Nor, one could argue, did nintendo. That's they're problem. They made 10 bucks a pop on consoles and 30 or 40 bucks on software sales for those consoles. Which was great for a couple of years. And now... not so much.
Sony and MS absorb any money they make back into companies with much more diverse portfolios (for better or worse) than nintendo. Sony and MS both make money on game sales, and a lot of it, but that's going to fund mobile phones, TV's, operating systems, and so on.
It's a long tail/short tail sort of thing. Nintendo made a pile of money early, when everyone bought a console, controller and a couple of games. That lasted for two years.
Net profit is *not* the only measure of value. If I make 1 dollar a year. But you lose 100 dollars a year. But I do 10 dollars a year in business and you 100 billion yours is the much better company. In this case the companies, and the ecosystems around them are much larger, have much more value, and produce far more money for both sony and MS than for nintendo. Unfortunately for the outside observer it's very hard to figure out where Sony's console business ends and it's various other services start, and the same applies to Microsoft (who are half competing with themselves on the PC market, but half supporting themselves too).
In terms of hours played of games, or money made on games, or games sold separate from the console the Wii isn't winning. At all.
A game console is the base of a broader platform. For sony that included other media, but selling consoles is done so you can sell *software*, and, if you're into that sort of thing, software people actually want to play. The Wii has had a handful of good titles. The PS3 and 360 have had a handful of good titles every year they've been out.
In terms of which console is the better to have. At this point the PS3 seems to be getting better exclusives (god of war, uncharted infamous etc.) but I'm sure Halo 4 will have something to say about that soon enough.
ya, I mean one can quibble over the exactly extent of the sentence or whatever, but that belongs on a law site. Steal credit card info, get caught, get convicted, get punished. Sounds about right.
It's not exactly clear if they mean he gained 36 million from this, or if that's just the value of the fraud on the cards. I remember here in canada we had a similar story years ago, and there are various levels of intermediaries. The hacker gets paid to get the card info, they sell it to a clearing house who resells it piecewise to people who might actually exploit it. There were a few steps in between too that I don't remember. But that doesn't mean he wasn't both getting the info and using it himself, though I don't suppose it matters much.
Sales tax always bothers me. In europe the argument goes that sales taxes (or in their case VAT taxes, which are practically not much different) are the least economically damaging taxes. That's true insofar as they disadvantage people who spend the least percent of their income (the rich) the least.
But if you're an amazon 3rd party seller you should still be taxed at the normal income tax rate/business tax rate. If you're an amazon shareholder you are, again, taxed at the normal dividends/capital gains/income tax rate. If you're an amazon employee you are taxed at the normal income tax rate (insofar as washington state chooses to impose such taxes).
I don't object to taxes. Taxes fund the collective buying power of government to provide effective services. But having multiple, layered taxes on the same thing is sort of silly. It costs a lot of money to regulate multiple tax regimes, and one of the goals of graduated taxation is to limit the tax burden on the poor - who spend all their money anyway - whereas sales tax aims to extend the burden to them.
Amazon brings to a head the modern world of sales tax though. If I, as a canadian, buy something out of province or country when I bring it back I'm supposed to pay the tax rate of where I live on it (out of country imports that happens on for sure, and for big purchases like cars the government will clamp down if you don't voluntarily cough up the cash but smaller stuff they let slide). In the US if you live in state X with a sales tax rate of 10%, but are 3 minutes from the border of state Y with a sales tax rate of 0 does the government have any mechanism to force you to pay the 10% rate on purchases out of state? (And would it want to?). Suddenly taxes managed on a state level are looking both exceedingly complicated antiquated, and unenforceable. Amazon happens to have 'partners' all over the place, and the specific issue is that stuff bought from those partners would have to be taxed at their state rates. That's all well and good in a map to the brick and mortar world, but in one where a single click sorts by price a 10% sales tax poses a lot of problems for a business. I tend to think that as a tax payer, I'd rather they just take it all out of me as income tax. And I can see amazon not being fond of the idea of listing prices without taxes, and then having to charge taxes. It's work for them to change their system to support taxing (and tax exemptions), but they have enough money they will probably have to eventually.
And google may not care about the covered technology. The tech in question covers connecting the phone to Windows desktops basically. From googles perspective Android works by itself, if you want to, as a feature to differentiate from competitors, connect to something else, that's your problem.
Not getting involved may keep the price down for everyone too. If MS settles for say 4 or 5 dollars a phone with several different makers that becomes the going rate. If they make a fight out of it MS may demand 15, or simply withdraw the licence at all, and if you risk losing in court you have a serious problem. You might win, but you might not, and not winning would put you out of business.
A surefire sign of MBA-idiots with no real-world life experience in long-term viability. That should do for the buzzword bingo, but the problem is real.
If I can leave for 3 weeks and nothing breaks down, you absolutely want to keep me, because I know how to build reliable systems that don't fall over as soon as someone looks at them funny.
As much as the/. crowd might be focused on IT skills, not everyone has the luxury of being in the support end of the business. Being the only one around who can build reliable servers is a legitimate skill, and takes time (or money) to replace, but honestly not that much, and if they can hire someone in for 8 hours to build a server that doesn't need to be touched for a month, well... like i say, I can see the appeal of contracting that out to someone else. I'm sure there's more to the job than building the server though, a lot of it is being able to translate boss requirements speak into something that will actually solve problems, and that is a skill not to be under estimated.
Ya absolutely - if we require all aircraft have 16 engines that would, with today's engines seem absurd. In a 150 person business having 15 people all with the same skills might be a bit too much redundancy, on the other hand only 1 person is probably too few.
I off and on contracted for a place where this was hugely important.
What they'd do is come up with some bullshit reason they were giving a bunch of people 2 or 3 extra weeks of vacation but it must be taken within a short time frame (that quarter or the next two quarters), usually times to align with the summer already planned vacations, and sometimes not entirely bullshit.
Either way, if you were gone for about 3 weeks, and no one really needed you for that time off, your job was going to be axed shortly. Maternity leave? No problem, your job will definitely be here when you get back because we'll try not to fill it at all, and if we don't need it, you're gone as soon as we're legally allowed when you get back.
