The industry analysts and pundits have been predicting this for ages: that while Apple led for ages, and reaped windfall profits as a consequence, there would be a stampede into the smartphone market, and Google would barge in, turn smartphones into a commodity, and crush Apple's margins. This is not a surprise. Happens in markets all the time, and had previously happened in the PC market, where nowadays, it's impossible to make serious money on PC hardware, and the only people selling parts are people happy to sell huge volumes on razor-thin margins.
What's interesting about this story, at least for me, is that iPad sales have tanked. Maybe that suggests that Android on tablets has matured somewhat from the early days of few, clunky tablet apps, and that tablets are commodities now too.
I think the idiotic lack of originality that emanates from American 'creative' industries is no news.
For instance, there was Independence Day, so there were several cheap knockoffs in quick succession immediately afterwards. Movies with brutal rape scenes were in vogue for a while, again, the copycats. This summer -- superhero movies and a stack of copycats.
When you have the autistic American obsession with profit at the expense of fulfilling your primary mission well, you have a recipe for lack of innovation and general crappiness. Might explain why Americans can't make cars -- and worse yet, can't even manage to copy the Japanese effectively.
Getting hold of a firearm, even for criminals, isn't trivial. Against people who are too lazy/stupid to obey the law in any case, the law serves its purpose.
It's hard to know what the 'next step' will be (beyond the invention of PageRank), but what happens if it turns out that it's possible to indeed effectively divine what people are searching for, and effectively block it?
People here seem to be thinking that keyword blocking is so ineffective, that the proposal will be laughed out of the room. Because when it becomes possible to build a model of somebody's search strategy (if it isn't already) and it can be admissible in court as intent of criminal intent, then all of a sudden, everyone will stop laughing.
The scary thing for me *isn't* that a bunch of powerful tech-illiterates are meddling; it's that they might be accidentally right; that effective blocking technology is indeed around the corner, it gets mandated by government -- and then the technology is misused to make certain kinds of thought and discussion effectively impossible in ways the Chinese Communist Party could barely dream of.
How about finding a way to eliminate our dependence on crude oil?
The West would be so much stronger, if it weren't us having to pay jizya to those crude savages in the Middle East.
Oil dependence is about Muslim domination and arrogant Muslim economic power, creeping cultural imperialism, and keeping us weak. How about we kick the oil habit, so we can kick the barbarians to the kerb?
The state is the expression of the collective will of a society. The more advanced and democratic that society, the more likely it is to reflect the collective will. That will reflects that society's priorities, hopes and fears.
As it were, it appears, judging by the size of the US military, that the US as a nation are fearful and paranoid.
That might be a difficult concept for an American to grasp, but it's an uncomfortable truth.
Don't pretend that "the government" is some distant, remote entity. Last time I looked, the government was staffed, run and overseen by citizens too.
Don't like it? Then do something about it. Then the change must come from society, and government will reflect that change. That's already been demonstrated through the civil rights era and the Vietnam War.
Just don't lie to yourself that you aren't "the government".
Everyone spies. The French and the British have just been busted doing it, to a far greater extent than the US. Read about 'full take' if you don't know what I'm talking about.
The fact that Snowden is being lauded as some kind of hero, when he's just a mindless, mentally ill vandal, who's destroying people's jobs, business and livelihoods everywhere, is unbelievable.
Orbital rendezvous and docking is hard, but a totally different problem to landing a drone on an aircraft carrier.
The Russians built theirs decades ago (Progress dockings are automatic by default, with manual overrides). The European ATV has completely automatic rendezvous and docking. The operators in the station have an ATV console with two buttons on it only: "back off", and "abort".
The Japanese HTV has no automated docking capability. The HTV has to be grappled by the SSRMS when it comes into range. Actually on that side of the station, it's not even called "docking", they call it "berthing".
Nice Godwin. I see that a call for government to step in to deal with problem families and generational dysfunction will get you called a fascist around here.
On the contrary, "those people" probably got a better appreciation of the complementary notions of rights and responsibilities. People can behave like children, and sometimes need structure like children.
I'd say you're American, since you seem to think that freedom to cause chaos should be completely unconditional, that mentally/socially incapable people deserve to be stigmatized and pass on that dysfunction to their kids -- and that responsibility is for the birds. I see some REALLY warped ideas of how freedom works here.
Sheltered housing units for 'families from hell' (where people live in good housing, and get intensive "coaching" from social workers) are already being trialled here in the UK, and they're delivering good results.
