Literally most of the reason I'm having children is because I have an IQ of ~172 and my wifes is north of 140. Anyone past 120 should be at least considering 2 children so they replace themselves. Since you both have good careers going and you are successful at a young age, its fairly safe to say you are both in that bracket.
For the good of humanity, please reconsider! More would be better, but you need to have two just to replace yourselves! Wait a few years and have some fun boating around the world maybe, but after the kids are 5-6 you can just take them with you for the most part. Also make sure you don't regret not having children later. No one ever regrets having kids unless you're part of the 0.001% that spawns a serial killer. LOTS of people regret NOT having children.
As for workplace hostility... as long as one of you, the man or the woman, is willing to make the decision to sacrifice career advancement for children then you're fine. If you can, whoever makes the decision should look for a job either in a union situation or for government. People there are VERY family friendly because they're literally forced to be.
If that fails, move to Canada. We have mandated 18 month leave for women and 9 months for men written straight into federal law. If they won't let you take it AND give you your job back afterwards(after which dismissing you for any reason within 6 months is going to cause them so many headaches they'd better not even think about it)
The entire iPhone 5 release. The thing is a horrid piece of shit.
Lens flaring issue means any light source ruins pictures entirely. Unless you wanted everything in it to be purple.
Forget about keeping it in your pocket, no one bothered to verify that it could at least handle some loose change rubbing softly against it now and then and never bothered to put a proper finish on the aluminum.
Light leaks on the white model... random glitches causing screen distortions.... This is the first REAL major release since Jobs death and the laundry list of problems is a mile long. These are quality issues that Jobs would have probably killed people over if they made it to release. There is a reason Jobs didn't announce a successor, he didn't have a viable candidate available among all of the idiot MBA managers on staff.
He's not... the number one killer in those sorts of buildings during fires is smoke. You're talking out of your ass because you're assuming he's talking out of his.
Fire code is designed to prevent structure collapse and slow down fire progression in order to give rescue workers time to get to people. Fire emergency PROCEDURES for the workers etc inside the building are designed to slow smoke progression and give firefighers time go get to areas of the building to get people out with oxygen. However those aren't usually terribly effective. Smoke gets in past the doors that are closed, not all of the doors that should be closed are etc... they're really just stop-gaps that save minutes. where the fire retarding installations can delay the building collapse by hours and sometimes prevent it altogether.
Source: I am a construction manager and was at one point also a volunteer firefighter. Information from training courses agrees with all of the information and experience I have as a builder. You would pretty much have to be a fire marshall in a large city or an engineer employed designing or inspecting the systems used to be more knowledgeable on this subject.
No, I'm actually talking about a bracketed tax system identical to the one we have in Canada. It is entirely possible to get a raise and see no benefit from it here, but it has to be something along the lines of someone making 72k/yr and getting a 2% raise getting them up to 73.44k/yr but going up a tax bracket at approximately 73.4k. This only happens towards the higher end of salaries however as the % tax climb gets steeper the higher you go. That said its still worthwhile to get the raise because the next one will be most all beneficial. Of course we have a fairly comprehensive tax credit system for Joe and Jane average so its usually easy enough to find something to claim to get you down from the next bracket up.
Progressive tax systems would not work quite as well and are harder to utilize to accomplish what I have described.
At 9 people per square mile we should be less efficient since we have a much broader tract of land to cover. We're TEN TIMES more efficient. It doesn't actually matter about our natural resources, that is a complete straw man argument. All I'm talking is efficiency. If you were getting our efficiency rates not only would current medicare funding be sufficient, one years funding would be sufficient to run the entire country on universal health care for TWO YEARS.
I should clarify that Territories don't count for the purpose of any of them having a balanced budget. They're all essentially giant native reserves propped up by the feds and none of them have had a balanced budget since their inception with a brief exception in the yukon where they had more money than they knew what to spend it on for a little while. They quickly came up with new things to spend it on.
Budget was balanced, once tax cuts are reversed it will be again. GST was a stupid cut, benefitted no one except massive companies.
