"Common stock" is, at an "intrinsic" level, only a worthless piece of paper (or equivalent digital representation). On that paper it is stated that you have some say in how the issuing company is run and what it does with its assets. But you are not the worker, you do not personally possess the assets of the company, and thus the value of the stock lies in the "trust" you place in the people who do personally possess the assets of the company to provide you some future value.
In concept (and often in practice as well) this is no different from money. Debt. IOUs.
The money in your bank account is not, but for a small fraction, actual currency issued by your sovereign (Federal Reserve notes in the US). Instead, it is a bunch of papers representing IOUs (largely home mortgages, auto loans and small business loans). This is how fractional reserve banking works. People come into an establishment that is trusted by the public to assess and aggregate risk, and literally create money on the spot by signing loan papers. This is how most money enters the system.
How is this system different from a corporation issuing common stock? It isn't really. Common stock USUALLY is just riskier, therefore TYPICALLY has a higher interest rate.
The United States is, by a wide margin, the largest manufacturer of goods in the world. We produce nearly 25% more than China and the Russian Federation combined, with a small fraction of the population. This was BEFORE the fracking boom.
I don't know about the UK, but here in the States, the safety standards for new reactors are much higher than for existing reactors. Paradoxically, this has the opposite effect on public safety because now there are no economical options to take the place of an aging reactor. Normalizing for externalities, nuclear would still be profitable to the public, but NIMBY means we won't be getting any new reactors for a long time. It won't last though. At current rate of growth in energy consumption, soon we won't have a choice.
1.) using a profit projection (likely to ALREADY include government-mandated insurance premiums, but you didn't cite a source so who knows?) 2.) from a reactor built to modern safety standards 3.) to meet modern regulations (which can make costs arbitrarily high) 4.) to compare with a reactor commissioned in the 1970s 5.) using a design from the 1960s.
That's now how insurance works. They look at the potential risk, and as Fukushima demonstrated that potential (in monetary terms) is rather high. Sorry, but if you irradiate someone's property and make it worthless, or destroy their business and livelihood, you have to compensate them.
The cost of compensating them multiplied by the frequency of such an occurrence would be FAR, FAR, FAR, less than the rate. The cost of occurrence is high, but the frequency of the occurrence is more than low enough to compensate. Ruin theory is THE ONLY THING AT PLAY HERE. I also want to point out that Fukushima was caused by a natural disaster that ALREADY MADE A SHITLOAD OF PROPERTY WORTHLESS.
That's not an imposed cost, that's how society works.
The fact that we require nuclear to be so much more profitable to society (AND IT IS) demonstrates that IS an imposed cost.
Only if the premiums made the energy produced ridiculously expensive.
Look up the number of Terawatts produced by nuclear reactors built in the last 30 years. Then look at the damage to life and property caused by nuclear reactors built in the last 30 years. Report your findings. This study has been done a thousand times and your just flat out wrong.
Keep in mind that the UK has already had to guarantee above market rate prices.
Only if "above market" means greater than the price of fossil fuels MINUS the externalized cost of their damages to human health and the environment.
As for all your other stuff about renewables, you make the classic mistake of considering a single type or single generator on its own. Sure, a particular wind farm may not produce the same amount of energy all year round, but over the entire country there is always a base load of wind energy.
Show me one fucking example of a geographical region that has achieved this. The mythical "composite base load" is just that. A myth. Even in theory, it requires natural gas to provide feedback-based stabilization (meaning you need a smart grid in the first place). The end game for such schemes is that we invest a shitload of money in the short-term on a precisely calculated ratio of wind to solar and sparse energy storage with gas-powered stabilization, and invest a shitload of money in the long-term on dense energy storage. Either way, it is not even close to economical.
Storage systems are already viable, such as the 50MW batteries they have deployed in Japan
with fewer government subsidies than nuclear AT PRESENT TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT, of course
Germany isn't even half way through it's transitional period yet, and has already made incredible progress.
