In all seriousness, here is another method of solving the problem, which would be just as effective at preventing rootkits from hiding in the bootloader: make the boot medium a flash device on the motherboard, and have a jumper that enables writes to that device. This would not rob users of control over their system (although it may force people to get over their fear of opening their computer's case and changing a jumper), and would be just as effective at stopping the overwhelming majority of rootkits.
You don't even need a jumper or a flash device. All you have to do is to forget about digital signatures and use one-time authorization in the BIOS or EFI menu: If you install a boot loader the firmware has never seen before, when you try to boot it you get a message that says "boot loader is not authorized, if you have not just installed a new operating system this could be a rootkit etc., click here to use your previous boot loader instead," and all you have to do is go into the menu if you want to authorize the new one. But since there is no way for the rootkit to do that by itself, since the menu has its own read-only keyboard drivers and requires input from the keyboard, the only way you get a rootkit is if you go into the menu by hand and authorize it.
The sad thing is that basically anything can execute arbitrary code. You can't just sign the boot loader, you then have to have a boot loader which checks signatures on the kernel, a kernel which checks signatures on the drivers, etc. Then all it takes is for one obscure hardware manufacturer to get a driver signed with a buffer overflow in it, or for enough hardware manufacturers to not sign their drivers so that all the users allow unsigned drivers, and the malware authors are back in business -- but without helping Linux any, because you can't exactly load 2/3rds of Windows to get to the point where you can run arbitrary code in Ring 0 and load the Linux kernel.
The problem will be when at some point in the future someone has an old crappy Ultra book made by Ikkkiianu and wants to put Linux on it because Windows 9 doesn't work well on it and Windows 8 is too insecure.
That is one of the problems. The other problem is that by the time Windows 10 comes around and nobody has any interest in running Windows 7 or any other version that lacks support for this feature, the incentive for OEMs not to make it mandatory becomes much reduced.
Maybe one day you will realize that every field protects itself. Doctors and lawyers restrict their trade. Regulators and government employees have direct access to government cash.
Economists call this behavior "rent seeking" and it is considered inefficient and undesirable. The idea that Microsoft should not be criticized for engaging in it is highly misguided.
There's just no truth that Android has slowed Apple's sales.
I can't understand how you can even think that. New competition almost by definition reduces the sales of the other competitors. Android has something like half of the market now. Do you really think that 0% of that came at the expense of Apple? Every sale of an Android phone was a potential sale of an iPhone; the fact that their growth is not negative does not mean that it would not have been substantially higher in the alternative scenario.
Being #1 isn't necessarily the way to profitability.
You're arguing the wrong point. The problem for Apple is not that one of their competitors will capture a large market share and force them to lower their margins, or even make them unprofitable. The problem is that if they maintain their margins (as can be expected) in the face of competition which is of sufficiently high quality and sufficiently lower price, their volume will be reduced. That doesn't mean they will stop making profit, but it means they will stop making as much profit. If Android takes 80% of the market and leaves Apple with 15%, even if Apple is making more profit than all of the Android phone makers put together, that doesn't mean they're in a good position relative to the rest of the stock market, only relative to the other phone manufacturers.
Apple has the highest market cap of any company right now. In order for them to be worth that, they can't just make more profit than each of their competitors. They have to make substantially more. Several times as much as their competitors. And there are a number of ways they can get tripped up going forward and be unable to do that.
Besides the obvious one (Apple already pays Lodsys royalties), there's some history of Apple paying one time fees to settle disputes [thisismynext.com]. Also, considering the number of injunctions Apple has won against Samsung, chances are, if both parties had to sit down and negotiate, and both parties really like being in the mobile phone space, I think Apple has a fairly strong negotiating platform.
The trouble is that maybe Samsung doesn't really like being in the mobile space. Given Microsoft/Nokia and Google/Motorola, they might just see the writing on the wall. Mobile devices are a small fraction of Samsung's business, but a very, very large fraction of Apple's. If Samsung decides they're better off exiting the business and then demanding a sizable chunk of Apple's profits, they end up in the position of a patent troll with a number of very fundamental mobile device patents and Apple would have no obvious counter if Samsung does not fear an injunction.
There's really not a lot of history of Apple cutting their margins to maintain their volume in the face of an onslaught of slightly inferior but cheaper products.