Also all provinces(not territories, but provinces, territores don't count) are running small deficits or balanced budgets. Newfoundland is running a significant deficit but its due to capital spending that is going to more than repay itself within 10 years and have income beyond that.
Ontario was in the shitter, but Ontario seems to be a bit of a Canadian microcosm of the U.S. They're not spending into the industries and they're trying to lower taxes to promote growth and its all failing miserably. They need to tax and spend and they're cutting and cutting.
As the old joke goes:
Whats the only thing you can you get a man from BC, a man from Alberta, a man from Quebec and a man from Newfoundland to agree on?
We're not ignorant. Most Canadians I know are better informed on the US political situation than most of those living in the U.S.
It needs to be reformed, but your right-wing nut-jobs just want to cut benefits and call it done. The programs need reform that may actually increase spending in the short-term but get people OFF of social security altogether in the long term.
Also "Cheaper and more efficient" in the U.S. has become synonymous with "Privatize it" with some large segments of the population. Theres an entire cultural problem down there right now. We're not belittling the situation, we're stating outright that its totally fucked on a very grand scale.
You have no political will to actually do things correctly. It may come across as belittling but as our largest trading partner many Canadians KNOW that the health and well-being of the U.S. as a country is directly tied to our own health and well being. We are pointing at ourselves as an example of "doing it right" in an attempt to generate more attention and hopefully some additional popular support in the U.S. for properly reforming your health care and social security systems.
#1 you need to raise taxes. #2 you need to reform the programs. Health care needs to become a single-payer federal system. Part of the reason for Canadas current efficiency of health care is because there is a giant health board that all of the individual provinces work with. The provincial boards have direct control over thier own affairs but cooperate on larger issues such as emergency heart care etc.
Since things are different down there the only effective way to implement it would be as a seperate federal department for each state that then runs within a larger federal board that functions purely to liase between the various states departments and perform audits now and then to keep everyone honest. This also reduces the potential for corruption because there isn't one giant federal board. If someone wants to issue bribes to get something they'd have to bribe too many people to make it worthwhile. It may seem like a logistical nightmare, and the states may even need to be broken up into groups to make it work better, but it is doable,
Social security.... education programs need to be implemented. Workfare programs, therapy benefits... anything that can help to get these people back to being productive needs to be done. Spending an extra 30-40k on education while they're on social security for 3 years is much better than spending an additional 300+k(not to mention the tax revenue loss since they're not paying any taxes at all). over the course of another 15-20 years or more.
"In the US, when tax rates were above 70%, we had some pretty good domestic growth. Please do not try to tell me that raising taxes is the death knell of innovation and business. As one small business owner told me recently, if taxes went up he would consider hiring to (1) expand his business because (2) instead of the Government getting his money from his profits, he would rather pay a worker. A tax cut would do nothing...nothing to inspire him to expand. He would just buy more goods, mostly made outside this country."
This. 1000000x this. There is a comfort level for business owners. Once the comfort level is attained they strive for nothing more than acquiring more personal wealth to ensure they have some sort of legacy. When taxes go up, businesses are forced to do MORE. They're forced to grow, hire more employees, train staff and do whatever it takes to achieve this comfort level and then acquire more wealth.
Taxes are on PROFIT, and a tiered tax system based on amount of profit encourages less massive companies that can monopolize or have massive industry-wide ramifications. The only companies that should be so large are manufacturers and R&D companies because there is simply no choice.
If you make say 200k net profit before taxes this year and end up with say 170k of it in your pocket after tax, then you project you'll make 250k net profit before taxes next year and would end up with say 200k in your pocket because you've been bumped up another tax bracket. 170k is a comfortable place for you, and you could use some extra help. You hire an employee at 40k/yr(including benefit costs yada yada for simplicities sake) which gets you down to 210k profit before taxes, but drops you down a tax bracket(which for arguments sake we'll say the limit is at 220k) However since you're down the tax bracket you end up making 178.5k. Thus the total cost of that employee to you wasn't the 40k you're putting into the economy, it was the difference between 200k and 178.5k. Which is only 21.5k. You've hired yourself a mid-level employee at a total cost of something barely above minimum wage plus some minor benefits.
