Getting a PH.D. in any science related field will most likely guarantee you a job.
No degree in any field will "guarantee you a job". Science is no exception. Conversely no degree in any field will make you unemployable nor will the lack of a degree. Some degrees make the odds of landing a job in your field better than others is the most you can say. Lacking a degree or having the "wrong" degree makes certain jobs unobtainable (you won't be a physician without a degree) but that doesn't mean you can't find some sort of employment.
Within the past century, 95% of the purchasing power of the US dollar has been taken away by inflation. Exactly how safe do you think the US dollar is again?
And within that same time period incomes have risen faster than inflation and so has the value of stocks and many other assets. Dollars are a store of value but there are better ones out there. You're making the same argument that my grandmother does when she inappropriately compares the price of milk to the price 50 year ago. A dollar is worth less but our ability to acquire them is greater. Net result is that after you adjust for inflation I'm actually paying less of my income than she did 50 years ago.
If you are using currency as a long-term store of value, you are mostly using it wrong.
Good thing I'm not doing that then. My money is invested in a combination of stocks, bonds, real estate and a few other assets. Holding excess cash, whether it be dollars or bitcoins, is foolish due to inflation and in the case of bitcoin exchange rate risk. (excess cash meaning more than your reasonably foreseeable liquidity needs)
And, as recently demonstrated by Cyprus, if the government arbitrarily changes the rules ex post facto and decides they're going to take your money "because we need it," how well do you sleep?
I sleep just fine. Governments have always had the ability to do this (it's called taxes) and they do it all the time. The only thing different here is the means by which they did it.
You sleep well thinking the rules of the game can't be changed. They can. They are. This is a terrifying precedent.
I sleep well knowing that the rules of the game are the same as they have always been. I understand that taxes can go up or down and I plan accordingly. I might not like it but it is hardly a big surprise.
That depends on if the US government can confiscate money held in banks like what happened in Cyprus, or not. The question is, do you trust government to honor its promises.
The government confiscates money all the time. It's call taxes. This version was just a little less democratic and done in an unusual way which freaks people out.
Generally speaking, no I'm not especially worried about the US government confiscating my money ala Cyprus. Furthermore even making the comparison between the two economies is a bit absurd since the situations are about as different as possible. Put a few billion into Cyprus and you'll hose the economy when you take it out. A few billion is a rounding error in the US economy and most US debt is not actually held by foreigners. Furthermore every penny the US government owes is denominated in dollars which the government can (though shouldn't) print whenever they want. Cyprus uses the Euro over which it has limited control. There is no possible way for the largest US creditors to pull their money out quickly. People make a big deal out of China and Japan each holding $1 trillion in treasury notes but what they usually don't consider is that China doesn't really have any alternative and they cannot sell them quickly to anyone. There literally are no other buyers for that much US debt especially in a short time frame.
Remember, the FDIC has about $25B in treasury notes (not cash, that's long gone) in its fund to cover about $10T in deposits, and most of the insured banks have very low ratios (perhaps 10% cash-on-hand at most). If there's ever a bank run, the FDIC can't stop it.
The FDIC doesn't have to stop it. The purpose of the FDIC is to keep bank runs from starting in the first place, not to be able to back every dollar deposited. The FDIC is there to reassure people that even if their particular bank is having issues that they still will be able to get to their money because the government is there to back them up. Bank runs start because people think they cannot get to their money. If the money is insured there is less chance of them doing this.
I hate to break this to you, but your insured deposits aren't held as coins in an outsized piggy bank like Scrooge McDuck's Money Bin. They exist only as entries in an electronic ledger.
Yes, and? Those insured deposits are backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government and the bank is liable for their security. Bitcoins enjoy none of the same protections. If someone wants to use bitcoin and understands the amount of risk they are assuming then I have no quarrel with them but let's not pretend the amount of risk is remotely comparable.
They should pay the same postage that everyone else has to.
They do. You can send bulk mail and they can send first class mail. The fact that you choose not to do so is beside the point.
Right now they get a discount "bulk rate" even though delivering their junk requires the same effort as delivering first class mail.