I completely agree that Apple would sooner accept a reduction in volume than a reduction in margin, but that doesn't take anything away from the need to make the trade off. Apple was on a growth vector before Android, now they have a consistent market share with little to no growth. If Android did not exist then Apple would likely have the whole market right now. If in the future Android devices become even less expensive than they are now, the effect can only increase, and the effect on Apple's volume could be significant.
Naturally there are no guarantees of any of this or the alternatives, but that's the trouble: There is no way to predict whether something like this, or some black swan even that no one has even considered, will cause them to lose the bulk of their customers to a competitor. Whereas if you look at other large companies, e.g. Walmart or Exxon, there is no obvious event that seems at all likely that could cause them to lose half their customers inside of a year or two.
We, the users, can indeed switch to use other products, although leaving Google Mail is likely to be painful, but their customers may not be able to switch this easily. If Google holds a massively dominant role in internet search (and surely nobody disputes that they do), then companies which wish to sell their products may have little choice but to use Google's advertisement mechanisms.
Do you know how to tell that the advertisers aren't being harmed? It's because they aren't the ones doing the complaining. It's Microsoft, Microsoft-funded proxies and a bunch of SEO spam companies doing the complaining, because Google is offering a better product than they are. You don't see Ford Motor Company going to Congress about it because they know perfectly well both that they have a thousand different ways to reach their customers and that Google is charging entirely reasonable prices -- just compare the cost of advertising with Google and with a print newspaper or radio or television and tell me which is more expensive.
I suspect that's quite unlikely... but if so, you'd probably see a large payout by Apple (which with $70+ billion in cash is likely possible). Apple might fight a judgement via appeal, but an actual injunction against iPhone would be settled, and quickly.
And you don't see why being forced into a quick settlement would be a serious problem for Apple?
iPhone is only $199 on contract, or do you think that a Chinese manufacturer is about to equal the iPhone build quality, and incorporate the long battery life, multi-core CPU, high DPI display, best of breed touch screen and stick 16gb to 32gb of memory in there for about $100 unsubsidized?
Who cares? If they're 80% as good for 20% of the price, the competition will by its nature cause Apple to have to reduce their margins to maintain their volume, or vice versa.
Are you for some reason under the impression that saying something over and over again without any reasoning behind it will somehow make it true? The Big Lie only works when no one is around to correct you.
Let's try another business where the customers do not pay for the product: The public library. Naturally, if a library has more patrons, it can use that fact to better solicit for donations and grants, which is how it gets "paid" for providing its service. Do you then say that the reader of a library book is the product? No, because that's ridiculous. The reader is the patron/customer. Then there is a separate transaction between the library and the donors in which having a greater readership is advantageous -- but that does not make the provision of books to the public, or the provision of web search, any less of a service.
I see a big difference in that Microsoft went out of their way to make sure that Netscape was not included whatsoever and went so far as to prohibit OEMs from adding it, whereas search results for Google's competitors appear in the search results in such a way that anyone who is actually looking for them can easily find them. It is, naturally, not Google's responsibility to give their competition free advertising.
I don't see how that would be a selling point for the consumers whatsoever. A single result being in a different place has no real negative impact on the consumer: If the consumer is actually looking for that result then it's a convenience, and if not then it is so utterly trivial to ignore it and go on to the next one that complaining about it is frivolous.
Are you familiar with the antitrust laws in this country? The laws don't include any details. This is pretty much the entirety of the statute prohibiting monopolies:
"Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony [and listing penalties]" (Sherman Act Section 2)
In other words, 'monopolies bad, you federal courts sort out what that means' -- and that's the way it has been ever since. There is a whole body of cases interpreting what that means. Congress has had nothing to do with it for something like a hundred years, through cases far more serious than whatever Google is accused of. What makes you think Congress is going to do anything different in this case, other than possibly the result of being induced by Microsoft campaign contributions?
You do realize that you often times see advertisements for cable on satellite and advertisements for satellite on cable. Not to mention advertisements for shows on a different channel.
And if you type "windows phone" or "operating system" or the like into Google web search then you get ads for Microsoft. So it's clear that they're not charging so much that they're preventing the competition from buying advertising.
Ad space is a finite commodity. Google is allowed to bid on it as much as anyone else. If they want the same keywords as Microsoft, Microsoft will have to outbid them. There is no functional difference between that and what Google is accused of doing, assuming that is not the exact cause of what Microsoft is complaining about.
