Err, you do realise that it is 2012 now? Ten years ago, Pentium 4s at 2 ghz+ were the average Intel cpu, gigabit over copper had been approved and brought to market 3 years before
Yeah, people don't seem to realize how long it has been... Think about this one: You could get a 2.2GHz Athlon 64 in 2003. K8 will be ten years old next year. Do you feel old yet?
Think it through: Chinese company makes solar panels. Let's say they cost $5 to make and people will buy them for $6. Chinese government provides a subsidy of $2.50, so now Chinese manufacturer can sell for $5 and flood the market while still making $2.50 profit instead of $1.
Now you impose a tax of $2.50 on the importer. Importers are plentiful and fungible; they have razor-thin margins. The entire tax is going to be paid by suppliers and customers, because if it isn't the importers all go out of business and the manufacturer can't allow that. If the Chinese manufacturer continued to sell for $5 while the importer has to pay a $2.50 tariff, the price to retailers would be $7.50, which is higher than the market rate of $6 and nobody would buy them. When the Chinese manufacturer realizes this and has to reduce their prices to $3.50 in order to have products that are competitive after the tariff, the price reduction eats the entire amount of the subsidy.
On top of that, even if you wrongly assume the importer is paying most of the tariff, it still defeats the unfair advantage of the subsidized product by raising its price back to where it would be absent the subsidy.
Taxing the chinese products is more proof that obama and the dems have absolutely no idea how to handle the economy.
It's actually a pretty standard response to an unfair subsidy: China pays $X to reduce the cost of Chinese solar panels, we charge $X in taxes to offset the subsidy and destroy the unfair competitive advantage. And China then loses all incentive to continue the subsidy, because the money isn't actually going to their solar industry anymore, it's just going to pay the tariff which would be eliminated if they stopped paying the subsidy.
Of course, the smart thing to do would be to impose a tariff on Chinese solar panels which doesn't capture the entire subsidy, and then pay the money collected to the domestic manufacturers to eliminate the competitive advantage created by the remainder of the subsidy which isn't collected as a tariff. The consequence is that China is then subsidizing world-wide, rather than only Chinese, manufacturing of solar panels. That's a good thing.
And, if you want to be strategic, make it known that you won't discontinue this arrangement until few years after China discontinues the subsidy, to give them an incentive to keep it -- since discontinuing the subsidy would then make their solar manufacturing totally uncompetitive for a few years, but keeping it (and thereby subsidizing everyone) would leave their industry on the same playing field as they would have been if they didn't decide to play this game in the first place.
Anyone anywhere can come up with a way ( if smart and motivated enough) to hack anything anywhere, it is completely different from invading another country or defending your own.
You're completely right. And the idea of having some incompetent bureaucracy with the power to spy on everyone and shut down the internet is is totally insane.
But let's not just complain about it, shall we? Why don't we do one better?
Making systems totally secure is a pipe dream, but we can certainly make them more secure. And entirely without a surveillance bureaucracy.
The key is to understand that secure software is a market failure: Nobody wants to pay for security until after they get hacked, which means software developers have the wrong incentives. The one that goes out of their way to do security right end up going out of business because they get beat to market by the ones that ship the first code that compiles. But let's resist the knee jerk government reaction to this, which is to pass laws telling everybody what to do. That isn't what's needed here -- the result of any sanctions will be a "teaching to the test" problem where developers do the bare minimum to avoid liability while not actually making secure software, and meanwhile software development is made far more expensive due to regulatory compliance burdens. So forget about that.
What would actually work? SE Linux. It was produced by the NSA, it's open source, and it makes things more secure. Why don't we spend the money on that sort of thing? Use the carrot, not the stick. Have the NSA provide free, voluntary security audits to major infrastructure providers. Have them produce more software in the nature of SE Linux -- things designed by all those genius cryptographers they already employ, which can subsequently be adopted by everyone everywhere and make things more secure. Fund more software like TOR which can protect privacy, to get such things to the point that they're fast and efficient enough for regular use by everyday people (and screw over enemy countries that censor and oppress in the process). Provide incentives for the more rapid adoption of technologies that increase security, like DNSSEC and IPv6.
