NASA's funding depends on pleasing politicians. So they need to be overly cautious and avoid pushing tech till it breaks, even if we would learn more that way.
I think that philosophy is just timidity at its worst. NASA could go and push the envelope and blow some stuff up. They've done it before. The problem is that they lack an administrator with the cojones to stand in front of congress and explain why blowing up the occasional rocket is a good thing.
SpaceX's investors have a longer attention span than voters.
Voters don't have much say in the funding of NASA. In fact very few of them really give much of a shit about NASA at all and NASA hasn't given them much of a reason to give a shit. SpaceX has a CEO who is also a substantial shareholder (reportedly at least 25%) and controls the company which has a LOT to do with the laser focus and long term outlook.
Non-compete "agreements" are hugely unethical in my opinion. If I work at Google and Apple wants to hire me I should have the right to switch employers without further restrictions. If companies want employees to sit on the sidelines they should either pay them enough to keep them on the payroll or pay them market value to sit on the sidelines. Putting a non-compete in front of an employee as a condition of employment should be illegal and unenforceable anywhere in the US.
If he wants to be a credible voice for artists then he can't afford conflicts of interest. If Trent Reznor wants to resign his post with Apple and speak on his own behalf then I'll consider his position on the matter. Until then he's just playing the role of corporate stooge even if he actually believes what his is saying.
how about one that implies some kind of fixed morality to the world that justified taking Nixon out while leaving Hillary Clinton free, considering they both did pretty much the same thing.
Hillary hasn't even come close to the lack of ethics shown by the Nixon administration. If you think otherwise you don't understand the Watergate scandal well enough.
The truth about Nixon is that he was living in an age with basically a single-source media - Television. The TV news people weren't letting the story go, so he had to go.
The Watergate story was broken by the Washington Post NEWSPAPER. If you think TV was the only news source in 1972-73 then you are completely clueless. Newspapers, magazine, TV, and radio were all substantial parts of the media in the early 1970s.
"I find YouTube's business to be very disingenuous. It is built on the backs of free, stolen content and that's how they got that big," said Reznor in an interview with Billboard. Reznor was not speaking purely as an artist, however. He is also chief creative officer at Apple Music, the streaming service launched by Apple in 2015, which is one of the key rivals to YouTube in the digital music world.
I find pretending to be on the side of artists against Google when you are drawing a paycheck from one of their biggest competitors to be "very disingenuous".
Of course I don't find Apple Music to be much of a rival at all to YouTube so this may be much sound and fury signifying nothing. Apple pretending to respect the intellectual property of others is a bit rich.
I'm pretty sure there is a buy American made first law on the books which would have favored Apple.
Very little of what Apple sells is made in America. That is why they have the weasel words "Designed in California" on their products but they are made elsewhere, often in China. It makes it sound like it's an American product when in fact little to none of the material in the device actually came from America.
Apple on the other hand, would likely see attempts at this as a means to backdoor their security and fight it like with the san Bernardino phone.
Inherently it is also a betrayal of American technology manufacturers.
Please point out a single US based manufacturer of smartphones. There has to be one for us to buy one. And then it has to be able to actually do the job required. The US has a huge manufacturing base and makes a lot of things but there are some products which simply aren't made in the US.
The President of a country should be a walking billboard for that country. All clothing and carried items should be US made.
So the guy whose job is 2/3 foreign relations shouldn't buy anything made outside the US. Seems a bit simplistic to me. While I have no problem with the US president (and congress for that matter) favoring US made goods, there are times and places where that's not the best course of action.
No matter how shitty the phone is there only one acceptable excuse, the US does not make any.
Ok, done. There is, to my knowledge, no current US manufacturer of smartphones. The federal government could contract to have one made by a US based company (Apple, Google, etc) but it will be wastefully expensive to do so. So would you prefer the US government be wasteful with taxpayer dollars?
Doesn't matter much. It's still a foreign country. We spy on our allies and our allies spy on us. When you are talking about the communications of the head of state, it's nuts to completely trust even a close ally. The US has proven that recently - just ask our allies in Europe.
Actually, I don't think people realize just how close the US Military and South Korea are. The DOD probably trusts devices made in South Korea far more than they would devices made in the US due to the massive influence they have in South Korea. Remember we still have US troops stationed in South Korea and South Korea (conceptually) relies on US support to keep North Korea from invading.
Again true but it doesn't matter. The US has close relationships with a number of countries but we still restrict sensitive equipment purchases and sales when they have national security implications. Obviously we would purchase equipment preferentially from a close ally like South Korea over a friendly rival like China but that doesn't mean South Korea gets a free pass no matter how much leverage we have over them.
1) I cannot fathom why anyone would be interested in a picture of me, naked, and I do not think that I am particularly unattractive.
