MS actually won the console war, barely. Nintendo pushed more consoles but didn't push anywhere near the number of games. MS and Sony pushed out huge numbers of games, and get the licence fees from that, nintendo is a distant 3rd in this race. Total consoles sold is not the measure of success, total revenue, the size of the ecosystem are much better measures of success here.
The Xbox 360, despite the initial RROD problems is a pretty successful mark for MS. Nintendo on the other hand is in serious trouble, they don't have a phone strategy, the Wii U doesn't have any new 'must go out a buy, play once and then never play again' game like the Wii had.
"That assumes of course that there's a reasonable possibility of payoff and so on, and solyndra particularly might have been a clusterfuck but on the scale of government spending one few hundred million dollar boondoggle is nothing new or particularly scandalous."
Though I appreciate you reading the entirety of my post before proclaiming yourself clairvoyant. I'm sure there are a lot of people who envisioned the clusterfuck that was the Iraq war was going to be a disaster, and there were many people insightful as you who proclaimed the auto bailouts doomed to fail, and who proclaimed attempts to put a man on the moon, a satellite in orbit a war with Nazi germany all destined to fail, and everyone was required to pay for those too. That's how governments work, they make a value judgment about the benefit to society, and decide if it's worth spreading the risk around or not. They can be wrong, in fact, they inevitably *will* be wrong some of the time. The question becomes what is the loss rate for government versus the benefits when it does work out.
Solyndra was funded by the US DOE. They spend 24 billion dollars a year. Of that, they lent 525 million in one year to solyndra, that was a bad loan. How often do banks make bad loans? It happens. No matter how many reviews, no matter how diligent you are, someone will always not pay. That's the risk you take whenever you loan anyone money. That doesn't mean the US government couldn't have done better necessarily, but one needs some perspective on this sort of thing. The US burns about 10 billion dollars a month in afghanistan. Of course at the time it's also blowing 4 billion a month on Iraq. So not even 2 days worth of afghan war, or 3 days of iraq war funding was spent on this scheme. I'm going to guess the US is wasting a lot more money on a lot more serious things than solyndra.
Doesn't that basically summarize the entire point of campaign spending in the US? Don't get me wrong, I don't live there, but that seems like what they've been doing for years.
It's certainly not inevitable, but the question is 'could they'. If MS had prohibited file transfers to non MS phones or some bullshit, or prevented itunes from doing its things they could have prevented the iPhone from ever taking off. "Will only sync with Windows Phone" sort of thing.
why? Loss is loss. When it's the government the loss is diluted amongst everyone, when it's private it's only people who invested, and they could have been fleeced into it, or the business may have just failed. The government should fund the most risky endevaours because they are most likely to fail, but provide benefits to society as a whole *if* they succeed. That assumes of course that there's a reasonable possibility of payoff and so on, and solyndra particularly might have been a clusterfuck but on the scale of government spending one few hundred million dollar boondoggle is nothing new or particularly scandalous.
The question I suppose is then whether the iPad exists at all because there is no MS slate. If Microsoft made a half arsed effort to get slates out there would they completely destroy the iPad and Android sales by virtue of using their monopoly in x86 to crush the non MS ARM business.
I would think this is a tricky dance for MS. Ideally Windows 8 slates should play nice with Windows 8 desktops and there should be some compelling reason to have windows 8 on both. But making that 'compelling reason' versus 'required' while keeping it under anti trust seems hard.
This whole business on Browsers though seems downright bizarre. What is Microsoft actually going to leave out that other software makers (browsers included) are going to want? It would seem like any networking, UI or graphics API calls mozilla would want to use other software makers might want to use as well, and locking it out is going to cripple a lot more than just browsers.
It's also possible Windows on ARM is just going to suck balls all ways around, and this is some ridiculous scheme to push x86/IA64 on to phones/tablets by making the ARM version terrible.
That was sort of my point. No big company other than apple has the clout to make a social network, and that would probably bomb with all of the apple haters. A small startup isn't going to do things any differently than facebook would. Sure, they'll start free and all private etc. Then they'll need money.
I would expect facebook to be here in 5 years. They're big enough, have enough revenue and enough momentum that they'd need to really screw up to lose their customer base. Google is still around despite the fact that their main revenue stream is polluted by SEO constantly, and they've got their paws into a lot of different areas.
Facebook needs something it can sell that isn't advertising. That might be an 'app store', that might be cloud or webpage services (think amazons cloud) or who knows what. If they aren't selling technology then they're a glorified newspaper, which is fine, there's a place for those and that kind of revenue, but 100 billion dollars is a bit much then. Granted, if facebook was being valued at 10 billion dollars total I think we'd all figure that's a lot more reasonable, so it's all a matter of degree.
And, inevitably, if you want a business that can sustain itself it needs revenue. If you don't pay for it, advertisers are paying and you're actually the product.
As sad as it is, facebook would probably have to be a whole lot more honest and respectful of your data if they charged you to use their service than when they're trying to eek out every penny of advertising dollars.
Facebook sustains itself because users are too cheap to cough up cash up front (and probably legitimately too skeptical of any new social network getting their CC info), and if it's free why would you change to someone else who is also free? As you correctly say, only a small minority cares or understands the 'evil' corporations and their TOS's.