These are the things that have the potential to actually work. If they're actually serious about improving security, and Something Must Be Done, let it be that. Because the last thing we need is another hopeless regulatory bureaucracy.
There's nothing for Google to test. By the time they get your traffic, the DNS query is done.
Why do you imagine they couldn't arrange the same result? Create a real DNS record for something like dns-ok.google.com pointed to a Google server with a no-op piece of javascript called test.js on it, then include "dns-ok.google.com/test.js" on google.com. Then they could call up the people who currently control the DNS changer server and tell them to add a record for dns-ok.google.com and point it to a different Google server where that piece of javascript causes the user to see a message that their computer is infected and provides instructions on how to fix it.
And people here are always moaning how insecure Windows is - yet when MS try to take action, they are lambasted for "blocking free speech".
That's because it's what they're doing. The wider internet is full of malware, that doesn't mean you block the whole internet. You just block the URLs that are known to contain malware. Which is, incidentally, what they almost certainly do on other sites -- download.com is probably full of malware too, do they block the whole site? What about RapidShare or the like?
It's very clear that this "Pirate Bay is unsafe" is just a pretense. There is no excuse for blocking an entire domain unless the entire domain contains nothing of value, and that isn't the case here.
The important thing to notice is that Fox News will not cover this, or will cover it in the nature of "why is the liberal media attacking our Dear Leader without cause?" Which means that viewers of Fox News will not find out about it.
Friends don't let friends watch Fox News. (Even -- especially -- if your views are toward the right. There are just so many better options: Cato.org, reason.com, volokh.com for legal issues, etc.)
That sounds suspiciously like question begging. There will almost always be a piece of prior art for any individual claim element. You've just gone from obviousness being a gut feeling to "teach or suggest" being a gut feeling; how does that help?
Call it mere semantics, if you want, but I call it due process - you need evidence to invalidate a patent, not just a gut feeling.
It seems to me that "gut feeling" is pretty much how obviousness works. It's not like there is a mathematical formula for it.
The OP was using the wrong terminology (anticipation/novelty instead of non-obviousness), but I don't see how you can seriously dispute the conclusion. Polysemes are an incredibly abstract concept. Certain characters (especially in foreign languages or mathematical languages) are polysemous words. Keys can be semantically polysemous regardless of their label, e.g. vim key bindings, and even the labels have been applied to keyboards as stickers since at least the 1980s. Claiming that prior art polysemous keyboard + prior art virtual keyboard = polysemous virtual keyboard is non-obvious seems like quite a stretch.
I'm not sure what that has to do with the subsidies. First world countries could easily pass a law prohibiting the import of solar panels not manufactured under first world environmental standards, but that wouldn't solve the "problem" of the Chinese making solar panels under subsidy and thereby undercutting first world competitors.
It really doesn't help to lower usage of fossil fuels if the way they are being made is environmentally unsustainable, all we are doing is buying a little time at the expense of land that will be uninhabitable. Considering the size of the Chinese military making more of their land unusable is probably be a BAD idea.
I would expect a civil war more than anything. Annexing more land is pretty useless because it's not like you can actually relocate the people to it cost-effectively, and besides which military conquest is very last-century. There is no need to invade a country when you can buy it instead. But that doesn't much help the people back home who are dying of cancer and having children with birth defects -- they're going to want change domestically. And if they don't get it, China could pretty easily be looking at their own version of the Arab Spring in a few years time.
I don't see how the Chinese government's money is somehow our money. Even if it was our money before we paid it to them, it's their money now.
I think what this is really doing is clarifying why we subsidize solar panels -- they're making clear that it's a jobs program, not an environmental program. If it was an environmental program then we would be happy. China is adding to our subsidy and making solar panels even more attractive: Now they will be even less expensive and even more people will use them.
But if it's a jobs program then it's a disaster. The point of the demand-side subsidy is then to increase demand and create more jobs making solar panels. And subsidizing supply in China means that the increased demand gets met by supply from China instead of supply from domestic industry. Worse yet (for jobs), the dual subsidy makes foreign solar panels extraordinarily competitive and displaces demand for non-solar domestic competitors like oil and gas.