Really? You can't figure that out? Have you ever been interested in seeing someone else without clothes on? Then you should be able to comprehend that the reverse is also true at least for some portion of the population. It's true that not everyone is interested in seeing you specifically sans clothes but it's not hard to understand that some would. And no you don't have to be a supermodel to be attractive to others. You indicated you are married so obviously at least one person must find you attractive. Not hard to believe there might be others. Same is true for pretty much anyone else out there. Even people who are generally considered not terribly attractive by most can typically find a few people who are interested.
We never had good news before so what is the difference?
Sure we have. We've also had crappy news before. It's trivial to point out examples of news done well over the last 100 years. It's even easier to point of examples of it being done badly.
Sure back in the 1950-1990 we had our "trusted" news on TV. However they tried to cover a Whole days of activity around the world in 1 hour. The first half covering Local and State News, the second half World and National News. So much of the coverage didn't spend more than a few minutes on the topic.
That's was the state of affairs basically until around the the late 1980s to early 1990s for television news. The first big change was CNN and the 24 hour news cycle. The second was the internet (specifically the web) in the 1990s.
The News Papers had much more depth to them. However during newspapers popularity there was a much lower literacy rate, so a good portion of the population couldn't fully read them, and just read what they could. So the headlines. Which is much shorter than a Twitter post.
Literacy rates have been rather high for well over a century in the US, particularly for white americans. Literacy in the 1950s was well above 90%. The percentage of the population that couldn't read a newspaper in the US hasn't been over 10% since before 1910.
While it may because of more polarization, but it is also because people are getting exposed to different ideas thus need to make their decisions from more data.
The evidence seems to show people doing exactly the opposite. People are now able to seek out niche news sources that support their already existing world view and disregarding contrary view points regardless of their validity.
The Media liked JFK, so his indiscretions were ignored. The Media didn't like Nixon so he was kicked out of office.
Must be nice to have such a simplistic world view. Nixon getting kicked out of office had a LOT more to it than whether "The Media" liked him or not. Saying something like that is the sort of idiotic sound bite we get from the Rush Limbaughs of the world. Sounds good to people who want it to be true even though it's complete nonsense in reality.
How did you happen to buy so many printers that aren't AirPrint compatible?
AirPrint is pretty recent thing. There are FAR more printers that are not AirPrint compatible than printers that are. My daily workhorse printers are a Lexmark T610 and a Brother HL-4150CDN. Neither of these printers has AirPrint and I don't anticipate replacing either of them any time soon.
I would have to go out of my way to find a wireless printer that doesn't support AirPrint.
None of my printers are wireless. Nor should they need to be. I should be able to access them through a network or through the PC they are attached to if I so desire. That should be an out of the box feature for any Apple product (router or Mac). As it stands I have to buy an unnecessary third party print server to get any iOS device to print. So much for "it just works".
Yes, if only Apple had been making something like that for the last decade. What a wonderful world we would be living in..
Try again.
The Airport Express does NOT solve the problem. It does not turn non-AirPrint printers into compatible ones by plugging into the USB port. You will need third party solutions to actually print to any non-AirPrint compatible printer attached to it. I actually own the hardware and have tried. Eventually I bought a third part print server (Lantronix xPrintServer) which solves the problem. It's ridiculous that any Mac cannot provide this functionality out of the box.
These links do little to further the claim that these represent self-insurance. I thought it's something more specific - as your wikipedia link seems to suggest too. With your quite broad definition of self-insurance, everyone is self-insuring left and right.
That is actually true. When you decline to buy the extended warranty you are engaging in a small scale version of self insurance. Apple is just able to absorb far larger risks. Don't get too worked up about the the term. I agree that it's a little bit silly but as long as you understand what it represents you'll know what people mean when they say it. There are lots of terms like that in finance and accounting. Often several that mean the same thing (Sales = Revenue = Gross Receipts for example) for no useful reason. It's annoying to people like me that come from an engineering/physics background where terms tend to be more standardized.
So I think it's quite meaningless to use this term unless there's wing to wing handling for specifically this risk category
Apple and most big retailers do exactly that with varying degrees of formality. Apple does have pools in their accounting for shrinkage and it is normal practice for a retailer to set aside a certain amount of funds and resources to account for expected losses and to make adjusting entries to account for actual loses. This does impact the P&L, it does impact budgeting, it does impact internal controls and it certainly is accounted for.
I think it's conceivable that with their very high gross margin they don't worry about store stealth to the extent a grocery chain would have to, and I believe most of their risk management priorities rarer and more impactful risks, mostly relating to their supply chain, and perhaps forex losses.
That is probably correct. I don't think shrinkage tops the list of things that keep Apple management up at night. It's something they have to deal with but it's not an existential threat to them like it might be to a low margin grocery store.
Symantec is buying Blue Coat Systems. Avira Anti-Virus installs the MixPanel data harvester. What's going on with security companies nowadays?
They're having the problem that they can't grow fast enough to please their shareholders/investors. The market for security products is finite, competitive and customers aren't willing to pay ever increasing amounts of cash for their products. So their management is pushed inexorably towards sources of revenue that might not be in the best interests of their customers. Of course Symantec has produced crap software for a long time now so them making bad decisions is nothing new. Removing their crapware is usually among the first things I do with any new PC that is burdened with it.
