I don't work for Apple but my guess is that it would be attractive for a scammy app to give itself a name like "Android mail" or something that could fool unsophisticated users into downloading it, just because their friend has mail on their android phone. So it is much more likely that a label like "android" will be abused so it is easier to just make developers of legitimate apps use a different name.
On the information superhighway, cool wind in my hair,
Warm smell of Doritos, rising up through the air
Up ahead in the distance, I saw a touchscreen with light
My laptop's too heavy and my dumb phone sucks
I had to stop for the night
There she stood at the genius bar;
I heard The Joshua Tree
And I was thinking to myself,
"This could be Heaven or this could be Siri"
Then she swiped to unlock it, and she showed me the way
There were hipsters down the corridor,
I thought I heard them say...
Welcome to the Hotel Cupertino!
Such a lovely place
Such a lovely interface
Plenty of apps at the Hotel Cupertino
Every other year
Have to buy new gear
Her mind is Tiffany-twisted, she got the Mercedes bends
She got a lot of app developers she calls friends
How they code like some monkeys, in a shop filled with sweat.
Some code to remember, some code to forget
So I called up the CEO,
"Please bring me my 'i'"
He said, "We haven't had that spirit here since 2009"
And still those hipsters are calling from far away,
Amber alert in the middle of the night
Just to hear them say...
Welcome to the Hotel Cupertino
Such a lovely place
Such a lovely interface
They livin' it up at the Hotel Cupertino
Alibis you bring...
There's just one more thing...
Selfie sticks now with bluetooth,
Instagrams look like ice
And she said "We are all just prisoners here, of the Apple device"
And in the Apple store,
Nobody ever feels fleeced
They trade in all their old device,
But they never pay the least
Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the OS I was on before
"Relax, " said the genius,
"It is programmed to receive.
You can check-out any time you like,
But you can never leave!
I seriously doubt the US government will start insuring bitcoin deposits
It's actually not as strange as it seems. The government insures any and all kinds of securities under SIPCas long as the institution that is holding those assets is insured. I just used FDIC because that is what people are more familiar with. But FDIC is to insure a deposit in a bank, which as we all know isn't actually held in the vault, it gets lent out to some guy buying a house or a car so if the bank has trouble, your money isn't there. But Bitcoin at Mt Gox wasn't a "deposit" where they could then lend those Bitcoin out willy nilly. Financial intermediaries who are simply holding *your* assets are different - if they get into trouble, your assets should still be there unless someone inside stole it (for various definitions of "stole"). So you don't need FDIC insurance for what happened to Mt Gox.
For example, if people could hold their Bitcoin in Charles Schwab, and the CEO of Charles Schwab stole all the Bitcoin, the US government (under SIPC) would insure them and reimburse investors for their losses (up to $500,000).
The non-recoverability of funds is *entirely* due to the fact that the assets were held in Mt Gox and not because they were Bitcoin (with the caveat that, as pointed out above, the financial system around Bitcoin is too immature to currently have any SIPC insured broker dealers AFAIK).
there's no guarantee that those people will get their money back - unlike with a government-issued, government-insured currency.
is sound, it's actually a little more subtle than that. The reason that people who lost money in Mt Gox can't get their money back isn't because it was in Bitcoin. In theory, the US government could decide to insure Bitcoin deposits in FDIC-regulated banks (of course they don't currently), even though the US government can't print Bitcoin (of course, the value of that guarantee is only as good as the US government's ability to get its hands on Bitcoin if a bank goes under). The reason people won't get their money back from Mt Gox is because Mt Gox isn't an FDIC insured bank. Even if people just deposited US Dollars in Mt Gox, they would have lost everything when it was stolen because there is no "deposit insurance" for a company that isn't FDIC-insured.
While it may seem like I am being pedantic for the sake of a silly "gotcha," that is not my intent. Instead, the very important point that this illustrates is that there is a big difference between Bitcoin as a currency, versus "Bitcoin" as a financial system. As strong as Bitcoin as a currency may be, the Bitcoin financial system is barely embryonic and needs to do a lot to develop the kind of institutional heft that the current financial system has. Note that this does not have to be centralized (and certainly doesn't have to be done through a government), but it's much more likely that large numbers of ordinary Joes will use Bitcoin only if the larger system is more robust.