Or to put it more simply: It makes it very attractive to replace domestic fossil fuel energy with foreign made solar panels. If you like solar panels, that's good. If you like domestic jobs, that's bad.
Five years from now, they will have a lot less money, and when they try to jack up the prices, we will be competitive again. Actually moreso, because we are doing most of the cutting edge research, and we won't have wasted capital resources on now outdated cell production processes. In the meantime, we can invest our capital in industries where they DON'T subsidize, and take over that market.
Government intervention in markets is NEVER productive. When you give +100 in subsidies to a particular industry, you must take a total of -120, -140, or even -200 from other industries. This does NOTHING except make their economy weaker.
That's...totally wrong.
Your argument only works if the subsidized and non-subsidized industries are roughly equal in economic size, so that the amount of benefit the subsidized industries get is offset by the amount of loss the unsubsidized industries pay in taxes to fund the subsidies. But that isn't what happens: What they're doing is divide and conquer. You pick some minority of industries, especially the ones that are expected to grow in the future, and you subsidize them heavily to drive competitors in other countries out of business. Once you own the market, you can cancel the subsidies and your country will still own the market because it now has all the know-how, infrastructure and already-amortized fixed costs that competitors lack. Then you can transfer the subsidy to the next growth industry. At the same time, the subsidy is a small portion of the overall existing economy and comes from a broad tax base, so the drag it creates on non-subsidized businesses is extremely minor and doesn't create a major competitive disadvantage.
In addition to that, it is easy for them to impose the tax tax on industries where they already have a competitive advantage (e.g. cheap labor costs), such that the amount of the tax doesn't even erode their entire advantage in those industries, meaning that they still out-compete other countries in those fields even after paying a small, broad-based tax to fund a large, narrowly targeted subsidy.
Those phones are not actually $49. They're subsidized and you can only get that price if you sign up for a two year contract. For people who don't make a lot of phone calls and are in range of WiFi 99% of the time, buying a used phone and then getting a prepaid plan is often substantially less expensive.
But it depends on the personality, not in the sex of the boss.
This.
The huge fail with any study that tries to measure whether X large group is "better" than Y large group is that there is, almost invariably, more variation within a group than between groups. The 60th percentile male boss will be a significantly better boss than the 40th percentile female boss even if (for sake of argument) the 50th percentile female boss is slightly better than the 50th percentile male boss.
On top of that, when the groups are identified by politically-charged categories like race, gender, sexual orientation, etc., the politics dictates the science. The only hypotheses that get tested are the ones that are expected to return the desired results. No one funds a study to determine whether male bosses are better in situations where tenacity or dedication is advantageous, because the outcome has the potential to be politically unacceptable. Authors of a study that finds white/heterosexual/male groups to have an advantage over minority/homosexual/female groups will be branded bigots and frequently fired, and people know that ahead of time, so they have a huge incentive to fudge the numbers in any case where that looks like it might end up as a conclusion.
This is very much not to say that white, heterosexual and male groups are, on net, superior to their counterparts, but rather that attempting to measure the difference is both useless and futile. The politics corrupts the science to the point that conclusions become meaningless, and in any event, what do you even expect to do with the data? Is making staffing decisions on the basis of someone's gender really something we want to promote? Really?
Since there is no vendor to guarantee that the software is legal and take the hit if it turns out to NOT be legal, they wont go for it.
Yeah, that sounds like a good heuristic... wait, what?
There are some pretty big open source companies. IBM, RedHat, Google, etc. Conversely, there are plenty of little proprietary software companies that could die off and blow away by the end of the year.
On top of that, since when do proprietary software companies offer to indemnify their customers anyway? Do you see anything like that in the license for Office or Photoshop?
The fact of the matter is that competitive commodity markets have low margins. The thing they teach in business school is to differentiate your product from your competitors. The problem is that selling Windows phones doesn't do that. Nokia has no monopoly on WP7. Several of the other manufacturers have WP7 phones too, and nobody is buying them either.