Your nonsense argument is ridiculous. Services don't stop being services because they're ad supported. The viewer is paying with his attention rather than his dollars, which attention is then either used by Google for its own purposes or resold to willing buyers. The fact that it is a non-cash transaction does not make it any less of a service -- if Google was not being "compensated" by its users then why would it continue to offer the service?
Apple has a market cap of $382 billion and $70 billion in net asset value, so even if they appointed a no-talent ass clown like Michael Dell as CEO and he immediately liquidated everything, they're less than 6x overpriced.
I think it's pretty obvious that being 30X overvalued is an exaggeration. The trouble is that the industry they're in is extremely fickle. For example, say Samsung wins their case against Apple and gets an injunction in all the major markets against the iPhone. Or suppose a Chinese manufacturer takes an Android license and gets into the mobile device market, and then drives the retail price for iPhone-comparable devices down to $100. Apple could lose half their revenues practically overnight.
And the fact that they have billions of dollars in cash helps some, but not much -- if they encounter a twist of fate it's far too easy to burn a mountain of cash trying to turn things back around. Look at Microsoft -- they wasted billions of dollars and Bing still sucks.
The problem is not that someone who wants to run Linux on a PC will be unable to find one to buy that will run it. The problem is that someone who has already bought their PC before they ever heard of Linux will not be able to install it without buying a different PC.
Also consider what happens to used PCs. Think about all the PCs that are and will remain perfectly serviceable for basic web browsing and email, but that came with Windows 2000 or Windows XP and are or soon will be unsupported without a newer OS. They're too old to run Vista or 7. Right now I can install Linux on it and give it to someone who can't afford a computer. What happens in 10 years when today's computers are in the same position? They all end up in a landfill instead of in the hands of people who desperately need them.
Except that it doesn't really work that way, and they certainly aren't acting as though that was ever their intention. If their goal was an integrated ecosystem then you would be able to plug an XBOX controller into a Windows PC, insert an XBOX game and play it. Or plug a USB keyboard and mouse into an XBOX and run Windows programs. But you can't.
And it doesn't make any sense to say that XBOX customers will be more likely to buy Windows phones, because they have no real relation to one another -- they're not even branded the same. It isn't as though customers like "Windows Console" and that leads them to want "Windows Phone", most of these people have utterly no clue that XBOX and WP7 are made by the same company.
All they're doing is wasting their money buying market share in a market where they never get a positive ROI.
Companies don't really pay dividends anymore, unless they want to make a token gesture. There are a number of reasons for it: The tax law isn't set up to favor it, because dividends get taxed immediately whereas if the stock value is higher because the company is holding more assets then stockholders can defer paying taxes until they sell the stock. On top of that, corporate executives would generally rather buy other companies than issue dividends because it gives them control over more stuff -- why issue a dividend when you can ruin Skype instead? And related to that, executives don't like to issue big dividends because it's a signal to stockholders that the company has nothing good internally to invest the money in, which is a strong indicator of a company on the decline.
So they issue token dividends, hoard the remaining assets and make a bunch of ill-conceived "investments" to make it seem like they're doing something productive.
They are no longer losing money year over year, but they are nowhere near making back the initial investment. And there is no guarantee at all that they ever will -- it will take them many more years and it seems extremely likely that before then games will no longer be played on consoles, in favor of e.g. mobile devices connected to TVs and controllers by wifi.
The only farming going on is for ad impressions. That's why it says "and it's a good thing" at the end -- a good thing from his perspective that the story's author is getting paid, because he certainly hasn't done any work.
How about a tax scale that accounts for the current unemployment rate? Higher unemployment = higher taxes for corporations and rich, lower unemployment is lower taxes for corporations and the rich. Hell of an incentive to create jobs.
The incentive is too diluted. A company that creates (or declines to create) 10,000 new jobs will barely put a dent in the national unemployment rate one way or the other, which means that they won't individually make any decisions based on the overall outcome.
If you want to do something like that which would actually work, create an 'employee tax credit' (not deduction) of substantial size (say 60% of the employee's salary up to $40,000) -- that will get companies hiring people. Of course, then corporations will pay no tax because of all the tax credits they're getting and people will complain about it. But they would be complaining about it while they're employed.
Increased taxes for high income earners are *not* barricades to becoming rich. It's a recognition of the fact that you don't need $1M to survive.