Although I dislike the "rent everything" future as much as you, it makes sense, even if you don't assume that these companies are blood sucking greedy vampires. The basic problem is that economies of scale are tremendously high for most modern goods. Once you create the master track (at great expense), distributing music to millions has never been cheaper. Once you invent the iPhone 23 (at great expense), slave labor in the far East builds them for $100 each. This is different from even highly capital intensive industries like automobiles where 50% or more of the cost to a consumer is just the raw materials.
In this world, if you view the "thing that is purchased" as the individual item, like a single song, then in the long run it will be hard for companies to charge anything at all. But if the "thing that is purchased" is the entire system, such as the entire music industry (or a large part of it), or the Apple smart phone industry, then those initial costs get factored in and the price to consumers doesn't go to zero.
It is an interesting response by companies to the digital economy, and may just be during a transition period before a true post-scarcity digital world.
It is very upsetting to see so many automakers build processing into the car, like satnav and fancy touchscreen audio. That becomes obsolete much more quickly than the mechanicals. But unlike the planned obsolescence from 50 years ago where a rusted out death trap with a leaky engine gasket isn't worth the money to fix, people can still use a car for it's primary purpose (transportation) well after the in-dash MySpace integration is obsolete.
But I think there is a place for automaker innovation beyond merely mechanical tech. I don't think that a HUD is a bad idea, since even though it may only save.01 seconds when looking down at the speed, at the margin I'm sure it's a little bit safer, and maybe a little bit more entertaining, and therefore at a cheap enough price it makes sense. For in-car entertainment, they should figure out how to make better tactile UI, which barring a great advancement on haptic technology, means physical steering wheel controls that are probably the same buttons on the lock screen of your smartphone. But touchscreens aren't safe because you have to take your eyes off the road, and touchscreen interfaces designed by automakers are really unsafe because you have to take your eyes off the road for a long time to figure out how the heck to make the audio system do what you want it to do.
So I assume you clip coupons, right? For $3 you can pick up the Sunday paper, peruse the advertisements, and work all morning so you can save (typically) $5-15. And of course you dig through the store leaflets to decide which store you go to based on where the sales are. That's good for another $5 or so. This only takes a little bit of time and over the course of the year will save hundreds of dollars.
There was a time in my life when I did that to save every little penny. Now I am in a totally different income quartile and I would gladly spend hundreds of dollars per year to spend a couple more hours with my family, or going to the gym, or even catching up on some reading. I am making mature, rational choices as to where I want to spend my money versus my time. You are free to make different decisions, but everybody spends money on something that someone else would think is a "waste".
Exactly. If you want the cheapest price on something, cut coupons and brave the crowds at the local Walmart. The dash button is about convenience. For people who have all the time in the world, then it makes sense to go out to the store whenever you discover you are out of something. For people who only have time on the weekends, it makes sense to make a shopping list and inventory the consumable products in your home and stock up as needed. But if you have other things that you want to do on the weekend, then anything that reduces the amount of time making a list and walking the aisles at the store is a big plus, and definitely worth the extra $1.50 to use the dash button.
How do you know he lives someplace where moving north doesn't get hotter still? Or that where he lives this year isn't already someplace more south than where he lived last year? I know you are just trying to help but sometimes you need to gather more facts.
I think it's a play on this meme. Like, I heard you like power plants (e.g. a coal firing electricity factory) so I put some powerful plants (e.g. CO2 absorbing members of kingdom Plantae) in your power plant (e.g. coal firing electricity factory) so you can power (verb) your plant (noun) while you plant (verb) plants (noun).
I don't understand your logic. If slavery "used to be" constitutional, and isn't now, then doesn't that help to support an argument that the constitution is perfect just as it is? If slavery "still is" constitutional, then that would be a knock against it, but to fault something today for what it used to be doesn't make sense. It's like saying that butterflies are ugly because they are fat, have a lot of legs, and can't fly.
If you are saying that ground installations are the greatest threat to future air operations then it logically follows that prioritizing against that threat even if it means giving short shrift to a modern jet's dogfighting capabilities is the right thing to do. And I wholeheartedly agree.
War is all about telling your enemy what they can and can't do. Gunpowder said "Your suit of armor is worthless now." The rifled barrel said "Don't get so close to me." Machine guns and artillery said "I will slaughter your entire regiment if you charge my position."