The point of differentiation is to make something that people actually want which competitors can't provide. The problem is that WP7 is neither of those things. People aren't buying it and Nokia's competitors are still offering it. It's a no-win plan. If nobody buys WP7, you're screwed. Even if people buy it, you're still screwed, because it's still a race to the bottom where you have competitors who also offer the same thing as you (WP7) -- and on top of it all now you've got to pay Microsoft for your OS going forward.
Differentiation requires doing something different than your competitors. Abandoning all but a tiny submarket with low demand where your competitors already have competitive products is suicidal.
They pay more and use less? What a shocker! Who would have thought?
It's not even that. What he's saying is that 4G Android users use more data than iPhone (i.e. 3G) users do (shocking!) since iPhone is currently still 3G/"3.5"G, and the Android users are more likely to demand the newest gadgets (i.e. "higher churn"). Which is naturally worse for the phone company who wants you to buy whatever phone, keep it forever, and never use the speed you're paying for while still continuing to pay for it.
The problem is that newer, 4G iPhones are likely to attract exactly the same crowd. So unless Sprint's new business model is to keep selling obsolete iPhones forever, they had probably better get a new plan.
You're just reaching now. That is only the European market, and barely outselling a thing which is deprecated and abandoned is hardly progress. According to your own link WP7 has only 2.5% of even that market. That's practically a rounding error.
They are competing sure, but by partnering with Microsoft they have an appreciable competitive advantage over the other manufacturers instead of being yet another Anroid manufacturer. Tell me, why exactly do we need another one of them? Is there not enough choice already for Android handsets? No, we don't need another, which is exactly why Nokia doesn't need to be yet another.
Let me rephrase that for you and see if it makes any more sense this way:
They are competing sure, but by partnering with RedHat they have an appreciable competitive advantage over the other manufacturers instead of being yet another Windows manufacturer. Tell me, why exactly do we need another one of them? Is there not enough choice already for Windows PCs? No, we don't need another, which is exactly why HP doesn't need to be yet another.
If someone came to you as the CEO of HP with that argument for why you should ignore the market for Windows PCs and focus on selling PCs with RHEL, what would you tell them?
Wild idea, I know, but they could have worked on making better phones than the competition. You know, hardware. Is a phone maker a software company? I don't think so.
Yeah, that's something else I don't really understand.
I can run both Ubuntu and Windows 7 on pretty much every PC made in the last five years. Somebody want to explain what fathomable reason there is that every model Nokia sells is not available with both Android and WP7 as options?
You're obviously going to get modded troll when you phrase it that way, but you're actually dead on.
Think about the possible outcomes of this for Nokia: The worst case is probably what is actually happening, which is that nobody is buying Windows phones. But even if they actually succeeded, what do you think Microsoft would do then?
Nokia currently has the option of Microsoft paying them to make phones nobody is buying, but as soon as anybody starts buying them, Microsoft is going to want Nokia to start paying them. Nokia ends up in the totally perverse situation that the more Windows phones they sell, the stronger Microsoft's leverage over them becomes, because demonstrating a market demand for Windows phones would get other phone makers into bed with Microsoft and thus into direct competition with Nokia.
Right now Microsoft needs Nokia more than Nokia needs Microsoft, but Nokia has put itself in the position that in the event Nokia succeeds, that situation reverses and then Nokia fails. In the long term it's totally lose-lose for Nokia.
It really feels like the focus on quarterly profits has doomed them. The Microsoft deal, if the market hadn't decided that it doesn't want Windows phones, would have been the most profitable for them in the short-term, but it completely ignores that inserting Microsoft into your supply chain does nothing but drain your margins in the long-term. And it completely ignores the very strong possibility, which has now been realized, that Windows phone would fail to sell.
Slashdot Mirror
Err, you do realise that it is 2012 now? Ten years ago, Pentium 4s at 2 ghz+ were the average Intel cpu, gigabit over copper had been approved and brought to market 3 years before
Yeah, people don't seem to realize how long it has been... Think about this one: You could get a 2.2GHz Athlon 64 in 2003. K8 will be ten years old next year. Do you feel old yet?