Of course there is also the old problem that security companies make money by "protecting" against malware but if malware ceased to exist so would their business. So they have a built in conflict of interest in that they want to protect but not actually get rid of malware completely. In theory they could even be the ones creating the malware to ensure there is a threat to protect against. A form of racketeering really.
This WWDC is so boring I've actually stopped watching. Is it just me or is the age of Tim Cook extremely dull?
In comparison to Steve Jobs pretty much anyone they put on stage would likely be considered extremely dull. It's hard to follow an act like that and Cook has never been known for his oratory skills or charisma. Like him or not you have to admit that Steve Jobs was second to none as a salesman.
I know it's silly, but the thing I would most like to see improved in MacOS is the print dialog.
Agreed but what I would like to see is printing supported on iDevices properly. Yeah I know about AirPrint but guess what? Millions of printers don't have that (including all of mine) and Apple can't be bothered to make a simple way make existing printers compatible with AirPrint despite it being technologically trivial to do so. It could be done with a simple network attached print server or an app on any macintosh. I get if they don't want to support Windows but it's absurd that my mac can't provide AirPrint services right out of the box.
It just amazes me that Apple, which gave us the original desktop publishing revolution back in the 80's, can have such terrible print support now.
Apple seems to be concerned with making things easy and pretty rather than deeply functional. If your needs don't extend beyond what Apple provides their devices work great. But $diety help you if you need to do something not approved by Saint Jobs or one of his disciples.
The rule for reporting inventory is that it must be valued at acquisition cost or market value, whichever is the lower amount. In general, inventories should be valued at acquisition costs. [...] Valuing at the price you could sell at retail is not allowed because retail prices are inflated to cover selling costs. Selling costs are not allowed in the market value calculation.
What you have quoted there is merely a detailing of what can be reported on the inventory account on the balance sheet. Accounting 101 stuff. There's a lot more to it than that. The value of inventory is only a fraction of the costs that would incurred in a theft. When the theft occurs you incur a variety of expenses including legal fees, security expenses, cost of replacing the lost inventory, administrative burden, insurance costs (not applicable here), and a bunch of other stuff you probably don't think of straight away. Depending on the size of the theft the expenses incurred in dealing with it could easily outstrip the value of the lost merchandise depending on how aggressively Apple pursues the problem.
Given that the current iPhone has been around for almost a year, stocks are aplenty and those who go to an Apple store to buy an iPhone are more likely to go to another one or come back the next day than to buy an Android phone, I'd be very surprised if this event actually lead to a significant number of irrevocably lost sales, if any
Probably true but one has to account for all the possible outcomes.
Also, I think it's not quite accurate to call apple "self-insured" - sure they may not have contracted with an insurance company for such events (I don't know), and sure they have a lot of cash that insulates them from measurable consequences, but these do not a self-insurance make.
Yes Apple is self insured. It's a common term of art for when company's back benefits and hedge against losses with certain pools of assets rather than by contracting with an insurance company. In the case of Apple it probably costs less for them to simply eat the loss than to pay an insurance company. Insurance is really to transfer risk, typically risks the company can't handle themselves. The loss of a few iPhones is a rounding error to Apple so they can afford to self insure against the occasional bit of theft.
So which figure are they going to use on their taxes? Because you know the joe q public taxpayer will be picking up at least a portion of this tab
Taxes are done on a cash basis so they'll probably take the material cost of the unit plus whatever expenses they incur in the process of dealing with the theft which might actually add up to more than the retail price of the phones themselves when all is said and done. Dealing with cops, security and paying lawyers is shockingly expensive.
This will not have any meaningful impact on the amount of tax that Apple pays. Yes it will (very) slightly reduce Apple's profits and in theory that would result in lower tax remittances. There is no cost to taxpayers though the government coffers might be lighter by a few pennies at the end of the day.
Sorry, but until you sell something, your loss is just what you invested.
Speaking as a certified accountant, I can tell you that that isn't true at all. It might be what you get reimbursed for by an insurance company but it isn't the full value of the loss incurred. Apple is self insured so they won't get reimbursed by anyone. Until the device can be replaced and sold, the value of the loss is the cost of the device, the cost to replace the device, the cost to transport and sell the device, the cost of investigating and dealing with the loss, the cost of the lost revenue for whatever period the device was unavailable to be sold, and I can keep going. Basically you have the cost of the device plus the opportunity cost of the lost revenue for whatever time the revenue is lost. If a sale is lost permanently (customer comes in to buy iPhone, can't get one and buys Android instead) then the lost value of the iPhone is the full retail value. If they can replace the phone the value is the cost of the device plus the opportunity costs involved.
Else I claim that the hardware I slapped together costs 10 grand (despite costing 5 bucks to make) and my insurance claim is for 10 grand.