In this case I agree with you -- $1M is about the right number. The problem is that before they were talking about raising taxes on anyone who makes $250K, and that's where you run into trouble. A family of five living on $250K in certain parts of the country is not saving anything. Three kids in private school or college are consuming $100K of that money just for tuition, because nobody who makes that much gets any financial aid. Around $50K is already being paid in taxes. You then have $100K left for the living expenses of five people. That is far from nothing, but it's only $20K per person. That family can easily spend that and have nothing left over. In other words, they will never break into the investment class, because they still consume all or very close to all that they earn. And for that reason I don't like the idea of raising their taxes.
On the other hand, someone making $1M/year could without significant sacrifice live the same life as the $250K/year family and quickly save up a multimillion dollar retirement account. Which means that if you make more than that, the government is not causing you any material hardship to deprive you of half or so.
You know, con men often get away scott free, so I guess we should just do away with laws against theft and fraud. No point trying to close loopholes in the laws or improving enforcement, since I'm sure they'll just find another way to get around those new laws too.
The problem is that by and large they aren't loopholes. The reason that rich people and corporations don't pay taxes isn't because they're committing tax fraud, it's because we created tax incentives to do things like research and development, hiring employees, doing construction, etc. And then people with money do those things, and get the tax incentives, which lowers their tax rate. That was the whole idea! We wanted to get them to do those things, and now they are. In exchange they pay lower tax rates. If you take away the tax incentives then they stop doing as much of those things we want them to do.
The only way to avoid "tax planning" is to implement a poll tax. As soon as you have different taxes on different activities, people have the ability to choose the activities with lower taxes and avoid the activities with higher taxes. That's what tax planning is.
More to the point, you can't tax people who operate outside of your jurisdiction and you can't force other countries to raise their tax rates to match or exceed yours in order to prevent companies moving operations there to achieve a lower tax rate. Tax competition exists, and the fact is it's generally more profitable to win the competition by having lower effective corporate tax rates and attracting corporations who convert people who would be collecting unemployment to people who are paying payroll and income taxes.
And that's what we've been doing for some time now. We have a high nominal corporate tax rate for political reasons, but corporations don't actually pay it, and we like it that way because it keeps more of them here.
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In all seriousness, here is another method of solving the problem, which would be just as effective at preventing rootkits from hiding in the bootloader: make the boot medium a flash device on the motherboard, and have a jumper that enables writes to that device. This would not rob users of control over their system (although it may force people to get over their fear of opening their computer's case and changing a jumper), and would be just as effective at stopping the overwhelming majority of rootkits.
You don't even need a jumper or a flash device. All you have to do is to forget about digital signatures and use one-time authorization in the BIOS or EFI menu: If you install a boot loader the firmware has never seen before, when you try to boot it you get a message that says "boot loader is not authorized, if you have not just installed a new operating system this could be a rootkit etc., click here to use your previous boot loader instead," and all you have to do is go into the menu if you want to authorize the new one. But since there is no way for the rootkit to do that by itself, since the menu has its own read-only keyboard drivers and requires input from the keyboard, the only way you get a rootkit is if you go into the menu by hand and authorize it.
The sad thing is that basically anything can execute arbitrary code. You can't just sign the boot loader, you then have to have a boot loader which checks signatures on the kernel, a kernel which checks signatures on the drivers, etc. Then all it takes is for one obscure hardware manufacturer to get a driver signed with a buffer overflow in it, or for enough hardware manufacturers to not sign their drivers so that all the users allow unsigned drivers, and the malware authors are back in business -- but without helping Linux any, because you can't exactly load 2/3rds of Windows to get to the point where you can run arbitrary code in Ring 0 and load the Linux kernel.
The problem will be when at some point in the future someone has an old crappy Ultra book made by Ikkkiianu and wants to put Linux on it because Windows 9 doesn't work well on it and Windows 8 is too insecure.
That is one of the problems. The other problem is that by the time Windows 10 comes around and nobody has any interest in running Windows 7 or any other version that lacks support for this feature, the incentive for OEMs not to make it mandatory becomes much reduced.
Maybe one day you will realize that every field protects itself. Doctors and lawyers restrict their trade. Regulators and government employees have direct access to government cash.
Economists call this behavior "rent seeking" and it is considered inefficient and undesirable. The idea that Microsoft should not be criticized for engaging in it is highly misguided.
There's just no truth that Android has slowed Apple's sales.