Your post is an economics fail.
Think it through: Chinese company makes solar panels. Let's say they cost $5 to make and people will buy them for $6. Chinese government provides a subsidy of $2.50, so now Chinese manufacturer can sell for $5 and flood the market while still making $2.50 profit instead of $1.
Now you impose a tax of $2.50 on the importer. Importers are plentiful and fungible; they have razor-thin margins. The entire tax is going to be paid by suppliers and customers, because if it isn't the importers all go out of business and the manufacturer can't allow that. If the Chinese manufacturer continued to sell for $5 while the importer has to pay a $2.50 tariff, the price to retailers would be $7.50, which is higher than the market rate of $6 and nobody would buy them. When the Chinese manufacturer realizes this and has to reduce their prices to $3.50 in order to have products that are competitive after the tariff, the price reduction eats the entire amount of the subsidy.
On top of that, even if you wrongly assume the importer is paying most of the tariff, it still defeats the unfair advantage of the subsidized product by raising its price back to where it would be absent the subsidy.
Taxing the chinese products is more proof that obama and the dems have absolutely no idea how to handle the economy.
It's actually a pretty standard response to an unfair subsidy: China pays $X to reduce the cost of Chinese solar panels, we charge $X in taxes to offset the subsidy and destroy the unfair competitive advantage. And China then loses all incentive to continue the subsidy, because the money isn't actually going to their solar industry anymore, it's just going to pay the tariff which would be eliminated if they stopped paying the subsidy.
Of course, the smart thing to do would be to impose a tariff on Chinese solar panels which doesn't capture the entire subsidy, and then pay the money collected to the domestic manufacturers to eliminate the competitive advantage created by the remainder of the subsidy which isn't collected as a tariff. The consequence is that China is then subsidizing world-wide, rather than only Chinese, manufacturing of solar panels. That's a good thing.
And, if you want to be strategic, make it known that you won't discontinue this arrangement until few years after China discontinues the subsidy, to give them an incentive to keep it -- since discontinuing the subsidy would then make their solar manufacturing totally uncompetitive for a few years, but keeping it (and thereby subsidizing everyone) would leave their industry on the same playing field as they would have been if they didn't decide to play this game in the first place.
Anyone anywhere can come up with a way ( if smart and motivated enough) to hack anything anywhere, it is completely different from invading another country or defending your own.
You're completely right. And the idea of having some incompetent bureaucracy with the power to spy on everyone and shut down the internet is is totally insane.
But let's not just complain about it, shall we? Why don't we do one better?
Making systems totally secure is a pipe dream, but we can certainly make them more secure. And entirely without a surveillance bureaucracy.
The key is to understand that secure software is a market failure: Nobody wants to pay for security until after they get hacked, which means software developers have the wrong incentives. The one that goes out of their way to do security right end up going out of business because they get beat to market by the ones that ship the first code that compiles. But let's resist the knee jerk government reaction to this, which is to pass laws telling everybody what to do. That isn't what's needed here -- the result of any sanctions will be a "teaching to the test" problem where developers do the bare minimum to avoid liability while not actually making secure software, and meanwhile software development is made far more expensive due to regulatory compliance burdens. So forget about that.
What would actually work? SE Linux. It was produced by the NSA, it's open source, and it makes things more secure. Why don't we spend the money on that sort of thing? Use the carrot, not the stick. Have the NSA provide free, voluntary security audits to major infrastructure providers. Have them produce more software in the nature of SE Linux -- things designed by all those genius cryptographers they already employ, which can subsequently be adopted by everyone everywhere and make things more secure. Fund more software like TOR which can protect privacy, to get such things to the point that they're fast and efficient enough for regular use by everyday people (and screw over enemy countries that censor and oppress in the process). Provide incentives for the more rapid adoption of technologies that increase security, like DNSSEC and IPv6.
These are the things that have the potential to actually work. If they're actually serious about improving security, and Something Must Be Done, let it be that. Because the last thing we need is another hopeless regulatory bureaucracy.