It's slimy, but it's business.
Fault tolerance is a serious problem. If you only have two people who know a system, both of whom work in the same area, and both get the same infectious disease for a week you have a problem. On the other hand, having 3 or 4 people with redundant skills is a waste of money. I can see the appeal of cloudsourcing to a 3rd party in that regard.
On a personal basis, if you don't have something you, and only you can do until the day you retire you're taking serious risk. That doesn't have to be technical of course, you can be the only one who knows how to deal with the crazy redhead secretary in another department who bothers you all the time, or you could be the only one who knows how stuff in storage is laid out or whatever. It's a tricky balance between 'manpower intensive to replace' and 'crippling the company if you get hit by a bus'.
That would be a difference between patent and copyright. Two completely independent discoveries of the same thing, and the first to patent it gets the rights (patents may be first to file or first to invent, depends on country). The patent holder would still own a monopoly on it, even if someone produced the same thing independently.
If you can patent an algorithm and or data structure then even an alternative implementation of the same algorithm would run afoul of the patent. Therein lies the problem with software patents I think.
Just because they wanted us to invade afghanistan doesn't mean it was a good plan on their part. The nazi's really clearly definitely decided they really really really wanted to invade russia after all. We just haven't done a great job of showing the world that we can be both gracious and terrifying at the same time - we've managed to do both badly.
Um... US warships go through the suez on a regular basis. To bomb iraq, threaten iran, bomb yemen, deploy to afghanistan etc. Whether you think those are valid goals or not is separate from the fact that al qaeda has a propaganda coup on its hands claiming that the egyptian government (including the new one) are basically in bed with the US allowing their ships transit through the canal. If they really wanted to be a pain about it the egyptians could ban all US ships through the suez as long as there are americans in iraq for example, they could open the borders to gaza (which they are doing), they could insist on ignoring the blockade of gaza etc. There's a long way from where they are, to where a lot of the arab street wants them to be (and a lot further still to where Al qaeda wants them to be).
Don't get me wrong, Al qaeda are nuts. But they have some legitimate grievances which is what is keeping them around. Desert storm and Iraq the first time is what actually fostered Al qaeda in the first place. The idea that a bunch of christians from across the world would be brought in to defend the wealthiest muslim country on earth made them mad. That the US continued to stick around for a decade made them REALLY mad. Which is a good example of their combination of nuts and legitimate grievances. The US defending Kuwait I think, was, on the whole reasonably agreeable to most of the muslim world - in a modern context that would be siding with the Libyan rebels. There are things the coalition there could have done better about including more muslims troops (including volunteering mujahadeed like Al qaeda) but most everyone was reasonably content with it. Al Qaeda's being pissed at not being 'the base' of the coalition is just foolish. That a decade later the US was still bombing iraqi's, from saudi arabia (who should damn well be able to defend themselves at that point) offends pretty much everyone, american taxpayers, muslims, human rights groups, the iraqi's themselves etc. That was a sort of legitimate gripe.
FAT has been around since 1977 (thought I think 1980 for anything actually sold). They figured out a way (however archaic) to make FAT better, with long file names. The fact that FAT is tied to MS if anything strengthens the argument that they own it. It's their technology, they developed it, they clearly have a working implementation of it, and if you want to use that technology (for whatever purpose) MS needs to be compensated for it.
If MS didn't have a working implementation of FAT with long filenames you'd at least potentially be talking about a patent troll. But MS has competing devices (windows phones), with LFN in FAT, which is again, technology they developed, to support other technology they developed. It's up to them if they want to give it away for free or not then.
Like hell it is, at least not research that you'd ever write down or spread around.
Prior to patent every company kept its own in house guarded secrets which they literally had to write special rules to guard, including cities granting special police powers to companies and so on. Think ventian glass makers, or modern chinese manufacturers (where patents mean nothing). Patent opens up those secrets after a time (and again we can argue if 20 years is at all reasonable in this day and age), but guarantees you legal protection from the state, and it applies equally to everyone. The lack of patent significantly limits labour mobility, because you value the people that you train, and you can't afford to lose them. On one hand that means you have to pay them well, on the other hand prisoners in gilded cage are still prisoners. Think lifetime non compete clauses.
Without patent the only incentive is to research things that the other guy can't steal, and steal anything that's valuable.
Again though, details matter. 20 years for patents, especially in software, poses a lot of questions. As the guy below says, the patent in question specifically is about long file names in FAT, and FAT has been around over 30 years at this point.
It was precisely what the terrorists wanted in the first place.. to make us so fearful that we started to treat people even worse, on average, than most third-world dictatorial/theocratic regimes do. They hated us for our way of life (rightly or wrongly.. doesn't matter at this point), and they succeeded in making it worse by proving that our high-and-mighty principles of liberty and privacy weren't as high-and-mighty as we kept saying they were to the rest of the world.
No, they don't hate you for how you live. They hate you for how the US government forces *them* to live. For the support it give to the regimes that oppress them. For the thousands of Iraq's the government has murdered. Yes, al qaeda are religious nutters, but the reason they can continue to exist as anything substantial is because the people who aren't radical want you dead too.
Al Qaeda *wanted* us (I'm in canada) in Afghanistan, they went so far as to declare war, and they kept trying to goad us into a fight, sept 11 got what they wanted. We've sure shown them how wrong they were, or something. Just because they have bad plans doesn't mean they don't have plans. They don't care about blowing up airplanes. It's a tool to goad us into more fighting, more oppressing *them* (they don't care what the TSA does to non-muslim people, as long as it costs money it's a win for them, what they really want is to see the TSA offending religious sensibilities of the muslim world, which drives more mainstream support to them). Al qaeda couldn't care less if the TSA wants to anal probe a 90 year old grandmother who can't walk and wears a diaper. But if the TSA does that to a rich arab man, or ask his wife or daughter to uncover her face in public that weakens your case for being 'tolerant and respectful' in the arab world, and builds their support, they want a newsreel of a Saudi prince walking past the TSA to show the disconnect between the leaders of the Muslim world, and the people they lead. They want to create an environment where they are the only organized muslims who stand up to this tyranny. Where the House of Saud holds hands with the president and the egyptians make friends with israel and let US warships through the Suez to bomb more muslims they are not friends of the muslim world - and Al qaeda is trying to strengthen it's case that the US is the root of the problem, and only by showing how offensive supporting the US is will they restore the caliphate and a great muslim nation or some nonsense.