You are correct that the opponent doesn't have to listen, but if you have the technology to back it up, then that will be very costly for them. So the outstanding question is whether technology has made the tactic of getting within cannon range and outmaneuvering an opponent a costly one or not. Clearly AAM tech circa 1960 was not enough. But modern missile tech? Plus stealth? I dunno. I think the F35 project in particular has been a disaster, but the idea that a squadron of 5th gen jets can use stealth and precision strike capabilities to destroy large numbers of 4th gen jets while they are still on the ground, or destroy enough CnC capabilities as to make a coordinated response impossible, seems pretty sound to me.
You argue in half your comments that current gen planes need to be ready for dogfighting. But then here you fault someone for wanting to fight the last war. Why is a strike aircraft doing bombing missions a part of past wars, but not future wars, while dogfighting is a part of both past and future wars?
While everybody knows the story of how a cannon for dogfighting was added to the F4 because they predicted incorrectly about dogfighting, just as pertinent here is how a the F15E strike eagle was developed because it's a shame not to be able to destroy ground targets on a very competent weapons platform. So making a fighter with limited dogfighting capabilities but reasonable bombing capabilities seems to be exactly the opposite of "fighting the last war." Rather, they are trying to build a weapons system for the next conflict as they currently envision it. You can agree or disagree with their vision of future conflict, but it's not fair to say they aren't even trying.
Someday, air planners will be correct about the end of the dogfighting era. Eventually, technology change will make aerial dogfights go the way of the massed infantry charge. I just wish that there was a good way to evaluate how close or far that day is.
what if the Germans had five more years of time to refine many of their (then) far-out ideas?
All what-ifs about WWII are ended by the fact that the only safe place for most of theworld'sgreatestphysicists was in the US just as humanity was on the verge of inventing the only superweapon of the war that matters. A world where the Germans do not surrender is a world without cities in the area formerly known as Germany.
I'm not proposing absolute author control either. Remixes have a place, and maybe non-commercial, non-political redistribution rights should be forced to be given under fairly liberal terms.
But here you have a case of a guy who took some video, and then some large media companies come along and make money off from it without even original source attribution. Don't you think he should have some sort of recourse to say, "hey you can't do that!"? Without some kind of copyright, how would someone know which is the certified original and which is the fork? After all, I'm sure CNN could just copy whatever certification that "this is the original" that goes along with the CNN version (see: all DRM is broken)
Back to my original point, isn't there a middle ground between, "CNN can rip off anybody they can steal video from?" and "Any level of copyright prevents us from standing on the shoulders of giants"?
Copyright is about more than just whether you can make a copy of some silly 1980's movie to watch with your friends. What if you wrote a novel with some basic plot about people falling in love. Then someone changes a couple paragraphs to make it a pro-racism (or pro-life, or pro-vim, or whatever other holy war you are on the opposite side of) tirade and distributes it freely. No matter how much you dislike media companies, it is hard to say that authors should have no rights over their work for any amount of time. And even if you did, you would have to amend the constitution to strike the copyright clause. Good luck with that.
But more importantly, you aren't really calling for destroying the whole system. You are proposing a perfectly reasonable copyright term of 2 decades which is exactly the kind of "middle of the road" proposal that I was thinking about.
No...copyright is a complex tool and like any tool has both good and bad uses. Which is why we should debate openly the exact provisions of what terms best fulfill the Constitutional prescription for copyright, balancing the desires of the creator and short term and long term good to society. The false dichotomy of "no rights for artists who don't want their work used for evil propaganda" and "no copying for 8 million years after the death of the artist or the destruction of the earth, whichever is longer" helps no one.
If a company is profitable but isn't paying a dividend, then one of the following must be true:
1) They are investing cash in new businesses or opportunities as quickly as they are bringing it in. A growing business with good opportunities should be doing this instead of paying out a dividend and stunting their growth.
2) They are using their cash to buy back shares in the market. This extra demand for shares makes the price go up
3) They save the cash. This increases the value of the firm and outside investors will bid up the share price ceteris paribus
In all but the first case, the price of the stock in an efficient market must go up. So it is more than mere "hope" that the price goes up if the company doesn't pay a dividend. Unless they are reinvesting (and if they did that they wouldn't pay a dividend either), stock price appreciation is a perfectly valid way to increase shareholder assets.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would it need to comit them?