There's nothing for Google to test. By the time they get your traffic, the DNS query is done.
Why do you imagine they couldn't arrange the same result? Create a real DNS record for something like dns-ok.google.com pointed to a Google server with a no-op piece of javascript called test.js on it, then include "dns-ok.google.com/test.js" on google.com. Then they could call up the people who currently control the DNS changer server and tell them to add a record for dns-ok.google.com and point it to a different Google server where that piece of javascript causes the user to see a message that their computer is infected and provides instructions on how to fix it.
What do you think the whole MegaVideo take down was all about? (Hint.)
And people here are always moaning how insecure Windows is - yet when MS try to take action, they are lambasted for "blocking free speech".
That's because it's what they're doing. The wider internet is full of malware, that doesn't mean you block the whole internet. You just block the URLs that are known to contain malware. Which is, incidentally, what they almost certainly do on other sites -- download.com is probably full of malware too, do they block the whole site? What about RapidShare or the like?
It's very clear that this "Pirate Bay is unsafe" is just a pretense. There is no excuse for blocking an entire domain unless the entire domain contains nothing of value, and that isn't the case here.
The important thing to notice is that Fox News will not cover this, or will cover it in the nature of "why is the liberal media attacking our Dear Leader without cause?" Which means that viewers of Fox News will not find out about it.
Friends don't let friends watch Fox News. (Even -- especially -- if your views are toward the right. There are just so many better options: Cato.org, reason.com, volokh.com for legal issues, etc.)
That sounds suspiciously like question begging. There will almost always be a piece of prior art for any individual claim element. You've just gone from obviousness being a gut feeling to "teach or suggest" being a gut feeling; how does that help?
Call it mere semantics, if you want, but I call it due process - you need evidence to invalidate a patent, not just a gut feeling.
It seems to me that "gut feeling" is pretty much how obviousness works. It's not like there is a mathematical formula for it.
The OP was using the wrong terminology (anticipation/novelty instead of non-obviousness), but I don't see how you can seriously dispute the conclusion. Polysemes are an incredibly abstract concept. Certain characters (especially in foreign languages or mathematical languages) are polysemous words. Keys can be semantically polysemous regardless of their label, e.g. vim key bindings, and even the labels have been applied to keyboards as stickers since at least the 1980s. Claiming that prior art polysemous keyboard + prior art virtual keyboard = polysemous virtual keyboard is non-obvious seems like quite a stretch.
You are forgetting about the pollution friend.
I'm not sure what that has to do with the subsidies. First world countries could easily pass a law prohibiting the import of solar panels not manufactured under first world environmental standards, but that wouldn't solve the "problem" of the Chinese making solar panels under subsidy and thereby undercutting first world competitors.
It really doesn't help to lower usage of fossil fuels if the way they are being made is environmentally unsustainable, all we are doing is buying a little time at the expense of land that will be uninhabitable. Considering the size of the Chinese military making more of their land unusable is probably be a BAD idea.
I would expect a civil war more than anything. Annexing more land is pretty useless because it's not like you can actually relocate the people to it cost-effectively, and besides which military conquest is very last-century. There is no need to invade a country when you can buy it instead. But that doesn't much help the people back home who are dying of cancer and having children with birth defects -- they're going to want change domestically. And if they don't get it, China could pretty easily be looking at their own version of the Arab Spring in a few years time.
Good intent, execution could use work. Try it this way next time:
At least make a donation to the EFF. (And consider checking the box to make a monthly donation.)
I don't see how the Chinese government's money is somehow our money. Even if it was our money before we paid it to them, it's their money now.
I think what this is really doing is clarifying why we subsidize solar panels -- they're making clear that it's a jobs program, not an environmental program. If it was an environmental program then we would be happy. China is adding to our subsidy and making solar panels even more attractive: Now they will be even less expensive and even more people will use them.