The problem of course, is that they're half right. You can be right about feeling the treaty of Versailles was too harsh to germany, and wrong about thinking the solution to that is to kill all the jews and invade everyone you can get to. Al Qaeda is right that the US does some bad things in the world, and there are a lot of people, even in the US who don't support those bad things. And they're wrong about wanting to build a transnational conservative muslim state (although we are faced with the problem that as time has gone oh, since the 60's that idea has gained more and more support). But you have a group (and I wouldn't attach a single political party to it), who've bought into the narrative that muslims are evil because they don't like all the terrible things the US does (the idea that the US is right because it's the US, just from a different point of view). That group, who are basically anti islam, are constantly being tempered by people who are too far on the side of 'treat everyone equally and we'll all pet butterflies!' as though the TSA screening a 6 year old is somehow a sensible fair treatment. The TSA is the mess that is it because geo-politically the US is trying to solve the problem from the wrong direction. If you want people to like you, treat them better (and there's a strong under current of people who support this in US politics, again, without any particular party affiliation) - the TSA still has a role, bomb sniffing dogs, possibly armed guards on airplanes, control of ph
They do make their own products. Competing products in fact. Therein lies the problem. Patents exists to provide incentive to research, you get a temporary monopoly on something you develop, in exchange for having developed it. Whether or not that should apply to software in general is an important question, but as it stands today software is patentable. If MS research patents something they own it until the patent expires, and they get to licence it.
Now, one can argue if patents are too broad, to absurd to apply to software or the like. But if we use the steel analogy. MS is making steel, and came up with a new, better way to make more of it. They patent that technique. Samsung shouldn't be able to just waltz over, copy the design, and implement it themselves and leave MS research unrewarded for the work they did. All the a money (and time) spent on research has real value, and real costs - and if you spent all that money doing research it may take you longer to implement it than a competitor who didn't spend the money on research.
Make sense? there is a finite puddle of money available, even to MS. If a company spends money on research they own the results of that research and if you want to use those results you have to pay. Or else there would very quickly be a lot less researchers.
Microsoft has a lot more (or depending on how large you want to count Steve Ballmer, a lot less) wrong with it than mobile patents not capturing market share. WP7 seems to be decent, but late to the game, so you have to use what you can.
Honestly, if I was MS, I'd be saying 'pay us a licence fee *or* let it boot WP7 along with whatever else you want'. Then it's a matter of getting app makers on board, and giving them the tools to do awesome stuff you can't easily do on droid (which might be more about building one product for desktop and mobile easily than about some specific feature that you can't do on droid).
that would be costs after interest, this is costs before. Although with interest at ~1% for bonds the difference might be quite small for the short term.
Besides, a lot of the infrastructure involved (for example hydro electric) was built some time ago, as was the nuclear, but nuclear is being phased out gradually (whether part of a broader strategy or not), whereas renewables aren't.
technology tends to be agnostic. P2P and photocopiers aren't illegal, but using them to spread classified material is.
Cameras are just that, cameras. They can be used to oppress dissent, help catch criminals, manage traffic, create an atmosphere of fear, monitor air quality and any number of other things. Some of that is good, some of that bad.
If technology is going to be used for something illegal, unethical or the like it should fall to governments to ban its import and export. China has a perfectly legitimate market for millions of home routers. Cisco should not be put in a position of saying 'well, we won't export this to you because we don't like you, but please have some home routers, we like you enough for that', especially if their competitors would not face the same restrictions.
You realize that in 1980 the US had a per capita GDP of about 12k, and china about $250 right?
Part of why the environmental rules are the way they are is that China and India 30 to 40 years ago had such small economies (in 1980 China's economy was about 2/3rd that of canada's), and most of what they had wasn't even industrial in nature. And of course they were (and to some degree are) so far behind on quality of life for people that we would feel very guilty forcing them to be trapped in further poverty by demanding they only use technology they couldn't afford.
It's and interesting problem. Can viruses and rootkits actually be removed, or not? If you fix the MBR and have some tool that claims to find and remove the rootkit is it actually gone, or do you always need to format and reinstall? Is there stuff, even non virus stuff, just floating around that's mucking up your system that nothing can get rid of? That seems unlikely in this day and age.
Lots of people do a windows reinstall every year, I tend to ask: If windows is getting slow every year, well what are you installing on it that makes it slow? If you just sit a windows computer and never do anything to it for a year it's not suddenly slower (ignoring the possibility of requiring a reboot). Just because I can't clear out a virus/rootkit by deleting some files by hand doesn't mean AV software can't fix/delete/quarantine those files.
Are driver updates or other software updates leaving behind crud that floats about in memory? If so is there a way to clear that out? There's not much you can do about crud left behind by windows updates, since well, you're installing them whether you reinstall or not hopefully. But other drivers using more memory each time you update them would be a very serious problem (and not entirely unheard of).
Leaving behind temporary files on your hard drive doesn't strike me as all that serious, it doesn't actually slow your computer down unless you're doing very specific tasks. Disk fragmentation, that sort of thing are more or less things of the past problems wise unless you go out of your way to cause them.
Part of why windows starts out fast is that it doesn't do much until you get drivers in there. You can disable all the eye candy, but if you want an anti virus, printer drivers, 3d for games etc. you pretty much have to install programs and device drivers. I'm not sure that it gets any slower after you have all that stuff on, unless you get a virus you don't clean out, but enabling all of those features and devices does tend to both slow down some things and speed up/enable others. An no, linux is not fundamentally much different in that regard, if you want features you have to install the drivers and applications for them, and that may or may not improve performance of the system overall.
