This is a religious issue because religion enables people to believe things that are not true. Religious people vehemently defend their right to believe things that most civilized society has deemed indefensible. For instance I recall when the Moral Majority elected the first non-repentant open adulterer into the white house in 1980. There is just no way to communicate with people who believe they know everything and their beliefs are beyond rational thoughts.
One of the conciets of the pulp science fiction age was that house work was going to be more automobile than 'real' brain work. House work was done by robots, but navigation was still done by hand. By the 1960's it was clear that all the math stuff was easily automated, in 2014 Wolfram can basically solve any college level math problem you give it, but housework is still done by hand. Furthermore, there are a lot of manufacturing jobs available, they just don't pay enough to keep them in the developed world.
Which leads to an interesting piece of economics that the writers of the time, most all versed in economics, seemed to miss. That we will pay for things, like cable, but not for things like a autonomous vacuum cleaner or lawn mower. That as long as people are willing to work cheaper than a machine, we will pay the people.
Galileo lifted natural philosophy to science, and helped end the reign of Popes who would thought murdering people was fun. There is no reason why someone should be so insecure that being directly insulted would cause any real harm. Only those who lack faith in the almighty and lack humility would think they are above criticism. It is like those in modern times whose faith is so weak that the fact that others do not agree with them is able to kill reduce their certainty of the almighty. No evidence would ever reduce by faith, but then my faith is not based on some assumption of superiority to other people or equality to the almighty.
It is always easy to debate by attacking the person rather than the ideas. The idea at the time was that knowledge comes from what was before, rather than observing what is in front of you. For example surface tension has to be broken for density to become the dominating factor in buoyancy, but saying Galileo is wrong on this issue is like saying Newtons laws are wrong because they implicitly assume that infinite speeds are possible. Technically one can say they are wrong, but practically it describes what we experience. In the case of ice, if we focus on the shape we do not discover that the crystalline structure of ice is what makes it an outlier.
The fact that we are still taking debates such as this indicates the power of the Church and other such power hungry and greedy agents to divert science from discoveries that help everyone to side alleys that only help the pharisees.
It is going to be a generational change, starting with providing resources to current developing developers. If not, they will see a near total irrelevance in a generation.
Back in that late 80's I was installing a vertical market application, networking among about 8 machines. The application was Unix native, but had recently been ported to MS Windows. Though Unix was our first choice, the cost was multiples of the MS Windows installation, maybe 5-10X as much when all costs were factored in, so the Unix option was a non starter.
I imagine for many small businesses that were started, or restarting, like we were, the MS option is now the expensive route. You have the costs of managing licenses, the cost of acquiring development tools(I know that some are free, but other provide real professional tools for free), and the constant threat that MS can come in a close down a business for an audit. This is why while I spent the 90's using MS tools, by the end of that decade their constant harassment made me think it was not worth the complications unless backed by major corporation. Don't get me wrong, the MS tools are good and the products useful, but the cost and restrictions are out of place in the current IT environment.
So here is what MS needs to do. If they insist on selling the OS, make it $100 and only sell one version. Give away some services with the OS, such as online storage. Up sell not by offering different levels of the OS, but by offering levels of services.
MS insistence that Visual Studio is worth $500 is going to be death of them. Give away the tools. If they want to put a non-commercial restriction on it and have a $100 charge per product to distribute, or $500 for unlimited, that might be a good compromise. MS is not going to capture a generation who can develop for free on Android and Mac OS by charging for the tools.
The fall of Unix is really the analogy here. I worked on an ATT Unix PC for a year, and it was beautiful. I would have loved for such a machine to have become the standard. I also worked on Irix, which was a wonderful interface. But like current MS products, they were just, on balance, too expensive.
This is really how the world has degraded into mediocrity. There was a time when one went to festival to hang with your friends, jam to some tunes, and, yes, maybe do some things you shouldn't. Now one has to have 4G. I blame the helicopter parents who create dependent children who cannot entertain themselves for a few hours with checking in with their mommy.
