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User: jbolden

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  1. Re:Yahooblr on Silicon Valley Could Be Heading For a New Stock Collapse. · · Score: 1

    Facebook is currently at $47.66 the IPO price was $38 2 years ago. That's a very good return even for an IPO that was considered to be priced too high.

    Yes you need to say more.

  2. Re:Yahooblr on Silicon Valley Could Be Heading For a New Stock Collapse. · · Score: 1

    Tumblr has 30-50m highly active users. It has 110m registered accounts who sometimes use the network. Tumblr has another 200m people who browse the service but haven't bothered to create accounts. To put that in perspective 108m people watched the Superbowl the most watched show.
    NCIS is the number one show with about 20m regular viewers, trailing slightly behind is Sunday Night Football and the BigBang theory. By way of analogy Yahoo is a network buying all rights to a show (Tumblr) that huge number of people like.

    Assuming that you agree that advertising is a viable business given its success for the last century,what's the problem?

  3. Re:not to wish bad things on anyone on Silicon Valley Could Be Heading For a New Stock Collapse. · · Score: 1

    The USA is a massive food exporter. It also has large domestic energy supplies. Manufacturing sucks in the USA but the USA has technical know-how and large supplies of natural resources.

  4. Tumblr and Instgram on Silicon Valley Could Be Heading For a New Stock Collapse. · · Score: 1

    Social networks like Tumblr don't have to be profitable. Google. Facebook, Yahoo are themselves profitable. What they are buying are user bases not the business. As far as record highs:

    Cisco P/E 12
    Apple P/E 13 (and that's x-cash, including cash it is much lower)
    Microsoft P/E 13.5 (also x-cash)
    Google P/E 28 (high but still rapidly growing)
    HP is losing money but the stock is cut in half

    I don't see a bubble.

  5. Re:Dump SSL / Certificate-based Security on Silent Circle, Lavabit Unite For 'Dark Mail' Encrypted Email Project · · Score: 1

    I'm not sure I understand the problem. In your example, if Y has a public key, X encrypts the message with Y's public key, and Y's private key never gets to Google or Yahoo, then the NSA knows who sent the message and who received the message but not what it contained.

    You understand the issue. Knowing who sent what to whom, the envelope, is the metadata that people are objecting to. Encrypting messages if one doesn't care about metadata is a much easier problem.

    _________

    As for PGP . I agree this sort of thing needs to be part of email clients. But it is a hard problem to solve.

  6. Re: Remember the old adage... on Microsoft, Apple and Others Launch Huge Patent Strike at Android · · Score: 1

    I gave to examples above that came out of research and in their current products: F# and LINQ.

  7. Re: If you can't be the best on Microsoft, Apple and Others Launch Huge Patent Strike at Android · · Score: 1

    Who cares about the EU-citiizenship? This is about standard ways of fixing computer problems. You live in Europe not on Mars you follow normal customs. Finally, Lessig is American.

  8. Re:Apple made the same mistake on Smartphone Sales: Apple Squeezed, Blackberry Squashed, Android 81.3% · · Score: 1

    Price X and up is "cherry-picking"? Apple takes over 1/2 the profits in the whole handset industry they don't need to be defended.

  9. Re:US turn already happened on Syria Completes Destruction of Chemical Weapon Producing Equipment · · Score: 1

    Yes, it is a total quantity thing. I suspect if we were spending 4x as much per year we could have been done during the Clinton administration, and I imagine the total cost would have been close to the same under that expedited process. The level we choose is indicative of the priority which is we want this to be a smallish line item that doesn't squeeze other priorities but we want progress. Plus there may be a defensive purpose. Because of the cleanup teams, we have large numbers of people skilled in working with and neutralizing chemical weapons. Many of the enemies we are/were likely to face (Iran, Iraq, Syria) have chemical but not nuclear weapons. I think the Army likes having this skill set so why rush?

    As the fools behind the policy that was the USA people. And the sanction they are facing is paying for the cleanup. We all embraced and continue to embrace a weapons policy. Chemical weapons aren't remotely expensive compared to the costs are for nuclear weapons. The Republican party just last year ran a candidate for president who advocated building the next generation of these weapons and replacing our entire current generation. He got 2.5m votes shy of 1/2 the vote. The #2 guy in the Senate on the Republican side, John Kyl, makes nuclear weapon enhancement a high priority consistently. We as a people wanted the chemical weapons policy we had same as we want the nuclear policy we have today.

  10. Re:Anti-Trust on Microsoft, Apple and Others Launch Huge Patent Strike at Android · · Score: 1

    A monopoly is based on share of the market not based on theoretical choice. You are making precisely the argument the sugar companies lost with: theoretical choice for consumers was fine their actual choice didn't matter. A monopoly is defined in terms of the actual choices consumers make, competitors are viable only if they actual sell.

    In terms of global search worse numbers are Google 90% with Bing, yahoo and other at 3% each. That would be a monopoly. If you count differently (customers and not search volume) then the market looks more diverse or count certain Asian providers that aren't tied to the advertising industry then the market does look more diverse. But clearly Google is still dominant enough, even with those counts that undermining Google is enhancing not diminishing competition.

    , I really want to know what you call companies like Microsoft regarding desktop operating systems - or the phone company - or patents/copyrights for that matter.

    Microsoft was a monopoly as well, even though there were dozens of other desktop operating systems available. They made the same argument you did citing Amiga OS, MacOS, the BSD, AIX, IRIX Didn't work. They were found to be a monopoly that had abused their position.

    As for the phone company, I assume you mean in the 1950s-1970s. And they were a regulated utility who agreed they were a monopoly and subject to strong constraints on price to act in the public interests.