If windows (or linux) is slow, you can usually hunt down the culprit and fix it, which is both more useful and more productive than a reinstall which may not solve the problem in the long run, alas most people don't read/. and don't know that.That goes to the root of the matter. Can viruses and rootkits actually be removed, or not? If windows is getting slow every year, well what are you installing on it that makes it slow? If you just sit a windows computer and never do anything to it for a year it's not suddenly slower (ignoring the possibility of requiring a reboot). Just because I can't clear out a virus/rootkit by deleting some files by hand doesn't mean AV software can't fix/delete/quarantine those files.
Are driver updates or other software updates leaving behind crud that floats about in memory? If so is there a way to clear that out? There's not much you can do about crud left behind by windows updates, since well, you're installing them whether you reinstall or not hopefully. But other drivers using more memory each time you update them would be a very serious problem (and not entirely unheard of).
Leaving behind temporary files on your hard drive doesn't strike me as all that serious, it doesn't actually slow your computer down unless you're doing very specific tasks. Disk fragmentation, that sort of thing are more or less things of the past problems wise unless you go out of your way to cause them.
Part of why windows starts out fast is that it doesn't do much until you get drivers in there. You can disable all the eye candy, but if you want an anti virus, printer drivers, 3d for games etc. you pretty much have to install programs and device drivers. I'm not sure that it gets any slower after you have all that
Yep, because it's *not* going to have all that time wasting crap on it your boss hates you using. That may come at a premium, but it's cheaper than lost productivity because you handed someone an iPad and they now spend all day playing games and watching movies rather than you know, doing what they're paid for.
Uh... have you been in business? There are countless uses for tablets in business. Document access on the go, custom apps for whatever your business does. Not every document fits neatly on a phone (and not every business will let you have a smart phone that does what you want). Tablets don't solve every problem, but they let you have better access to documents than phones, and if you can plug it into a docking station and type stuff you can, when moving around have your office computer with you.
Whether or not this will work out depends on how well they could pull it off. But I can tell you right now I have lots of (former) business clients who'd love to be able to use iPads for things, but they are limited by iPads all having cameras, and relatively poor keyboard functionality, oh, and they're macs. So they're looking for alternatives, this stuff from cisco is one option.
Sure. But I seriously doubt that governments around the world, including the US, were going to continue to allow such a widely used piece of software circumvent existing law enforcement capabilities. Microsoft is big enough I'm sure they'd *have* to allow wiretapping, just as google is big enough they *have* to try and do something about copyrighted material on youtube. I'd be surprised if skype has been small enough to stay under the radar this long honestly.
When you're small you can get away with it. Ironically, smart criminals use the small stuff which would dodge the rules, but the police wiretap phones and everyone knows you can wiretap phones, so there must be a lot of dumb criminals. And either way, the government writes the rules, and you comply or you don't do business. You may not agree with them, but wiretapping is one of those tools that can be both a gross invasion of privacy, and enormously useful to catch people up to bad stuff, and by virtue of being the government, the government decides who can, and who can't wiretap.
what about your own service charges? I'm in canada, and more than a handful of transactions in a month and they want to start dinging me money to use debit or a credit card.
I also don't particularly like the idea that both my spending history is available for minor stuff, and that a power or networking failure is going to prevent me buying lunch. I don't particularly like my debit or credit card being swiped here there and everywhere, because the more you use it, the more likely someone is going to clone it. Sketchy gas stations are the worst but I wouldn't trust a lot of places with either a debit, or credit card if I can avoid it.
Covering everyone seems to work pretty well everywhere else. Don't see why it wouldn't work in the US. Ever been a single 28 year old man living alone with a job, gotten cancer, twice, and in while you were on disability had your employer shut down (this was a 200+ employee outfit too)? Ya, those bums have no right to healthcare, you can work while you're on chemo, just keep a barf bag in your office. Or maybe you should be using that fat 900 dollar a month disability/unemployment cheque on eharmony to find yourself a wife with healthcare so you can be covered. What *right* does anyone have to anything? What right does a black person have to demand that a majority white country treat them equally? What right does anyone have to an education if their parents don't pay taxes? Stop leeching off the rest of us right? Get a clue, people have a right to not be exploited by their fellow citizens, and they have a right to not be faced with crippling disadvantage in life just because they were born black, or born poor, or got cancer or hit by a car. It is the point of organizing a society that we can take care of people and help them not just die horribly in the street. Now if you want to say 'if you smoke you shouldn't get healthcare' that's a very different problem than helping people be functioning members of society but who couldn't possibly pay to keep themselves alive without healthcare - hence, it is a form of insurance. Why, as an adult, should your parents specifically be expected to chip in for your healthcare? Maybe they're poor too. That notion of 'only look after your family and not your neighbour' is why in india people still have 8 fucking kids (including I will note my charming cousins, who are engineers, doctors, an army Major, and professors... ), because if you can't count on your neighbour to help you out, you don't want to roll the dice with just 2 or 3 kids, one of them might not chip in to support you when you get old or sick.
The US system in that regard is outright odd. The most expensive healthcare patients, those over 65, *are* covered by the government already. Most people who die are over 65, and most healthcare dollars are spent right before you die. As long as you live to 65, the government coughs up the money to pay for you, no matter what you've done to yourself before that point. And it covers people who are too poor (and generally the also expensive on healthcare for a lot of reasons) already. The marginal cost of adding coverage for the 16-65 year olds who aren't already covered is pretty low. That's also the most important group to protect, because if you can fix whatever is wrong with them, they can continue to be productive, and if you can prevent problems building up, they won't be so expensive when they hit 65. Overall it's just a poorly thought out or constructed system.
Other countries provide healtcare for the whole population for ~8% of GDP, france is up around 11. The combined government healthcare spending in the US is *already* about 7.5% (http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/budget_pie_gs.php) using a GDP of 14.12 trillion. And that excludes defence department healtcare spending. Covering everyone, especially given who already *is* covered shouldn't be all that hard, or expensive overall. Yet your politicians like to make it more difficult than it needs to be.
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Nor, one could argue, did nintendo. That's they're problem. They made 10 bucks a pop on consoles and 30 or 40 bucks on software sales for those consoles. Which was great for a couple of years. And now... not so much.
