That's not my point. My point is you can sue anyone but that doesn't mean your case is valid. For instance, if I filed suit against the manufacture of a firearm for negligence since someone used their weapon to kill my spouse, the case would be dismissed citing the very law you linked if I don't prove that the weapons company did anything illegal at the motion to dismiss review. I could also be punished for wasting the court's and defendant's time by paying legal fees.
Can you sue automakers for car crashes not caused by defect?
Yes.
Can you sue gun makers for deaths?
Yes.
Can you sue the financial industry for losses in the market?
Again, Yes.
Then why the hell is this any different?
It's not. Nothing is stopping you from suing anyone for anything, you just need to be prepared to pay for a lot of legal fees as your cases get dismissed left and right. This is America and we can sue anyone we damn well please for any frivolous reason. You just can't always win. The only requirement for a tort is a civil wrongdoing, intentional or unintentional, and you, plaintiff, have to achieve the preponderance of the evidence.
Hell, sue the f[u]cking NSA for not having told you about it and stopped it.
Give her time, she's working on including them for failing to the act against the National security that is her mediocre body (I assume, I haven't seen the pics).
Fort Smith (where I live) is 9.75% (was 9.25% until the recent tax increase at the State level). 9.375% (no 9.875%) is for "prepared" foods. Basically it's a tax on restaurants to pay for terrible tourism shortfalls and things like a convention center that no one really uses but still costs the city over a million dollars to maintain. Non-prepared foods are taxed much lower since the state only taxes it at 1.5% instead of the normal 6.5% for everything else.
If you use a proxy or VPN, then Pandora won't cut out (actually it just restarts the connection and moves to the next song). I've tested this numerous times with Pandora on Android with VPNs and proxy servers. Pandora only seems to complain if you change IPs suddenly (makes sense since you're changing networks).
As for the Siri use case, that's more applicable as you send the request to Siri down one pipe and receive it down the other. It doesn't support sending the same packets down both pipes simultaneously though since it still has to wait for the acknowledgement (or lack thereof) .
Often times, when I drive around the city, my phone will pick up a known wifi hotspot, negotiate an IP, then timeout when I drive too far away and my apps go ape shit crazy because the connection changed. My alternatives are to route all the traffic through a VPN (not the best since I only have 2.5G where I live and negotiation of the certificates takes forever), route the traffic for each hotspot through a proxy (an annoyance of Android for not having a system wide proxy), or turn off the wifi until I reach my destination. I tend to just turn it off since that's a one-click solution.
Federal wage law states any break less than 20 minutes must be paid by the employer. Anything over that, you're riding your own dime. Funny thing, Federal laws don't require breaks at all. An employer could technically make you work an entire shift with no resting periods or to eat anything. However, doing so is a risk to the company since employee turnover will be through the roof, employee exhaustion will cause accidents, increasing workers comp claims, and OSHA violations are bound to pop-up everywhere. The State level is different since each state varies. Some states require rest periods after a certain number of hours worked. Some even require that lunches even be paid. Workers rights in the US are an abysmal failure, especially for hourly jobs. Your best bet is to find a salary job where breaks aren't that big of a concern and your quality and quantity of work are more important than how often you take a moment to breath.
It does add up if you read the article. The virus survives in humidity levels below 50% and above 98% since 98% simulates the human body. It doesn't fair as well at humidity levels between 60-80%.
As someone with an undergrad and post grad in business, I feel compelled to answer your confusion between worker pay and executive pay. For the worker, they're focused on their specific task, a tacical viewpoint of the business unit they are responsible. The worker answers for the actions of him/herself and not the actions of their fellow co-workers. When profits are down, investors don't ask the worker, they don't fire the worker, they look at the leadership team. It's not the worker who's neck is on the line if the company is unprofitable, and the worker will most certainly never face lawsuits from investors, the government, and other stakeholders.
The CEO on the other and is responsible for the actions of every worker that represents the company. They're responsible for the financial well being of the organization, the brand, and the relationship with every stakehokder. Like a game of chess, the CEO is responsible for the strategic direction of the business with not just today's direction but tomorrow's and the years ahead. In short, the worker is responsible for one thing, his/her work. The CEO is responsible for the work of everyone underneith him/her.
As far as compensation, most CEO's compensation come with base salaries and huge amounts of stock ownership to incentivise the CEO to return higher profits for the shareholders. So it would make since that CEOs receive a large stake of the profits.