The selling price of the iPhones is well known and the cost to build them is easy to prove. A company the size of Apple is self insured so there is no insurance claim to be made. The value of the phones at minimum is higher than their cost to make and could in principle be the full retail value of them if certain factors prove true. The real value of the loss is somewhere in between in the long run most likely but it definitely is more than just the cost to make it.
$16,000 retail maybe, but probably $1600 to manufacture, so that is the true loss.
Umm, no. They would have sold for full retail so the value of the loss is the revenue foregone by having the phones stolen. Don't conflate a theft like this with the absurd values assigned to pirated software that probably wouldn't have sold anyway to the people doing the pirating. Not the same thing.
I've seen them and yes they look like fun. However they aren't much practical use, particularly in places where there are obstacles. Not going to see one sailing up main street any time soon.
Planes that drive on highways? When did "flying car" come to mean a plane that drives on a highway?
Pretty much from day one. If you can't drive it on a road then it isn't really a car now is it? If it flies from point to point then it's just a VTOL aircraft. We already have that - it's called a helicopter.
Slashdot has filled up with unimaginative luddites.
Imagination without a plan is just a dream. People who are good at imagining the future actually try to figure out what is possible and just as importantly what won't work. I love the idea of a flying car. But I also have an engineering degree and a business degree and decades of manufacturing experience so I understand why they won't happen any time soon. I understand that for a flying car to be realistic we would need huge technological advances in compact energy supplies, autopilot systems, infrastructure, materials, and much more. And even if you can develop all the technology there still has to be a economic case for it. I'm not even getting into the safety and reliability and maintenance problems which are legion. I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying that we aren't even remotely close to it being feasible right now. I think we will have humans on Mars long before we see a mass market flying car. It's that hard of a problem.
Flying cars will use the loads of helipads and short runways that will be built everywhere.
You don't get it do you? There aren't going to be any flying cars within our lifetime. Won't happen. Even if it were currently possible to make a vehicle that performed well (it isn't) the idea has no economic advantage over dedicated vehicles. It's cheaper to drive to an airport or helopad, rent time on a dedicated aircraft, and then rent a vehicle at your destination. Show me an economic case where a flying car makes more sense than that and only then can we start worrying about conquering the physics involved or building infrastructure. Until then it is just a quirky idea that engineers like to play with in their spare time for kicks.
My company was a supplier for a company that made a combination ATV and jetski. Cool product and actually worked pretty well. But they are no longer making any new ones. Why? The vehicle was more expensive than an ATV and a jetski separately and nobody bought them. It solved a problem very few people had. Most people don't need a vehicle that can do both activities. Flying cars are no different. For technologies to converge there has to be a use case that makes economic sense. As far as I can tell there isn't one for flying cars. Being cool just isn't enough.
A hundred years from now, everyone thinks of Apple as the power company, and if they know at all, they think it's quaint that Apple started as a computer company, much like we think of Nintendo starting as a trading card company, or Nokia as a wood-pulp mill.
Apple isn't becoming a power company. They are selling excess generating capacity. That's it. Nothing to see here. They are making a little extra cash off of an underutilized asset. Building a solar farm generates capacity in a step function. You can't scale it exactly to your need so you have to buy a bit extra. You can then sell this extra capacity very cheaply because it costs very little to operate. The expensive bit was buying it in the first place. For solar there aren't even any input costs, just a bit of administration and maintenance. So they'll add a tiny bit to the bottom line and do it with clean energy. Nothing super exciting.
Allow me roll my eyes. Yes people are working on electric airplanes. No they haven't gotten very far with them and their efforts certainly are nothing that is going to result in a mass production flying car within my lifetime. Why? The best power source we have available are some lithium batteries which are great but still have a power to weight ratio that limits flight to short duration flights of very light aircraft. A very light aircraft makes for a very terrible road going car. Even as airplanes these electric powered versions are basically proof of concept vehicles. Nothing that is going to displace fossil fuel powered planes any time soon and certainly not going to see mass market adoption without substantial improvements.
Yes, all of those flying pedestrians darting out into your path, other commuters slamming on the brakes to avoid a flying cat, drivers going the wrong way down a one-way air lane, your maximum rate of cornering varying by a couple orders of magnitude depending on conditions just like an icy vs. dry road...
If you think those are harder problems than the engineering problems in a flying car you don't understand the physics, economics or regulation involved. A mass market flying car will require a vastly upgraded power plant, navigation controls well beyond what is available today, substantial improvements in reliability and durability, substantial regulatory changes, maintenance infrastructure, ground infrastructure and much more. All the problems you face in developing a self driving car and quite a lot more apply to a flying car because very few people are competent pilots. (most are barely competent drivers) A self driving car is basically putting sensors and controls on an existing and well understood vehicle. Not so with a flying car - that has to be designed from scratch. And you have to solve all these problems in a way that makes them economically practical which frankly is going to be nigh impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
NASA's funding depends on pleasing politicians. So they need to be overly cautious and avoid pushing tech till it breaks, even if we would learn more that way.