But if it's a jobs program then it's a disaster. The point of the demand-side subsidy is then to increase demand and create more jobs making solar panels. And subsidizing supply in China means that the increased demand gets met by supply from China instead of supply from domestic industry. Worse yet (for jobs), the dual subsidy makes foreign solar panels extraordinarily competitive and displaces demand for non-solar domestic competitors like oil and gas.
Or to put it more simply: It makes it very attractive to replace domestic fossil fuel energy with foreign made solar panels. If you like solar panels, that's good. If you like domestic jobs, that's bad.
Five years from now, they will have a lot less money, and when they try to jack up the prices, we will be competitive again. Actually moreso, because we are doing most of the cutting edge research, and we won't have wasted capital resources on now outdated cell production processes. In the meantime, we can invest our capital in industries where they DON'T subsidize, and take over that market.
Government intervention in markets is NEVER productive. When you give +100 in subsidies to a particular industry, you must take a total of -120, -140, or even -200 from other industries. This does NOTHING except make their economy weaker.
That's...totally wrong.
Your argument only works if the subsidized and non-subsidized industries are roughly equal in economic size, so that the amount of benefit the subsidized industries get is offset by the amount of loss the unsubsidized industries pay in taxes to fund the subsidies. But that isn't what happens: What they're doing is divide and conquer. You pick some minority of industries, especially the ones that are expected to grow in the future, and you subsidize them heavily to drive competitors in other countries out of business. Once you own the market, you can cancel the subsidies and your country will still own the market because it now has all the know-how, infrastructure and already-amortized fixed costs that competitors lack. Then you can transfer the subsidy to the next growth industry. At the same time, the subsidy is a small portion of the overall existing economy and comes from a broad tax base, so the drag it creates on non-subsidized businesses is extremely minor and doesn't create a major competitive disadvantage.
In addition to that, it is easy for them to impose the tax tax on industries where they already have a competitive advantage (e.g. cheap labor costs), such that the amount of the tax doesn't even erode their entire advantage in those industries, meaning that they still out-compete other countries in those fields even after paying a small, broad-based tax to fund a large, narrowly targeted subsidy.
Those phones are not actually $49. They're subsidized and you can only get that price if you sign up for a two year contract. For people who don't make a lot of phone calls and are in range of WiFi 99% of the time, buying a used phone and then getting a prepaid plan is often substantially less expensive.
But it depends on the personality, not in the sex of the boss.
This.
The huge fail with any study that tries to measure whether X large group is "better" than Y large group is that there is, almost invariably, more variation within a group than between groups. The 60th percentile male boss will be a significantly better boss than the 40th percentile female boss even if (for sake of argument) the 50th percentile female boss is slightly better than the 50th percentile male boss.
On top of that, when the groups are identified by politically-charged categories like race, gender, sexual orientation, etc., the politics dictates the science. The only hypotheses that get tested are the ones that are expected to return the desired results. No one funds a study to determine whether male bosses are better in situations where tenacity or dedication is advantageous, because the outcome has the potential to be politically unacceptable. Authors of a study that finds white/heterosexual/male groups to have an advantage over minority/homosexual/female groups will be branded bigots and frequently fired, and people know that ahead of time, so they have a huge incentive to fudge the numbers in any case where that looks like it might end up as a conclusion.
This is very much not to say that white, heterosexual and male groups are, on net, superior to their counterparts, but rather that attempting to measure the difference is both useless and futile. The politics corrupts the science to the point that conclusions become meaningless, and in any event, what do you even expect to do with the data? Is making staffing decisions on the basis of someone's gender really something we want to promote? Really?
Not only that, how do you people think IBM and RedHat make their money? Support contracts.
People who argue you can't get support for open source software are living in Microsoft propaganda land.
Since there is no vendor to guarantee that the software is legal and take the hit if it turns out to NOT be legal, they wont go for it.
Yeah, that sounds like a good heuristic... wait, what?
There are some pretty big open source companies. IBM, RedHat, Google, etc. Conversely, there are plenty of little proprietary software companies that could die off and blow away by the end of the year.
On top of that, since when do proprietary software companies offer to indemnify their customers anyway? Do you see anything like that in the license for Office or Photoshop?