France is still innovating too. And they are WAY farther along. I'd say they are pretty much DONE with their transition already!
there is plenty of money being invested in new renewable energy sources, but very little in nuclear
The problem is IMPOSED cost. We IMPOSE cost on nuclear because, despite it's amazing track record of safety normalized for Terawatt-hours produced, the one accident where fewer than 70 people actually died from the radiation (despite the fact that its primary purpose was for enriching weapons grade nuclear material, not energy and had third-world safety controls) was heavily publicized. 70 people fall of their roofs in different parts of the world for a trickle of solar power and it is as "statistic." 70 people die from radiation for the oceans of energy nuclear has produced, and it is a "disaster."
in the UK the government has to provide insurance since no commercial insurer would even consider it.
Insurance companies profit by dispersing the risk of low-frequency-high-cost events over multiple parties. For any given event, the frequency multiplied by the cost of the event must be less than the premium. Nuclear meets this requirement! But there is a second requirement called "ruin capacity" that derives from a statistical nicety in the central limit theorem: The cost of a single event must be much lower than the operating cost of the risk-aggregating party, so that the off-chance of a single event wouldn't put the company at risk of going out of business.
This is not true for any single insurer in the UK, but it is true for the government. Thus, an insurer could not profit from a nuclear power plant, but the government could.
There are too many competitive alternatives now.
There are no alternatives that are as safe and reliable as nuclear power. Fossil fuels? Not nearly as safe as nuclear. Hydro? Not nearly as safe as nuclear. Wind/Solar? Not reliable enough to generate base load electricity without energy storage. Energy storage? Not even close to becoming economically viable yet. Germany is the closest any major power has come to ditching fossil fuels for renewables, with a whopping 25% reduction in fossil fuel dependency.
But renewables can't produce energy on-demand without expensive energy storage mechanisms. So Germany can't actually CONSUME that energy without the help of rate agreements from their nuclear-producing neighbors like France.
voting 3rd party streghtens the position of the candidate furthest from the voter's preferences
No, it doesn't. It strengthens the position of the 3rd party.
You are trying to use game theoretical optimums to model a system which is inherently game-theoretically irrational by design. Consider this:
Informing yourself about the issues, takes time. Informing yourself about each candidates positions on the issues takes time. Going to the polls takes time, even if "the polls" is just your mailbox. You could spend that time doing literally anything else, but you don't, despite the nearly-impossible odds that you taking the time to do these things will influence the results of the election.
According to game theory then, about 60% of people in the voting age population (approx. voter turnout) are being irrational. So what is going on here? Well, you understand that if only a small number of people vote, then they will have a great deal of power, and that is clearly bad. You know your vote probably won't make a difference, but if EVERYONE thought that way, it would be really bad.
Game theoretically, you know it would benefit you right now to push button B, but if EVERYONE pushed button B we would all suffer. You aren't thinking about yourself, you are thinking about the group. That is an area of human behavior described in the study of superrationality.
So why then the two party system? Actually, two party systems TEND to crop up even using voting algorithms specifically designed to give 3rd parties a fair chance. Even in wars, you see factions magically aligning themselves into two narrowly-defined groups of strange bedfellows.
The reason is because of ignorance on a massive scale. To bring back the war analogy, we were allies with Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden once, because we didn't know any better. People are scared into an irrational panic when faced with the false specter of "the Great Enemy" and are suddenly willing to compromise their own goals with lesser enemies. But it doesn't have to be like that. It isn't ALWAYS like that even now, particularly when people are informed. And that is what "vote 3rd party" advocates are trying to achieve.
Vote your conscience. Vote 3rd party*
*Unless you conscience tells you to vote for one of the two main parties.
Once they start scrubbing the data to "improve the relevance of targeted advertising" I might start worrying. I'm not cool with advertisers being able to bid on my screen real-estate based on what I write in private messages. MS, Google, Yahoo filtering scam and spam? That is perfectly expected behavior.