I'm afraid it doesn't. Much of the cost is in sorting and bulk mail tends to be pre-sorted which cuts down the cost to the post office. There are economies of scale at work here. I agree with your premise that postal spam should cost more but since 95+% of the mail I get (and thus the revenue the post office gets) goes straight to the trash I don't see this happening any time soon.
isn't that because there are lots of things a bank can hide off the public financial records?
They don't need to do that although that has been a tactic used in the past. A bit less these days, post Enron. The bank simply needs to be vague about exactly what the composition of their investment portfolio is and ALL banks are rather opaque in this respect. Furthermore certain financial instruments are extremely difficult to evaluate. It's difficult to tell sometimes whether a derivative is a hedge or speculation or what the risk is. As an outsider it can be extremely difficult to evaluate the level of risk a bank is exposed to.
Isn't that what this lawsuit is about? Hiding the "bad apples"?
I've read the article and it is hard to say. Probably you are correct but maybe not in the way you think. I suspect it might have more to do with the VCs not wanting their various clients to see who is getting a better deal. Furthermore if you know KP or Sequoia's returns it gives information to other VCs who might offer a better deal It's not probably about hiding the performance of specific investments so much as it is for competitive reasons. There are a finite number of good investments at a given time and it wouldn't be hard for a manager of an investing fund to do a bit of price shopping if they had enough information. After all, it doesn't matter if the VC charges a lot if their performance (alpha) is good enough to justify their rate. But if their performance is just average, no one wants to pay extra for average performance.
Most VC deals are not that lucrative by a long shot and that's where the founders and investors get screwed - and that's another thing that this lawsuit is about.
Anyone who invests in a VC fund knows the batting average is low. This is not an interesting fact. There probably will be around 1 successful company out of 10. That's not (usually) a reflection of the incompetence of VCs so much as it is a reflection of how hard it is build a successful business. The real question is why KP and Sequoia are hiding the returns of their specific funds. It's not shocking that they would do so - I can think of several reasonable explanations. My confusion is why the University is trying to protect that information.
On the other side, startups tend not to have audited financial statements, so it takes a lot of leg work for the due diligence.
Audited financials are somewhat overrated. See Enron. It's not terribly hard to make financial statements too confusing to interpret. I defy anyone reading this to look at the financial reports of any large bank and tell me how much risk they are exposed to or what their investment portfolio looks like. A VC will still have to do a ton of legwork for any company they plan to invest in.
AND they use other people's money while making sure they get a big cut in fees and whatnot because of their "expertise" while giving their investors returns that don't quite warrant the risk they are taking.They, the VCs, can't lose - the founders and the investors take most if not all the risk.
It's not true that they cannot lose. While typically it is not their own money at risk (though sometimes it is), if a VC is unsuccessful with a fund they often find it difficult/impossible to raise money for their next fund. The risks to the VC are typically more long term. If I'm a big pension fund manager investing with a VC fund and I don't receive a return on my investment, I'm not going to invest with that VC again most likely. The VC community isn't a very big one and the people who invest in VC funds typically are pretty well connected. Screw up a VC fund and the VC fund manager can easily find themselves effectively blackballed from future work in the industry.
The only thing these guys have is connections to money and a lucky hit or two.
Connections to money is an extremely valuable thing. You talk about it dismissively but access to capital is difficult to come by. VCs do provide a useful service for a relatively small number of companies but their reputation as kingmakers is somewhat out of proportion to their actual ability to pick winners. Most successful companies do not ever get VC funding. Most of the Fortune 500 got there without a dime of VC money. A few (Google etc) probably wouldn't have gotten there without it.
Didn't Nokia also make a bunch of money selling cell towers and other network stuff?
Yes. About half their revenue comes from cell phones and related products and about half comes from infrastructure via Nokia Siemens Networks which is a 50/50 joint venture. They have a third division for their mapping technology (NAVTEQ) but its revenue is relatively inconsequential at about 1/10th the size of the other two divisions. The infrastructure division is relatively profitable though joint ventures tend to be unstable in the long run. (commonly the partners eventually have differing goals and one or the other takes over) It's not a good situation when your most profitable division is half owned by someone else. Worse, Nokia's prospects in cell phones now depend heavily on Microsoft and that hasn't exactly worked out amazingly well.