Sony and MS absorb any money they make back into companies with much more diverse portfolios (for better or worse) than nintendo. Sony and MS both make money on game sales, and a lot of it, but that's going to fund mobile phones, TV's, operating systems, and so on.
It's a long tail/short tail sort of thing. Nintendo made a pile of money early, when everyone bought a console, controller and a couple of games. That lasted for two years.
Net profit is *not* the only measure of value. If I make 1 dollar a year. But you lose 100 dollars a year. But I do 10 dollars a year in business and you 100 billion yours is the much better company. In this case the companies, and the ecosystems around them are much larger, have much more value, and produce far more money for both sony and MS than for nintendo. Unfortunately for the outside observer it's very hard to figure out where Sony's console business ends and it's various other services start, and the same applies to Microsoft (who are half competing with themselves on the PC market, but half supporting themselves too).
In terms of hours played of games, or money made on games, or games sold separate from the console the Wii isn't winning. At all.
A game console is the base of a broader platform. For sony that included other media, but selling consoles is done so you can sell *software*, and, if you're into that sort of thing, software people actually want to play. The Wii has had a handful of good titles. The PS3 and 360 have had a handful of good titles every year they've been out.
In terms of which console is the better to have. At this point the PS3 seems to be getting better exclusives (god of war, uncharted infamous etc.) but I'm sure Halo 4 will have something to say about that soon enough.
ya, I mean one can quibble over the exactly extent of the sentence or whatever, but that belongs on a law site. Steal credit card info, get caught, get convicted, get punished. Sounds about right.
It's not exactly clear if they mean he gained 36 million from this, or if that's just the value of the fraud on the cards. I remember here in canada we had a similar story years ago, and there are various levels of intermediaries. The hacker gets paid to get the card info, they sell it to a clearing house who resells it piecewise to people who might actually exploit it. There were a few steps in between too that I don't remember. But that doesn't mean he wasn't both getting the info and using it himself, though I don't suppose it matters much.
Sales tax always bothers me. In europe the argument goes that sales taxes (or in their case VAT taxes, which are practically not much different) are the least economically damaging taxes. That's true insofar as they disadvantage people who spend the least percent of their income (the rich) the least.
But if you're an amazon 3rd party seller you should still be taxed at the normal income tax rate/business tax rate. If you're an amazon shareholder you are, again, taxed at the normal dividends/capital gains/income tax rate. If you're an amazon employee you are taxed at the normal income tax rate (insofar as washington state chooses to impose such taxes).
I don't object to taxes. Taxes fund the collective buying power of government to provide effective services. But having multiple, layered taxes on the same thing is sort of silly. It costs a lot of money to regulate multiple tax regimes, and one of the goals of graduated taxation is to limit the tax burden on the poor - who spend all their money anyway - whereas sales tax aims to extend the burden to them.
Amazon brings to a head the modern world of sales tax though. If I, as a canadian, buy something out of province or country when I bring it back I'm supposed to pay the tax rate of where I live on it (out of country imports that happens on for sure, and for big purchases like cars the government will clamp down if you don't voluntarily cough up the cash but smaller stuff they let slide). In the US if you live in state X with a sales tax rate of 10%, but are 3 minutes from the border of state Y with a sales tax rate of 0 does the government have any mechanism to force you to pay the 10% rate on purchases out of state? (And would it want to?). Suddenly taxes managed on a state level are looking both exceedingly complicated antiquated, and unenforceable. Amazon happens to have 'partners' all over the place, and the specific issue is that stuff bought from those partners would have to be taxed at their state rates. That's all well and good in a map to the brick and mortar world, but in one where a single click sorts by price a 10% sales tax poses a lot of problems for a business. I tend to think that as a tax payer, I'd rather they just take it all out of me as income tax. And I can see amazon not being fond of the idea of listing prices without taxes, and then having to charge taxes. It's work for them to change their system to support taxing (and tax exemptions), but they have enough money they will probably have to eventually.
And google may not care about the covered technology. The tech in question covers connecting the phone to Windows desktops basically. From googles perspective Android works by itself, if you want to, as a feature to differentiate from competitors, connect to something else, that's your problem.
Not getting involved may keep the price down for everyone too. If MS settles for say 4 or 5 dollars a phone with several different makers that becomes the going rate. If they make a fight out of it MS may demand 15, or simply withdraw the licence at all, and if you risk losing in court you have a serious problem. You might win, but you might not, and not winning would put you out of business.
A surefire sign of MBA-idiots with no real-world life experience in long-term viability. That should do for the buzzword bingo, but the problem is real.
If I can leave for 3 weeks and nothing breaks down, you absolutely want to keep me, because I know how to build reliable systems that don't fall over as soon as someone looks at them funny.
As much as the /. crowd might be focused on IT skills, not everyone has the luxury of being in the support end of the business. Being the only one around who can build reliable servers is a legitimate skill, and takes time (or money) to replace, but honestly not that much, and if they can hire someone in for 8 hours to build a server that doesn't need to be touched for a month, well... like i say, I can see the appeal of contracting that out to someone else. I'm sure there's more to the job than building the server though, a lot of it is being able to translate boss requirements speak into something that will actually solve problems, and that is a skill not to be under estimated.
Ya absolutely - if we require all aircraft have 16 engines that would, with today's engines seem absurd. In a 150 person business having 15 people all with the same skills might be a bit too much redundancy, on the other hand only 1 person is probably too few.
I off and on contracted for a place where this was hugely important.
What they'd do is come up with some bullshit reason they were giving a bunch of people 2 or 3 extra weeks of vacation but it must be taken within a short time frame (that quarter or the next two quarters), usually times to align with the summer already planned vacations, and sometimes not entirely bullshit.
Either way, if you were gone for about 3 weeks, and no one really needed you for that time off, your job was going to be axed shortly. Maternity leave? No problem, your job will definitely be here when you get back because we'll try not to fill it at all, and if we don't need it, you're gone as soon as we're legally allowed when you get back.
It's slimy, but it's business.