Unless the law says you can't game the test. I believe you meant to make a normative statement instead of a positive one.
I don't work for Apple but my guess is that it would be attractive for a scammy app to give itself a name like "Android mail" or something that could fool unsophisticated users into downloading it, just because their friend has mail on their android phone. So it is much more likely that a label like "android" will be abused so it is easier to just make developers of legitimate apps use a different name.
On the information superhighway, cool wind in my hair,
Warm smell of Doritos, rising up through the air
Up ahead in the distance, I saw a touchscreen with light
My laptop's too heavy and my dumb phone sucks
I had to stop for the night
There she stood at the genius bar;
I heard The Joshua Tree
And I was thinking to myself,
"This could be Heaven or this could be Siri"
Then she swiped to unlock it, and she showed me the way
There were hipsters down the corridor,
I thought I heard them say...
Welcome to the Hotel Cupertino!
Such a lovely place
Such a lovely interface
Plenty of apps at the Hotel Cupertino
Every other year
Have to buy new gear
Her mind is Tiffany-twisted, she got the Mercedes bends
She got a lot of app developers she calls friends
How they code like some monkeys, in a shop filled with sweat.
Some code to remember, some code to forget
So I called up the CEO,
"Please bring me my 'i'"
He said, "We haven't had that spirit here since 2009"
And still those hipsters are calling from far away,
Amber alert in the middle of the night
Just to hear them say...
Welcome to the Hotel Cupertino
Such a lovely place
Such a lovely interface
They livin' it up at the Hotel Cupertino
Alibis you bring...
There's just one more thing...
Selfie sticks now with bluetooth,
Instagrams look like ice
And she said "We are all just prisoners here, of the Apple device"
And in the Apple store,
Nobody ever feels fleeced
They trade in all their old device,
But they never pay the least
Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the OS I was on before
"Relax, " said the genius,
"It is programmed to receive.
You can check-out any time you like,
But you can never leave!
I seriously doubt the US government will start insuring bitcoin deposits
It's actually not as strange as it seems. The government insures any and all kinds of securities under SIPC as long as the institution that is holding those assets is insured. I just used FDIC because that is what people are more familiar with. But FDIC is to insure a deposit in a bank, which as we all know isn't actually held in the vault, it gets lent out to some guy buying a house or a car so if the bank has trouble, your money isn't there. But Bitcoin at Mt Gox wasn't a "deposit" where they could then lend those Bitcoin out willy nilly. Financial intermediaries who are simply holding *your* assets are different - if they get into trouble, your assets should still be there unless someone inside stole it (for various definitions of "stole"). So you don't need FDIC insurance for what happened to Mt Gox.
For example, if people could hold their Bitcoin in Charles Schwab, and the CEO of Charles Schwab stole all the Bitcoin, the US government (under SIPC) would insure them and reimburse investors for their losses (up to $500,000).
The non-recoverability of funds is *entirely* due to the fact that the assets were held in Mt Gox and not because they were Bitcoin (with the caveat that, as pointed out above, the financial system around Bitcoin is too immature to currently have any SIPC insured broker dealers AFAIK).
Although your conclusion
there's no guarantee that those people will get their money back - unlike with a government-issued, government-insured currency.
is sound, it's actually a little more subtle than that. The reason that people who lost money in Mt Gox can't get their money back isn't because it was in Bitcoin. In theory, the US government could decide to insure Bitcoin deposits in FDIC-regulated banks (of course they don't currently), even though the US government can't print Bitcoin (of course, the value of that guarantee is only as good as the US government's ability to get its hands on Bitcoin if a bank goes under). The reason people won't get their money back from Mt Gox is because Mt Gox isn't an FDIC insured bank. Even if people just deposited US Dollars in Mt Gox, they would have lost everything when it was stolen because there is no "deposit insurance" for a company that isn't FDIC-insured.