If Apple made the next social network it *might* have a chance, apparently steve jobs reality distortion bubble is persisting through death. People still think of of Microsoft as BSOD windows 95, and blame them for their shitty computers with shitty software they installed running windows poorly, so microsoft can't do it. Google tried and failed, because google plus doesn't really offer anything worth switching over. So who are the 'internet' or technology companies going to fill this niche facebook has? They'll have to do something monstrous to the page (myspace) for people to flee to a simpler product, who would have to be free, because no one is going to give a new company their CC info. And if they're free, they'll do exactly the same thing facebook does with your data, sell it to the highest bidder, lowest bidder, and all other bidders.
No, if you're buying a business product expect to have to actually read the licence agreement, I know EULA's suck right, that's why it's for professionals and you have a legal team. 2 years of support for software would even meet EU standards for consumers btw.
There's nothing in a contract that includes support for 2 years that would reasonably fail any consumer rules. If they were amending an agreement after the fact down to 2 years (think about the sort of things Rogers does where it reserves the right to change your cell contract even during your 3 year contract period) that's bullshit, but 'we will only provide support, or this price or whatever' for 2 years is a business contract matter, not a consumer protection one. You can't even argue 'similar products' all carry a 10 year warranty but this one doesn't. E.g. would be a TV with a 30 day warranty and all other TV's have 2 year, because CS6 isn't similar in any way to Windows and its 10 year lifecycle.
And yes, businesses are out to screw you, especially if you're a business client and they think they can get more money from you. If you don't like it find an alternative, develop your own or suck it up and pay it and consider it part of the cost of doing business. If you think adobe is unlawfully leveraging its monopoly in the content creation suite file an anti trust complaint.
It may also mean some roads would get redesigned to better accommodate automation. I somehow doubt the plethora of signs about hidden intersections, white and yellow dotted lines, reflective signs etc existed in the era of horse and buggy, or even in the early era of cars.
The challenge is getting automated cars to the point that such modifications become worthwhile.
And it wasn't intended as complimentary. But if you buy a pen what is the warranty on it? How about a chair? How about a chair from an antique shop? How about a house?
A 2 year warranty of business software is simply part of the TCO. If you don't like it, buy something else. If there isn't a competing product then you're stuck paying it and you have to suck it up, that's business. I used to buy (from europeans) electrical equipment, that was designed to operate for testing at european power standards, so we could export the actual products from here to europe. Care to guess how much that costs? Manufacturers warranty doesn't cover shipping costs outside of europe (duh), nor are they obliged to.
'Consumer' protection is a concept to protect consumers from unscrupulous vendors. If you're buying professional software you're not buying a consumer product. You're now into business contract law. Whole other ball game. We have consumer protection, that for example, houses can be sold 'as is', but if you fraudulently represent the state of the house then you could be liable. That's all well and good, but Adobe doesn't say 'we have a 10 year support policy we're amending to 2 years', they couldn't get away with that even in the US (remember Sony removing the 'other OS' from the PS3 and the legal fight they're having over that?), they're saying our product that you're paying X for has a 2 year support warranty with it. So... you knew that when you bought it, or at least, you should have read the licence agreement. And knowing that you shouldn't have bought it unless you had to.
And CS5/6 are completely different businesses than Windows anyway. CS5/6 isn't really for home users. It's for businesses or professionals and if the cost of doing business with CSx is a 700 dollar licence then you do that.
Support costs money, we can't, as a society, expect indefinite support for a product. Some items have 30 day warranties, some none at all. If the best Adobe is willing to do is 2 years then that factors into the TCO and the cost of doing business.
As though the west doesn't have incompetent policies or mind numbingly stupid implementations? Ever heard of the TSA in the US, bridges to nowhere (also in the US), or the dozens of different rules about who can and can't publish mein kampf? Remember when Ted Kennedy, the US senator (when he was alive) was on the US No fly list? Half of europe still have rules on sunday shopping. You know they used to have rules in the EU about the shapes of food so that it looked like the right quality on store shelves? Ya, the rest of us do some mind numbingly stupid and wasteful things too. Iran doesn't have a monopoly on that.
In the US if you don't like a law and are rich enough you simply pay politicians to remove it for you. If you're in the UK you sit in the house of lords and you vote against laws, and certain laws don't apply to you, even if you don't live in the country and are in prison in a foreign country you still retain these rights and pay by the way (Lord Conrad Black of Crossharbour for example), the same with the commons but it's different rules.
The Iranians system, because they only recently restarted government hasn't formalized the legal dodging of tax by rich people, and all of that stuff the way the rest of us have over the last few hundred years. Do you know that if you rape a child outside of france but are a french citizen they won't extradite you, even to their one of their closest allies? (roman polanski). In Iran they would probably hang you and stone her to death or force you to marry her, or one, then the other 2.
If you have a law that demands filtering circumventing that law would seem striaghtforwardly illegal. It's also a perfectly viable system to allow laws to be written or interpreted by decree by judges or the clergy. Fairly regularly supreme courts (or whatever you want to call them) broadly interpret or re-interpret rules to their liking, the french have a particularly complex set of supreme courts that cover different things. Until 2005 the highest 'court' in the united kingdom were the law lords (i.e. judges who were made lords), but they, as part of the house of lords lost their supreme court function only in 2009, 2005-2009 is a fairly complex arrangement.