I think Nokia has a business model that made sense a few years ago when people weren't so picky about the software on their cell phones. (everyone's software kind of sucked, not just Nokias) Nokia was geared to sell to AT&T and Verizon and the other carriers rather than worrying about the needs of the end users. They tried lots of phones but they never worried too much about the phone interface because their real customers (the carriers) didn't care. Apple changed expectations about the interface for phones and Nokia was caught flat footed and consumers haven't warmed much to their latest offerings.
Nokia historically has made pretty good hardware but their software has traditionally been mediocre at best. Their internal software projects were not getting much consumer interest and so they threw in with Microsoft. I don't think they are dead yet but if their stock price falls too far I wouldn't be shocked to see the cell phone division get bought by Microsoft or see the company broken up into its constituent divisions.
Nokia is not a design company. They're an engineering company.
They make most of their money selling phones. As such they are a consumer electronics company. Nokia doesn't make the majority of their money selling engineering. They may have an engineering culture but that isn't the same thing. Similarly Apple is a consumer electronics company that arguably has a design culture.
(Actually you can make a very credible argument that Apple really is a software company that bundles their software with nicely designed commodity hardware. One could put Android on an iPhone or Windows on a Mac but if Apple did that Apple's profit margins would disappear faster that you could say shareholder lawsuit because everything that truly makes their products different in important ways is in the software. A Mac running windows isn't much different from a PC from Dell or HP.)
Nokia's R&D also is more engineering-focused. Hardware, signals processing, accessibility, etc. They'll be trying to cram a large swiss army knife worth of tools into a phone, or coming up with new antenna designs to improve signal transmission and reception, or finding new materials to make lighter, thinner phone casings.
All of which is meaningless unless they can come up with products people want to buy or technology they can license to others who do have products people want to buy. I think large companies absolutely should have research labs working on some long term basic science and engineering problems. But Nokia is seriously in danger of going out of business. They have lost over $4 billion in the last two years and their share price is around $3.28 per share as I write this. Their assets are falling faster than their liabilities. While they still have a lot of cash, they have been hemorrhaging cash for the last year or so. Their market cap is around $12 billion which Apple, Microsoft, Samsung or Google could buy with petty cash were they so inclined. (I doubt any of them would except maybe Microsoft)
Regardless of your dismissiveness, it is a scene that is self-sustaining.
What "dismissiveness"? I think working on old hardware is cool the same way I think model building or playing board games is cool. If someone enjoys it, who am I to say they shouldn't? But what they shouldn't say is that "lots" of people do it. The number of people who boot up DOS games is demonstrably tiny, whether it is 1000 or 10,000 or more.
From a more serious point of view, a practical use for DOS on one of these machines may be for certain industrial applications. There are still machines running DOS for point of sale and similar uses in use even today. Nice to have another possible bit of hardware to replace them with if needed.
There are certainly more than 1000 people playing DOS games today.
Fine. Make the number 10,000 or 30,000 and it still is a tiny little niche activity. I'm not sure I know a single person I interact with face-to-face who has even booted up DOS for recreational purposes in the last 10 years. Last time I personally booted a DOS machine was around 1997 or so.
Don't get me wrong, I think it is cool. It just isn't popular or common. As good as some of the games are, most of us moved on from them long ago.
Yes, a lot of people enjoy playing retro DOS games, especially LucasArts adventure games.
If your definition of "a lot" is a number less than 1000 then sure.
Nothing wrong with playing old DOS games or hacking hardware so you can do so but let's not pretend it is an activity with wide appeal shall we? Nostalgic geeks and old hardware are not new but not common either.
Over the last few decades, Nokia has spent more money in R&D than almost any other company in the world.
They do spend quite a lot but they're not top of the heap even just in technology companies. IBM, and Microsoft both spend considerably more on research.
Nokia has spent roughly $4-5 billion per year but it's been dropping steadily from about $5B in 2009 down to about $3.7B last year. A very substantial sum to be sure but not out of line with other large tech companies and they've been forced to spend steadily less due to their financial position. Kind of amazing that they can't seem to develop a hit phone when they spend 5X what Apple does on R&D. Makes you wonder what the heck they are doing.
Wrong question. The correct question is whether it has profit potential. Revenue is just how much you sell. Profits are how much you keep. Profits = Revenue - Expenses. The revenue is not sufficiently larger than the costs then there is no point in being in that line of business.