Actually, that isn't quite right. The patent itself would cover the entire business case to be made for such an invention, that is the whole car, or any possible way in which the engine might be used.
The INDEPENDENT CLAIMS in the patent would include all of the things you listed. A solid, enforceable patent will have independent claims specific enough to exclude as much prior art as possible, but that doesn't mean any prior art would invalidate the patent. Your super efficient engine design, for example, could include components like a fuel injector that people have been putting into engine designs for decades, but that doesn't mean it isn't patentable. Your patent should at least reference the prior art, however.
Here is where lawyers like to get general. A super efficient engine is novel, but it is a useless novelty, unless you put it into a machine, such as a car, that performs a useful function. That is where DEPENDENT CLAIMS come into play. You want your dependent claims to be big, broad, sweeping and general to cover as many business cases as possible. This process invariably invokes big giant buckets of prior art. All of which you need to reference, of course.
I think it is high time for/. to stop cherry-picking lawyer-speak from patent applications. If your invention builds off of previous inventions, like all inventions do, and the patent application is written correctly, then there is always going to be some set of broad, sweeping claims which, when quoted, will send the comment section into a rantfest.
There is a task switcher (hold down the back button and a list pops up with thumbnails from your open app). Also, with WP8, any app can run in the background as long as it conforms to certain rules about resource utilization. Not many apps use the feature yet, but the key ones like Skype do, where you want the app to do something even if the app is running in the background.
Microsoft encourages you to use their billing system, but it is by no means required. You can give your program to users as crippled trialware if you wish and then just distribute the key for the full version via an in-app purchase. Microsoft only charges you for the in-app purchase if you use their built-in billing API, but you are free to use any billing service you wish and cut Microsoft out of the game completely. At this point, you have basically obtained free hosting for your binaries from Microsoft, in exchange for the contribution of your app to augment their ecosystem.
Last I checked, Apple put an explicit ban on the sale of digital content through iOS apps in a way that cuts Apple out of the gravy train.
No guarantee that Microsoft won't turn into Apple when/if it finally does gain a more entrenched ecosystem, but hey, that's business for you.
In the history of software, I can think of no major OS releases that hit the market without major issue, much less something as high-profile as a new Windows version. Not Windows, OSX, iOS, Android, Solaris, or pick-your-flavor of Linux. The larger your scale, the more beta-testers just don't cut it anymore. You can take Apple's approach and strictly control the hardware that your software can run on, but you can always fuck that up to. You always have to wait for the first round of updates (or in Apple's situation, a free carrying case for every user) and hope that fixes it.
And there is always a chance that the wind turbine in my yard could get struck by lightning and blown into my neighbors dying spruce tree, igniting the side of his house during a wind storm, in turn setting the connecting fence ablaze causing our entire town and the surrounding national forest to erupt in a giant hell-fire of death, moving across Northern Colorado in to the mountains where the fire-fighting capabilities of sparse municipalities are defensless against its firey rage.
Its just not a very good chance.
The only fair comparison is a measurement of deaths-per-Terawatt. And large scale nuclear has proven pretty good even after the contrived linear-no-threshold-model gymnastics that FUD spreaders like to use.
You sound like one of my PMs here. As long as it works right, the customer won't care right? Wrong.
The fallacy is this. The code WILL NOT WORK RIGHT on the first go. Your customers will often be willing to pay for more features than you planned for in the next version. Your QA testers will find as many bugs as they can, but the scale at which they can test is never close to what it will be in production. You WILL have to support the software, you WILL have to release patches, and someday, someone WILL want to reuse your code.
True, the cost of writing the code is heavily front-loaded and therefore seems larger. But the cost of maintanence is never ever trivial. A good developers will come to understand this, so long as they have to maintain their own code. A good developer will offer resistance to a PM that emphasizes cost of coding over the elegance and extensibility of the code. If theses developers in India are building a career, they will become good developers.