The UK very carefully blocked the pirate bay by demanding specific action from ISP's. That's different than saying it is illegal for a person to access the pirate bay from within the UK. Even if we discuss those as being effectively the same thing, they are not. Iran, Saudi etc. would ban even looking at pornography for example, and require ISP's to have filtering to enforce that. Part of their system is to have clerics in government who guide the government on how to keep morals pure. And I mean Iran's guardian council, not the Lords Spiritual in the house of Lords in the UK who theoretically serve a similar purpose but are significantly diluted given that the Church of England doesn't get to write laws.
Iran *is* a republic. They have no monarchy (arguably the Shah is the legal monarchy/government but in exile but that's a whole other problem), and their 'guardian council' is some combination of the presidency and supreme court wrapped into one body. I'm not saying that's necessarily a good idea. But it is a republican system, as they act,, at least officially, with an elected body that is chosen from some defined subset of the population.
and yes, it's ironic that the filtering blocked the supreme leaders comments about filtering. That highlights why filtering is unlikely to be particularly good, but that would apply to equally to any country or government type.
This isn't secret filtering. This is the government (claiming it is only) trying to block out non Islamic content, it's censorship and they probably have similar policies for other media. In that situation it's no secret that they're filtering, or that they're censoring. In fact we censor child pornography in the west, and as a society people know about and are fully aware of this censorship. We don't make an effort to censor discussions of how to get around the censorship of child porn, but if you believe Islamic values will be compromised by exposure to decadent western culture and imperialist thoughts, or zionist propaganda then discussions of how to get around filtering are very much problematic.
Journalists here have a certain amount of power to know things which are censored but they don't talk about, or don't talk about yet. Usually the press gets a pre-brief before official briefings, they know what that loud banging sound at the whitehouse is, they know who is accused of a crime even if their name is protected by a publication ban etc.
Filtering is just an effort to enforce censorship. It's not the only method, and if you're reasonably upfront about what you're censoring then there's no need for secret filtering, it's just filtering in support of existing censorship laws. You may think Iran is not a country of decent laws, but I would argue they are middle of the road. Easily half the world is far more backwards, corrupt and far more arbitrary than Iran. They may not be good, but at least they acknowledge that they're censoring content and using filtering to try and enforce that.
ya that came out wrong. there obviously is a policy or procedure in place. Whether that should have an 89 90 or 91 day retention period (or 45 days or 180 day) is a discussion for somewhere other than/. Maybe people who are actually experts in how long these things take to deal with.
If it's so bad sell your furniture and move the day your lease expires.
But frankly, if you don't have the skills to get you a job that pays enough in the US that you can afford to leave, don't be hopeful about finding work (and therefore getting immigration) with the rest of us. Canada and Australia are tremendously fortunate we have oil and metals respectively, the Europeans are saddled with layers upon layers of political stupidity leading to tremendous economic uncertainty. The one things we all want are skilled labourers, but if you're one of those in the US you can afford to leave. Or should be able to if you know how to manage your money.
If you're going to emigrate *from* india or china or the like the US wouldn't be at the top of the list on places to move to. But if you're in the US your options on where you can go, if you can't be successful in the US, are very limited.
If you actually really honestly want to leave you need to both apply for immigration and apply for work in your target area first. The problem is that here for example you have to say that you are 'not presently eligible to work in canada'. Once you can get immigration status you can actually move there, or at the very least get a reasonable prospect of getting a job. But I hate to break it to you, if you have a shitty pay nothing job in the US, you'll end up an only marginally less shitty job elsewhere. Sure, you'll get more vacation time and healthcare in europe, you'll get healthcare in canada or australia, but you'll still have low pay and low mobility.
If you have skills, someone will pay to move you happily, even within the US. If you don't have skills we don't want you.
And if they are spying on you, even accidentally should they be allowed to immediately delete that information to hide the fact that they did it?
One can argue over the figure of 90 days a lot. But the airforce will accidentally or incidentally spy on people. Even if you take as lawful* 'surveying a natural disaster' they could capture images on the periphery of a disaster area which could count as spying. There should be some sort of policy or procedure in place to know what was seen, by whom, when.
*I have no idea if this is a point that would be taken for granted by I would guess *some* government agency will have the authority to survey natural disasters and the same basic premise applies to them.
Well maybe the issue is more about making it obvious to the user that they need to install updates, making that process as unobtrusive as possible, and providing incentives to companies to do this well. God forbid, maybe even government regulations (although I don't think we're at that stage yet) on how these things have to behave, so that my java updates, my adobe updates my windows updates, my firefox/chrome/ie updates all come in roughly the same style and roughly the same way and with an ease of understanding that if this is to address a 0 day exploit that's made clear.
You're right, making it about going after hackers isn't going to work. Murder is illegal, people still get murdered. I would venture to say that it's hard to find a law on the books some people don't violate. Hacking adds a layer of complexity because the hackers need not even be in your country. So systems should be more secure, and more easily secured by design, that doesn't mean you ignore attempts at hacking but it may mean that the government (or more likely government funded universities) have to interact with companies to help them either be more secure, or face consequences for willfully disregarding secure practices. You know, the same way there's an NTSB in the US for travel accidents. Mistakes happen, but if you're upfront about trying to deal with them, fix the issues (recalls in the case of cars) that's one thing, if you willfully ignore a problem, hide evidence from investigators and generally refuse to be a positive participant in the process then expect to not be allowed to do business in whatever country it is.
It's not like other MS founders don't have luxury yachts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus_(yacht), and lots of rich people don't necessarily feel the need to give the money to charity which may not be all that effective and robs governments of tax revenue from estate taxes (where such things exist) http://www.onlinecardonation.org/charitynews/archives/102.