Freedom shouldn't be absolutely unconditional; freedom and responsibility are two sides of the same coin. People are increasingly conscious of the fact that it's cheaper and more humane to spend a bit of money upfront, to control the useless and chaotic amongst us for the benefit of all. The cost of picking up the pieces of ignoring the problems of intergenerational uselessness is increasingly one we cannot afford.
I have to wonder why people are so anti-government, that they live with the idea that while they themselves make a net contribution to society, there are plenty of people who simply lack the ability to manage their own chaotic lives and make everyone else's lives hell.
The libertarian conceit of the middle class, is that everyone else is just as clever, motivated, drug-free and mentally healthy as them, and that the useless are somehow "morally inferior" to their betters. Worse, this conceit goes as far as blaming the useless amongst us, saying they deserve to be dead or rot in jail.
One day, we'll have something between jails (for rehabilitation of criminals) and open society, where people who are too stupid and useless to manage their own chaotic lives can live reasonably well under a highly controlled environment where they can be made to do something useful with their lives and have structure imposed upon them until they can prove that they can properly exercise the rights and responsibilites of citizenship. This may include being compelled to train and work (for pay), and also involve drug rehab, and losing their automatic right to have children.
The "trash" (as people who say) who spawn kids who join gangs belong in sheltered facilities, not on the street.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate that evil old rightwing cunt. I hope he dies of cancer.
If Google can pull this off (and no doubt they will), everyone will be like "TAKE MY MONEY PLEASE"
That alone would be enough to convince me to switch to Google-everything. ATM, streaming sports semi-legally from other countries is a complete joke,
Google certainly have the size, finance and power to do it; now it's a question of will.
Rent-seekers of the world unite!!
... it being so completely hidebound by strong DRM, that it'll be completely unusable -- and in due course, completely irrelevant?
SO typical of Sony.
This turkey is DOA.
Like a 'cleveland steamer', but with a Soviet-era tank.
'Yeah good morning, I'd like the porn filter on my broadband turned off, please?'
'What, are you some kind of PERVERT?'
.... that this Government are a bunch of complete fucking idiots.
(In case it wasn't obvious from the PM's rhetoric about the 'I am a pervert' opt-out porn filter.)
The industry analysts and pundits have been predicting this for ages: that while Apple led for ages, and reaped windfall profits as a consequence, there would be a stampede into the smartphone market, and Google would barge in, turn smartphones into a commodity, and crush Apple's margins. This is not a surprise. Happens in markets all the time, and had previously happened in the PC market, where nowadays, it's impossible to make serious money on PC hardware, and the only people selling parts are people happy to sell huge volumes on razor-thin margins.
What's interesting about this story, at least for me, is that iPad sales have tanked. Maybe that suggests that Android on tablets has matured somewhat from the early days of few, clunky tablet apps, and that tablets are commodities now too.
Greed makes for shit art, shit entertainment and *gasp* shit profits.
Serves the dickheads right.
I think the idiotic lack of originality that emanates from American 'creative' industries is no news.
For instance, there was Independence Day, so there were several cheap knockoffs in quick succession immediately afterwards. Movies with brutal rape scenes were in vogue for a while, again, the copycats. This summer -- superhero movies and a stack of copycats.
When you have the autistic American obsession with profit at the expense of fulfilling your primary mission well, you have a recipe for lack of innovation and general crappiness. Might explain why Americans can't make cars -- and worse yet, can't even manage to copy the Japanese effectively.
And yet the fraud itself was uncovered by other scientists. So it would appear that the process itself is more-or-less working.
Too bad Andrew Wakefield, for all the blood on his hands, won't find himself in jail.
I suppose him being forcibly injected up the backside on a nightly basis, would be poetic justice.
Getting hold of a firearm, even for criminals, isn't trivial. Against people who are too lazy/stupid to obey the law in any case, the law serves its purpose.
It's hard to know what the 'next step' will be (beyond the invention of PageRank), but what happens if it turns out that it's possible to indeed effectively divine what people are searching for, and effectively block it?
People here seem to be thinking that keyword blocking is so ineffective, that the proposal will be laughed out of the room. Because when it becomes possible to build a model of somebody's search strategy (if it isn't already) and it can be admissible in court as intent of criminal intent, then all of a sudden, everyone will stop laughing.
The scary thing for me *isn't* that a bunch of powerful tech-illiterates are meddling; it's that they might be accidentally right; that effective blocking technology is indeed around the corner, it gets mandated by government -- and then the technology is misused to make certain kinds of thought and discussion effectively impossible in ways the Chinese Communist Party could barely dream of.
How about finding a way to eliminate our dependence on crude oil?
The West would be so much stronger, if it weren't us having to pay jizya to those crude savages in the Middle East.