I can't understand how you can even think that. New competition almost by definition reduces the sales of the other competitors. Android has something like half of the market now. Do you really think that 0% of that came at the expense of Apple? Every sale of an Android phone was a potential sale of an iPhone; the fact that their growth is not negative does not mean that it would not have been substantially higher in the alternative scenario.
Being #1 isn't necessarily the way to profitability.
You're arguing the wrong point. The problem for Apple is not that one of their competitors will capture a large market share and force them to lower their margins, or even make them unprofitable. The problem is that if they maintain their margins (as can be expected) in the face of competition which is of sufficiently high quality and sufficiently lower price, their volume will be reduced. That doesn't mean they will stop making profit, but it means they will stop making as much profit. If Android takes 80% of the market and leaves Apple with 15%, even if Apple is making more profit than all of the Android phone makers put together, that doesn't mean they're in a good position relative to the rest of the stock market, only relative to the other phone manufacturers.
Apple has the highest market cap of any company right now. In order for them to be worth that, they can't just make more profit than each of their competitors. They have to make substantially more. Several times as much as their competitors. And there are a number of ways they can get tripped up going forward and be unable to do that.
Besides the obvious one (Apple already pays Lodsys royalties), there's some history of Apple paying one time fees to settle disputes [thisismynext.com]. Also, considering the number of injunctions Apple has won against Samsung, chances are, if both parties had to sit down and negotiate, and both parties really like being in the mobile phone space, I think Apple has a fairly strong negotiating platform.
The trouble is that maybe Samsung doesn't really like being in the mobile space. Given Microsoft/Nokia and Google/Motorola, they might just see the writing on the wall. Mobile devices are a small fraction of Samsung's business, but a very, very large fraction of Apple's. If Samsung decides they're better off exiting the business and then demanding a sizable chunk of Apple's profits, they end up in the position of a patent troll with a number of very fundamental mobile device patents and Apple would have no obvious counter if Samsung does not fear an injunction.
There's really not a lot of history of Apple cutting their margins to maintain their volume in the face of an onslaught of slightly inferior but cheaper products.
I completely agree that Apple would sooner accept a reduction in volume than a reduction in margin, but that doesn't take anything away from the need to make the trade off. Apple was on a growth vector before Android, now they have a consistent market share with little to no growth. If Android did not exist then Apple would likely have the whole market right now. If in the future Android devices become even less expensive than they are now, the effect can only increase, and the effect on Apple's volume could be significant.
Naturally there are no guarantees of any of this or the alternatives, but that's the trouble: There is no way to predict whether something like this, or some black swan even that no one has even considered, will cause them to lose the bulk of their customers to a competitor. Whereas if you look at other large companies, e.g. Walmart or Exxon, there is no obvious event that seems at all likely that could cause them to lose half their customers inside of a year or two.
We, the users, can indeed switch to use other products, although leaving Google Mail is likely to be painful, but their customers may not be able to switch this easily. If Google holds a massively dominant role in internet search (and surely nobody disputes that they do), then companies which wish to sell their products may have little choice but to use Google's advertisement mechanisms.
Do you know how to tell that the advertisers aren't being harmed? It's because they aren't the ones doing the complaining. It's Microsoft, Microsoft-funded proxies and a bunch of SEO spam companies doing the complaining, because Google is offering a better product than they are. You don't see Ford Motor Company going to Congress about it because they know perfectly well both that they have a thousand different ways to reach their customers and that Google is charging entirely reasonable prices -- just compare the cost of advertising with Google and with a print newspaper or radio or television and tell me which is more expensive.
I suspect that's quite unlikely... but if so, you'd probably see a large payout by Apple (which with $70+ billion in cash is likely possible). Apple might fight a judgement via appeal, but an actual injunction against iPhone would be settled, and quickly.
And you don't see why being forced into a quick settlement would be a serious problem for Apple?
iPhone is only $199 on contract, or do you think that a Chinese manufacturer is about to equal the iPhone build quality, and incorporate the long battery life, multi-core CPU, high DPI display, best of breed touch screen and stick 16gb to 32gb of memory in there for about $100 unsubsidized?
Who cares? If they're 80% as good for 20% of the price, the competition will by its nature cause Apple to have to reduce their margins to maintain their volume, or vice versa.
Are you for some reason under the impression that saying something over and over again without any reasoning behind it will somehow make it true? The Big Lie only works when no one is around to correct you.