Having all games (and thus their ports) on million and millions of xbox and PS consoles designed and optimized for your specific hardware for the next 10 years is worth money. Any profit they actually get is just icing.
Profit is never "just icing". Profit is the entire purpose for a for-profit company. No (sane) business exists to just make revenue. They have to do more than break even on the job.
The saying is military propaganda. If you want peace, prepare for peace.
No, it's simple game theory. Let's say you decide to do away with your army or you defund it such that it is no longer capable. Your neighbor however decides to keep their army. Furthermore your neighbor is lead by a dictator who would really like to be your dictator too. Now that you no longer have an army you suddenly find yourself ruled by your neighbor who thought having an army was a fine idea. Maintaining an army (i.e. preparing for war) is simply an act of deterrence.
It's not about military propaganda. It's a recognition that there are people (and nation-states) in this world who will behave aggressively unless it is clear there is a credible opposition force. You ensure no one attacks you by proving you are not someone anyone wants to attack - in other words you prepare for war. Switzerland is a great example. They really have no apparent intention to attack anyone but the place is armed to the teeth just in case someone (like Germany) gets the idea they might want to attack Switzerland.
You are capable of sending a multi-part,..... and you are telling me that you need a citation proving that no other species has as complex of a social structure?
That is correct. Intelligence != Complexity.
When another species can communicate complex compound thoughts (more than HEY!! There are flowers that way!!!!!) to thousands of their own kind over thousands of kilometers, then we might be able to have a complex compound social interaction about how you might, vaguely have a point.
This is a tired argument. The fact that they have not developed an internet does not mean what they are doing and saying is not complex. Animals other than humans demonstrably communicate complex messages, sometimes over very long distances. Whale songs have been shown to travel well over 1000km. Hell my dogs can communicate with me (not even their own species) whether they are tired, want to play, hungry, need to go out, scared, happy, angry. My dogs organize games, coordinate movements of other species (I have border collies), can leave messages (markings), can navigate complex obstacle courses, and more. All this and I barely understand their social structure.
Doesn't need a citation really. It's obvious as hell.
I'm afraid it isn't. It seems logical and might even be true but that is a long way from being a proven fact. I'm not saying you are wrong necessarily but I can say for certain that your assertion is quite ill defined (define complexity) and lacks sufficient data to be taken at face value.
Show me the termite equivalent of philosophy of science or any other long running institution.
That is merely one form of complexity. There are many others. Furthermore to prove that termites lack some version of such philosophies (or have ones that we lack) we would need to be able to communicate with them. Since we cannot do so, our ability to evaluate the complexity of their society in that particular manner is significantly limited. There is much we can observe but even more that we miss. I have several dogs and I can communicate with them on a basic level, far better than with most animals. However I miss a tremendous amount of their communication and social cues - undoubtedly far more than I manage to glean by observation.
Ants don't get death certificates.
Neither does a huge percentage of the human population. Furthermore just because ants don't do things the same way we do, it does not logically follow that their way of doing things is less complex.
Neither do they have a justice system.
Are you sure of that? It is easily demonstrable that other social creatures engage in conduct that could be considered akin to a justice system.
For me, it's quite plain that the onus of evidence would be on someone to show a non-human societal structure than is comparable.
Doesn't work that way. My claim is that we do not know. Further I claim that the term "complexity" is quite vague and needs clarification before meaningful comparisons can be made. You are the one who is claiming definitively that humans have the more complex society which is an assertion requiring evidence and thus the burden of proof is on you. I will concede that you may very well be correct but the matter is hardly an established fact.
No other species has built as complex of a societal structure to compare with.
Citation needed. I've seen this argument before and I've never seen any real analysis to back up the assertion. Mostly it sounds simply like puffery on our part when we claim this. Complexity is a difficult thing to measure. We have some unique abilities and out societal structure is indeed complex but we barely understand the societal structure of most other animals so it really is difficult to make comparisons that are meaningful.
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Getting a PH.D. in any science related field will most likely guarantee you a job.