Yeah, terrible thing about what happened at Fukushima. HOW MANY MORE WILL HAVE TO DIE???
I think it's funny that whenever anti-nuclear people talk about nuclear, they bring up a reactor from 25 years ago, but whenever they talk about other alternatives to fossil fuels, its always some cutting-edge solar project or some future break through in energy storage that nobody nowhere has commercially implemented.
Ask them why, and its all, "you know, the Man and stuff, and the Banksters, and the you know, the Nuclear Industry with their corporate... uh... thought police and they have the world governments in their pockets."
They have about 45B in cash. Their market cap is about 220B. Does this mean that if their share price dropped below $5.20 that Microsoft could potentially buy out Microsoft?
a lot of editorial comments, branding WP7 as Windows Mobile, and obvious misleading lines. The headers to the patents involved misled me to believe that the patents covered broad UI concepts with huge areas of scope with 15 years of prior art. Patent 5,889,522 for example was stated as claiming "putting known tab controls into an operating system for use by all applications rather than providing tabs on an application-by-application basis."
That sounds wicked general and its a really old UI concept that seems obvious to anyone who switched to Firefox back in the day for exactly that reason. Until you read the actual patent and discover that in reality they are claiming the implementation of the UI SDK framework that comes as part of the OS. Oh yeah, and the patent was filed back in 1994. I'm not sure how many operating systems offered tab-centric UI support in the SDKs for third party apps back then, but I'm thinking prior art will be a little hard to come by, and tabs sure as hell didn't seem like such a duh-concept back before they were ubiquitous, much less a specific object implementation of a tab control in a common UI SDK for the OS.
After reading a few of the actual claims from some of the patents, I stopped wasting my time and discarded the whole patent table. After the TFA came out and stated that Microsoft was pure evil, which was unfortunately at the very end, I felt dirty for having even clicked. What MS is doing may be wrong, and it certainly hinders innovation, but let us not pretend that one company serving its shareholders' interests is going to be evil while another company doing the same damn thing is going to be the Shining White Knight of our fantasy.
Its a subsidy. The public is assuming risk or cost on behalf of a non-public entity. That's a subsidy. BUT you shouldn't count this as a strike against nuclear and here's why:
This is NOT a typical business risk that the public is assuming. The typical business risks are the increasing market value of inputs and the decreasing market value of outputs. Your plain-old honest market forces being plain-old unpredictable. But that is not the case with nuclear.
Nuclear has big returns, but also has huge investments. It also has a long lead-time. Your typical nuclear construction project has miles of regulatory red-tape, truck-loads of public design review, and a moving-target approval process that must span several political cycles. The public-at-large believes the NRC to be a rubber-stamping revolving door for the industry, but ironically enough, people in the nuclear industry believe the NRC is there to over-regulate, micro-manage and generally crush your hopes and dreams.
You can play the parlor games of calculating how many Chernobyl-scale accidents would have to happen per year before we would say the nuclear industry regulations WEREN'T ridiculous when compared to other base-load energy sources.
But the general point is that a lot of the risk of nuclear power isn't from melt-downs or contamination leaks. No, most of it is associated with developing and building nuclear plants, and is artificially contrived from public opinion and the political process keeping the plant from ever getting off the ground in the first place. This is of course true for many business ventures, but it is ESPECIALLY true for the nuclear industry. It seems fitting to me that the public should bare at least part of the burden of risk that the public created.
Slashdot Mirror
"Common stock" is, at an "intrinsic" level, only a worthless piece of paper (or equivalent digital representation). On that paper it is stated that you have some say in how the issuing company is run and what it does with its assets. But you are not the worker, you do not personally possess the assets of the company, and thus the value of the stock lies in the "trust" you place in the people who do personally possess the assets of the company to provide you some future value.
In concept (and often in practice as well) this is no different from money. Debt. IOUs.