40k/yr is a fairly solid middle class job in a lot of places. This tax scenario creates a situation where middle class jobs start piling up fast from a LOT of different businesses. You can apply the same(15% and 20% for increasing tax brackets) in many business areas and the exact same thing will happen. The government ends up with MORE money because the individuals tax rate is probably a few % higher than the business tax rate is. Even if they don't just from the income tax portion, they will end up with more tax money, and zounds more tax money from the transactions and other services this guy consumes that are also taxed.
Yes, Higher taxes CAN STIMULATE an economy. They can be used to create an artificial pressure for companies to increase local expenses. Which puts more money back into the economy and the cycle continues. The largest periods of growth in the U.S. in particular vastly support this theory. Higher taxes = more growth. Bill Clinton raised taxes. Low and behold, middle class got stronger. Every country runs on its middle class. Without a strong middle class, the rest of the country is screwed.
Funny, Canada has a balanced budget and we have a more robust welfare system(that less people are forced to take advantage of prior to old-age because it is robust and includes education and sometimes FORCED education programs.
We also spend 10% per capita on health care of what you spend and get LONGER life expectancies. Emergency treatment isn't as good(but only for SOME things, generally rarer things/situations that a country with 10% of your population base isn't going to have a very large absolute number of people needing attention for), but preventative measures are used in every possible case where they can have a strong benefit.
Most americans are so fucking narrow minded its mind-boggling. Even some american friends who I would otherwise consider relatively intelligent just can't see the fucking forest because they get hung up on one or two trees.
Depends on the specific system. In my case I was building a new computer with a Piledriver based AMD cpu in it, and 8350 to be precise. Windows 7 doesn't have and will never have the scheduler update that makes the 8350 compete with all but the top I5 and $450+ i7 parts.
That, again, depends on specific games, but in my case for my gaming it was worth the $35 and the 10 minutes online searching for the metro fix.
Right now the cheapest possible gaming rig that can beast anything on the market on max settings involves Windows 8.
I'm not promoting the OS, just stating that I have upgraded, and its not that terrible.
Windows 8 has some nicely improved features though. Plug & Play is certainly better, its pretty much as good as Ubuntu. The Metro Interface for autplay is a huge improvement over the last 5 generations of windows software...
Honestly MS could have actually had a bit of a winner here if it wasn't for forcing the Metro interface. Its not enough to upgrade from windows 7 immediately but if it wasn't for metro it wouldn't be avoided by anyone.
Its legal anyways. To hit it with a rifle its below the 500ft ceiling that constitutes trespassing. In most states they can't shoot YOU but can call the police. Your property, AKA that drone, is fair game.
I didn't say anything at all about Windows, I was referring to PCs in general. Even if they launch their console I expect they'll at the very least keep steam going on linux, even if it is only their own distro that they officially support.
Basically what I'm seeing is anyone thats got a real interest in gaming is getting a gaming PC at this point. Most of them get hooked on the mouse/keyboard control scheme after a short while too.
Laptop and PC sales are tanking but part of that has to do with everyone has a desktop or a laptop at this point that has some sort of office software on it etc and unless that actually breaks they don't replace it. The market is slowly settling into gamers and non-gamers. Gamers buy a desktop because they can game on it and its the same price as a laptop they can't game with, another set of people buy desktops that can play games to save some money on consoles for thier kids or just because their kids want to play PC games. These people are true casuals. The rest of the true casuals have gone over to laptops + tablets + phones because they don't want to take up that much space in their homes.
Then theres another growing set of people who I call professionals. They have a desk at home for work anyways and the space is already there for gaming. Why not use it? There are a lot of this segment getting interested in Eve Online and games like it. Their income generally isn't a factor in having both a gaming PC and a laptop and they'll often start gaming a bit on the laptop then switch to a desktop because "Hey, the fucking desk isn't going anywhere anyways."
they can't shoot the goose that laid the golden egg. A lot of the reason PC gaming is seeing a resurgence is actually tablets. Most people don't LIKE working on laptops and have desks for them anyways. For the same price as a laptop you can go buy a gaming PC generally and bam, you're now a PC gamer. Whats happening is tablets are eating the convenience of notebooks alive and more and more people are turning to desktop PCs for gaming and work.