I'm not referring to the resell value, but the brand, which is a major part of public perception. Apple doesn't care about actual resell value, but they do care if their brand is diminished because the lack of their products holding value. If Apple's products diminished in value as rapidly as their PC and android/blackberry smartphone counterparts, then the brand is damaged and will become increasingly difficult to demand higher prices and "claim" to have higher quality. It's human nature to assume that if something loses its (economic) value rapidly, then it isn't worth much to begin with. I would love to claim I have the highest quality products; however, if my product loses half to nearly all its value in one year, then my customers are going to start questioning why I priced my product so high.
Not to go off topic too far, take a look at the housing market. People who are currently underwater are asking themselves if it is better to walk away from their homes or keep throwing money down the toilet, not knowing if the equity in their homes will ever come back. A home is a big portion of one's income, but so is a $500 tablet to someone with a $25,000 salary, and the bigger the portion of my income I lose for a product, the more I'm going to demand that the product not become worthless in less than a year. This is how Apple's brand can be tarnished unsuspectingly, because their price points on their tablets are reaching consumers that weren't once their target market, and could have a greater risk of bad mouthing the brand because they feel ripped off.
While you're right on about the 1% of iPad owners tearing the device apart to repair, you might be missing another problem: resell ability. Apple products are notorious for retaining their resell value, but if it becomes too hard and too expensive to fix issues, then consumers are going to start demanding lower prices or Apple can watch its precious resell brand value evaporate. This typically doesn't matter for most of Apple's products except in their iPhone and iPad products. Clunking down $1500-3000 and having to pay a repair bill of $100 isn't that big of a deal to Apple's target market; however, for those that plopped $50-500 for their iPhones or iPads will find that $100 repair bill a little harder to swallow. A repair shouldn't costs 20% of the purchase price. If you bought a new Camry for $20,000 and you had to come up with $4,000 to repair it, you'd think twice about the purchase; the same idea works here but on a smaller scale.
And nothing happens. While I commend the writer for articulating what is wrong with the current movie industry model, the reality is that Hollywood is hell bent on preserving their business model. For good reason too, most of Hollywood are distributors. The distributors are the ones that pay for the movie, the marketing, and shoving it down the throats of consumers. They're middle men protecting their business. Change the distribution model and you'll hear the sucking sound of Hollywood companies drying up. Studios aren't strapped with tons of cash to pay for hit movies on their own, so you'll have fewer movies being made. No one in Hollywood has any incentive to change the current model, and unlike the music industry that got dragged into the 21st century, or the game industry that has adapted to every new platform to survive, the movie industry consumers lack any desire to force a business model change or adaption. Tthe closest thing to adaption is Netflix and recent price hikes are an indicator that the distributors will kill it before giving the consumers what they want.
Simple business decision. If the biggest cost of moving to a new platform is usability, then it would make sense to copy the competing platform to reduce the learning curve. Furthermore, hardcore gamers tend to go for the carbon, black, grey look more often than most. Personally, I've never understood why everything including the window shell has to be some form of black polished metal, but I don't use all of my free time gaming either.
While I hate the idea that Netflix may not be around much longer, I'm not surprised. Mr. Hastings strategy seems to be focusing on maximizing contribution margins instead of maximizing profit. Getting one doesn't mean you'll get the other. What I don't understand is why Hastings believes that the major studios will allow Netflix to operate the online distribution at the price levels consumers demand. It is clear that Hollywood has no interest in lowering prices on digital content even though the marginal costs of distribution is minuscule. It won't be long before Netflix changes to a "on-demand" pricing model that Apple, Amazon, and a whole other set of competitors are already doing, and the recent exit of a third of their customers due to the recent price increase is a clear indication that Netflix is selling a highly elastic product. When will Hollywod ever learn that we don't want to pay 2.99 per episode for a show with DRM restrictions that force you to re-purchase the damn video for every device you have, and that paying $14 for a digital download when the DVD is selling at Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and Target for $10 is price gouging.
As someone who has and still works in the call center industry, let me say that it's not about Americans not wanting call center jobs, it's about the costs of low level call center work. For example, if you're a credit card company, you can train a low-wage non-American to do the simple stuff like tell you your balance and available credit, accept a payment, or reissue you another card. But the more complicated stuff will come back on-shore in smaller call centers. Things like credit card disputes, fraud management, and more common sales work.