While it may seem like I am being pedantic for the sake of a silly "gotcha," that is not my intent. Instead, the very important point that this illustrates is that there is a big difference between Bitcoin as a currency, versus "Bitcoin" as a financial system. As strong as Bitcoin as a currency may be, the Bitcoin financial system is barely embryonic and needs to do a lot to develop the kind of institutional heft that the current financial system has. Note that this does not have to be centralized (and certainly doesn't have to be done through a government), but it's much more likely that large numbers of ordinary Joes will use Bitcoin only if the larger system is more robust.
Although I dislike the "rent everything" future as much as you, it makes sense, even if you don't assume that these companies are blood sucking greedy vampires. The basic problem is that economies of scale are tremendously high for most modern goods. Once you create the master track (at great expense), distributing music to millions has never been cheaper. Once you invent the iPhone 23 (at great expense), slave labor in the far East builds them for $100 each. This is different from even highly capital intensive industries like automobiles where 50% or more of the cost to a consumer is just the raw materials.
In this world, if you view the "thing that is purchased" as the individual item, like a single song, then in the long run it will be hard for companies to charge anything at all. But if the "thing that is purchased" is the entire system, such as the entire music industry (or a large part of it), or the Apple smart phone industry, then those initial costs get factored in and the price to consumers doesn't go to zero.
It is an interesting response by companies to the digital economy, and may just be during a transition period before a true post-scarcity digital world.
It is very upsetting to see so many automakers build processing into the car, like satnav and fancy touchscreen audio. That becomes obsolete much more quickly than the mechanicals. But unlike the planned obsolescence from 50 years ago where a rusted out death trap with a leaky engine gasket isn't worth the money to fix, people can still use a car for it's primary purpose (transportation) well after the in-dash MySpace integration is obsolete.
.01 seconds when looking down at the speed, at the margin I'm sure it's a little bit safer, and maybe a little bit more entertaining, and therefore at a cheap enough price it makes sense. For in-car entertainment, they should figure out how to make better tactile UI, which barring a great advancement on haptic technology, means physical steering wheel controls that are probably the same buttons on the lock screen of your smartphone. But touchscreens aren't safe because you have to take your eyes off the road, and touchscreen interfaces designed by automakers are really unsafe because you have to take your eyes off the road for a long time to figure out how the heck to make the audio system do what you want it to do.
But I think there is a place for automaker innovation beyond merely mechanical tech. I don't think that a HUD is a bad idea, since even though it may only save
So I assume you clip coupons, right? For $3 you can pick up the Sunday paper, peruse the advertisements, and work all morning so you can save (typically) $5-15. And of course you dig through the store leaflets to decide which store you go to based on where the sales are. That's good for another $5 or so. This only takes a little bit of time and over the course of the year will save hundreds of dollars.
There was a time in my life when I did that to save every little penny. Now I am in a totally different income quartile and I would gladly spend hundreds of dollars per year to spend a couple more hours with my family, or going to the gym, or even catching up on some reading. I am making mature, rational choices as to where I want to spend my money versus my time. You are free to make different decisions, but everybody spends money on something that someone else would think is a "waste".
Exactly. If you want the cheapest price on something, cut coupons and brave the crowds at the local Walmart. The dash button is about convenience. For people who have all the time in the world, then it makes sense to go out to the store whenever you discover you are out of something. For people who only have time on the weekends, it makes sense to make a shopping list and inventory the consumable products in your home and stock up as needed. But if you have other things that you want to do on the weekend, then anything that reduces the amount of time making a list and walking the aisles at the store is a big plus, and definitely worth the extra $1.50 to use the dash button.
How do you know he lives someplace where moving north doesn't get hotter still? Or that where he lives this year isn't already someplace more south than where he lived last year? I know you are just trying to help but sometimes you need to gather more facts.
I think it's a play on this meme. Like, I heard you like power plants (e.g. a coal firing electricity factory) so I put some powerful plants (e.g. CO2 absorbing members of kingdom Plantae) in your power plant (e.g. coal firing electricity factory) so you can power (verb) your plant (noun) while you plant (verb) plants (noun).
this country's puritanical environment
Yeah, people in Canada and Saudi Arabia are so judgmental. I'm glad I live in the US where we can have these discussions!
I don't understand your logic. If slavery "used to be" constitutional, and isn't now, then doesn't that help to support an argument that the constitution is perfect just as it is? If slavery "still is" constitutional, then that would be a knock against it, but to fault something today for what it used to be doesn't make sense. It's like saying that butterflies are ugly because they are fat, have a lot of legs, and can't fly.