If you buy a network you have to deal with the problems of the current system and employees.
If you roll your own you get to dictate its development and management style from the ground up.
Google obviously sees the problem as systemic, and they're right.
Sprint *MAY* be a good fit but you're taking an awful chance buying them for 18b and then potentially having to gut a lot of the experienced staff.
Verizon and AT&T aren't options. Market caps are too high for Google to legitimately finance buying them. They would have to consume over half of their cash reserves at a minimum which would put them into something of an all-or-nothing move into the carrier business. Taking a hit like that if it doesn't work out or being forced to take another 3-5b hit after they make the purchase due to having to gut the company and restructure isn't something they should do.
They may be forced to buy someone to get the spectrum however.
Several, Samsung being one of them, would already like patents gone. They've spoken about this, but they can't really clamor because they NEED some form of patent system and the current one is so broken no one has a good way to fix it.
The new one in NY is rumored to have 22nm capabilities. Supposedly its development has taken a turn towards ARM but I'd be VERY interested to see what a piledriver core on 22nm can do considering what it does against intels offerings on the windows 8 scheduler currently.
The problem was money both times. AMD lacked the money to advertise properly and Intel both times tapped their huge war chest to literally PAY PC manufacturers not to use AMD chips.
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That is why you need to have kids.
Literally most of the reason I'm having children is because I have an IQ of ~172 and my wifes is north of 140. Anyone past 120 should be at least considering 2 children so they replace themselves. Since you both have good careers going and you are successful at a young age, its fairly safe to say you are both in that bracket.
For the good of humanity, please reconsider! More would be better, but you need to have two just to replace yourselves! Wait a few years and have some fun boating around the world maybe, but after the kids are 5-6 you can just take them with you for the most part. Also make sure you don't regret not having children later. No one ever regrets having kids unless you're part of the 0.001% that spawns a serial killer. LOTS of people regret NOT having children.
As for workplace hostility... as long as one of you, the man or the woman, is willing to make the decision to sacrifice career advancement for children then you're fine. If you can, whoever makes the decision should look for a job either in a union situation or for government. People there are VERY family friendly because they're literally forced to be.
If that fails, move to Canada. We have mandated 18 month leave for women and 9 months for men written straight into federal law. If they won't let you take it AND give you your job back afterwards(after which dismissing you for any reason within 6 months is going to cause them so many headaches they'd better not even think about it)
We'd be happy to have you :)
The entire iPhone 5 release. The thing is a horrid piece of shit.
Lens flaring issue means any light source ruins pictures entirely. Unless you wanted everything in it to be purple.
Forget about keeping it in your pocket, no one bothered to verify that it could at least handle some loose change rubbing softly against it now and then and never bothered to put a proper finish on the aluminum.
Light leaks on the white model... random glitches causing screen distortions.... This is the first REAL major release since Jobs death and the laundry list of problems is a mile long. These are quality issues that Jobs would have probably killed people over if they made it to release. There is a reason Jobs didn't announce a successor, he didn't have a viable candidate available among all of the idiot MBA managers on staff.
I'm going to bet it was the new CEO. You're seeing this sort of rushed production all over the place now that jobs is dead.
It happened previously as well but it was things like antennagate that were relatively hard to detect on quality control measures.
He's not... the number one killer in those sorts of buildings during fires is smoke. You're talking out of your ass because you're assuming he's talking out of his.
Fire code is designed to prevent structure collapse and slow down fire progression in order to give rescue workers time to get to people. Fire emergency PROCEDURES for the workers etc inside the building are designed to slow smoke progression and give firefighers time go get to areas of the building to get people out with oxygen. However those aren't usually terribly effective. Smoke gets in past the doors that are closed, not all of the doors that should be closed are etc... they're really just stop-gaps that save minutes. where the fire retarding installations can delay the building collapse by hours and sometimes prevent it altogether.
Source: I am a construction manager and was at one point also a volunteer firefighter. Information from training courses agrees with all of the information and experience I have as a builder. You would pretty much have to be a fire marshall in a large city or an engineer employed designing or inspecting the systems used to be more knowledgeable on this subject.