The fact of the matter is that competitive commodity markets have low margins. The thing they teach in business school is to differentiate your product from your competitors. The problem is that selling Windows phones doesn't do that. Nokia has no monopoly on WP7. Several of the other manufacturers have WP7 phones too, and nobody is buying them either.
The point of differentiation is to make something that people actually want which competitors can't provide. The problem is that WP7 is neither of those things. People aren't buying it and Nokia's competitors are still offering it. It's a no-win plan. If nobody buys WP7, you're screwed. Even if people buy it, you're still screwed, because it's still a race to the bottom where you have competitors who also offer the same thing as you (WP7) -- and on top of it all now you've got to pay Microsoft for your OS going forward.
Differentiation requires doing something different than your competitors. Abandoning all but a tiny submarket with low demand where your competitors already have competitive products is suicidal.
They pay more and use less? What a shocker! Who would have thought?
It's not even that. What he's saying is that 4G Android users use more data than iPhone (i.e. 3G) users do (shocking!) since iPhone is currently still 3G/"3.5"G, and the Android users are more likely to demand the newest gadgets (i.e. "higher churn"). Which is naturally worse for the phone company who wants you to buy whatever phone, keep it forever, and never use the speed you're paying for while still continuing to pay for it.
The problem is that newer, 4G iPhones are likely to attract exactly the same crowd. So unless Sprint's new business model is to keep selling obsolete iPhones forever, they had probably better get a new plan.
You're just reaching now. That is only the European market, and barely outselling a thing which is deprecated and abandoned is hardly progress. According to your own link WP7 has only 2.5% of even that market. That's practically a rounding error.
They are competing sure, but by partnering with Microsoft they have an appreciable competitive advantage over the other manufacturers instead of being yet another Anroid manufacturer. Tell me, why exactly do we need another one of them? Is there not enough choice already for Android handsets? No, we don't need another, which is exactly why Nokia doesn't need to be yet another.
Let me rephrase that for you and see if it makes any more sense this way:
They are competing sure, but by partnering with RedHat they have an appreciable competitive advantage over the other manufacturers instead of being yet another Windows manufacturer. Tell me, why exactly do we need another one of them? Is there not enough choice already for Windows PCs? No, we don't need another, which is exactly why HP doesn't need to be yet another.
If someone came to you as the CEO of HP with that argument for why you should ignore the market for Windows PCs and focus on selling PCs with RHEL, what would you tell them?
I don't know about prosecuting him, but what I can't understand is why haven't they fired him yet?
Wild idea, I know, but they could have worked on making better phones than the competition. You know, hardware. Is a phone maker a software company? I don't think so.
Yeah, that's something else I don't really understand.
I can run both Ubuntu and Windows 7 on pretty much every PC made in the last five years. Somebody want to explain what fathomable reason there is that every model Nokia sells is not available with both Android and WP7 as options?
You're obviously going to get modded troll when you phrase it that way, but you're actually dead on.
Think about the possible outcomes of this for Nokia: The worst case is probably what is actually happening, which is that nobody is buying Windows phones. But even if they actually succeeded, what do you think Microsoft would do then?
Nokia currently has the option of Microsoft paying them to make phones nobody is buying, but as soon as anybody starts buying them, Microsoft is going to want Nokia to start paying them. Nokia ends up in the totally perverse situation that the more Windows phones they sell, the stronger Microsoft's leverage over them becomes, because demonstrating a market demand for Windows phones would get other phone makers into bed with Microsoft and thus into direct competition with Nokia.
Right now Microsoft needs Nokia more than Nokia needs Microsoft, but Nokia has put itself in the position that in the event Nokia succeeds, that situation reverses and then Nokia fails. In the long term it's totally lose-lose for Nokia.
It really feels like the focus on quarterly profits has doomed them. The Microsoft deal, if the market hadn't decided that it doesn't want Windows phones, would have been the most profitable for them in the short-term, but it completely ignores that inserting Microsoft into your supply chain does nothing but drain your margins in the long-term. And it completely ignores the very strong possibility, which has now been realized, that Windows phone would fail to sell.