No degree in any field will "guarantee you a job". Science is no exception. Conversely no degree in any field will make you unemployable nor will the lack of a degree. Some degrees make the odds of landing a job in your field better than others is the most you can say. Lacking a degree or having the "wrong" degree makes certain jobs unobtainable (you won't be a physician without a degree) but that doesn't mean you can't find some sort of employment.
Within the past century, 95% of the purchasing power of the US dollar has been taken away by inflation. Exactly how safe do you think the US dollar is again?
And within that same time period incomes have risen faster than inflation and so has the value of stocks and many other assets. Dollars are a store of value but there are better ones out there. You're making the same argument that my grandmother does when she inappropriately compares the price of milk to the price 50 year ago. A dollar is worth less but our ability to acquire them is greater. Net result is that after you adjust for inflation I'm actually paying less of my income than she did 50 years ago.
If you are using currency as a long-term store of value, you are mostly using it wrong.
Good thing I'm not doing that then. My money is invested in a combination of stocks, bonds, real estate and a few other assets. Holding excess cash, whether it be dollars or bitcoins, is foolish due to inflation and in the case of bitcoin exchange rate risk. (excess cash meaning more than your reasonably foreseeable liquidity needs)
And, as recently demonstrated by Cyprus, if the government arbitrarily changes the rules ex post facto and decides they're going to take your money "because we need it," how well do you sleep?
I sleep just fine. Governments have always had the ability to do this (it's called taxes) and they do it all the time. The only thing different here is the means by which they did it.
You sleep well thinking the rules of the game can't be changed. They can. They are. This is a terrifying precedent.
I sleep well knowing that the rules of the game are the same as they have always been. I understand that taxes can go up or down and I plan accordingly. I might not like it but it is hardly a big surprise.
That depends on if the US government can confiscate money held in banks like what happened in Cyprus, or not. The question is, do you trust government to honor its promises.
The government confiscates money all the time. It's call taxes. This version was just a little less democratic and done in an unusual way which freaks people out.
Generally speaking, no I'm not especially worried about the US government confiscating my money ala Cyprus. Furthermore even making the comparison between the two economies is a bit absurd since the situations are about as different as possible. Put a few billion into Cyprus and you'll hose the economy when you take it out. A few billion is a rounding error in the US economy and most US debt is not actually held by foreigners. Furthermore every penny the US government owes is denominated in dollars which the government can (though shouldn't) print whenever they want. Cyprus uses the Euro over which it has limited control. There is no possible way for the largest US creditors to pull their money out quickly. People make a big deal out of China and Japan each holding $1 trillion in treasury notes but what they usually don't consider is that China doesn't really have any alternative and they cannot sell them quickly to anyone. There literally are no other buyers for that much US debt especially in a short time frame.
Remember, the FDIC has about $25B in treasury notes (not cash, that's long gone) in its fund to cover about $10T in deposits, and most of the insured banks have very low ratios (perhaps 10% cash-on-hand at most). If there's ever a bank run, the FDIC can't stop it.
The FDIC doesn't have to stop it. The purpose of the FDIC is to keep bank runs from starting in the first place, not to be able to back every dollar deposited. The FDIC is there to reassure people that even if their particular bank is having issues that they still will be able to get to their money because the government is there to back them up. Bank runs start because people think they cannot get to their money. If the money is insured there is less chance of them doing this.
I hate to break this to you, but your insured deposits aren't held as coins in an outsized piggy bank like Scrooge McDuck's Money Bin. They exist only as entries in an electronic ledger.
Yes, and? Those insured deposits are backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government and the bank is liable for their security. Bitcoins enjoy none of the same protections. If someone wants to use bitcoin and understands the amount of risk they are assuming then I have no quarrel with them but let's not pretend the amount of risk is remotely comparable.
They should pay the same postage that everyone else has to.
They do. You can send bulk mail and they can send first class mail. The fact that you choose not to do so is beside the point.
Right now they get a discount "bulk rate" even though delivering their junk requires the same effort as delivering first class mail.
I'm afraid it doesn't. Much of the cost is in sorting and bulk mail tends to be pre-sorted which cuts down the cost to the post office. There are economies of scale at work here. I agree with your premise that postal spam should cost more but since 95+% of the mail I get (and thus the revenue the post office gets) goes straight to the trash I don't see this happening any time soon.
