible selection of what I was interested in (primarily Vertigo stuff), which often compilations 1,4,5,6,7 or some such (often with 2 or three copies of some). It was a terrible place to find anything except the most recent random Sandman book.
Always better to just go to the comic book shop where they had one copy of everything.
CCK and Views gives it A LOT of flexibility one does not have in other CMS's.
You can make a content type of "photos", with a field for an image, caption,some tagging, etc.
And then in one area display links to galleries based on various fields put in. You can insert it into an article with a caption.
The ability to make an item contain all relevant info about itself, and display only the parts you want in various contexts is quite powerful.
If I was making a simple site with blog I would use Wordpress, but there are times where having articles pegged to locations and dates allows for some interesting things (map and calendar, without too much effort the two could be overlaid, giving pins on a map withing a date range, each pin linking to an article, or a photo, or whatever you feel like.
It wwas in the browser cache, so you are fine (it didn't infect anywhere else, and UAC makes sure it doesn't have the privledge to hide from your virus software).
If you visted the same site with out of date software, there would be a chance of infectio, but most likely the security essentials + uac would prevent it.
Don't know, this is the best I can find to support what I said.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CryEngine
I remember when it came-out it was essentially a tech-demo of an engine that allowed zooming into the distance smoothly.
The demo was well received enough they made a game.
I first used Linux on a 486 with 66MHz 16 MiB RAM, and it sucked, I would never accept that level of performance on my phone.
I never had a 266MHz, but I had a 233, and a 450, and used Netscape on both, and it sucked. If my phone browser ran comparably to that (as in a few times better), I would be very disappointed.
Computers used to be slow, and the expectations from a phone are much much higher. I want my browser to open like Chrome on my 3GHz computer, not like Netscape on a 486 or a Pentium.
As for the smartphones, you're not the target. The phone part is the least useful feature of my pocket computer, but I am happy to have it.