Fault tolerance is a serious problem. If you only have two people who know a system, both of whom work in the same area, and both get the same infectious disease for a week you have a problem. On the other hand, having 3 or 4 people with redundant skills is a waste of money. I can see the appeal of cloudsourcing to a 3rd party in that regard.
On a personal basis, if you don't have something you, and only you can do until the day you retire you're taking serious risk. That doesn't have to be technical of course, you can be the only one who knows how to deal with the crazy redhead secretary in another department who bothers you all the time, or you could be the only one who knows how stuff in storage is laid out or whatever. It's a tricky balance between 'manpower intensive to replace' and 'crippling the company if you get hit by a bus'.
That would be a difference between patent and copyright. Two completely independent discoveries of the same thing, and the first to patent it gets the rights (patents may be first to file or first to invent, depends on country). The patent holder would still own a monopoly on it, even if someone produced the same thing independently.
If you can patent an algorithm and or data structure then even an alternative implementation of the same algorithm would run afoul of the patent. Therein lies the problem with software patents I think.
Just because they wanted us to invade afghanistan doesn't mean it was a good plan on their part. The nazi's really clearly definitely decided they really really really wanted to invade russia after all. We just haven't done a great job of showing the world that we can be both gracious and terrifying at the same time - we've managed to do both badly.
Um... US warships go through the suez on a regular basis. To bomb iraq, threaten iran, bomb yemen, deploy to afghanistan etc. Whether you think those are valid goals or not is separate from the fact that al qaeda has a propaganda coup on its hands claiming that the egyptian government (including the new one) are basically in bed with the US allowing their ships transit through the canal. If they really wanted to be a pain about it the egyptians could ban all US ships through the suez as long as there are americans in iraq for example, they could open the borders to gaza (which they are doing), they could insist on ignoring the blockade of gaza etc. There's a long way from where they are, to where a lot of the arab street wants them to be (and a lot further still to where Al qaeda wants them to be).
Don't get me wrong, Al qaeda are nuts. But they have some legitimate grievances which is what is keeping them around. Desert storm and Iraq the first time is what actually fostered Al qaeda in the first place. The idea that a bunch of christians from across the world would be brought in to defend the wealthiest muslim country on earth made them mad. That the US continued to stick around for a decade made them REALLY mad. Which is a good example of their combination of nuts and legitimate grievances. The US defending Kuwait I think, was, on the whole reasonably agreeable to most of the muslim world - in a modern context that would be siding with the Libyan rebels. There are things the coalition there could have done better about including more muslims troops (including volunteering mujahadeed like Al qaeda) but most everyone was reasonably content with it. Al Qaeda's being pissed at not being 'the base' of the coalition is just foolish. That a decade later the US was still bombing iraqi's, from saudi arabia (who should damn well be able to defend themselves at that point) offends pretty much everyone, american taxpayers, muslims, human rights groups, the iraqi's themselves etc. That was a sort of legitimate gripe.
Right, so they can't charge a licence for purely software patents in those places. It's still patentable some places.
I think the steel analogy still works.
FAT has been around since 1977 (thought I think 1980 for anything actually sold). They figured out a way (however archaic) to make FAT better, with long file names. The fact that FAT is tied to MS if anything strengthens the argument that they own it. It's their technology, they developed it, they clearly have a working implementation of it, and if you want to use that technology (for whatever purpose) MS needs to be compensated for it.
If MS didn't have a working implementation of FAT with long filenames you'd at least potentially be talking about a patent troll. But MS has competing devices (windows phones), with LFN in FAT, which is again, technology they developed, to support other technology they developed. It's up to them if they want to give it away for free or not then.
Like hell it is, at least not research that you'd ever write down or spread around.
Prior to patent every company kept its own in house guarded secrets which they literally had to write special rules to guard, including cities granting special police powers to companies and so on. Think ventian glass makers, or modern chinese manufacturers (where patents mean nothing). Patent opens up those secrets after a time (and again we can argue if 20 years is at all reasonable in this day and age), but guarantees you legal protection from the state, and it applies equally to everyone. The lack of patent significantly limits labour mobility, because you value the people that you train, and you can't afford to lose them. On one hand that means you have to pay them well, on the other hand prisoners in gilded cage are still prisoners. Think lifetime non compete clauses.
Without patent the only incentive is to research things that the other guy can't steal, and steal anything that's valuable.
Again though, details matter. 20 years for patents, especially in software, poses a lot of questions. As the guy below says, the patent in question specifically is about long file names in FAT, and FAT has been around over 30 years at this point.
It was precisely what the terrorists wanted in the first place.. to make us so fearful that we started to treat people even worse, on average, than most third-world dictatorial/theocratic regimes do. They hated us for our way of life (rightly or wrongly.. doesn't matter at this point), and they succeeded in making it worse by proving that our high-and-mighty principles of liberty and privacy weren't as high-and-mighty as we kept saying they were to the rest of the world.
No, they don't hate you for how you live. They hate you for how the US government forces *them* to live. For the support it give to the regimes that oppress them. For the thousands of Iraq's the government has murdered. Yes, al qaeda are religious nutters, but the reason they can continue to exist as anything substantial is because the people who aren't radical want you dead too.
Al Qaeda *wanted* us (I'm in canada) in Afghanistan, they went so far as to declare war, and they kept trying to goad us into a fight, sept 11 got what they wanted. We've sure shown them how wrong they were, or something. Just because they have bad plans doesn't mean they don't have plans. They don't care about blowing up airplanes. It's a tool to goad us into more fighting, more oppressing *them* (they don't care what the TSA does to non-muslim people, as long as it costs money it's a win for them, what they really want is to see the TSA offending religious sensibilities of the muslim world, which drives more mainstream support to them). Al qaeda couldn't care less if the TSA wants to anal probe a 90 year old grandmother who can't walk and wears a diaper. But if the TSA does that to a rich arab man, or ask his wife or daughter to uncover her face in public that weakens your case for being 'tolerant and respectful' in the arab world, and builds their support, they want a newsreel of a Saudi prince walking past the TSA to show the disconnect between the leaders of the Muslim world, and the people they lead. They want to create an environment where they are the only organized muslims who stand up to this tyranny. Where the House of Saud holds hands with the president and the egyptians make friends with israel and let US warships through the Suez to bomb more muslims they are not friends of the muslim world - and Al qaeda is trying to strengthen it's case that the US is the root of the problem, and only by showing how offensive supporting the US is will they restore the caliphate and a great muslim nation or some nonsense.