The money in your bank account is not, but for a small fraction, actual currency issued by your sovereign (Federal Reserve notes in the US). Instead, it is a bunch of papers representing IOUs (largely home mortgages, auto loans and small business loans). This is how fractional reserve banking works. People come into an establishment that is trusted by the public to assess and aggregate risk, and literally create money on the spot by signing loan papers. This is how most money enters the system.
How is this system different from a corporation issuing common stock? It isn't really. Common stock USUALLY is just riskier, therefore TYPICALLY has a higher interest rate.
The United States is, by a wide margin, the largest manufacturer of goods in the world. We produce nearly 25% more than China and the Russian Federation combined, with a small fraction of the population. This was BEFORE the fracking boom.
http://www.wisegeek.org/what-a...
I don't know about the UK, but here in the States, the safety standards for new reactors are much higher than for existing reactors. Paradoxically, this has the opposite effect on public safety because now there are no economical options to take the place of an aging reactor. Normalizing for externalities, nuclear would still be profitable to the public, but NIMBY means we won't be getting any new reactors for a long time. It won't last though. At current rate of growth in energy consumption, soon we won't have a choice.
Ironically, this is exactly what I use Microsoft's own Skydrive for:
http://windows.microsoft.com/e...
Its free as in beer, but sadly, the host box has to be Windows so it might not be what you are looking for.
So lets see, you are
1.) using a profit projection (likely to ALREADY include government-mandated insurance premiums, but you didn't cite a source so who knows?)
2.) from a reactor built to modern safety standards
3.) to meet modern regulations (which can make costs arbitrarily high)
4.) to compare with a reactor commissioned in the 1970s
5.) using a design from the 1960s.
Sounds legit.
That's now how insurance works. They look at the potential risk, and as Fukushima demonstrated that potential (in monetary terms) is rather high. Sorry, but if you irradiate someone's property and make it worthless, or destroy their business and livelihood, you have to compensate them.
The cost of compensating them multiplied by the frequency of such an occurrence would be FAR, FAR, FAR, less than the rate. The cost of occurrence is high, but the frequency of the occurrence is more than low enough to compensate. Ruin theory is THE ONLY THING AT PLAY HERE. I also want to point out that Fukushima was caused by a natural disaster that ALREADY MADE A SHITLOAD OF PROPERTY WORTHLESS.
That's not an imposed cost, that's how society works.
The fact that we require nuclear to be so much more profitable to society (AND IT IS) demonstrates that IS an imposed cost.
Only if the premiums made the energy produced ridiculously expensive.
Look up the number of Terawatts produced by nuclear reactors built in the last 30 years. Then look at the damage to life and property caused by nuclear reactors built in the last 30 years. Report your findings. This study has been done a thousand times and your just flat out wrong.
Keep in mind that the UK has already had to guarantee above market rate prices.
Only if "above market" means greater than the price of fossil fuels MINUS the externalized cost of their damages to human health and the environment.
As for all your other stuff about renewables, you make the classic mistake of considering a single type or single generator on its own. Sure, a particular wind farm may not produce the same amount of energy all year round, but over the entire country there is always a base load of wind energy.
Show me one fucking example of a geographical region that has achieved this. The mythical "composite base load" is just that. A myth. Even in theory, it requires natural gas to provide feedback-based stabilization (meaning you need a smart grid in the first place). The end game for such schemes is that we invest a shitload of money in the short-term on a precisely calculated ratio of wind to solar and sparse energy storage with gas-powered stabilization, and invest a shitload of money in the long-term on dense energy storage. Either way, it is not even close to economical.
Storage systems are already viable, such as the 50MW batteries they have deployed in Japan
with fewer government subsidies than nuclear AT PRESENT TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT, of course
Germany isn't even half way through it's transitional period yet, and has already made incredible progress.
France is still innovating too. And they are WAY farther along. I'd say they are pretty much DONE with their transition already!
there is plenty of money being invested in new renewable energy sources, but very little in nuclear
Ruin theory. It's a thing.
The problem is cost.