It's not about finding just cheap labor, but about finding cheap specialized labor. The best part about offshoring is the added benefit of attracting highly skilled and intelligent workers on the cheap. But add American and British culture in the mix and it becomes a little more difficult for the really cheap labor from degree holding Indians or Filipinos to understand cultural cues. It's part of the reason why those who make the mistake of placing Level 3 support in these countries where cultural miscommunication occurs through lack of training and little value of the customer's time causes offshoring to have a bad name.
Exclusivtivity is just one attribute of Apple's brand. It's one way Apple differentiates itself from other computers. It's not the basis, just a part. My explination was just an example of how Apple leverages their brand to push product that on a tech/price comparison gives Apple a way to say "Apple products are more than just computers."
Brand is everything if you think about it. A brand is just the attributes that people use to describe your product or company. If you sell shitty product, then you'll have a brand of shitty quality products. Let's be honest, most consumers don't understand technology and even fewer can predict what's going to be the next big thing in tech, so consumers use brand to differentiate products and reduce selection complexity. They assume that the higher the price the better the quality, be damned if it doesn't work. Apple is a great proponent of brand utilization. Often times, their products are under specced and priced higher than the competition. Even though there are far technical alternatives that on a apples to apples comparison make Apple products look 5 years old, they price their products so high that only a select few can purchase them, the products become a status symbol instead of providing utility, and they develop a brand that equates to high quality. Real computer science nerds know the difference but the average soccer mom does not, nor do they care. If Meg can change HP's brand to be the high quality standard of beige boxes, then that's good for consumers and great for investors. If HP continues the strategy that they're getting out of the PC and consumer device market to focus on consulting, then she can develop the brand that SBU managers know and trust for their tech needs in the way we trust IBM and Accenture now.
Privacy aside, this is a very interesting way to solve the talk and surf problem for those stuck on the EDGE network with no 3G coverage, since plain text messages can be sent and received while on the phone. Yes, this would be painfully slow and inefficient, but it is a work around nonetheless.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not my point. My point is you can sue anyone but that doesn't mean your case is valid. For instance, if I filed suit against the manufacture of a firearm for negligence since someone used their weapon to kill my spouse, the case would be dismissed citing the very law you linked if I don't prove that the weapons company did anything illegal at the motion to dismiss review. I could also be punished for wasting the court's and defendant's time by paying legal fees.
In other words : whoosh!
Can you sue automakers for car crashes not caused by defect?
Yes.
Can you sue gun makers for deaths?
Yes.
Can you sue the financial industry for losses in the market?
Again, Yes.
Then why the hell is this any different?
It's not. Nothing is stopping you from suing anyone for anything, you just need to be prepared to pay for a lot of legal fees as your cases get dismissed left and right. This is America and we can sue anyone we damn well please for any frivolous reason. You just can't always win. The only requirement for a tort is a civil wrongdoing, intentional or unintentional, and you, plaintiff, have to achieve the preponderance of the evidence.
Hell, sue the f[u]cking NSA for not having told you about it and stopped it.
Give her time, she's working on including them for failing to the act against the National security that is her mediocre body (I assume, I haven't seen the pics).
Fort Smith (where I live) is 9.75% (was 9.25% until the recent tax increase at the State level). 9.375% (no 9.875%) is for "prepared" foods. Basically it's a tax on restaurants to pay for terrible tourism shortfalls and things like a convention center that no one really uses but still costs the city over a million dollars to maintain. Non-prepared foods are taxed much lower since the state only taxes it at 1.5% instead of the normal 6.5% for everything else.
Even Microsoft is looking at SK and saying: "WTF? We don't even use ActiveX anymore."
If you use a proxy or VPN, then Pandora won't cut out (actually it just restarts the connection and moves to the next song). I've tested this numerous times with Pandora on Android with VPNs and proxy servers. Pandora only seems to complain if you change IPs suddenly (makes sense since you're changing networks).
As for the Siri use case, that's more applicable as you send the request to Siri down one pipe and receive it down the other. It doesn't support sending the same packets down both pipes simultaneously though since it still has to wait for the acknowledgement (or lack thereof) .
Often times, when I drive around the city, my phone will pick up a known wifi hotspot, negotiate an IP, then timeout when I drive too far away and my apps go ape shit crazy because the connection changed. My alternatives are to route all the traffic through a VPN (not the best since I only have 2.5G where I live and negotiation of the certificates takes forever), route the traffic for each hotspot through a proxy (an annoyance of Android for not having a system wide proxy), or turn off the wifi until I reach my destination. I tend to just turn it off since that's a one-click solution.