No, I'm actually talking about a bracketed tax system identical to the one we have in Canada. It is entirely possible to get a raise and see no benefit from it here, but it has to be something along the lines of someone making 72k/yr and getting a 2% raise getting them up to 73.44k/yr but going up a tax bracket at approximately 73.4k. This only happens towards the higher end of salaries however as the % tax climb gets steeper the higher you go. That said its still worthwhile to get the raise because the next one will be most all beneficial. Of course we have a fairly comprehensive tax credit system for Joe and Jane average so its usually easy enough to find something to claim to get you down from the next bracket up.
Progressive tax systems would not work quite as well and are harder to utilize to accomplish what I have described.
Thats supposed to be a good argument?
At 9 people per square mile we should be less efficient since we have a much broader tract of land to cover. We're TEN TIMES more efficient. It doesn't actually matter about our natural resources, that is a complete straw man argument. All I'm talking is efficiency. If you were getting our efficiency rates not only would current medicare funding be sufficient, one years funding would be sufficient to run the entire country on universal health care for TWO YEARS.
I should clarify that Territories don't count for the purpose of any of them having a balanced budget. They're all essentially giant native reserves propped up by the feds and none of them have had a balanced budget since their inception with a brief exception in the yukon where they had more money than they knew what to spend it on for a little while. They quickly came up with new things to spend it on.
Budget was balanced, once tax cuts are reversed it will be again. GST was a stupid cut, benefitted no one except massive companies.
Also all provinces(not territories, but provinces, territores don't count) are running small deficits or balanced budgets. Newfoundland is running a significant deficit but its due to capital spending that is going to more than repay itself within 10 years and have income beyond that.
Ontario was in the shitter, but Ontario seems to be a bit of a Canadian microcosm of the U.S. They're not spending into the industries and they're trying to lower taxes to promote growth and its all failing miserably. They need to tax and spend and they're cutting and cutting.
As the old joke goes:
Whats the only thing you can you get a man from BC, a man from Alberta, a man from Quebec and a man from Newfoundland to agree on?
People from Ontario are all fucking retarded.
We're not ignorant. Most Canadians I know are better informed on the US political situation than most of those living in the U.S.
It needs to be reformed, but your right-wing nut-jobs just want to cut benefits and call it done. The programs need reform that may actually increase spending in the short-term but get people OFF of social security altogether in the long term.
Also "Cheaper and more efficient" in the U.S. has become synonymous with "Privatize it" with some large segments of the population. Theres an entire cultural problem down there right now. We're not belittling the situation, we're stating outright that its totally fucked on a very grand scale.
You have no political will to actually do things correctly. It may come across as belittling but as our largest trading partner many Canadians KNOW that the health and well-being of the U.S. as a country is directly tied to our own health and well being. We are pointing at ourselves as an example of "doing it right" in an attempt to generate more attention and hopefully some additional popular support in the U.S. for properly reforming your health care and social security systems.
#1 you need to raise taxes. #2 you need to reform the programs. Health care needs to become a single-payer federal system. Part of the reason for Canadas current efficiency of health care is because there is a giant health board that all of the individual provinces work with. The provincial boards have direct control over thier own affairs but cooperate on larger issues such as emergency heart care etc.
Since things are different down there the only effective way to implement it would be as a seperate federal department for each state that then runs within a larger federal board that functions purely to liase between the various states departments and perform audits now and then to keep everyone honest. This also reduces the potential for corruption because there isn't one giant federal board. If someone wants to issue bribes to get something they'd have to bribe too many people to make it worthwhile. It may seem like a logistical nightmare, and the states may even need to be broken up into groups to make it work better, but it is doable,
Social security.... education programs need to be implemented. Workfare programs, therapy benefits... anything that can help to get these people back to being productive needs to be done. Spending an extra 30-40k on education while they're on social security for 3 years is much better than spending an additional 300+k(not to mention the tax revenue loss since they're not paying any taxes at all). over the course of another 15-20 years or more.