The problem is IMPOSED cost. We IMPOSE cost on nuclear because, despite it's amazing track record of safety normalized for Terawatt-hours produced, the one accident where fewer than 70 people actually died from the radiation (despite the fact that its primary purpose was for enriching weapons grade nuclear material, not energy and had third-world safety controls) was heavily publicized. 70 people fall of their roofs in different parts of the world for a trickle of solar power and it is as "statistic." 70 people die from radiation for the oceans of energy nuclear has produced, and it is a "disaster."
in the UK the government has to provide insurance since no commercial insurer would even consider it.
Insurance companies profit by dispersing the risk of low-frequency-high-cost events over multiple parties. For any given event, the frequency multiplied by the cost of the event must be less than the premium. Nuclear meets this requirement! But there is a second requirement called "ruin capacity" that derives from a statistical nicety in the central limit theorem: The cost of a single event must be much lower than the operating cost of the risk-aggregating party, so that the off-chance of a single event wouldn't put the company at risk of going out of business.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
This is not true for any single insurer in the UK, but it is true for the government. Thus, an insurer could not profit from a nuclear power plant, but the government could.
There are too many competitive alternatives now.
There are no alternatives that are as safe and reliable as nuclear power. Fossil fuels? Not nearly as safe as nuclear. Hydro? Not nearly as safe as nuclear. Wind/Solar? Not reliable enough to generate base load electricity without energy storage. Energy storage? Not even close to becoming economically viable yet. Germany is the closest any major power has come to ditching fossil fuels for renewables, with a whopping 25% reduction in fossil fuel dependency.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
But renewables can't produce energy on-demand without expensive energy storage mechanisms. So Germany can't actually CONSUME that energy without the help of rate agreements from their nuclear-producing neighbors like France.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
France, by contrast, ditched fossil fuels for a primarily nuclear-based strategy a long time ago. The result? 90+% reduction in fossil fuel usage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
By all measures, nuclear is winning.
because the extremely powerful newspapers hate all the alternatives.
[Citation needed]
Anthropomorphic Global Warming
I'm a credentialed scientist, and I can confirm that the weather is indeed an asshole!
voting 3rd party streghtens the position of the candidate furthest from the voter's preferences
No, it doesn't. It strengthens the position of the 3rd party.
You are trying to use game theoretical optimums to model a system which is inherently game-theoretically irrational by design. Consider this:
Informing yourself about the issues, takes time. Informing yourself about each candidates positions on the issues takes time. Going to the polls takes time, even if "the polls" is just your mailbox. You could spend that time doing literally anything else, but you don't, despite the nearly-impossible odds that you taking the time to do these things will influence the results of the election.
According to game theory then, about 60% of people in the voting age population (approx. voter turnout) are being irrational. So what is going on here? Well, you understand that if only a small number of people vote, then they will have a great deal of power, and that is clearly bad. You know your vote probably won't make a difference, but if EVERYONE thought that way, it would be really bad.
Game theoretically, you know it would benefit you right now to push button B, but if EVERYONE pushed button B we would all suffer. You aren't thinking about yourself, you are thinking about the group. That is an area of human behavior described in the study of superrationality.
So why then the two party system? Actually, two party systems TEND to crop up even using voting algorithms specifically designed to give 3rd parties a fair chance. Even in wars, you see factions magically aligning themselves into two narrowly-defined groups of strange bedfellows.
The reason is because of ignorance on a massive scale. To bring back the war analogy, we were allies with Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden once, because we didn't know any better. People are scared into an irrational panic when faced with the false specter of "the Great Enemy" and are suddenly willing to compromise their own goals with lesser enemies. But it doesn't have to be like that. It isn't ALWAYS like that even now, particularly when people are informed. And that is what "vote 3rd party" advocates are trying to achieve.
Vote your conscience. Vote 3rd party*
*Unless you conscience tells you to vote for one of the two main parties.