Vista was more of a failure than ME. Surface RT has had to be placed in the remainder bin at fire sale prices, and even at the lower prices still needs massive advertising. MS has been in the smartphone biz as long as anyone and still cannot get a popular phone. The seemed to have lost of the xBox momentum by trying to leverage it produce increased profits. Sony made this mistake by trying to leverage playstation popularity to sell Blu ray, a strategy that worked but arguably hurt sales by increasing the price of the unit.
Windows 8 has not been able to establish a value for business buying computers for worker drones, the core market.
On hallmark of a civilized democratic society is the freedom to travel. One way to insure that a populous remains subservient and ignorant is to limit travel. This is because it limits experiences. For instance, if kids stay in the square couple miles that define their neighborhood, they may never learn there are other options, and that people do live in luxury. I recall attending a summer retreat with a guy from the Texas valley and how surprised he was at how big the houses were in around the the retreat. This is why many high school will encourage students to go away for college, which I agree with unless it imposes huge debts.
In any case, while the argument can be made he could have driven or taken the bus instead of flown, and so travel is not infringed, there are cases when air travel is the only viable option. Therefore the security theater that has popped up over the past decade can only be construed as an attack on our right to travel, and, along with the job creation program called military action and surveillance, transform us into a citizenry whose ability to grow and become education is much less that the previous generation.
I enjoy driving as well. I drive a stick with very little of the modern convinces found in modern cars, like a tv, coffee maker, refrigerator, or sofa.
In reality, as soon as autonomous cars come around at a reasonable cost, most people will acquire them, put in a 50" flat screen tv, and let it drive wherever it needs to go. As soon as driver less cars no longer require a licensed driver, families will send their pre teens to the movies in the car.
One thing we can expect is increased traffic, pollutions, and fuel prices as driving is no longer down time.
As always the naysayers are looking back to a world that never existed. When cars were fully manual not everyone drove. Now that drivers and cars are not directly linked, more people can drive and more do. With power steering, anti-lock breaks, traction control, automatic transmission safe driving become easier and less skilled people are more likely to continue driving their entire lives Over the past 40 years traffic fatalities as fraction of miles driven has fallen by a third.
Drive in theaters and theaters in general are not popular because for many people the additional cost is not reflected in additional quality and user experience. Four people will cost $80 as opposed to $10 at home. Many movies are targeted to teen and young men as they will pay to take dates to silly movies, not drive ins as they were not raised on it.
That said implying the outdoor theatre is dead simply because operators are making a rational decision not to invest in their firms is a bit overreaching. There are two theaters in my city that show live and filmed entertainment. They are both free. They are both jam packed. We take picnics and blankets, walk about a mile, then sit for an evening of entertainment. On one saturday we were walking around and some kids were putting on shakespeare, so we sat and watched.
While it is critical to provide Hollywood a venue to maximize profits, that is not the only purpose of a theater.
I was listening to the radio last night and they reported the top job desired by children is that of reality star. I see this in a number of high school and college graduates as well. They want to be a star working at a star company. For jobs that do not really create anything, CEO, lawyer, doctor, that is OK. But for an engineer, who should be innovating everyday things that makes our lives better, that should be making the world safer, it does. Of course a game developer is likely more like a lawyer than an engineer, but still. I would say find somewhere you can make a difference, not somewhere you can be a star. It is not a bad thing to know that you went into work and did something meaningful. Of course that could happen a Blizzard. But if someone is offerring you a job at a firm where what you do matters, and you are getting well compensated, I think that is a good thing.
This is the rub. Ideally one should be able to comply with a court order and then get one's day in a public court, as most would guaranteed by the constitution, or refuse to comply and get one's day in court. This is the basis of the system of government in the US. Three equal branches of government, executive, legislative, and judicial. These branches of government are not there to fight amongst each other in isolation, but to be used by the people to make sure their concerns are dealt with. Notice I said dealt with, not just heard. Now, in a country of 300 million people not everyone can be dealt with, but it can be at least in the aggregate.
Unfortunately the legislative branch has systematically reduced the effectiveness of the judicial branch. I am talking tort reform. I am talking about threatening activist judges. I am talking about secret court order and secret courts. Without an equal court system democracy just does not work and things like this happen. Manning and Snoden and all these leaks are due to the lack of due process. If Manning had not been isolated and tortured, it would not nearly be the black eye on the US, and Snoden likely would not be in Russia.