Let's try another business where the customers do not pay for the product: The public library. Naturally, if a library has more patrons, it can use that fact to better solicit for donations and grants, which is how it gets "paid" for providing its service. Do you then say that the reader of a library book is the product? No, because that's ridiculous. The reader is the patron/customer. Then there is a separate transaction between the library and the donors in which having a greater readership is advantageous -- but that does not make the provision of books to the public, or the provision of web search, any less of a service.
I see a big difference in that Microsoft went out of their way to make sure that Netscape was not included whatsoever and went so far as to prohibit OEMs from adding it, whereas search results for Google's competitors appear in the search results in such a way that anyone who is actually looking for them can easily find them. It is, naturally, not Google's responsibility to give their competition free advertising.
I don't see how that would be a selling point for the consumers whatsoever. A single result being in a different place has no real negative impact on the consumer: If the consumer is actually looking for that result then it's a convenience, and if not then it is so utterly trivial to ignore it and go on to the next one that complaining about it is frivolous.
Are you familiar with the antitrust laws in this country? The laws don't include any details. This is pretty much the entirety of the statute prohibiting monopolies:
"Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony [and listing penalties]" (Sherman Act Section 2)
In other words, 'monopolies bad, you federal courts sort out what that means' -- and that's the way it has been ever since. There is a whole body of cases interpreting what that means. Congress has had nothing to do with it for something like a hundred years, through cases far more serious than whatever Google is accused of. What makes you think Congress is going to do anything different in this case, other than possibly the result of being induced by Microsoft campaign contributions?
You do realize that you often times see advertisements for cable on satellite and advertisements for satellite on cable. Not to mention advertisements for shows on a different channel.
And if you type "windows phone" or "operating system" or the like into Google web search then you get ads for Microsoft. So it's clear that they're not charging so much that they're preventing the competition from buying advertising.
Ad space is a finite commodity. Google is allowed to bid on it as much as anyone else. If they want the same keywords as Microsoft, Microsoft will have to outbid them. There is no functional difference between that and what Google is accused of doing, assuming that is not the exact cause of what Microsoft is complaining about.
Apparently you missed this. The FTC approved it, so you can stop trolling.
Your nonsense argument is ridiculous. Services don't stop being services because they're ad supported. The viewer is paying with his attention rather than his dollars, which attention is then either used by Google for its own purposes or resold to willing buyers. The fact that it is a non-cash transaction does not make it any less of a service -- if Google was not being "compensated" by its users then why would it continue to offer the service?
Apple has a market cap of $382 billion and $70 billion in net asset value, so even if they appointed a no-talent ass clown like Michael Dell as CEO and he immediately liquidated everything, they're less than 6x overpriced.
I think it's pretty obvious that being 30X overvalued is an exaggeration. The trouble is that the industry they're in is extremely fickle. For example, say Samsung wins their case against Apple and gets an injunction in all the major markets against the iPhone. Or suppose a Chinese manufacturer takes an Android license and gets into the mobile device market, and then drives the retail price for iPhone-comparable devices down to $100. Apple could lose half their revenues practically overnight.
And the fact that they have billions of dollars in cash helps some, but not much -- if they encounter a twist of fate it's far too easy to burn a mountain of cash trying to turn things back around. Look at Microsoft -- they wasted billions of dollars and Bing still sucks.
The problem is not that someone who wants to run Linux on a PC will be unable to find one to buy that will run it. The problem is that someone who has already bought their PC before they ever heard of Linux will not be able to install it without buying a different PC.
Also consider what happens to used PCs. Think about all the PCs that are and will remain perfectly serviceable for basic web browsing and email, but that came with Windows 2000 or Windows XP and are or soon will be unsupported without a newer OS. They're too old to run Vista or 7. Right now I can install Linux on it and give it to someone who can't afford a computer. What happens in 10 years when today's computers are in the same position? They all end up in a landfill instead of in the hands of people who desperately need them.
Except that it doesn't really work that way, and they certainly aren't acting as though that was ever their intention. If their goal was an integrated ecosystem then you would be able to plug an XBOX controller into a Windows PC, insert an XBOX game and play it. Or plug a USB keyboard and mouse into an XBOX and run Windows programs. But you can't.