It's not like MS trying to go carbon neutral is a bad thing. Both Google and apple have massive solar power generators, and there are lots of people trying to be better corporate citizens. But it's the modern equivalent of freeing your slaves when you die (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington), or giving colonies independence after looting them for all you can. Yes, MS is trying to do good now, hell they even make better products than they did 20 years ago, but the *only* reason they're behaving well is because they have taken more money from us than they know what to do with, and are hoping to earn back karma, a legacy, favour with some fictitious deity, or to make up for their own young naive decisions with the benefit of years of experience.
Again, none of this is bad, hell buying a 300 million dollar yacht isn't bad, if you have the money it's better spent paying people to build and maintain a boat than sitting as a pile of stock somewhere, and give someone else a chance to earn some dividends on that capital. But don't think for a minute that most other people wouldn't do the same thing given the problem of more money than they know how to spend. I would argue steve jobs never really had the chance, so we can't entirely fault him for not doing much personally for anyone else, where everyone else from that era has had a chance to think about their contribution not just to their companies but to humanity as a whole, Jobs never really got out of the mindset of 'the company'.
I asked a med student friend of mine (in canada) at one point about this sort of thing years ago. Apparently some places have 'bulletins' that go around regularly about all the common diseases this week/month and what's going on, and from that they know what 90% of case load is going to be for some doctors (the front line ones generally at walk in clinics that sort of thing).
If you show up with the common ailment of the month, or if there's really no different options for treatment for disease A and disease B then their options are rather limited.
The doctor *should* also know what questions to ask if you're describing symptoms that would differentiate one problem from another. It's possible you provided all that info, it's possible the doctor asked the right question to clarify. Actually looking at a patient doesn't always provide a lot of useful info.
Kickstarter isn't investment. It's giving them money in the hopes that it shows publishers there is a market for these products.
Most Kickstarter projects will fail, quite possibly wasteland 2 will be an unmitigated disaster and fail as well. Much as the summary suggests these guys can get it on time and on budget we don't actually know that. We know they can make a product, and we know that they have a good creative vision, but it's like giving 100 bucks to a student for a painting. You're hoping that in the long run they'll be able to sustain themselves on their own. But we don't know if they've ever been on time or on budget, we know obsidian (who they are getting some people from) made a great fallout new vegas, it sold a shitload of copies but it didn't meet the 85 metacritic score required for a bonus, so they had to lay people off. Ex interplay CEO is ex CEO of a company that is basically bankrupt and has been for a while.
The best Kickstarter does is let you take your donations from the community, and go to a publisher and say 'this is how much interest people have in this project, sight unseen, and without guarantees, give us more money to make it work'. What we will hopefully get in the next few years is how big that multiplier has to be, do pubs have to kick in 10%, 90%? 80%? Maybe there are more factors at work that just how much interest there is. I'm not sure I'd give money on kickstarter for someone who said "we need 6million dollars to make a game and 20 million to advertise it to everyone that isn't donating on kickstarter so we can actually make money', but that's a pretty realistic estimate for a half decent project. A mega project feel free to add a zero to each.
Kickstarter will drive a certain amount of the future, it will give people a voice in what content is created so that it's not a bunch of MBA's with spreadsheets figuring out what the most profitable game to make based on the last 5 years will be. But it's not going to completely change investment. If you were putting 10 grand into Wasteland 2 you had to be in a position to lose 10 grand in exchange for basically one copy of the game and some name recognition. The vast majority of us, even game developers can't throw that kind of money at a game project. Relying on steve wozniak to forget his pocket change so you can make a game isn't a business strategy. Games that only get 15 or 20k in funding might see a small mobile release, but they don't exactly have a lot to take to a big release. Sure, there will be the occasional minecraft, but most of them will be student projects growing into something or trying to revitalize a lost franchise.
The f117's were also 20 years old and are terrible aircraft other than for the stealth part. The F22 is an otherwise capable aircraft that happens to have some stealth features.
Sen. John McCain says that the jets, which the Air Force call the future of American air dominance, are a waste of their $79 billion price tag and serve no role in today's combat environment.
If the Libyans had acquired Eurofighters, rafales or if the syrians had any decent russian aircraft he'd be singing a different tune. Yes NATO has air assets that can handle SU27's and Mig 29's, but you end up in a shooting war with eretria, or sudan or syria and they manage to down even one US aircraft people will be wondering wtf there wasn't something better available.
The problem with *all* military spending is that you're trying to guess future needs and have something that can cope with an unknown problem. It's not like the US was stupid enough to only buy f22's (at the astronomical price that would have entailed). The US Air force has something like 2400 'fighters' of which about 200 are F22's. That's not counting the Navy. For what they do that seems like a fairly reasonable allotment of 'might need for air superiority role' for the next 20 years or so. One can argue specifics on stealth, performance or total numbers, but it doesn't seem like the F22 purchase was wildly out of place by US standards. As with any piece of equipment it's possible there is something wrong with a system (in this case the oxygen system), but that could be a maintenance issue, a replacement part issue a design issue, or any number of other things. Whenever you buy any piece of equipment (including a car) you take the chance that something on it will be defective.
That's not really a shock though. Political campaigners only have work once every 2 years in the US, in off years and even off months they go to other english speaking countries and work with ideologically similar parties, and it goes back and forth.