The courts provide an alternative to extreme and violent acts. Let's say that a child that is killed by a defective Ikea bed. The parents can go to court, have the company be publicly held responsible for the death, and, outside of tort reform, receive a judgement that will encourage the company to do better in the future. Or the parents could just go to location where they bought the bed and justifiably kill the person who sold them the bed, or go to corporate and justifiably kill the executives who profited from the bed, etc. Which one actually leads to a safer world?
So really the problem is that some powerful people are upset because the courts do not allow them to sufficiently oppress the people or murder customers, so the want to reduce our government to the two branches that can effectively be bribed to engage in unnecessary and illegal activities, like spying on US citizens, which invariable requires massive purchases of inflated sales and products which invariably increases the profits of those companies. A classic example in the war in Iraq, which was facilitated by the purchase of an election by those who wanted Dick Cheney in the executive, and the subsequent transfer of taxpayer treasure directly to those who bought him.
The justification is that darker complexioned young men tend to commit crimes and therefore they should be investigated. The justification is that when we do stop such people, crime rates fall, therefore we are stopping criminals. The counter argument is that even if such people may in fact commit crimes at an increased rate, it is not in the best interest of the country to take a group of people and deprive them of rights or privileges simply because they are part of a dangerous group.
Let look at two examples based on driving. Driving is a privileged, not a right, and therefore it should be easy to pass laws to severely reduce the death of innocent people. Three groups are arguably predominately responsible for deaths of innocent bystanders involving vehicles. One are drunk drivers, which are being dealt with as a nation. The other are the very young and the very old. We could cut the deaths caused by these dangerous drivers significantly by two simple laws. The first would restrict the driving of any minor. Right now it is restricted for a number of months, or a year, but we could easily say 1 passenger and no driving after 10, without a special waiver, for anyone under 19, with any accident resulting in a year increase.This would likely result in the deaths of families of four caused by distracted teens a few times a year, and well as a myriad of other deaths. It would likely reduce insurance of all of us.
Likewise we could demand that anyone over 70 take a full drivers exam every year. If anyone over 60 has a ticket, they have to take a full drivers exam. This would end the death of innocents shopping at farmers markets.
Why do we not make these common sense precautions that save lives? Because we do not want to infringe on the rights of the great majority of drivers who are skilled and law abiding. Just because a few show criminal negligence, we do not punish everyone.
This is what happens when you work for someone else. You do things they don't like you get fired. It really has nothing to do with management. It has to do with common sense.
I know this is not directly related, but we saw this in the Boston thing. Common sense says when bullets are flying you go the other direction. We had all these people running towards it trying to get photos. Bullets can be fatal even from a mile away.
So you are in a meeting where tension is running high, and you start doing something that common sense tells you is going to antagonize your boss or a c-level executive. Yeah, that is really smart. Someone like that deserves to keep their job. Maybe the nest thing that person is going to do is watch videos while they are driving, because, you know, you have an inherent right to do stuff like that.
Life lesson. If you do something dumb, just let it go. The Streisand effect. Now the entire internet knows how dumb this guy is.
Pretty much Google's consumer products seem never to be improved or maintained. At first the consumer products were critical because this is why people like me allowed Google to set cookies, while 2o7 and the like were blocked. Of course we are now in world where tracking on the web goes beyond cookies, so maybe Google does not think it needs to provide a service beyond search to entice users.
In any case the decline of the WiFI is not surprising. It is like Google docs, now Drive, that started off as a really competitive product, but the office applications has never been updated so the features continue to lag. OpenOffice makes it look like vintage 1990.
Seriously. If MS were competent they could destroy Google with Bing and MS Windows Phone. But that is how the game works. Google does not have outrun the bear, it only has to outrun MS, which isn't that hard.
In many cases, I have to pay more. For instance, I wanted to have a copy of paper book I have. The paper book was #20 and the e-book was $30. Silly. O'Rieley has about the only decent plan.
Before profilers became common, developers would just waste time optimizing functions that were only run once instead of leaving seldom used functions alone and spending most of their time optimizing the functions that actually took up 80% of the run time. Cost benefit.