And it doesn't make any sense to say that XBOX customers will be more likely to buy Windows phones, because they have no real relation to one another -- they're not even branded the same. It isn't as though customers like "Windows Console" and that leads them to want "Windows Phone", most of these people have utterly no clue that XBOX and WP7 are made by the same company.
All they're doing is wasting their money buying market share in a market where they never get a positive ROI.
Companies don't really pay dividends anymore, unless they want to make a token gesture. There are a number of reasons for it: The tax law isn't set up to favor it, because dividends get taxed immediately whereas if the stock value is higher because the company is holding more assets then stockholders can defer paying taxes until they sell the stock. On top of that, corporate executives would generally rather buy other companies than issue dividends because it gives them control over more stuff -- why issue a dividend when you can ruin Skype instead? And related to that, executives don't like to issue big dividends because it's a signal to stockholders that the company has nothing good internally to invest the money in, which is a strong indicator of a company on the decline.
So they issue token dividends, hoard the remaining assets and make a bunch of ill-conceived "investments" to make it seem like they're doing something productive.
They are no longer losing money year over year, but they are nowhere near making back the initial investment. And there is no guarantee at all that they ever will -- it will take them many more years and it seems extremely likely that before then games will no longer be played on consoles, in favor of e.g. mobile devices connected to TVs and controllers by wifi.
The only farming going on is for ad impressions. That's why it says "and it's a good thing" at the end -- a good thing from his perspective that the story's author is getting paid, because he certainly hasn't done any work.
How about a tax scale that accounts for the current unemployment rate? Higher unemployment = higher taxes for corporations and rich, lower unemployment is lower taxes for corporations and the rich. Hell of an incentive to create jobs.
The incentive is too diluted. A company that creates (or declines to create) 10,000 new jobs will barely put a dent in the national unemployment rate one way or the other, which means that they won't individually make any decisions based on the overall outcome.
If you want to do something like that which would actually work, create an 'employee tax credit' (not deduction) of substantial size (say 60% of the employee's salary up to $40,000) -- that will get companies hiring people. Of course, then corporations will pay no tax because of all the tax credits they're getting and people will complain about it. But they would be complaining about it while they're employed.
Increased taxes for high income earners are *not* barricades to becoming rich. It's a recognition of the fact that you don't need $1M to survive.
In this case I agree with you -- $1M is about the right number. The problem is that before they were talking about raising taxes on anyone who makes $250K, and that's where you run into trouble. A family of five living on $250K in certain parts of the country is not saving anything. Three kids in private school or college are consuming $100K of that money just for tuition, because nobody who makes that much gets any financial aid. Around $50K is already being paid in taxes. You then have $100K left for the living expenses of five people. That is far from nothing, but it's only $20K per person. That family can easily spend that and have nothing left over. In other words, they will never break into the investment class, because they still consume all or very close to all that they earn. And for that reason I don't like the idea of raising their taxes.
On the other hand, someone making $1M/year could without significant sacrifice live the same life as the $250K/year family and quickly save up a multimillion dollar retirement account. Which means that if you make more than that, the government is not causing you any material hardship to deprive you of half or so.
You know, con men often get away scott free, so I guess we should just do away with laws against theft and fraud. No point trying to close loopholes in the laws or improving enforcement, since I'm sure they'll just find another way to get around those new laws too.
The problem is that by and large they aren't loopholes. The reason that rich people and corporations don't pay taxes isn't because they're committing tax fraud, it's because we created tax incentives to do things like research and development, hiring employees, doing construction, etc. And then people with money do those things, and get the tax incentives, which lowers their tax rate. That was the whole idea! We wanted to get them to do those things, and now they are. In exchange they pay lower tax rates. If you take away the tax incentives then they stop doing as much of those things we want them to do.
The only way to avoid "tax planning" is to implement a poll tax. As soon as you have different taxes on different activities, people have the ability to choose the activities with lower taxes and avoid the activities with higher taxes. That's what tax planning is.
More to the point, you can't tax people who operate outside of your jurisdiction and you can't force other countries to raise their tax rates to match or exceed yours in order to prevent companies moving operations there to achieve a lower tax rate. Tax competition exists, and the fact is it's generally more profitable to win the competition by having lower effective corporate tax rates and attracting corporations who convert people who would be collecting unemployment to people who are paying payroll and income taxes.
And that's what we've been doing for some time now. We have a high nominal corporate tax rate for political reasons, but corporations don't actually pay it, and we like it that way because it keeps more of them here.