The IRS considers Bitcoin an good not a currency.
You got a citation for that? I'm pretty sure the IRS will consider it a negotiable instrument which is not a good. And yes I am an accountant.
It isn't income until/unless you sell it and realize a profit.
Properly stated until you sell it, it is an unrealized gain and typically is not taxed, though there are some special cases.
isn't that because there are lots of things a bank can hide off the public financial records?
They don't need to do that although that has been a tactic used in the past. A bit less these days, post Enron. The bank simply needs to be vague about exactly what the composition of their investment portfolio is and ALL banks are rather opaque in this respect. Furthermore certain financial instruments are extremely difficult to evaluate. It's difficult to tell sometimes whether a derivative is a hedge or speculation or what the risk is. As an outsider it can be extremely difficult to evaluate the level of risk a bank is exposed to.
Isn't that what this lawsuit is about? Hiding the "bad apples"?
I've read the article and it is hard to say. Probably you are correct but maybe not in the way you think. I suspect it might have more to do with the VCs not wanting their various clients to see who is getting a better deal. Furthermore if you know KP or Sequoia's returns it gives information to other VCs who might offer a better deal It's not probably about hiding the performance of specific investments so much as it is for competitive reasons. There are a finite number of good investments at a given time and it wouldn't be hard for a manager of an investing fund to do a bit of price shopping if they had enough information. After all, it doesn't matter if the VC charges a lot if their performance (alpha) is good enough to justify their rate. But if their performance is just average, no one wants to pay extra for average performance.
Most VC deals are not that lucrative by a long shot and that's where the founders and investors get screwed - and that's another thing that this lawsuit is about.
Anyone who invests in a VC fund knows the batting average is low. This is not an interesting fact. There probably will be around 1 successful company out of 10. That's not (usually) a reflection of the incompetence of VCs so much as it is a reflection of how hard it is build a successful business. The real question is why KP and Sequoia are hiding the returns of their specific funds. It's not shocking that they would do so - I can think of several reasonable explanations. My confusion is why the University is trying to protect that information.
On the other side, startups tend not to have audited financial statements, so it takes a lot of leg work for the due diligence.
Audited financials are somewhat overrated. See Enron. It's not terribly hard to make financial statements too confusing to interpret. I defy anyone reading this to look at the financial reports of any large bank and tell me how much risk they are exposed to or what their investment portfolio looks like. A VC will still have to do a ton of legwork for any company they plan to invest in.
Disclosure: I'm am a certified accountant.
AND they use other people's money while making sure they get a big cut in fees and whatnot because of their "expertise" while giving their investors returns that don't quite warrant the risk they are taking.They, the VCs, can't lose - the founders and the investors take most if not all the risk.
It's not true that they cannot lose. While typically it is not their own money at risk (though sometimes it is), if a VC is unsuccessful with a fund they often find it difficult/impossible to raise money for their next fund. The risks to the VC are typically more long term. If I'm a big pension fund manager investing with a VC fund and I don't receive a return on my investment, I'm not going to invest with that VC again most likely. The VC community isn't a very big one and the people who invest in VC funds typically are pretty well connected. Screw up a VC fund and the VC fund manager can easily find themselves effectively blackballed from future work in the industry.
The only thing these guys have is connections to money and a lucky hit or two.
Connections to money is an extremely valuable thing. You talk about it dismissively but access to capital is difficult to come by. VCs do provide a useful service for a relatively small number of companies but their reputation as kingmakers is somewhat out of proportion to their actual ability to pick winners. Most successful companies do not ever get VC funding. Most of the Fortune 500 got there without a dime of VC money. A few (Google etc) probably wouldn't have gotten there without it.
Didn't Nokia also make a bunch of money selling cell towers and other network stuff?
Yes. About half their revenue comes from cell phones and related products and about half comes from infrastructure via Nokia Siemens Networks which is a 50/50 joint venture. They have a third division for their mapping technology (NAVTEQ) but its revenue is relatively inconsequential at about 1/10th the size of the other two divisions. The infrastructure division is relatively profitable though joint ventures tend to be unstable in the long run. (commonly the partners eventually have differing goals and one or the other takes over) It's not a good situation when your most profitable division is half owned by someone else. Worse, Nokia's prospects in cell phones now depend heavily on Microsoft and that hasn't exactly worked out amazingly well.