You every notice how there is a subset that get upset when anyone suggests that we might go against the grain? These are the folks who got upset when we put in personal computers, and they could no longer control our lives by controlling the mainframes. These are the people who hated GPS on the phone because they could no longer charge us $200 for map updates. Certainly a women doctor may not matter one way or the other, but complaining that we are discussing it is like complaining that we are discussing whether steam power is a good idea.
This is pretty common. For instance some people permanently place ODB devices in their cars that hook up with bluetooth or wireless. The setup on these devices may or may not be the same key. Both broadcast, so one can potentially hack into a car.
The threat on these, really, does exist. In certain situation susceptibility to traffic analysis is a security risk. For instance, in a home invasion, assuming that one washing after going to the toilet, it might provide an interval of venerability.
Aside from the validity of the statements, which are overreaching, the Pharmaceutical industry does survive on the idea that one can live however one wishes and there will be a pill or procedure that will correct the damage. If you are unhappy take a pill. If you eat food that gives you indigestion, take a pill. It seldom occurs to people to think about why they are unhappy or stop eating food that makes them sick.
Heart disease is a natural degradation of the body, but is accelerated by diet and lack of appropriate motion.
When I first saw the comic progressing, I thought of this book by Kim Stanley Robinson. A couple meets on the beach, explores a strange world, and discovers who they really are.
I either drive my car, take a bus, or schedule a pickup using the cab service website. About the only time when I do an impromptu taxi ride, it is fixed rate downtown and the taxis are everywhere.
So what is the advantage of a hailing program for a phone? Is it like the food delivery service for outlets that don't have delivery? I suppose that might be useful in some areas, but I just walk down a few blocks and get the food.
This really seems like the tech bubble all over again when a sock puppet was going to make us all rich. There are some really good ideas out there that will generate profit, but even Amazon is only making $130 million on $13 billion in sales, or about 1% profit, so making money online is not trivial and we are no longer the innocents we were in the 90s, so we can't pretend it is.
Let's look at this from another perspective. I know parents whose kids go to several specialized high school, art, science, engineering, aerospace. In the arts in particular many parent want the school to foster broad creativity, but what they teach is skill. They screen for talent, then the kids who can stifle the talent for a few years and learn skills are the ones who graduate and go off to the major art universities. The other schools generally do the same thing. Look for talent, build skills.
In this discussion the assumption is that some skills are talent and others are genuine skills. In fact there are a number of different talents in software development, and the question is if the person has developed that talent into a marketable skill. One complicating factor is that we are only 50 or so years into this, 10-12 degree cycles, 2 or 3 generations, the guys who made a killing at IBM retired early and are still alive. Even 20 years ago most people could not afford the limited pool of people who really had skills, so they depended on talent. Also the tools we use substantially change every several years. A person with talent and general skills can adapt, and fake her way through the interview for a job looking for someone with 10 years android experience, but if all a person has is skill, that is understanding of how to use the interface, they won't. It is like, and I still don't understand how this is possible, a person who knows how to use Excel but not a generic spreadsheet.
So I would say a person who has talent, who can creatively visualize a process is superior to a person who only knows which buttons to press or words to type in to get a specific action, but a person who has never taken the time to learn the skills is not of much use either. From a business perspective it really depends on how much money one is willing to pay. People with skills and no talent or talent and no skills are cheaper than a talented person with mad skills.
It is possible that Google will use this opportunity to collect data, track the users across networks, This will probably be very valuable. Hooking up directly to Google hardware will likely allow them to snoop and collect data not accessible through generic hardware. Last time I was in a Starbucks I had to click through an advertisement, so clearly Starbucks and ATT are not seeing a lot of inhernet value in the current arrangement.
This value may translate into allowances for higher speeds. They could also offer a free slow speed, upgrade speed if you log into you Google accounts, offer day passes, or simply limit the downloaded content. It does seem unimaginable that Starbucks would find value creating a high speed location to look at pr0n.