"In the US, when tax rates were above 70%, we had some pretty good domestic growth. Please do not try to tell me that raising taxes is the death knell of innovation and business. As one small business owner told me recently, if taxes went up he would consider hiring to (1) expand his business because (2) instead of the Government getting his money from his profits, he would rather pay a worker. A tax cut would do nothing...nothing to inspire him to expand. He would just buy more goods, mostly made outside this country."
This. 1000000x this. There is a comfort level for business owners. Once the comfort level is attained they strive for nothing more than acquiring more personal wealth to ensure they have some sort of legacy. When taxes go up, businesses are forced to do MORE. They're forced to grow, hire more employees, train staff and do whatever it takes to achieve this comfort level and then acquire more wealth.
Taxes are on PROFIT, and a tiered tax system based on amount of profit encourages less massive companies that can monopolize or have massive industry-wide ramifications. The only companies that should be so large are manufacturers and R&D companies because there is simply no choice.
If you make say 200k net profit before taxes this year and end up with say 170k of it in your pocket after tax, then you project you'll make 250k net profit before taxes next year and would end up with say 200k in your pocket because you've been bumped up another tax bracket. 170k is a comfortable place for you, and you could use some extra help. You hire an employee at 40k/yr(including benefit costs yada yada for simplicities sake) which gets you down to 210k profit before taxes, but drops you down a tax bracket(which for arguments sake we'll say the limit is at 220k) However since you're down the tax bracket you end up making 178.5k. Thus the total cost of that employee to you wasn't the 40k you're putting into the economy, it was the difference between 200k and 178.5k. Which is only 21.5k. You've hired yourself a mid-level employee at a total cost of something barely above minimum wage plus some minor benefits.
40k/yr is a fairly solid middle class job in a lot of places. This tax scenario creates a situation where middle class jobs start piling up fast from a LOT of different businesses. You can apply the same(15% and 20% for increasing tax brackets) in many business areas and the exact same thing will happen. The government ends up with MORE money because the individuals tax rate is probably a few % higher than the business tax rate is. Even if they don't just from the income tax portion, they will end up with more tax money, and zounds more tax money from the transactions and other services this guy consumes that are also taxed.
Yes, Higher taxes CAN STIMULATE an economy. They can be used to create an artificial pressure for companies to increase local expenses. Which puts more money back into the economy and the cycle continues. The largest periods of growth in the U.S. in particular vastly support this theory. Higher taxes = more growth. Bill Clinton raised taxes. Low and behold, middle class got stronger. Every country runs on its middle class. Without a strong middle class, the rest of the country is screwed.
Funny, Canada has a balanced budget and we have a more robust welfare system(that less people are forced to take advantage of prior to old-age because it is robust and includes education and sometimes FORCED education programs.
We also spend 10% per capita on health care of what you spend and get LONGER life expectancies. Emergency treatment isn't as good(but only for SOME things, generally rarer things/situations that a country with 10% of your population base isn't going to have a very large absolute number of people needing attention for), but preventative measures are used in every possible case where they can have a strong benefit.
Most americans are so fucking narrow minded its mind-boggling. Even some american friends who I would otherwise consider relatively intelligent just can't see the fucking forest because they get hung up on one or two trees.
Not long now. Their net spending is up to 7.5 billion in raw dollars and they're getting a LOT more out of that money than the US ever can.
Its mostly multi-tasking performance.
In my case I play Eve Online and running 3 eve clients plus world of tanks is a breeze now where it used to cause the computer to chug a little bit.
There is a raw performance increase for AMD CPU parts however due to the new scheduler in Windows 8 that Windows 7 is not going to get the update for.
Depends on the specific system. In my case I was building a new computer with a Piledriver based AMD cpu in it, and 8350 to be precise. Windows 7 doesn't have and will never have the scheduler update that makes the 8350 compete with all but the top I5 and $450+ i7 parts.
That, again, depends on specific games, but in my case for my gaming it was worth the $35 and the 10 minutes online searching for the metro fix.
Right now the cheapest possible gaming rig that can beast anything on the market on max settings involves Windows 8.