I think Nokia has a business model that made sense a few years ago when people weren't so picky about the software on their cell phones. (everyone's software kind of sucked, not just Nokias) Nokia was geared to sell to AT&T and Verizon and the other carriers rather than worrying about the needs of the end users. They tried lots of phones but they never worried too much about the phone interface because their real customers (the carriers) didn't care. Apple changed expectations about the interface for phones and Nokia was caught flat footed and consumers haven't warmed much to their latest offerings.
Nokia historically has made pretty good hardware but their software has traditionally been mediocre at best. Their internal software projects were not getting much consumer interest and so they threw in with Microsoft. I don't think they are dead yet but if their stock price falls too far I wouldn't be shocked to see the cell phone division get bought by Microsoft or see the company broken up into its constituent divisions.
Nokia is not a design company. They're an engineering company.
They make most of their money selling phones. As such they are a consumer electronics company. Nokia doesn't make the majority of their money selling engineering. They may have an engineering culture but that isn't the same thing. Similarly Apple is a consumer electronics company that arguably has a design culture.
(Actually you can make a very credible argument that Apple really is a software company that bundles their software with nicely designed commodity hardware. One could put Android on an iPhone or Windows on a Mac but if Apple did that Apple's profit margins would disappear faster that you could say shareholder lawsuit because everything that truly makes their products different in important ways is in the software. A Mac running windows isn't much different from a PC from Dell or HP.)
Nokia's R&D also is more engineering-focused. Hardware, signals processing, accessibility, etc. They'll be trying to cram a large swiss army knife worth of tools into a phone, or coming up with new antenna designs to improve signal transmission and reception, or finding new materials to make lighter, thinner phone casings.
All of which is meaningless unless they can come up with products people want to buy or technology they can license to others who do have products people want to buy. I think large companies absolutely should have research labs working on some long term basic science and engineering problems. But Nokia is seriously in danger of going out of business. They have lost over $4 billion in the last two years and their share price is around $3.28 per share as I write this. Their assets are falling faster than their liabilities. While they still have a lot of cash, they have been hemorrhaging cash for the last year or so. Their market cap is around $12 billion which Apple, Microsoft, Samsung or Google could buy with petty cash were they so inclined. (I doubt any of them would except maybe Microsoft)
Regardless of your dismissiveness, it is a scene that is self-sustaining.
What "dismissiveness"? I think working on old hardware is cool the same way I think model building or playing board games is cool. If someone enjoys it, who am I to say they shouldn't? But what they shouldn't say is that "lots" of people do it. The number of people who boot up DOS games is demonstrably tiny, whether it is 1000 or 10,000 or more.
From a more serious point of view, a practical use for DOS on one of these machines may be for certain industrial applications. There are still machines running DOS for point of sale and similar uses in use even today. Nice to have another possible bit of hardware to replace them with if needed.
There are certainly more than 1000 people playing DOS games today.
Fine. Make the number 10,000 or 30,000 and it still is a tiny little niche activity. I'm not sure I know a single person I interact with face-to-face who has even booted up DOS for recreational purposes in the last 10 years. Last time I personally booted a DOS machine was around 1997 or so.
Don't get me wrong, I think it is cool. It just isn't popular or common. As good as some of the games are, most of us moved on from them long ago.
Yes, a lot of people enjoy playing retro DOS games, especially LucasArts adventure games.
If your definition of "a lot" is a number less than 1000 then sure.
Nothing wrong with playing old DOS games or hacking hardware so you can do so but let's not pretend it is an activity with wide appeal shall we? Nostalgic geeks and old hardware are not new but not common either.
Over the last few decades, Nokia has spent more money in R&D than almost any other company in the world.
They do spend quite a lot but they're not top of the heap even just in technology companies. IBM, and Microsoft both spend considerably more on research.
Nokia has spent roughly $4-5 billion per year but it's been dropping steadily from about $5B in 2009 down to about $3.7B last year. A very substantial sum to be sure but not out of line with other large tech companies and they've been forced to spend steadily less due to their financial position. Kind of amazing that they can't seem to develop a hit phone when they spend 5X what Apple does on R&D. Makes you wonder what the heck they are doing.