    Grounds for voiding a patent would be that it establishes a monopoly. As for copyright I don't see the connection.

  11. Re:Anti-Trust on Microsoft, Apple and Others Launch Huge Patent Strike at Android · · Score: 1

    If you look at a lot of the anti-trust people they wanted smaller companies that were more easily manageable by the government and more importantly had diverse and conflicting interests. Their primary interest was not the underlying products. Which if you think about where they applied this first: sugar, oil, steel; these were products who are literally commodities and thus commoditized.

    One of the harms often cited for monopolies was excessive prices. And certainly the OPEC cartel has a similar reputation today. (I'm freely intermixing monopoly, trust and cartel for this post). But I can't think of many if any of the anti-trust laws that were passed so as to encourage "better" products. Quite often better products (i.e. expensive niche items) were dismissed as irrelevant as they didn't give consumers effective choice even if they created theoretical choice.

  12. Re: If you can't be the best on Microsoft, Apple and Others Launch Huge Patent Strike at Android · · Score: 1

    1) That's not the correct action. The correct action with a failed installation is to reinstall not to return.

    2) If Lessig had tried the reinstall the way Apple instructed him to (i.e. force the update of flash) it would have worked. He may have tried it himself prior to having received instruction from Apple and been successful.

  13. Re: If you can't be the best on Microsoft, Apple and Others Launch Huge Patent Strike at Android · · Score: 1

    The seller was willing to do that. In this case it was a 3rd party advising buyers to mislead the seller as to the nature of the problem and not let the seller fix the problem.

  14. Re: Remember the old adage... on Microsoft, Apple and Others Launch Huge Patent Strike at Android · · Score: 1

    Sorry the "C" above should have read C-Omega. I used the greek and /. dropped it.

  15. Re: Remember the old adage... on Microsoft, Apple and Others Launch Huge Patent Strike at Android · · Score: 1

    The innovation was making database objects act like primitives in a general purpose high performance programming language. That was the big idea behind C which is what became LINQ. I'm not saying that Microsoft invented an entire field or anything but that's a rather important recent innovation.

  16. Re:Anti-Trust on Microsoft, Apple and Others Launch Huge Patent Strike at Android · · Score: 1

    I'm not saying "rather". I'm saying it isn't anti-competitive. Little guys can gang up on a potential monopolist, that's considered preserving competition.

    As for someone forking Android that's been done in China. There is also the Amazon and Nook versions. Cyanogen... If those start to sell enough then there is no longer any potential monopolist and the whole thing becomes moot from a competition standpoint.

  17. Re:US turn already happened on Syria Completes Destruction of Chemical Weapon Producing Equipment · · Score: 2

    Yes. We started with the massive quantity stuff and then had to go to the more specialized stuff. From what I understand the easy stuff we could just heat up 2100F and it was ruined. The harder stuff you have to carefully add neutralizing chemicals to which makes it into only standard toxic waste. Figuring out the right process + mixture + manufacturing the chemicals +.... is about $.5b / year job. It is more like the 80/20 rule the last 20% is more difficult than the first 80% several times over.

  18. Re:But how much do they have stockpiled? on Syria Completes Destruction of Chemical Weapon Producing Equipment · · Score: 1

    Syria is always going to have the capacity to openly start massive chemical weapons production. That's not a question. They have the capacity. But there will be satellites and intelligence in Syria for the foreseeable future. Syria isn't permanently giving up the weapons by more than treaty.

  19. Re:Definition of patent on Microsoft, Apple and Others Launch Huge Patent Strike at Android · · Score: 1

    True. But GP was making a claim about Google directly. As for ads... I have to tell you as someone who was on the internet from 1988. Advertising was not late in 1996. Business on the internet was really a 1995 idea.

  20. Re: Remember the old adage... on Microsoft, Apple and Others Launch Huge Patent Strike at Android · · Score: 1

    I do know people using F#. But if one wants innovations innovations take time to catch on. It is unreasonable to expect new invention -> product -> popular product, to happen quickly. Rather we can show Microsoft at all stages in the process. I was just showing new products that came out of their inventions.

    As for SQL you are misreading my comment. I said LINQ for SQLServer: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vstudio/bb397926.aspx

  21. Re:Justia link on Microsoft, Apple and Others Launch Huge Patent Strike at Android · · Score: 1

    I'd love to read the filing. Normally with this sort of late filing you have to argue you were unaware of the infringing invention. So are they going to argue that Nortel was unaware of Google using their idea?

    We have to see how this plays out.

  22. Re:Anti-Trust on Microsoft, Apple and Others Launch Huge Patent Strike at Android · · Score: 1

    Viewing this as a trust for phone-OSes is complex since it is so indirect. But let's assume that's makable. You still have my point (2) and (3) above. Android is much closer to being a monopoly than Apple + RIM + Microsoft.

  23. Re: If you can't be the best on Microsoft, Apple and Others Launch Huge Patent Strike at Android · · Score: 1

    Apple did say that. And the fix already existed at the time. They did precisely what you were advising.

  24. Re: If you can't be the best on Microsoft, Apple and Others Launch Huge Patent Strike at Android · · Score: 0

    If the customer is knowingly misrepresenting the problem yes that's fraud. I can't return my computer if I install a new version of Windows improperly.

  25. Re:Anti-Trust on Microsoft, Apple and Others Launch Huge Patent Strike at Android · · Score: 1

    Where is the evidence for anti-competitive collusion here. Google has a virtual monopoly in search. Weakening Google's position in search would enhance not diminish competition. Moreover some of the players here aren't in the search business.

    If you want to make the case about phone OSes. Android again is becoming a virtual monopoly at many price points.