I think that philosophy is just timidity at its worst. NASA could go and push the envelope and blow some stuff up. They've done it before. The problem is that they lack an administrator with the cojones to stand in front of congress and explain why blowing up the occasional rocket is a good thing.
SpaceX's investors have a longer attention span than voters.
Voters don't have much say in the funding of NASA. In fact very few of them really give much of a shit about NASA at all and NASA hasn't given them much of a reason to give a shit. SpaceX has a CEO who is also a substantial shareholder (reportedly at least 25%) and controls the company which has a LOT to do with the laser focus and long term outlook.
Non-compete "agreements" are hugely unethical in my opinion. If I work at Google and Apple wants to hire me I should have the right to switch employers without further restrictions. If companies want employees to sit on the sidelines they should either pay them enough to keep them on the payroll or pay them market value to sit on the sidelines. Putting a non-compete in front of an employee as a condition of employment should be illegal and unenforceable anywhere in the US.
Let's ask Trent whose back his work is built on.
If he wants to be a credible voice for artists then he can't afford conflicts of interest. If Trent Reznor wants to resign his post with Apple and speak on his own behalf then I'll consider his position on the matter. Until then he's just playing the role of corporate stooge even if he actually believes what his is saying.
how about one that implies some kind of fixed morality to the world that justified taking Nixon out while leaving Hillary Clinton free, considering they both did pretty much the same thing.
Exactly when did Hillary Clinton wiretap the Democratic Party Headquarters? When did she order the CIA to block the FBI's investigation? When did Hillary force the Attorney General and Deputies to resign? When did Hillary authorize the White House to pay blackmail payments?
Hillary hasn't even come close to the lack of ethics shown by the Nixon administration. If you think otherwise you don't understand the Watergate scandal well enough.
The truth about Nixon is that he was living in an age with basically a single-source media - Television. The TV news people weren't letting the story go, so he had to go.
The Watergate story was broken by the Washington Post NEWSPAPER. If you think TV was the only news source in 1972-73 then you are completely clueless. Newspapers, magazine, TV, and radio were all substantial parts of the media in the early 1970s.
"I find YouTube's business to be very disingenuous. It is built on the backs of free, stolen content and that's how they got that big," said Reznor in an interview with Billboard. Reznor was not speaking purely as an artist, however. He is also chief creative officer at Apple Music, the streaming service launched by Apple in 2015, which is one of the key rivals to YouTube in the digital music world.
I find pretending to be on the side of artists against Google when you are drawing a paycheck from one of their biggest competitors to be "very disingenuous".
Of course I don't find Apple Music to be much of a rival at all to YouTube so this may be much sound and fury signifying nothing. Apple pretending to respect the intellectual property of others is a bit rich.
I'm pretty sure there is a buy American made first law on the books which would have favored Apple.
Very little of what Apple sells is made in America. That is why they have the weasel words "Designed in California" on their products but they are made elsewhere, often in China. It makes it sound like it's an American product when in fact little to none of the material in the device actually came from America.
Apple on the other hand, would likely see attempts at this as a means to backdoor their security and fight it like with the san Bernardino phone.
And Apple would probably be correct about that.
Inherently it is also a betrayal of American technology manufacturers.
Please point out a single US based manufacturer of smartphones. There has to be one for us to buy one. And then it has to be able to actually do the job required. The US has a huge manufacturing base and makes a lot of things but there are some products which simply aren't made in the US.
The President of a country should be a walking billboard for that country. All clothing and carried items should be US made.
So the guy whose job is 2/3 foreign relations shouldn't buy anything made outside the US. Seems a bit simplistic to me. While I have no problem with the US president (and congress for that matter) favoring US made goods, there are times and places where that's not the best course of action.
No matter how shitty the phone is there only one acceptable excuse, the US does not make any.
Ok, done. There is, to my knowledge, no current US manufacturer of smartphones. The federal government could contract to have one made by a US based company (Apple, Google, etc) but it will be wastefully expensive to do so. So would you prefer the US government be wasteful with taxpayer dollars?
South Korea is an ally.
Doesn't matter much. It's still a foreign country. We spy on our allies and our allies spy on us. When you are talking about the communications of the head of state, it's nuts to completely trust even a close ally. The US has proven that recently - just ask our allies in Europe.
Actually, I don't think people realize just how close the US Military and South Korea are. The DOD probably trusts devices made in South Korea far more than they would devices made in the US due to the massive influence they have in South Korea. Remember we still have US troops stationed in South Korea and South Korea (conceptually) relies on US support to keep North Korea from invading.
Again true but it doesn't matter. The US has close relationships with a number of countries but we still restrict sensitive equipment purchases and sales when they have national security implications. Obviously we would purchase equipment preferentially from a close ally like South Korea over a friendly rival like China but that doesn't mean South Korea gets a free pass no matter how much leverage we have over them.
1) I cannot fathom why anyone would be interested in a picture of me, naked, and I do not think that I am particularly unattractive.