Slashdot Mirror
MS actually won the console war, barely. Nintendo pushed more consoles but didn't push anywhere near the number of games. MS and Sony pushed out huge numbers of games, and get the licence fees from that, nintendo is a distant 3rd in this race. Total consoles sold is not the measure of success, total revenue, the size of the ecosystem are much better measures of success here.
The Xbox 360, despite the initial RROD problems is a pretty successful mark for MS. Nintendo on the other hand is in serious trouble, they don't have a phone strategy, the Wii U doesn't have any new 'must go out a buy, play once and then never play again' game like the Wii had.
To quote myself
"That assumes of course that there's a reasonable possibility of payoff and so on, and solyndra particularly might have been a clusterfuck but on the scale of government spending one few hundred million dollar boondoggle is nothing new or particularly scandalous."
Though I appreciate you reading the entirety of my post before proclaiming yourself clairvoyant. I'm sure there are a lot of people who envisioned the clusterfuck that was the Iraq war was going to be a disaster, and there were many people insightful as you who proclaimed the auto bailouts doomed to fail, and who proclaimed attempts to put a man on the moon, a satellite in orbit a war with Nazi germany all destined to fail, and everyone was required to pay for those too. That's how governments work, they make a value judgment about the benefit to society, and decide if it's worth spreading the risk around or not. They can be wrong, in fact, they inevitably *will* be wrong some of the time. The question becomes what is the loss rate for government versus the benefits when it does work out.
Solyndra was funded by the US DOE. They spend 24 billion dollars a year. Of that, they lent 525 million in one year to solyndra, that was a bad loan. How often do banks make bad loans? It happens. No matter how many reviews, no matter how diligent you are, someone will always not pay. That's the risk you take whenever you loan anyone money. That doesn't mean the US government couldn't have done better necessarily, but one needs some perspective on this sort of thing. The US burns about 10 billion dollars a month in afghanistan. Of course at the time it's also blowing 4 billion a month on Iraq. So not even 2 days worth of afghan war, or 3 days of iraq war funding was spent on this scheme. I'm going to guess the US is wasting a lot more money on a lot more serious things than solyndra.
Doesn't that basically summarize the entire point of campaign spending in the US? Don't get me wrong, I don't live there, but that seems like what they've been doing for years.
There's a broad spectrum between research and industrialization. Even figuring out how to build something in mass quantity can be highly experimental.
It's certainly not inevitable, but the question is 'could they'. If MS had prohibited file transfers to non MS phones or some bullshit, or prevented itunes from doing its things they could have prevented the iPhone from ever taking off. "Will only sync with Windows Phone" sort of thing.
why? Loss is loss. When it's the government the loss is diluted amongst everyone, when it's private it's only people who invested, and they could have been fleeced into it, or the business may have just failed. The government should fund the most risky endevaours because they are most likely to fail, but provide benefits to society as a whole *if* they succeed. That assumes of course that there's a reasonable possibility of payoff and so on, and solyndra particularly might have been a clusterfuck but on the scale of government spending one few hundred million dollar boondoggle is nothing new or particularly scandalous.
The question I suppose is then whether the iPad exists at all because there is no MS slate. If Microsoft made a half arsed effort to get slates out there would they completely destroy the iPad and Android sales by virtue of using their monopoly in x86 to crush the non MS ARM business.
I would think this is a tricky dance for MS. Ideally Windows 8 slates should play nice with Windows 8 desktops and there should be some compelling reason to have windows 8 on both. But making that 'compelling reason' versus 'required' while keeping it under anti trust seems hard.
This whole business on Browsers though seems downright bizarre. What is Microsoft actually going to leave out that other software makers (browsers included) are going to want? It would seem like any networking, UI or graphics API calls mozilla would want to use other software makers might want to use as well, and locking it out is going to cripple a lot more than just browsers.
It's also possible Windows on ARM is just going to suck balls all ways around, and this is some ridiculous scheme to push x86/IA64 on to phones/tablets by making the ARM version terrible.
That was sort of my point. No big company other than apple has the clout to make a social network, and that would probably bomb with all of the apple haters. A small startup isn't going to do things any differently than facebook would. Sure, they'll start free and all private etc. Then they'll need money.
I would expect facebook to be here in 5 years. They're big enough, have enough revenue and enough momentum that they'd need to really screw up to lose their customer base. Google is still around despite the fact that their main revenue stream is polluted by SEO constantly, and they've got their paws into a lot of different areas.
Facebook needs something it can sell that isn't advertising. That might be an 'app store', that might be cloud or webpage services (think amazons cloud) or who knows what. If they aren't selling technology then they're a glorified newspaper, which is fine, there's a place for those and that kind of revenue, but 100 billion dollars is a bit much then. Granted, if facebook was being valued at 10 billion dollars total I think we'd all figure that's a lot more reasonable, so it's all a matter of degree.
And, inevitably, if you want a business that can sustain itself it needs revenue. If you don't pay for it, advertisers are paying and you're actually the product.
As sad as it is, facebook would probably have to be a whole lot more honest and respectful of your data if they charged you to use their service than when they're trying to eek out every penny of advertising dollars.
Facebook sustains itself because users are too cheap to cough up cash up front (and probably legitimately too skeptical of any new social network getting their CC info), and if it's free why would you change to someone else who is also free? As you correctly say, only a small minority cares or understands the 'evil' corporations and their TOS's.