Once they start scrubbing the data to "improve the relevance of targeted advertising" I might start worrying. I'm not cool with advertisers being able to bid on my screen real-estate based on what I write in private messages. MS, Google, Yahoo filtering scam and spam? That is perfectly expected behavior.
Actually, that isn't quite right. The patent itself would cover the entire business case to be made for such an invention, that is the whole car, or any possible way in which the engine might be used.
The INDEPENDENT CLAIMS in the patent would include all of the things you listed. A solid, enforceable patent will have independent claims specific enough to exclude as much prior art as possible, but that doesn't mean any prior art would invalidate the patent. Your super efficient engine design, for example, could include components like a fuel injector that people have been putting into engine designs for decades, but that doesn't mean it isn't patentable. Your patent should at least reference the prior art, however.
Here is where lawyers like to get general. A super efficient engine is novel, but it is a useless novelty, unless you put it into a machine, such as a car, that performs a useful function. That is where DEPENDENT CLAIMS come into play. You want your dependent claims to be big, broad, sweeping and general to cover as many business cases as possible. This process invariably invokes big giant buckets of prior art. All of which you need to reference, of course.
I think it is high time for /. to stop cherry-picking lawyer-speak from patent applications. If your invention builds off of previous inventions, like all inventions do, and the patent application is written correctly, then there is always going to be some set of broad, sweeping claims which, when quoted, will send the comment section into a rantfest.
There is a task switcher (hold down the back button and a list pops up with thumbnails from your open app). Also, with WP8, any app can run in the background as long as it conforms to certain rules about resource utilization. Not many apps use the feature yet, but the key ones like Skype do, where you want the app to do something even if the app is running in the background.
Microsoft encourages you to use their billing system, but it is by no means required. You can give your program to users as crippled trialware if you wish and then just distribute the key for the full version via an in-app purchase. Microsoft only charges you for the in-app purchase if you use their built-in billing API, but you are free to use any billing service you wish and cut Microsoft out of the game completely. At this point, you have basically obtained free hosting for your binaries from Microsoft, in exchange for the contribution of your app to augment their ecosystem.
Last I checked, Apple put an explicit ban on the sale of digital content through iOS apps in a way that cuts Apple out of the gravy train.
No guarantee that Microsoft won't turn into Apple when/if it finally does gain a more entrenched ecosystem, but hey, that's business for you.
Sure were a lot of mod points that went in to getting this metaphor right.
In the history of software, I can think of no major OS releases that hit the market without major issue, much less something as high-profile as a new Windows version. Not Windows, OSX, iOS, Android, Solaris, or pick-your-flavor of Linux. The larger your scale, the more beta-testers just don't cut it anymore. You can take Apple's approach and strictly control the hardware that your software can run on, but you can always fuck that up to. You always have to wait for the first round of updates (or in Apple's situation, a free carrying case for every user) and hope that fixes it.
until SP1.
This is insightful. Not sure why you got modded down but I was just thinking the exact same thing.
Mod parent up.
Admittedly, you SHOULD already know what the Stop Online Piracey Act is, but whoever modded you as flamebait obviously had an axe to grind.
And there is always a chance that the wind turbine in my yard could get struck by lightning and blown into my neighbors dying spruce tree, igniting the side of his house during a wind storm, in turn setting the connecting fence ablaze causing our entire town and the surrounding national forest to erupt in a giant hell-fire of death, moving across Northern Colorado in to the mountains where the fire-fighting capabilities of sparse municipalities are defensless against its firey rage.
Its just not a very good chance.
The only fair comparison is a measurement of deaths-per-Terawatt. And large scale nuclear has proven pretty good even after the contrived linear-no-threshold-model gymnastics that FUD spreaders like to use.
How much?
You sound like one of my PMs here. As long as it works right, the customer won't care right? Wrong.