Obligatory xkcd:
http://xkcd.com/1200/
Federal wage law states any break less than 20 minutes must be paid by the employer. Anything over that, you're riding your own dime. Funny thing, Federal laws don't require breaks at all. An employer could technically make you work an entire shift with no resting periods or to eat anything. However, doing so is a risk to the company since employee turnover will be through the roof, employee exhaustion will cause accidents, increasing workers comp claims, and OSHA violations are bound to pop-up everywhere. The State level is different since each state varies. Some states require rest periods after a certain number of hours worked. Some even require that lunches even be paid. Workers rights in the US are an abysmal failure, especially for hourly jobs. Your best bet is to find a salary job where breaks aren't that big of a concern and your quality and quantity of work are more important than how often you take a moment to breath.
Any deal with Microsoft in the title is destined for failure. Just ask Nokia how that's worked out for them so far.
It does add up if you read the article. The virus survives in humidity levels below 50% and above 98% since 98% simulates the human body. It doesn't fair as well at humidity levels between 60-80%.
...and four inches smaller... it's a completely different product.
That's what she said.
As someone with an undergrad and post grad in business, I feel compelled to answer your confusion between worker pay and executive pay. For the worker, they're focused on their specific task, a tacical viewpoint of the business unit they are responsible. The worker answers for the actions of him/herself and not the actions of their fellow co-workers. When profits are down, investors don't ask the worker, they don't fire the worker, they look at the leadership team. It's not the worker who's neck is on the line if the company is unprofitable, and the worker will most certainly never face lawsuits from investors, the government, and other stakeholders.
The CEO on the other and is responsible for the actions of every worker that represents the company. They're responsible for the financial well being of the organization, the brand, and the relationship with every stakehokder. Like a game of chess, the CEO is responsible for the strategic direction of the business with not just today's direction but tomorrow's and the years ahead. In short, the worker is responsible for one thing, his/her work. The CEO is responsible for the work of everyone underneith him/her.
As far as compensation, most CEO's compensation come with base salaries and huge amounts of stock ownership to incentivise the CEO to return higher profits for the shareholders. So it would make since that CEOs receive a large stake of the profits.
I'm not referring to the resell value, but the brand, which is a major part of public perception. Apple doesn't care about actual resell value, but they do care if their brand is diminished because the lack of their products holding value. If Apple's products diminished in value as rapidly as their PC and android/blackberry smartphone counterparts, then the brand is damaged and will become increasingly difficult to demand higher prices and "claim" to have higher quality. It's human nature to assume that if something loses its (economic) value rapidly, then it isn't worth much to begin with. I would love to claim I have the highest quality products; however, if my product loses half to nearly all its value in one year, then my customers are going to start questioning why I priced my product so high.
Not to go off topic too far, take a look at the housing market. People who are currently underwater are asking themselves if it is better to walk away from their homes or keep throwing money down the toilet, not knowing if the equity in their homes will ever come back. A home is a big portion of one's income, but so is a $500 tablet to someone with a $25,000 salary, and the bigger the portion of my income I lose for a product, the more I'm going to demand that the product not become worthless in less than a year. This is how Apple's brand can be tarnished unsuspectingly, because their price points on their tablets are reaching consumers that weren't once their target market, and could have a greater risk of bad mouthing the brand because they feel ripped off.
While you're right on about the 1% of iPad owners tearing the device apart to repair, you might be missing another problem: resell ability. Apple products are notorious for retaining their resell value, but if it becomes too hard and too expensive to fix issues, then consumers are going to start demanding lower prices or Apple can watch its precious resell brand value evaporate. This typically doesn't matter for most of Apple's products except in their iPhone and iPad products. Clunking down $1500-3000 and having to pay a repair bill of $100 isn't that big of a deal to Apple's target market; however, for those that plopped $50-500 for their iPhones or iPads will find that $100 repair bill a little harder to swallow. A repair shouldn't costs 20% of the purchase price. If you bought a new Camry for $20,000 and you had to come up with $4,000 to repair it, you'd think twice about the purchase; the same idea works here but on a smaller scale.