If Apple made the next social network it *might* have a chance, apparently steve jobs reality distortion bubble is persisting through death. People still think of of Microsoft as BSOD windows 95, and blame them for their shitty computers with shitty software they installed running windows poorly, so microsoft can't do it. Google tried and failed, because google plus doesn't really offer anything worth switching over. So who are the 'internet' or technology companies going to fill this niche facebook has? They'll have to do something monstrous to the page (myspace) for people to flee to a simpler product, who would have to be free, because no one is going to give a new company their CC info. And if they're free, they'll do exactly the same thing facebook does with your data, sell it to the highest bidder, lowest bidder, and all other bidders.
No, if you're buying a business product expect to have to actually read the licence agreement, I know EULA's suck right, that's why it's for professionals and you have a legal team. 2 years of support for software would even meet EU standards for consumers btw.
There's nothing in a contract that includes support for 2 years that would reasonably fail any consumer rules. If they were amending an agreement after the fact down to 2 years (think about the sort of things Rogers does where it reserves the right to change your cell contract even during your 3 year contract period) that's bullshit, but 'we will only provide support, or this price or whatever' for 2 years is a business contract matter, not a consumer protection one. You can't even argue 'similar products' all carry a 10 year warranty but this one doesn't. E.g. would be a TV with a 30 day warranty and all other TV's have 2 year, because CS6 isn't similar in any way to Windows and its 10 year lifecycle.
And yes, businesses are out to screw you, especially if you're a business client and they think they can get more money from you. If you don't like it find an alternative, develop your own or suck it up and pay it and consider it part of the cost of doing business. If you think adobe is unlawfully leveraging its monopoly in the content creation suite file an anti trust complaint.
It may also mean some roads would get redesigned to better accommodate automation. I somehow doubt the plethora of signs about hidden intersections, white and yellow dotted lines, reflective signs etc existed in the era of horse and buggy, or even in the early era of cars.
The challenge is getting automated cars to the point that such modifications become worthwhile.
Canada.
And it wasn't intended as complimentary. But if you buy a pen what is the warranty on it? How about a chair? How about a chair from an antique shop? How about a house?
A 2 year warranty of business software is simply part of the TCO. If you don't like it, buy something else. If there isn't a competing product then you're stuck paying it and you have to suck it up, that's business. I used to buy (from europeans) electrical equipment, that was designed to operate for testing at european power standards, so we could export the actual products from here to europe. Care to guess how much that costs? Manufacturers warranty doesn't cover shipping costs outside of europe (duh), nor are they obliged to.
'Consumer' protection is a concept to protect consumers from unscrupulous vendors. If you're buying professional software you're not buying a consumer product. You're now into business contract law. Whole other ball game. We have consumer protection, that for example, houses can be sold 'as is', but if you fraudulently represent the state of the house then you could be liable. That's all well and good, but Adobe doesn't say 'we have a 10 year support policy we're amending to 2 years', they couldn't get away with that even in the US (remember Sony removing the 'other OS' from the PS3 and the legal fight they're having over that?), they're saying our product that you're paying X for has a 2 year support warranty with it. So... you knew that when you bought it, or at least, you should have read the licence agreement. And knowing that you shouldn't have bought it unless you had to.
And CS5/6 are completely different businesses than Windows anyway. CS5/6 isn't really for home users. It's for businesses or professionals and if the cost of doing business with CSx is a 700 dollar licence then you do that.
Support costs money, we can't, as a society, expect indefinite support for a product. Some items have 30 day warranties, some none at all. If the best Adobe is willing to do is 2 years then that factors into the TCO and the cost of doing business.
As though the west doesn't have incompetent policies or mind numbingly stupid implementations? Ever heard of the TSA in the US, bridges to nowhere (also in the US), or the dozens of different rules about who can and can't publish mein kampf? Remember when Ted Kennedy, the US senator (when he was alive) was on the US No fly list? Half of europe still have rules on sunday shopping. You know they used to have rules in the EU about the shapes of food so that it looked like the right quality on store shelves? Ya, the rest of us do some mind numbingly stupid and wasteful things too. Iran doesn't have a monopoly on that.
In the US if you don't like a law and are rich enough you simply pay politicians to remove it for you. If you're in the UK you sit in the house of lords and you vote against laws, and certain laws don't apply to you, even if you don't live in the country and are in prison in a foreign country you still retain these rights and pay by the way (Lord Conrad Black of Crossharbour for example), the same with the commons but it's different rules.
The Iranians system, because they only recently restarted government hasn't formalized the legal dodging of tax by rich people, and all of that stuff the way the rest of us have over the last few hundred years. Do you know that if you rape a child outside of france but are a french citizen they won't extradite you, even to their one of their closest allies? (roman polanski). In Iran they would probably hang you and stone her to death or force you to marry her, or one, then the other 2.
If you have a law that demands filtering circumventing that law would seem striaghtforwardly illegal. It's also a perfectly viable system to allow laws to be written or interpreted by decree by judges or the clergy. Fairly regularly supreme courts (or whatever you want to call them) broadly interpret or re-interpret rules to their liking, the french have a particularly complex set of supreme courts that cover different things. Until 2005 the highest 'court' in the united kingdom were the law lords (i.e. judges who were made lords), but they, as part of the house of lords lost their supreme court function only in 2009, 2005-2009 is a fairly complex arrangement.