Oil dependence is about Muslim domination and arrogant Muslim economic power, creeping cultural imperialism, and keeping us weak. How about we kick the oil habit, so we can kick the barbarians to the kerb?
"The reason academic politics are so bitter is that so little is at stake." -- Henry Kissinger
Yes I am for real.
The state is the expression of the collective will of a society. The more advanced and democratic that society, the more likely it is to reflect the collective will. That will reflects that society's priorities, hopes and fears.
As it were, it appears, judging by the size of the US military, that the US as a nation are fearful and paranoid.
That might be a difficult concept for an American to grasp, but it's an uncomfortable truth.
Don't pretend that "the government" is some distant, remote entity. Last time I looked, the government was staffed, run and overseen by citizens too.
Don't like it? Then do something about it. Then the change must come from society, and government will reflect that change. That's already been demonstrated through the civil rights era and the Vietnam War.
Just don't lie to yourself that you aren't "the government".
Adolf Hitler was nominated for the Peace Prize in 1939.
Henry Kissinger got the Nobel Peace Prize for bombing the shit out of Vietnam and Cambodia.
Obama got the Peace Prize doing sweet FA.
The fact that somebody was either nominated for the Peace Prize, or actually won it, does not actually mean much.
Everyone spies. The French and the British have just been busted doing it, to a far greater extent than the US. Read about 'full take' if you don't know what I'm talking about.
The fact that Snowden is being lauded as some kind of hero, when he's just a mindless, mentally ill vandal, who's destroying people's jobs, business and livelihoods everywhere, is unbelievable.
Don't buy the basement-dweller libertarian hype.
And WHO, might I asked, tipped off these "Asian governments and businesses"?
If America is losing business, blame your culture of coddling attention-seeking little bitches like Snowden.
Isn't Florida run by Republicans (who are Real Americans), not the reviled, freedom-hating hippie Democrats?
Don't think about this too hard, Slashdot cyber-utopians. Your heads might explode.
Dragon is not docked, it's berthed. Furthermore, like the HTV, it needs to be grappled and berthed to the station manually.
You are wrong.
Orbital rendezvous and docking is hard, but a totally different problem to landing a drone on an aircraft carrier.
The Russians built theirs decades ago (Progress dockings are automatic by default, with manual overrides). The European ATV has completely automatic rendezvous and docking. The operators in the station have an ATV console with two buttons on it only: "back off", and "abort".
The Japanese HTV has no automated docking capability. The HTV has to be grappled by the SSRMS when it comes into range. Actually on that side of the station, it's not even called "docking", they call it "berthing".
Do your homework. This took me seconds in Google.
Nice Godwin. I see that a call for government to step in to deal with problem families and generational dysfunction will get you called a fascist around here.
On the contrary, "those people" probably got a better appreciation of the complementary notions of rights and responsibilities. People can behave like children, and sometimes need structure like children.
I'd say you're American, since you seem to think that freedom to cause chaos should be completely unconditional, that mentally/socially incapable people deserve to be stigmatized and pass on that dysfunction to their kids -- and that responsibility is for the birds. I see some REALLY warped ideas of how freedom works here.
Sheltered housing units for 'families from hell' (where people live in good housing, and get intensive "coaching" from social workers) are already being trialled here in the UK, and they're delivering good results.
Freedom shouldn't be absolutely unconditional; freedom and responsibility are two sides of the same coin. People are increasingly conscious of the fact that it's cheaper and more humane to spend a bit of money upfront, to control the useless and chaotic amongst us for the benefit of all. The cost of picking up the pieces of ignoring the problems of intergenerational uselessness is increasingly one we cannot afford.
I have to wonder why people are so anti-government, that they live with the idea that while they themselves make a net contribution to society, there are plenty of people who simply lack the ability to manage their own chaotic lives and make everyone else's lives hell.
The libertarian conceit of the middle class, is that everyone else is just as clever, motivated, drug-free and mentally healthy as them, and that the useless are somehow "morally inferior" to their betters. Worse, this conceit goes as far as blaming the useless amongst us, saying they deserve to be dead or rot in jail.
One day, we'll have something between jails (for rehabilitation of criminals) and open society, where people who are too stupid and useless to manage their own chaotic lives can live reasonably well under a highly controlled environment where they can be made to do something useful with their lives and have structure imposed upon them until they can prove that they can properly exercise the rights and responsibilites of citizenship. This may include being compelled to train and work (for pay), and also involve drug rehab, and losing their automatic right to have children.
The "trash" (as people who say) who spawn kids who join gangs belong in sheltered facilities, not on the street.