Really? You can't figure that out? Have you ever been interested in seeing someone else without clothes on? Then you should be able to comprehend that the reverse is also true at least for some portion of the population. It's true that not everyone is interested in seeing you specifically sans clothes but it's not hard to understand that some would. And no you don't have to be a supermodel to be attractive to others. You indicated you are married so obviously at least one person must find you attractive. Not hard to believe there might be others. Same is true for pretty much anyone else out there. Even people who are generally considered not terribly attractive by most can typically find a few people who are interested.
We never had good news before so what is the difference?
Sure we have. We've also had crappy news before. It's trivial to point out examples of news done well over the last 100 years. It's even easier to point of examples of it being done badly.
Sure back in the 1950-1990 we had our "trusted" news on TV. However they tried to cover a Whole days of activity around the world in 1 hour. The first half covering Local and State News, the second half World and National News. So much of the coverage didn't spend more than a few minutes on the topic.
That's was the state of affairs basically until around the the late 1980s to early 1990s for television news. The first big change was CNN and the 24 hour news cycle. The second was the internet (specifically the web) in the 1990s.
The News Papers had much more depth to them. However during newspapers popularity there was a much lower literacy rate, so a good portion of the population couldn't fully read them, and just read what they could. So the headlines. Which is much shorter than a Twitter post.
Literacy rates have been rather high for well over a century in the US, particularly for white americans. Literacy in the 1950s was well above 90%. The percentage of the population that couldn't read a newspaper in the US hasn't been over 10% since before 1910.
While it may because of more polarization, but it is also because people are getting exposed to different ideas thus need to make their decisions from more data.
The evidence seems to show people doing exactly the opposite. People are now able to seek out niche news sources that support their already existing world view and disregarding contrary view points regardless of their validity.
The Media liked JFK, so his indiscretions were ignored. The Media didn't like Nixon so he was kicked out of office.
Must be nice to have such a simplistic world view. Nixon getting kicked out of office had a LOT more to it than whether "The Media" liked him or not. Saying something like that is the sort of idiotic sound bite we get from the Rush Limbaughs of the world. Sounds good to people who want it to be true even though it's complete nonsense in reality.
How did you happen to buy so many printers that aren't AirPrint compatible?
AirPrint is pretty recent thing. There are FAR more printers that are not AirPrint compatible than printers that are. My daily workhorse printers are a Lexmark T610 and a Brother HL-4150CDN. Neither of these printers has AirPrint and I don't anticipate replacing either of them any time soon.
I would have to go out of my way to find a wireless printer that doesn't support AirPrint.
None of my printers are wireless. Nor should they need to be. I should be able to access them through a network or through the PC they are attached to if I so desire. That should be an out of the box feature for any Apple product (router or Mac). As it stands I have to buy an unnecessary third party print server to get any iOS device to print. So much for "it just works".
Yes, if only Apple had been making something like that for the last decade. What a wonderful world we would be living in..
Try again.
The Airport Express does NOT solve the problem. It does not turn non-AirPrint printers into compatible ones by plugging into the USB port. You will need third party solutions to actually print to any non-AirPrint compatible printer attached to it. I actually own the hardware and have tried. Eventually I bought a third part print server (Lantronix xPrintServer) which solves the problem. It's ridiculous that any Mac cannot provide this functionality out of the box.
These links do little to further the claim that these represent self-insurance. I thought it's something more specific - as your wikipedia link seems to suggest too. With your quite broad definition of self-insurance, everyone is self-insuring left and right.
That is actually true. When you decline to buy the extended warranty you are engaging in a small scale version of self insurance. Apple is just able to absorb far larger risks. Don't get too worked up about the the term. I agree that it's a little bit silly but as long as you understand what it represents you'll know what people mean when they say it. There are lots of terms like that in finance and accounting. Often several that mean the same thing (Sales = Revenue = Gross Receipts for example) for no useful reason. It's annoying to people like me that come from an engineering/physics background where terms tend to be more standardized.
So I think it's quite meaningless to use this term unless there's wing to wing handling for specifically this risk category
Apple and most big retailers do exactly that with varying degrees of formality. Apple does have pools in their accounting for shrinkage and it is normal practice for a retailer to set aside a certain amount of funds and resources to account for expected losses and to make adjusting entries to account for actual loses. This does impact the P&L, it does impact budgeting, it does impact internal controls and it certainly is accounted for.
I think it's conceivable that with their very high gross margin they don't worry about store stealth to the extent a grocery chain would have to, and I believe most of their risk management priorities rarer and more impactful risks, mostly relating to their supply chain, and perhaps forex losses.
That is probably correct. I don't think shrinkage tops the list of things that keep Apple management up at night. It's something they have to deal with but it's not an existential threat to them like it might be to a low margin grocery store.
Symantec is buying Blue Coat Systems. Avira Anti-Virus installs the MixPanel data harvester. What's going on with security companies nowadays?