60million units doesn't have revenue potential?
Wrong question. The correct question is whether it has profit potential. Revenue is just how much you sell. Profits are how much you keep. Profits = Revenue - Expenses. The revenue is not sufficiently larger than the costs then there is no point in being in that line of business.
Having all games (and thus their ports) on million and millions of xbox and PS consoles designed and optimized for your specific hardware for the next 10 years is worth money. Any profit they actually get is just icing.
Profit is never "just icing". Profit is the entire purpose for a for-profit company. No (sane) business exists to just make revenue. They have to do more than break even on the job.
The saying is military propaganda. If you want peace, prepare for peace.
No, it's simple game theory. Let's say you decide to do away with your army or you defund it such that it is no longer capable. Your neighbor however decides to keep their army. Furthermore your neighbor is lead by a dictator who would really like to be your dictator too. Now that you no longer have an army you suddenly find yourself ruled by your neighbor who thought having an army was a fine idea. Maintaining an army (i.e. preparing for war) is simply an act of deterrence.
It's not about military propaganda. It's a recognition that there are people (and nation-states) in this world who will behave aggressively unless it is clear there is a credible opposition force. You ensure no one attacks you by proving you are not someone anyone wants to attack - in other words you prepare for war. Switzerland is a great example. They really have no apparent intention to attack anyone but the place is armed to the teeth just in case someone (like Germany) gets the idea they might want to attack Switzerland.
You are capable of sending a multi-part, ..... and you are telling me that you need a citation proving that no other species has as complex of a social structure?
That is correct. Intelligence != Complexity.
When another species can communicate complex compound thoughts (more than HEY!! There are flowers that way!!!!!) to thousands of their own kind over thousands of kilometers, then we might be able to have a complex compound social interaction about how you might, vaguely have a point.
This is a tired argument. The fact that they have not developed an internet does not mean what they are doing and saying is not complex. Animals other than humans demonstrably communicate complex messages, sometimes over very long distances. Whale songs have been shown to travel well over 1000km. Hell my dogs can communicate with me (not even their own species) whether they are tired, want to play, hungry, need to go out, scared, happy, angry. My dogs organize games, coordinate movements of other species (I have border collies), can leave messages (markings), can navigate complex obstacle courses, and more. All this and I barely understand their social structure.
Doesn't need a citation really. It's obvious as hell.
I'm afraid it isn't. It seems logical and might even be true but that is a long way from being a proven fact. I'm not saying you are wrong necessarily but I can say for certain that your assertion is quite ill defined (define complexity) and lacks sufficient data to be taken at face value.
Show me the termite equivalent of philosophy of science or any other long running institution.
That is merely one form of complexity. There are many others. Furthermore to prove that termites lack some version of such philosophies (or have ones that we lack) we would need to be able to communicate with them. Since we cannot do so, our ability to evaluate the complexity of their society in that particular manner is significantly limited. There is much we can observe but even more that we miss. I have several dogs and I can communicate with them on a basic level, far better than with most animals. However I miss a tremendous amount of their communication and social cues - undoubtedly far more than I manage to glean by observation.
Ants don't get death certificates.
Neither does a huge percentage of the human population. Furthermore just because ants don't do things the same way we do, it does not logically follow that their way of doing things is less complex.
Neither do they have a justice system.
Are you sure of that? It is easily demonstrable that other social creatures engage in conduct that could be considered akin to a justice system.
For me, it's quite plain that the onus of evidence would be on someone to show a non-human societal structure than is comparable.
Doesn't work that way. My claim is that we do not know. Further I claim that the term "complexity" is quite vague and needs clarification before meaningful comparisons can be made. You are the one who is claiming definitively that humans have the more complex society which is an assertion requiring evidence and thus the burden of proof is on you. I will concede that you may very well be correct but the matter is hardly an established fact.
No other species has built as complex of a societal structure to compare with.
Citation needed. I've seen this argument before and I've never seen any real analysis to back up the assertion. Mostly it sounds simply like puffery on our part when we claim this. Complexity is a difficult thing to measure. We have some unique abilities and out societal structure is indeed complex but we barely understand the societal structure of most other animals so it really is difficult to make comparisons that are meaningful.