The problem of course, is that they're half right. You can be right about feeling the treaty of Versailles was too harsh to germany, and wrong about thinking the solution to that is to kill all the jews and invade everyone you can get to. Al Qaeda is right that the US does some bad things in the world, and there are a lot of people, even in the US who don't support those bad things. And they're wrong about wanting to build a transnational conservative muslim state (although we are faced with the problem that as time has gone oh, since the 60's that idea has gained more and more support). But you have a group (and I wouldn't attach a single political party to it), who've bought into the narrative that muslims are evil because they don't like all the terrible things the US does (the idea that the US is right because it's the US, just from a different point of view). That group, who are basically anti islam, are constantly being tempered by people who are too far on the side of 'treat everyone equally and we'll all pet butterflies!' as though the TSA screening a 6 year old is somehow a sensible fair treatment. The TSA is the mess that is it because geo-politically the US is trying to solve the problem from the wrong direction. If you want people to like you, treat them better (and there's a strong under current of people who support this in US politics, again, without any particular party affiliation) - the TSA still has a role, bomb sniffing dogs, possibly armed guards on airplanes, control of ph
They do make their own products. Competing products in fact. Therein lies the problem. Patents exists to provide incentive to research, you get a temporary monopoly on something you develop, in exchange for having developed it. Whether or not that should apply to software in general is an important question, but as it stands today software is patentable. If MS research patents something they own it until the patent expires, and they get to licence it.
Now, one can argue if patents are too broad, to absurd to apply to software or the like. But if we use the steel analogy. MS is making steel, and came up with a new, better way to make more of it. They patent that technique. Samsung shouldn't be able to just waltz over, copy the design, and implement it themselves and leave MS research unrewarded for the work they did. All the a money (and time) spent on research has real value, and real costs - and if you spent all that money doing research it may take you longer to implement it than a competitor who didn't spend the money on research.
Make sense? there is a finite puddle of money available, even to MS. If a company spends money on research they own the results of that research and if you want to use those results you have to pay. Or else there would very quickly be a lot less researchers.
Microsoft has a lot more (or depending on how large you want to count Steve Ballmer, a lot less) wrong with it than mobile patents not capturing market share. WP7 seems to be decent, but late to the game, so you have to use what you can.
Honestly, if I was MS, I'd be saying 'pay us a licence fee *or* let it boot WP7 along with whatever else you want'. Then it's a matter of getting app makers on board, and giving them the tools to do awesome stuff you can't easily do on droid (which might be more about building one product for desktop and mobile easily than about some specific feature that you can't do on droid).
that would be costs after interest, this is costs before. Although with interest at ~1% for bonds the difference might be quite small for the short term.
Besides, a lot of the infrastructure involved (for example hydro electric) was built some time ago, as was the nuclear, but nuclear is being phased out gradually (whether part of a broader strategy or not), whereas renewables aren't.
technology tends to be agnostic. P2P and photocopiers aren't illegal, but using them to spread classified material is.
Cameras are just that, cameras. They can be used to oppress dissent, help catch criminals, manage traffic, create an atmosphere of fear, monitor air quality and any number of other things. Some of that is good, some of that bad.
If technology is going to be used for something illegal, unethical or the like it should fall to governments to ban its import and export. China has a perfectly legitimate market for millions of home routers. Cisco should not be put in a position of saying 'well, we won't export this to you because we don't like you, but please have some home routers, we like you enough for that', especially if their competitors would not face the same restrictions.
You realize that in 1980 the US had a per capita GDP of about 12k, and china about $250 right?
Part of why the environmental rules are the way they are is that China and India 30 to 40 years ago had such small economies (in 1980 China's economy was about 2/3rd that of canada's), and most of what they had wasn't even industrial in nature. And of course they were (and to some degree are) so far behind on quality of life for people that we would feel very guilty forcing them to be trapped in further poverty by demanding they only use technology they couldn't afford.
It's and interesting problem. Can viruses and rootkits actually be removed, or not? If you fix the MBR and have some tool that claims to find and remove the rootkit is it actually gone, or do you always need to format and reinstall? Is there stuff, even non virus stuff, just floating around that's mucking up your system that nothing can get rid of? That seems unlikely in this day and age.
Lots of people do a windows reinstall every year, I tend to ask: If windows is getting slow every year, well what are you installing on it that makes it slow? If you just sit a windows computer and never do anything to it for a year it's not suddenly slower (ignoring the possibility of requiring a reboot). Just because I can't clear out a virus/rootkit by deleting some files by hand doesn't mean AV software can't fix/delete/quarantine those files.
Are driver updates or other software updates leaving behind crud that floats about in memory? If so is there a way to clear that out? There's not much you can do about crud left behind by windows updates, since well, you're installing them whether you reinstall or not hopefully. But other drivers using more memory each time you update them would be a very serious problem (and not entirely unheard of).
Leaving behind temporary files on your hard drive doesn't strike me as all that serious, it doesn't actually slow your computer down unless you're doing very specific tasks. Disk fragmentation, that sort of thing are more or less things of the past problems wise unless you go out of your way to cause them.
Part of why windows starts out fast is that it doesn't do much until you get drivers in there. You can disable all the eye candy, but if you want an anti virus, printer drivers, 3d for games etc. you pretty much have to install programs and device drivers. I'm not sure that it gets any slower after you have all that stuff on, unless you get a virus you don't clean out, but enabling all of those features and devices does tend to both slow down some things and speed up/enable others. An no, linux is not fundamentally much different in that regard, if you want features you have to install the drivers and applications for them, and that may or may not improve performance of the system overall.