I'm not promoting the OS, just stating that I have upgraded, and its not that terrible.
Windows 8 has some nicely improved features though. Plug & Play is certainly better, its pretty much as good as Ubuntu. The Metro Interface for autplay is a huge improvement over the last 5 generations of windows software...
Honestly MS could have actually had a bit of a winner here if it wasn't for forcing the Metro interface. Its not enough to upgrade from windows 7 immediately but if it wasn't for metro it wouldn't be avoided by anyone.
Its legal anyways. To hit it with a rifle its below the 500ft ceiling that constitutes trespassing. In most states they can't shoot YOU but can call the police. Your property, AKA that drone, is fair game.
Windows 8 is a performance upgrade.
I'm a gamer, I bought it purely for that reason.
I downloaded a free app that gave me back the start menu, and voila, faster windows 7. Which is all I really wanted.
I didn't say anything at all about Windows, I was referring to PCs in general. Even if they launch their console I expect they'll at the very least keep steam going on linux, even if it is only their own distro that they officially support.
Basically what I'm seeing is anyone thats got a real interest in gaming is getting a gaming PC at this point. Most of them get hooked on the mouse/keyboard control scheme after a short while too.
Laptop and PC sales are tanking but part of that has to do with everyone has a desktop or a laptop at this point that has some sort of office software on it etc and unless that actually breaks they don't replace it. The market is slowly settling into gamers and non-gamers. Gamers buy a desktop because they can game on it and its the same price as a laptop they can't game with, another set of people buy desktops that can play games to save some money on consoles for thier kids or just because their kids want to play PC games. These people are true casuals. The rest of the true casuals have gone over to laptops + tablets + phones because they don't want to take up that much space in their homes.
Then theres another growing set of people who I call professionals. They have a desk at home for work anyways and the space is already there for gaming. Why not use it? There are a lot of this segment getting interested in Eve Online and games like it. Their income generally isn't a factor in having both a gaming PC and a laptop and they'll often start gaming a bit on the laptop then switch to a desktop because "Hey, the fucking desk isn't going anywhere anyways."
they can't shoot the goose that laid the golden egg. A lot of the reason PC gaming is seeing a resurgence is actually tablets. Most people don't LIKE working on laptops and have desks for them anyways. For the same price as a laptop you can go buy a gaming PC generally and bam, you're now a PC gamer. Whats happening is tablets are eating the convenience of notebooks alive and more and more people are turning to desktop PCs for gaming and work.
So thats why Rogers doesn't suck for coverage anymore. Its all CDMA now. That makes a whole lot of sense.
Thanks.
CDMA had more to do with that. Its a far FAR more robust technology than GSM.
GSM is actually garbage, its just been adopted as the standard .... well I don't know why.
CDMA had better building penetration, better range, and the equipment itself is less delicate.
If you buy a network you have to deal with the problems of the current system and employees.
If you roll your own you get to dictate its development and management style from the ground up.
Google obviously sees the problem as systemic, and they're right.
Sprint *MAY* be a good fit but you're taking an awful chance buying them for 18b and then potentially having to gut a lot of the experienced staff.
Verizon and AT&T aren't options. Market caps are too high for Google to legitimately finance buying them. They would have to consume over half of their cash reserves at a minimum which would put them into something of an all-or-nothing move into the carrier business. Taking a hit like that if it doesn't work out or being forced to take another 3-5b hit after they make the purchase due to having to gut the company and restructure isn't something they should do.
They may be forced to buy someone to get the spectrum however.
Several, Samsung being one of them, would already like patents gone. They've spoken about this, but they can't really clamor because they NEED some form of patent system and the current one is so broken no one has a good way to fix it.
They make majority (85%) of thier profits selling X86 chips, platforms and accessories for those chips.
The new one in NY is rumored to have 22nm capabilities. Supposedly its development has taken a turn towards ARM but I'd be VERY interested to see what a piledriver core on 22nm can do considering what it does against intels offerings on the windows 8 scheduler currently.
The problem was money both times. AMD lacked the money to advertise properly and Intel both times tapped their huge war chest to literally PAY PC manufacturers not to use AMD chips.