The fallacy is this. The code WILL NOT WORK RIGHT on the first go. Your customers will often be willing to pay for more features than you planned for in the next version. Your QA testers will find as many bugs as they can, but the scale at which they can test is never close to what it will be in production. You WILL have to support the software, you WILL have to release patches, and someday, someone WILL want to reuse your code.
True, the cost of writing the code is heavily front-loaded and therefore seems larger. But the cost of maintanence is never ever trivial. A good developers will come to understand this, so long as they have to maintain their own code. A good developer will offer resistance to a PM that emphasizes cost of coding over the elegance and extensibility of the code. If theses developers in India are building a career, they will become good developers.
Yeah, terrible thing about what happened at Fukushima. HOW MANY MORE WILL HAVE TO DIE???
I think it's funny that whenever anti-nuclear people talk about nuclear, they bring up a reactor from 25 years ago, but whenever they talk about other alternatives to fossil fuels, its always some cutting-edge solar project or some future break through in energy storage that nobody nowhere has commercially implemented.
Ask them why, and its all, "you know, the Man and stuff, and the Banksters, and the you know, the Nuclear Industry with their corporate... uh... thought police and they have the world governments in their pockets."
Sweet Lord.
They have about 45B in cash. Their market cap is about 220B. Does this mean that if their share price dropped below $5.20 that Microsoft could potentially buy out Microsoft?
a lot of editorial comments, branding WP7 as Windows Mobile, and obvious misleading lines. The headers to the patents involved misled me to believe that the patents covered broad UI concepts with huge areas of scope with 15 years of prior art. Patent 5,889,522 for example was stated as claiming "putting known tab controls into an operating system for use by all applications rather than providing tabs on an application-by-application basis."
That sounds wicked general and its a really old UI concept that seems obvious to anyone who switched to Firefox back in the day for exactly that reason. Until you read the actual patent and discover that in reality they are claiming the implementation of the UI SDK framework that comes as part of the OS. Oh yeah, and the patent was filed back in 1994. I'm not sure how many operating systems offered tab-centric UI support in the SDKs for third party apps back then, but I'm thinking prior art will be a little hard to come by, and tabs sure as hell didn't seem like such a duh-concept back before they were ubiquitous, much less a specific object implementation of a tab control in a common UI SDK for the OS.
After reading a few of the actual claims from some of the patents, I stopped wasting my time and discarded the whole patent table. After the TFA came out and stated that Microsoft was pure evil, which was unfortunately at the very end, I felt dirty for having even clicked. What MS is doing may be wrong, and it certainly hinders innovation, but let us not pretend that one company serving its shareholders' interests is going to be evil while another company doing the same damn thing is going to be the Shining White Knight of our fantasy.
Its a subsidy. The public is assuming risk or cost on behalf of a non-public entity. That's a subsidy. BUT you shouldn't count this as a strike against nuclear and here's why:
This is NOT a typical business risk that the public is assuming. The typical business risks are the increasing market value of inputs and the decreasing market value of outputs. Your plain-old honest market forces being plain-old unpredictable. But that is not the case with nuclear.
Nuclear has big returns, but also has huge investments. It also has a long lead-time. Your typical nuclear construction project has miles of regulatory red-tape, truck-loads of public design review, and a moving-target approval process that must span several political cycles. The public-at-large believes the NRC to be a rubber-stamping revolving door for the industry, but ironically enough, people in the nuclear industry believe the NRC is there to over-regulate, micro-manage and generally crush your hopes and dreams.
You can play the parlor games of calculating how many Chernobyl-scale accidents would have to happen per year before we would say the nuclear industry regulations WEREN'T ridiculous when compared to other base-load energy sources.
But the general point is that a lot of the risk of nuclear power isn't from melt-downs or contamination leaks. No, most of it is associated with developing and building nuclear plants, and is artificially contrived from public opinion and the political process keeping the plant from ever getting off the ground in the first place. This is of course true for many business ventures, but it is ESPECIALLY true for the nuclear industry. It seems fitting to me that the public should bare at least part of the burden of risk that the public created.