The UK very carefully blocked the pirate bay by demanding specific action from ISP's. That's different than saying it is illegal for a person to access the pirate bay from within the UK. Even if we discuss those as being effectively the same thing, they are not. Iran, Saudi etc. would ban even looking at pornography for example, and require ISP's to have filtering to enforce that. Part of their system is to have clerics in government who guide the government on how to keep morals pure. And I mean Iran's guardian council, not the Lords Spiritual in the house of Lords in the UK who theoretically serve a similar purpose but are significantly diluted given that the Church of England doesn't get to write laws.
Iran *is* a republic. They have no monarchy (arguably the Shah is the legal monarchy/government but in exile but that's a whole other problem), and their 'guardian council' is some combination of the presidency and supreme court wrapped into one body. I'm not saying that's necessarily a good idea. But it is a republican system, as they act,, at least officially, with an elected body that is chosen from some defined subset of the population.
and yes, it's ironic that the filtering blocked the supreme leaders comments about filtering. That highlights why filtering is unlikely to be particularly good, but that would apply to equally to any country or government type.
This isn't secret filtering. This is the government (claiming it is only) trying to block out non Islamic content, it's censorship and they probably have similar policies for other media. In that situation it's no secret that they're filtering, or that they're censoring. In fact we censor child pornography in the west, and as a society people know about and are fully aware of this censorship. We don't make an effort to censor discussions of how to get around the censorship of child porn, but if you believe Islamic values will be compromised by exposure to decadent western culture and imperialist thoughts, or zionist propaganda then discussions of how to get around filtering are very much problematic.
Journalists here have a certain amount of power to know things which are censored but they don't talk about, or don't talk about yet. Usually the press gets a pre-brief before official briefings, they know what that loud banging sound at the whitehouse is, they know who is accused of a crime even if their name is protected by a publication ban etc.
Filtering is just an effort to enforce censorship. It's not the only method, and if you're reasonably upfront about what you're censoring then there's no need for secret filtering, it's just filtering in support of existing censorship laws. You may think Iran is not a country of decent laws, but I would argue they are middle of the road. Easily half the world is far more backwards, corrupt and far more arbitrary than Iran. They may not be good, but at least they acknowledge that they're censoring content and using filtering to try and enforce that.
ya that came out wrong. there obviously is a policy or procedure in place. Whether that should have an 89 90 or 91 day retention period (or 45 days or 180 day) is a discussion for somewhere other than /. Maybe people who are actually experts in how long these things take to deal with.
If it's so bad sell your furniture and move the day your lease expires.
But frankly, if you don't have the skills to get you a job that pays enough in the US that you can afford to leave, don't be hopeful about finding work (and therefore getting immigration) with the rest of us. Canada and Australia are tremendously fortunate we have oil and metals respectively, the Europeans are saddled with layers upon layers of political stupidity leading to tremendous economic uncertainty. The one things we all want are skilled labourers, but if you're one of those in the US you can afford to leave. Or should be able to if you know how to manage your money.
If you're going to emigrate *from* india or china or the like the US wouldn't be at the top of the list on places to move to. But if you're in the US your options on where you can go, if you can't be successful in the US, are very limited.
If you actually really honestly want to leave you need to both apply for immigration and apply for work in your target area first. The problem is that here for example you have to say that you are 'not presently eligible to work in canada'. Once you can get immigration status you can actually move there, or at the very least get a reasonable prospect of getting a job. But I hate to break it to you, if you have a shitty pay nothing job in the US, you'll end up an only marginally less shitty job elsewhere. Sure, you'll get more vacation time and healthcare in europe, you'll get healthcare in canada or australia, but you'll still have low pay and low mobility.
If you have skills, someone will pay to move you happily, even within the US. If you don't have skills we don't want you.
And if they are spying on you, even accidentally should they be allowed to immediately delete that information to hide the fact that they did it?
One can argue over the figure of 90 days a lot. But the airforce will accidentally or incidentally spy on people. Even if you take as lawful* 'surveying a natural disaster' they could capture images on the periphery of a disaster area which could count as spying. There should be some sort of policy or procedure in place to know what was seen, by whom, when.
*I have no idea if this is a point that would be taken for granted by I would guess *some* government agency will have the authority to survey natural disasters and the same basic premise applies to them.
Well maybe the issue is more about making it obvious to the user that they need to install updates, making that process as unobtrusive as possible, and providing incentives to companies to do this well. God forbid, maybe even government regulations (although I don't think we're at that stage yet) on how these things have to behave, so that my java updates, my adobe updates my windows updates, my firefox/chrome/ie updates all come in roughly the same style and roughly the same way and with an ease of understanding that if this is to address a 0 day exploit that's made clear.
You're right, making it about going after hackers isn't going to work. Murder is illegal, people still get murdered. I would venture to say that it's hard to find a law on the books some people don't violate. Hacking adds a layer of complexity because the hackers need not even be in your country. So systems should be more secure, and more easily secured by design, that doesn't mean you ignore attempts at hacking but it may mean that the government (or more likely government funded universities) have to interact with companies to help them either be more secure, or face consequences for willfully disregarding secure practices. You know, the same way there's an NTSB in the US for travel accidents. Mistakes happen, but if you're upfront about trying to deal with them, fix the issues (recalls in the case of cars) that's one thing, if you willfully ignore a problem, hide evidence from investigators and generally refuse to be a positive participant in the process then expect to not be allowed to do business in whatever country it is.
It's not like other MS founders don't have luxury yachts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus_(yacht), and lots of rich people don't necessarily feel the need to give the money to charity which may not be all that effective and robs governments of tax revenue from estate taxes (where such things exist) http://www.onlinecardonation.org/charitynews/archives/102.