I don't find anything wrong with the current ATT situation. It has changed over time, gotten better and worse, but right now it is good. It is probably a expense that Starbucks wants to get rid of. I find fewer coffee houses that gives free and open internet. I find department stores has better broadband, you know surf on the ipad while the others shop.
iTool which included.mac debuted in January of 2000 at no charge to Macintosh users. Two years later it became subscription based.
Not saying MS has not done many wonderful things. They have been, for instance, trying to build a viable phone since 1990. But for most things MS waits until others have developed a process to commodity status, then implements the inexpensive mass market option.
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This is a religious issue because religion enables people to believe things that are not true. Religious people vehemently defend their right to believe things that most civilized society has deemed indefensible. For instance I recall when the Moral Majority elected the first non-repentant open adulterer into the white house in 1980. There is just no way to communicate with people who believe they know everything and their beliefs are beyond rational thoughts.
Which leads to an interesting piece of economics that the writers of the time, most all versed in economics, seemed to miss. That we will pay for things, like cable, but not for things like a autonomous vacuum cleaner or lawn mower. That as long as people are willing to work cheaper than a machine, we will pay the people.
It is always easy to debate by attacking the person rather than the ideas. The idea at the time was that knowledge comes from what was before, rather than observing what is in front of you. For example surface tension has to be broken for density to become the dominating factor in buoyancy, but saying Galileo is wrong on this issue is like saying Newtons laws are wrong because they implicitly assume that infinite speeds are possible. Technically one can say they are wrong, but practically it describes what we experience. In the case of ice, if we focus on the shape we do not discover that the crystalline structure of ice is what makes it an outlier.
The fact that we are still taking debates such as this indicates the power of the Church and other such power hungry and greedy agents to divert science from discoveries that help everyone to side alleys that only help the pharisees.
Back in that late 80's I was installing a vertical market application, networking among about 8 machines. The application was Unix native, but had recently been ported to MS Windows. Though Unix was our first choice, the cost was multiples of the MS Windows installation, maybe 5-10X as much when all costs were factored in, so the Unix option was a non starter.
I imagine for many small businesses that were started, or restarting, like we were, the MS option is now the expensive route. You have the costs of managing licenses, the cost of acquiring development tools(I know that some are free, but other provide real professional tools for free), and the constant threat that MS can come in a close down a business for an audit. This is why while I spent the 90's using MS tools, by the end of that decade their constant harassment made me think it was not worth the complications unless backed by major corporation. Don't get me wrong, the MS tools are good and the products useful, but the cost and restrictions are out of place in the current IT environment.
So here is what MS needs to do. If they insist on selling the OS, make it $100 and only sell one version. Give away some services with the OS, such as online storage. Up sell not by offering different levels of the OS, but by offering levels of services.
MS insistence that Visual Studio is worth $500 is going to be death of them. Give away the tools. If they want to put a non-commercial restriction on it and have a $100 charge per product to distribute, or $500 for unlimited, that might be a good compromise. MS is not going to capture a generation who can develop for free on Android and Mac OS by charging for the tools.
The fall of Unix is really the analogy here. I worked on an ATT Unix PC for a year, and it was beautiful. I would have loved for such a machine to have become the standard. I also worked on Irix, which was a wonderful interface. But like current MS products, they were just, on balance, too expensive.
This is really how the world has degraded into mediocrity. There was a time when one went to festival to hang with your friends, jam to some tunes, and, yes, maybe do some things you shouldn't. Now one has to have 4G. I blame the helicopter parents who create dependent children who cannot entertain themselves for a few hours with checking in with their mommy.
Windows 8 has not been able to establish a value for business buying computers for worker drones, the core market.
In any case, while the argument can be made he could have driven or taken the bus instead of flown, and so travel is not infringed, there are cases when air travel is the only viable option. Therefore the security theater that has popped up over the past decade can only be construed as an attack on our right to travel, and, along with the job creation program called military action and surveillance, transform us into a citizenry whose ability to grow and become education is much less that the previous generation.
In reality, as soon as autonomous cars come around at a reasonable cost, most people will acquire them, put in a 50" flat screen tv, and let it drive wherever it needs to go. As soon as driver less cars no longer require a licensed driver, families will send their pre teens to the movies in the car.
One thing we can expect is increased traffic, pollutions, and fuel prices as driving is no longer down time.