They're having the problem that they can't grow fast enough to please their shareholders/investors. The market for security products is finite, competitive and customers aren't willing to pay ever increasing amounts of cash for their products. So their management is pushed inexorably towards sources of revenue that might not be in the best interests of their customers. Of course Symantec has produced crap software for a long time now so them making bad decisions is nothing new. Removing their crapware is usually among the first things I do with any new PC that is burdened with it.
Of course there is also the old problem that security companies make money by "protecting" against malware but if malware ceased to exist so would their business. So they have a built in conflict of interest in that they want to protect but not actually get rid of malware completely. In theory they could even be the ones creating the malware to ensure there is a threat to protect against. A form of racketeering really.
This WWDC is so boring I've actually stopped watching. Is it just me or is the age of Tim Cook extremely dull?
In comparison to Steve Jobs pretty much anyone they put on stage would likely be considered extremely dull. It's hard to follow an act like that and Cook has never been known for his oratory skills or charisma. Like him or not you have to admit that Steve Jobs was second to none as a salesman.
I know it's silly, but the thing I would most like to see improved in MacOS is the print dialog.
Agreed but what I would like to see is printing supported on iDevices properly. Yeah I know about AirPrint but guess what? Millions of printers don't have that (including all of mine) and Apple can't be bothered to make a simple way make existing printers compatible with AirPrint despite it being technologically trivial to do so. It could be done with a simple network attached print server or an app on any macintosh. I get if they don't want to support Windows but it's absurd that my mac can't provide AirPrint services right out of the box.
It just amazes me that Apple, which gave us the original desktop publishing revolution back in the 80's, can have such terrible print support now.
Apple seems to be concerned with making things easy and pretty rather than deeply functional. If your needs don't extend beyond what Apple provides their devices work great. But $diety help you if you need to do something not approved by Saint Jobs or one of his disciples.
Really?
Yes really.
The rule for reporting inventory is that it must be valued at acquisition cost or market value, whichever is the lower amount. In general, inventories should be valued at acquisition costs. [...] Valuing at the price you could sell at retail is not allowed because retail prices are inflated to cover selling costs. Selling costs are not allowed in the market value calculation.
What you have quoted there is merely a detailing of what can be reported on the inventory account on the balance sheet. Accounting 101 stuff. There's a lot more to it than that. The value of inventory is only a fraction of the costs that would incurred in a theft. When the theft occurs you incur a variety of expenses including legal fees, security expenses, cost of replacing the lost inventory, administrative burden, insurance costs (not applicable here), and a bunch of other stuff you probably don't think of straight away. Depending on the size of the theft the expenses incurred in dealing with it could easily outstrip the value of the lost merchandise depending on how aggressively Apple pursues the problem.
Given that the current iPhone has been around for almost a year, stocks are aplenty and those who go to an Apple store to buy an iPhone are more likely to go to another one or come back the next day than to buy an Android phone, I'd be very surprised if this event actually lead to a significant number of irrevocably lost sales, if any
Probably true but one has to account for all the possible outcomes.
Also, I think it's not quite accurate to call apple "self-insured" - sure they may not have contracted with an insurance company for such events (I don't know), and sure they have a lot of cash that insulates them from measurable consequences, but these do not a self-insurance make.
Yes Apple is self insured. It's a common term of art for when company's back benefits and hedge against losses with certain pools of assets rather than by contracting with an insurance company. In the case of Apple it probably costs less for them to simply eat the loss than to pay an insurance company. Insurance is really to transfer risk, typically risks the company can't handle themselves. The loss of a few iPhones is a rounding error to Apple so they can afford to self insure against the occasional bit of theft.
So which figure are they going to use on their taxes? Because you know the joe q public taxpayer will be picking up at least a portion of this tab
Taxes are done on a cash basis so they'll probably take the material cost of the unit plus whatever expenses they incur in the process of dealing with the theft which might actually add up to more than the retail price of the phones themselves when all is said and done. Dealing with cops, security and paying lawyers is shockingly expensive.
This will not have any meaningful impact on the amount of tax that Apple pays. Yes it will (very) slightly reduce Apple's profits and in theory that would result in lower tax remittances. There is no cost to taxpayers though the government coffers might be lighter by a few pennies at the end of the day.
Sorry, but until you sell something, your loss is just what you invested.
Speaking as a certified accountant, I can tell you that that isn't true at all. It might be what you get reimbursed for by an insurance company but it isn't the full value of the loss incurred. Apple is self insured so they won't get reimbursed by anyone. Until the device can be replaced and sold, the value of the loss is the cost of the device, the cost to replace the device, the cost to transport and sell the device, the cost of investigating and dealing with the loss, the cost of the lost revenue for whatever period the device was unavailable to be sold, and I can keep going. Basically you have the cost of the device plus the opportunity cost of the lost revenue for whatever time the revenue is lost. If a sale is lost permanently (customer comes in to buy iPhone, can't get one and buys Android instead) then the lost value of the iPhone is the full retail value. If they can replace the phone the value is the cost of the device plus the opportunity costs involved.
Else I claim that the hardware I slapped together costs 10 grand (despite costing 5 bucks to make) and my insurance claim is for 10 grand.