And nothing happens. While I commend the writer for articulating what is wrong with the current movie industry model, the reality is that Hollywood is hell bent on preserving their business model. For good reason too, most of Hollywood are distributors. The distributors are the ones that pay for the movie, the marketing, and shoving it down the throats of consumers. They're middle men protecting their business. Change the distribution model and you'll hear the sucking sound of Hollywood companies drying up. Studios aren't strapped with tons of cash to pay for hit movies on their own, so you'll have fewer movies being made. No one in Hollywood has any incentive to change the current model, and unlike the music industry that got dragged into the 21st century, or the game industry that has adapted to every new platform to survive, the movie industry consumers lack any desire to force a business model change or adaption. Tthe closest thing to adaption is Netflix and recent price hikes are an indicator that the distributors will kill it before giving the consumers what they want.
Simple business decision. If the biggest cost of moving to a new platform is usability, then it would make sense to copy the competing platform to reduce the learning curve. Furthermore, hardcore gamers tend to go for the carbon, black, grey look more often than most. Personally, I've never understood why everything including the window shell has to be some form of black polished metal, but I don't use all of my free time gaming either.
They loss 1/3 of their new subscription rate. I Should have clarified.
This feature is actually on Netflix for xbox360. I was surprised to find t here.
Hollywood isn't making money from the popcorn and drinks, that's the theaters. Hollywood gets the money from ticket sales.
While I hate the idea that Netflix may not be around much longer, I'm not surprised. Mr. Hastings strategy seems to be focusing on maximizing contribution margins instead of maximizing profit. Getting one doesn't mean you'll get the other. What I don't understand is why Hastings believes that the major studios will allow Netflix to operate the online distribution at the price levels consumers demand. It is clear that Hollywood has no interest in lowering prices on digital content even though the marginal costs of distribution is minuscule. It won't be long before Netflix changes to a "on-demand" pricing model that Apple, Amazon, and a whole other set of competitors are already doing, and the recent exit of a third of their customers due to the recent price increase is a clear indication that Netflix is selling a highly elastic product. When will Hollywod ever learn that we don't want to pay 2.99 per episode for a show with DRM restrictions that force you to re-purchase the damn video for every device you have, and that paying $14 for a digital download when the DVD is selling at Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and Target for $10 is price gouging.
As someone who has and still works in the call center industry, let me say that it's not about Americans not wanting call center jobs, it's about the costs of low level call center work. For example, if you're a credit card company, you can train a low-wage non-American to do the simple stuff like tell you your balance and available credit, accept a payment, or reissue you another card. But the more complicated stuff will come back on-shore in smaller call centers. Things like credit card disputes, fraud management, and more common sales work.
It's not about finding just cheap labor, but about finding cheap specialized labor. The best part about offshoring is the added benefit of attracting highly skilled and intelligent workers on the cheap. But add American and British culture in the mix and it becomes a little more difficult for the really cheap labor from degree holding Indians or Filipinos to understand cultural cues. It's part of the reason why those who make the mistake of placing Level 3 support in these countries where cultural miscommunication occurs through lack of training and little value of the customer's time causes offshoring to have a bad name.
Subscribers have asterisks next to their name.
Very Old Interstellar Large Array.
Exclusivtivity is just one attribute of Apple's brand. It's one way Apple differentiates itself from other computers. It's not the basis, just a part. My explination was just an example of how Apple leverages their brand to push product that on a tech/price comparison gives Apple a way to say "Apple products are more than just computers."
Brand is everything if you think about it. A brand is just the attributes that people use to describe your product or company. If you sell shitty product, then you'll have a brand of shitty quality products. Let's be honest, most consumers don't understand technology and even fewer can predict what's going to be the next big thing in tech, so consumers use brand to differentiate products and reduce selection complexity. They assume that the higher the price the better the quality, be damned if it doesn't work. Apple is a great proponent of brand utilization. Often times, their products are under specced and priced higher than the competition. Even though there are far technical alternatives that on a apples to apples comparison make Apple products look 5 years old, they price their products so high that only a select few can purchase them, the products become a status symbol instead of providing utility, and they develop a brand that equates to high quality. Real computer science nerds know the difference but the average soccer mom does not, nor do they care. If Meg can change HP's brand to be the high quality standard of beige boxes, then that's good for consumers and great for investors. If HP continues the strategy that they're getting out of the PC and consumer device market to focus on consulting, then she can develop the brand that SBU managers know and trust for their tech needs in the way we trust IBM and Accenture now.
Privacy aside, this is a very interesting way to solve the talk and surf problem for those stuck on the EDGE network with no 3G coverage, since plain text messages can be sent and received while on the phone. Yes, this would be painfully slow and inefficient, but it is a work around nonetheless.