It's not like MS trying to go carbon neutral is a bad thing. Both Google and apple have massive solar power generators, and there are lots of people trying to be better corporate citizens. But it's the modern equivalent of freeing your slaves when you die (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington), or giving colonies independence after looting them for all you can. Yes, MS is trying to do good now, hell they even make better products than they did 20 years ago, but the *only* reason they're behaving well is because they have taken more money from us than they know what to do with, and are hoping to earn back karma, a legacy, favour with some fictitious deity, or to make up for their own young naive decisions with the benefit of years of experience.
Again, none of this is bad, hell buying a 300 million dollar yacht isn't bad, if you have the money it's better spent paying people to build and maintain a boat than sitting as a pile of stock somewhere, and give someone else a chance to earn some dividends on that capital. But don't think for a minute that most other people wouldn't do the same thing given the problem of more money than they know how to spend. I would argue steve jobs never really had the chance, so we can't entirely fault him for not doing much personally for anyone else, where everyone else from that era has had a chance to think about their contribution not just to their companies but to humanity as a whole, Jobs never really got out of the mindset of 'the company'.
I asked a med student friend of mine (in canada) at one point about this sort of thing years ago. Apparently some places have 'bulletins' that go around regularly about all the common diseases this week/month and what's going on, and from that they know what 90% of case load is going to be for some doctors (the front line ones generally at walk in clinics that sort of thing).
If you show up with the common ailment of the month, or if there's really no different options for treatment for disease A and disease B then their options are rather limited.
The doctor *should* also know what questions to ask if you're describing symptoms that would differentiate one problem from another. It's possible you provided all that info, it's possible the doctor asked the right question to clarify. Actually looking at a patient doesn't always provide a lot of useful info.
Kickstarter isn't investment. It's giving them money in the hopes that it shows publishers there is a market for these products.
Most Kickstarter projects will fail, quite possibly wasteland 2 will be an unmitigated disaster and fail as well. Much as the summary suggests these guys can get it on time and on budget we don't actually know that. We know they can make a product, and we know that they have a good creative vision, but it's like giving 100 bucks to a student for a painting. You're hoping that in the long run they'll be able to sustain themselves on their own. But we don't know if they've ever been on time or on budget, we know obsidian (who they are getting some people from) made a great fallout new vegas, it sold a shitload of copies but it didn't meet the 85 metacritic score required for a bonus, so they had to lay people off. Ex interplay CEO is ex CEO of a company that is basically bankrupt and has been for a while.
The best Kickstarter does is let you take your donations from the community, and go to a publisher and say 'this is how much interest people have in this project, sight unseen, and without guarantees, give us more money to make it work'. What we will hopefully get in the next few years is how big that multiplier has to be, do pubs have to kick in 10%, 90%? 80%? Maybe there are more factors at work that just how much interest there is. I'm not sure I'd give money on kickstarter for someone who said "we need 6million dollars to make a game and 20 million to advertise it to everyone that isn't donating on kickstarter so we can actually make money', but that's a pretty realistic estimate for a half decent project. A mega project feel free to add a zero to each.
Kickstarter will drive a certain amount of the future, it will give people a voice in what content is created so that it's not a bunch of MBA's with spreadsheets figuring out what the most profitable game to make based on the last 5 years will be. But it's not going to completely change investment. If you were putting 10 grand into Wasteland 2 you had to be in a position to lose 10 grand in exchange for basically one copy of the game and some name recognition. The vast majority of us, even game developers can't throw that kind of money at a game project. Relying on steve wozniak to forget his pocket change so you can make a game isn't a business strategy. Games that only get 15 or 20k in funding might see a small mobile release, but they don't exactly have a lot to take to a big release. Sure, there will be the occasional minecraft, but most of them will be student projects growing into something or trying to revitalize a lost franchise.
The f117's were also 20 years old and are terrible aircraft other than for the stealth part. The F22 is an otherwise capable aircraft that happens to have some stealth features.
Sen. John McCain says that the jets, which the Air Force call the future of American air dominance, are a waste of their $79 billion price tag and serve no role in today's combat environment.
If the Libyans had acquired Eurofighters, rafales or if the syrians had any decent russian aircraft he'd be singing a different tune. Yes NATO has air assets that can handle SU27's and Mig 29's, but you end up in a shooting war with eretria, or sudan or syria and they manage to down even one US aircraft people will be wondering wtf there wasn't something better available.
The problem with *all* military spending is that you're trying to guess future needs and have something that can cope with an unknown problem. It's not like the US was stupid enough to only buy f22's (at the astronomical price that would have entailed). The US Air force has something like 2400 'fighters' of which about 200 are F22's. That's not counting the Navy. For what they do that seems like a fairly reasonable allotment of 'might need for air superiority role' for the next 20 years or so. One can argue specifics on stealth, performance or total numbers, but it doesn't seem like the F22 purchase was wildly out of place by US standards. As with any piece of equipment it's possible there is something wrong with a system (in this case the oxygen system), but that could be a maintenance issue, a replacement part issue a design issue, or any number of other things. Whenever you buy any piece of equipment (including a car) you take the chance that something on it will be defective.
That's not really a shock though. Political campaigners only have work once every 2 years in the US, in off years and even off months they go to other english speaking countries and work with ideologically similar parties, and it goes back and forth.