The selling price of the iPhones is well known and the cost to build them is easy to prove. A company the size of Apple is self insured so there is no insurance claim to be made. The value of the phones at minimum is higher than their cost to make and could in principle be the full retail value of them if certain factors prove true. The real value of the loss is somewhere in between in the long run most likely but it definitely is more than just the cost to make it.
$16,000 retail maybe, but probably $1600 to manufacture, so that is the true loss.
Umm, no. They would have sold for full retail so the value of the loss is the revenue foregone by having the phones stolen. Don't conflate a theft like this with the absurd values assigned to pirated software that probably wouldn't have sold anyway to the people doing the pirating. Not the same thing.
Actually, the land sailers are a lot of fun.
I've seen them and yes they look like fun. However they aren't much practical use, particularly in places where there are obstacles. Not going to see one sailing up main street any time soon.
Planes that drive on highways? When did "flying car" come to mean a plane that drives on a highway?
Pretty much from day one. If you can't drive it on a road then it isn't really a car now is it? If it flies from point to point then it's just a VTOL aircraft. We already have that - it's called a helicopter.
Slashdot has filled up with unimaginative luddites.
Imagination without a plan is just a dream. People who are good at imagining the future actually try to figure out what is possible and just as importantly what won't work. I love the idea of a flying car. But I also have an engineering degree and a business degree and decades of manufacturing experience so I understand why they won't happen any time soon. I understand that for a flying car to be realistic we would need huge technological advances in compact energy supplies, autopilot systems, infrastructure, materials, and much more. And even if you can develop all the technology there still has to be a economic case for it. I'm not even getting into the safety and reliability and maintenance problems which are legion. I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying that we aren't even remotely close to it being feasible right now. I think we will have humans on Mars long before we see a mass market flying car. It's that hard of a problem.
Flying cars will use the loads of helipads and short runways that will be built everywhere.
You don't get it do you? There aren't going to be any flying cars within our lifetime. Won't happen. Even if it were currently possible to make a vehicle that performed well (it isn't) the idea has no economic advantage over dedicated vehicles. It's cheaper to drive to an airport or helopad, rent time on a dedicated aircraft, and then rent a vehicle at your destination. Show me an economic case where a flying car makes more sense than that and only then can we start worrying about conquering the physics involved or building infrastructure. Until then it is just a quirky idea that engineers like to play with in their spare time for kicks.
My company was a supplier for a company that made a combination ATV and jetski. Cool product and actually worked pretty well. But they are no longer making any new ones. Why? The vehicle was more expensive than an ATV and a jetski separately and nobody bought them. It solved a problem very few people had. Most people don't need a vehicle that can do both activities. Flying cars are no different. For technologies to converge there has to be a use case that makes economic sense. As far as I can tell there isn't one for flying cars. Being cool just isn't enough.
A hundred years from now, everyone thinks of Apple as the power company, and if they know at all, they think it's quaint that Apple started as a computer company, much like we think of Nintendo starting as a trading card company, or Nokia as a wood-pulp mill.
Apple isn't becoming a power company. They are selling excess generating capacity. That's it. Nothing to see here. They are making a little extra cash off of an underutilized asset. Building a solar farm generates capacity in a step function. You can't scale it exactly to your need so you have to buy a bit extra. You can then sell this extra capacity very cheaply because it costs very little to operate. The expensive bit was buying it in the first place. For solar there aren't even any input costs, just a bit of administration and maintenance. So they'll add a tiny bit to the bottom line and do it with clean energy. Nothing super exciting.
Shh, don't tell these people!
Allow me roll my eyes. Yes people are working on electric airplanes. No they haven't gotten very far with them and their efforts certainly are nothing that is going to result in a mass production flying car within my lifetime. Why? The best power source we have available are some lithium batteries which are great but still have a power to weight ratio that limits flight to short duration flights of very light aircraft. A very light aircraft makes for a very terrible road going car. Even as airplanes these electric powered versions are basically proof of concept vehicles. Nothing that is going to displace fossil fuel powered planes any time soon and certainly not going to see mass market adoption without substantial improvements.
Yes, all of those flying pedestrians darting out into your path, other commuters slamming on the brakes to avoid a flying cat, drivers going the wrong way down a one-way air lane, your maximum rate of cornering varying by a couple orders of magnitude depending on conditions just like an icy vs. dry road...
If you think those are harder problems than the engineering problems in a flying car you don't understand the physics, economics or regulation involved. A mass market flying car will require a vastly upgraded power plant, navigation controls well beyond what is available today, substantial improvements in reliability and durability, substantial regulatory changes, maintenance infrastructure, ground infrastructure and much more. All the problems you face in developing a self driving car and quite a lot more apply to a flying car because very few people are competent pilots. (most are barely competent drivers) A self driving car is basically putting sensors and controls on an existing and well understood vehicle. Not so with a flying car - that has to be designed from scratch. And you have to solve all these problems in a way that makes them economically practical which frankly is going to be nigh impossible.