As always the naysayers are looking back to a world that never existed. When cars were fully manual not everyone drove. Now that drivers and cars are not directly linked, more people can drive and more do. With power steering, anti-lock breaks, traction control, automatic transmission safe driving become easier and less skilled people are more likely to continue driving their entire lives Over the past 40 years traffic fatalities as fraction of miles driven has fallen by a third.
That said implying the outdoor theatre is dead simply because operators are making a rational decision not to invest in their firms is a bit overreaching. There are two theaters in my city that show live and filmed entertainment. They are both free. They are both jam packed. We take picnics and blankets, walk about a mile, then sit for an evening of entertainment. On one saturday we were walking around and some kids were putting on shakespeare, so we sat and watched.
While it is critical to provide Hollywood a venue to maximize profits, that is not the only purpose of a theater.
I was listening to the radio last night and they reported the top job desired by children is that of reality star. I see this in a number of high school and college graduates as well. They want to be a star working at a star company. For jobs that do not really create anything, CEO, lawyer, doctor, that is OK. But for an engineer, who should be innovating everyday things that makes our lives better, that should be making the world safer, it does. Of course a game developer is likely more like a lawyer than an engineer, but still. I would say find somewhere you can make a difference, not somewhere you can be a star. It is not a bad thing to know that you went into work and did something meaningful. Of course that could happen a Blizzard. But if someone is offerring you a job at a firm where what you do matters, and you are getting well compensated, I think that is a good thing.
Unfortunately the legislative branch has systematically reduced the effectiveness of the judicial branch. I am talking tort reform. I am talking about threatening activist judges. I am talking about secret court order and secret courts. Without an equal court system democracy just does not work and things like this happen. Manning and Snoden and all these leaks are due to the lack of due process. If Manning had not been isolated and tortured, it would not nearly be the black eye on the US, and Snoden likely would not be in Russia.
The courts provide an alternative to extreme and violent acts. Let's say that a child that is killed by a defective Ikea bed. The parents can go to court, have the company be publicly held responsible for the death, and, outside of tort reform, receive a judgement that will encourage the company to do better in the future. Or the parents could just go to location where they bought the bed and justifiably kill the person who sold them the bed, or go to corporate and justifiably kill the executives who profited from the bed, etc. Which one actually leads to a safer world?
So really the problem is that some powerful people are upset because the courts do not allow them to sufficiently oppress the people or murder customers, so the want to reduce our government to the two branches that can effectively be bribed to engage in unnecessary and illegal activities, like spying on US citizens, which invariable requires massive purchases of inflated sales and products which invariably increases the profits of those companies. A classic example in the war in Iraq, which was facilitated by the purchase of an election by those who wanted Dick Cheney in the executive, and the subsequent transfer of taxpayer treasure directly to those who bought him.
Let look at two examples based on driving. Driving is a privileged, not a right, and therefore it should be easy to pass laws to severely reduce the death of innocent people. Three groups are arguably predominately responsible for deaths of innocent bystanders involving vehicles. One are drunk drivers, which are being dealt with as a nation. The other are the very young and the very old. We could cut the deaths caused by these dangerous drivers significantly by two simple laws. The first would restrict the driving of any minor. Right now it is restricted for a number of months, or a year, but we could easily say 1 passenger and no driving after 10, without a special waiver, for anyone under 19, with any accident resulting in a year increase.This would likely result in the deaths of families of four caused by distracted teens a few times a year, and well as a myriad of other deaths. It would likely reduce insurance of all of us.
Likewise we could demand that anyone over 70 take a full drivers exam every year. If anyone over 60 has a ticket, they have to take a full drivers exam. This would end the death of innocents shopping at farmers markets.
Why do we not make these common sense precautions that save lives? Because we do not want to infringe on the rights of the great majority of drivers who are skilled and law abiding. Just because a few show criminal negligence, we do not punish everyone.
I know this is not directly related, but we saw this in the Boston thing. Common sense says when bullets are flying you go the other direction. We had all these people running towards it trying to get photos. Bullets can be fatal even from a mile away.