If windows (or linux) is slow, you can usually hunt down the culprit and fix it, which is both more useful and more productive than a reinstall which may not solve the problem in the long run, alas most people don't read /. and don't know that.That goes to the root of the matter. Can viruses and rootkits actually be removed, or not? If windows is getting slow every year, well what are you installing on it that makes it slow? If you just sit a windows computer and never do anything to it for a year it's not suddenly slower (ignoring the possibility of requiring a reboot). Just because I can't clear out a virus/rootkit by deleting some files by hand doesn't mean AV software can't fix/delete/quarantine those files.
Are driver updates or other software updates leaving behind crud that floats about in memory? If so is there a way to clear that out? There's not much you can do about crud left behind by windows updates, since well, you're installing them whether you reinstall or not hopefully. But other drivers using more memory each time you update them would be a very serious problem (and not entirely unheard of).
Leaving behind temporary files on your hard drive doesn't strike me as all that serious, it doesn't actually slow your computer down unless you're doing very specific tasks. Disk fragmentation, that sort of thing are more or less things of the past problems wise unless you go out of your way to cause them.
Part of why windows starts out fast is that it doesn't do much until you get drivers in there. You can disable all the eye candy, but if you want an anti virus, printer drivers, 3d for games etc. you pretty much have to install programs and device drivers. I'm not sure that it gets any slower after you have all that
Yep, because it's *not* going to have all that time wasting crap on it your boss hates you using. That may come at a premium, but it's cheaper than lost productivity because you handed someone an iPad and they now spend all day playing games and watching movies rather than you know, doing what they're paid for.
Uh... have you been in business? There are countless uses for tablets in business. Document access on the go, custom apps for whatever your business does. Not every document fits neatly on a phone (and not every business will let you have a smart phone that does what you want). Tablets don't solve every problem, but they let you have better access to documents than phones, and if you can plug it into a docking station and type stuff you can, when moving around have your office computer with you.
Whether or not this will work out depends on how well they could pull it off. But I can tell you right now I have lots of (former) business clients who'd love to be able to use iPads for things, but they are limited by iPads all having cameras, and relatively poor keyboard functionality, oh, and they're macs. So they're looking for alternatives, this stuff from cisco is one option.
Breaking encryption would be for eavesdropping/intelligence gathering. Wiretapping for law enforcement. Two slightly different problems.
Sure. But I seriously doubt that governments around the world, including the US, were going to continue to allow such a widely used piece of software circumvent existing law enforcement capabilities. Microsoft is big enough I'm sure they'd *have* to allow wiretapping, just as google is big enough they *have* to try and do something about copyrighted material on youtube. I'd be surprised if skype has been small enough to stay under the radar this long honestly.
When you're small you can get away with it. Ironically, smart criminals use the small stuff which would dodge the rules, but the police wiretap phones and everyone knows you can wiretap phones, so there must be a lot of dumb criminals. And either way, the government writes the rules, and you comply or you don't do business. You may not agree with them, but wiretapping is one of those tools that can be both a gross invasion of privacy, and enormously useful to catch people up to bad stuff, and by virtue of being the government, the government decides who can, and who can't wiretap.
what about your own service charges? I'm in canada, and more than a handful of transactions in a month and they want to start dinging me money to use debit or a credit card.
I also don't particularly like the idea that both my spending history is available for minor stuff, and that a power or networking failure is going to prevent me buying lunch. I don't particularly like my debit or credit card being swiped here there and everywhere, because the more you use it, the more likely someone is going to clone it. Sketchy gas stations are the worst but I wouldn't trust a lot of places with either a debit, or credit card if I can avoid it.
Covering everyone seems to work pretty well everywhere else. Don't see why it wouldn't work in the US. Ever been a single 28 year old man living alone with a job, gotten cancer, twice, and in while you were on disability had your employer shut down (this was a 200+ employee outfit too)? Ya, those bums have no right to healthcare, you can work while you're on chemo, just keep a barf bag in your office. Or maybe you should be using that fat 900 dollar a month disability/unemployment cheque on eharmony to find yourself a wife with healthcare so you can be covered. What *right* does anyone have to anything? What right does a black person have to demand that a majority white country treat them equally? What right does anyone have to an education if their parents don't pay taxes? Stop leeching off the rest of us right? Get a clue, people have a right to not be exploited by their fellow citizens, and they have a right to not be faced with crippling disadvantage in life just because they were born black, or born poor, or got cancer or hit by a car. It is the point of organizing a society that we can take care of people and help them not just die horribly in the street. Now if you want to say 'if you smoke you shouldn't get healthcare' that's a very different problem than helping people be functioning members of society but who couldn't possibly pay to keep themselves alive without healthcare - hence, it is a form of insurance. Why, as an adult, should your parents specifically be expected to chip in for your healthcare? Maybe they're poor too. That notion of 'only look after your family and not your neighbour' is why in india people still have 8 fucking kids (including I will note my charming cousins, who are engineers, doctors, an army Major, and professors... ), because if you can't count on your neighbour to help you out, you don't want to roll the dice with just 2 or 3 kids, one of them might not chip in to support you when you get old or sick.
The US system in that regard is outright odd. The most expensive healthcare patients, those over 65, *are* covered by the government already. Most people who die are over 65, and most healthcare dollars are spent right before you die. As long as you live to 65, the government coughs up the money to pay for you, no matter what you've done to yourself before that point. And it covers people who are too poor (and generally the also expensive on healthcare for a lot of reasons) already. The marginal cost of adding coverage for the 16-65 year olds who aren't already covered is pretty low. That's also the most important group to protect, because if you can fix whatever is wrong with them, they can continue to be productive, and if you can prevent problems building up, they won't be so expensive when they hit 65. Overall it's just a poorly thought out or constructed system.
Other countries provide healtcare for the whole population for ~8% of GDP, france is up around 11. The combined government healthcare spending in the US is *already* about 7.5% (http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/budget_pie_gs.php) using a GDP of 14.12 trillion. And that excludes defence department healtcare spending. Covering everyone, especially given who already *is* covered shouldn't be all that hard, or expensive overall. Yet your politicians like to make it more difficult than it needs to be.