So you are in a meeting where tension is running high, and you start doing something that common sense tells you is going to antagonize your boss or a c-level executive. Yeah, that is really smart. Someone like that deserves to keep their job. Maybe the nest thing that person is going to do is watch videos while they are driving, because, you know, you have an inherent right to do stuff like that.
Life lesson. If you do something dumb, just let it go. The Streisand effect. Now the entire internet knows how dumb this guy is.
In any case the decline of the WiFI is not surprising. It is like Google docs, now Drive, that started off as a really competitive product, but the office applications has never been updated so the features continue to lag. OpenOffice makes it look like vintage 1990.
Seriously. If MS were competent they could destroy Google with Bing and MS Windows Phone. But that is how the game works. Google does not have outrun the bear, it only has to outrun MS, which isn't that hard.
In many cases, I have to pay more. For instance, I wanted to have a copy of paper book I have. The paper book was #20 and the e-book was $30. Silly. O'Rieley has about the only decent plan.
It is definitely a generic frat boy joke generator. Cue the 'In Russia...' jokes.
Before profilers became common, developers would just waste time optimizing functions that were only run once instead of leaving seldom used functions alone and spending most of their time optimizing the functions that actually took up 80% of the run time. Cost benefit.
You every notice how there is a subset that get upset when anyone suggests that we might go against the grain? These are the folks who got upset when we put in personal computers, and they could no longer control our lives by controlling the mainframes. These are the people who hated GPS on the phone because they could no longer charge us $200 for map updates. Certainly a women doctor may not matter one way or the other, but complaining that we are discussing it is like complaining that we are discussing whether steam power is a good idea.
The threat on these, really, does exist. In certain situation susceptibility to traffic analysis is a security risk. For instance, in a home invasion, assuming that one washing after going to the toilet, it might provide an interval of venerability.
Heart disease is a natural degradation of the body, but is accelerated by diet and lack of appropriate motion.
When I first saw the comic progressing, I thought of this book by Kim Stanley Robinson. A couple meets on the beach, explores a strange world, and discovers who they really are.
So what is the advantage of a hailing program for a phone? Is it like the food delivery service for outlets that don't have delivery? I suppose that might be useful in some areas, but I just walk down a few blocks and get the food.
This really seems like the tech bubble all over again when a sock puppet was going to make us all rich. There are some really good ideas out there that will generate profit, but even Amazon is only making $130 million on $13 billion in sales, or about 1% profit, so making money online is not trivial and we are no longer the innocents we were in the 90s, so we can't pretend it is.
In this discussion the assumption is that some skills are talent and others are genuine skills. In fact there are a number of different talents in software development, and the question is if the person has developed that talent into a marketable skill. One complicating factor is that we are only 50 or so years into this, 10-12 degree cycles, 2 or 3 generations, the guys who made a killing at IBM retired early and are still alive. Even 20 years ago most people could not afford the limited pool of people who really had skills, so they depended on talent. Also the tools we use substantially change every several years. A person with talent and general skills can adapt, and fake her way through the interview for a job looking for someone with 10 years android experience, but if all a person has is skill, that is understanding of how to use the interface, they won't. It is like, and I still don't understand how this is possible, a person who knows how to use Excel but not a generic spreadsheet.
So I would say a person who has talent, who can creatively visualize a process is superior to a person who only knows which buttons to press or words to type in to get a specific action, but a person who has never taken the time to learn the skills is not of much use either. From a business perspective it really depends on how much money one is willing to pay. People with skills and no talent or talent and no skills are cheaper than a talented person with mad skills.
This value may translate into allowances for higher speeds. They could also offer a free slow speed, upgrade speed if you log into you Google accounts, offer day passes, or simply limit the downloaded content. It does seem unimaginable that Starbucks would find value creating a high speed location to look at pr0n.
I don't find anything wrong with the current ATT situation. It has changed over time, gotten better and worse, but right now it is good. It is probably a expense that Starbucks wants to get rid of. I find fewer coffee houses that gives free and open internet. I find department stores has better broadband, you know surf on the ipad while the others shop.
Not saying MS has not done many wonderful things. They have been, for instance, trying to build a viable phone since 1990. But for most things MS waits until others have developed a process to commodity status, then implements the inexpensive mass market option.