So what? She is saying that 10% of life's problems can be best solved by setting fire to something. That sounds about right.
If you are saying that ground installations are the greatest threat to future air operations then it logically follows that prioritizing against that threat even if it means giving short shrift to a modern jet's dogfighting capabilities is the right thing to do. And I wholeheartedly agree.
War is all about telling your enemy what they can and can't do. Gunpowder said "Your suit of armor is worthless now." The rifled barrel said "Don't get so close to me." Machine guns and artillery said "I will slaughter your entire regiment if you charge my position."
You are correct that the opponent doesn't have to listen, but if you have the technology to back it up, then that will be very costly for them. So the outstanding question is whether technology has made the tactic of getting within cannon range and outmaneuvering an opponent a costly one or not. Clearly AAM tech circa 1960 was not enough. But modern missile tech? Plus stealth? I dunno. I think the F35 project in particular has been a disaster, but the idea that a squadron of 5th gen jets can use stealth and precision strike capabilities to destroy large numbers of 4th gen jets while they are still on the ground, or destroy enough CnC capabilities as to make a coordinated response impossible, seems pretty sound to me.
So where does that scenario of F35 vs SU35 happen without a serious risk of all out nuclear war?
The war of Chinese Territorial Integrity (known in the West as the Battle of South China Sea and War for Taiwanese Independence) of 2032?
You argue in half your comments that current gen planes need to be ready for dogfighting. But then here you fault someone for wanting to fight the last war. Why is a strike aircraft doing bombing missions a part of past wars, but not future wars, while dogfighting is a part of both past and future wars?
While everybody knows the story of how a cannon for dogfighting was added to the F4 because they predicted incorrectly about dogfighting, just as pertinent here is how a the F15E strike eagle was developed because it's a shame not to be able to destroy ground targets on a very competent weapons platform. So making a fighter with limited dogfighting capabilities but reasonable bombing capabilities seems to be exactly the opposite of "fighting the last war." Rather, they are trying to build a weapons system for the next conflict as they currently envision it. You can agree or disagree with their vision of future conflict, but it's not fair to say they aren't even trying.
Someday, air planners will be correct about the end of the dogfighting era. Eventually, technology change will make aerial dogfights go the way of the massed infantry charge. I just wish that there was a good way to evaluate how close or far that day is.
what if the Germans had five more years of time to refine many of their (then) far-out ideas?
All what-ifs about WWII are ended by the fact that the only safe place for most of the world's greatest physicists was in the US just as humanity was on the verge of inventing the only superweapon of the war that matters. A world where the Germans do not surrender is a world without cities in the area formerly known as Germany.
I'm not proposing absolute author control either. Remixes have a place, and maybe non-commercial, non-political redistribution rights should be forced to be given under fairly liberal terms.
But here you have a case of a guy who took some video, and then some large media companies come along and make money off from it without even original source attribution. Don't you think he should have some sort of recourse to say, "hey you can't do that!"? Without some kind of copyright, how would someone know which is the certified original and which is the fork? After all, I'm sure CNN could just copy whatever certification that "this is the original" that goes along with the CNN version (see: all DRM is broken)
Back to my original point, isn't there a middle ground between, "CNN can rip off anybody they can steal video from?" and "Any level of copyright prevents us from standing on the shoulders of giants"?
Copyright is about more than just whether you can make a copy of some silly 1980's movie to watch with your friends. What if you wrote a novel with some basic plot about people falling in love. Then someone changes a couple paragraphs to make it a pro-racism (or pro-life, or pro-vim, or whatever other holy war you are on the opposite side of) tirade and distributes it freely. No matter how much you dislike media companies, it is hard to say that authors should have no rights over their work for any amount of time. And even if you did, you would have to amend the constitution to strike the copyright clause. Good luck with that.
But more importantly, you aren't really calling for destroying the whole system. You are proposing a perfectly reasonable copyright term of 2 decades which is exactly the kind of "middle of the road" proposal that I was thinking about.
No...copyright is a complex tool and like any tool has both good and bad uses. Which is why we should debate openly the exact provisions of what terms best fulfill the Constitutional prescription for copyright, balancing the desires of the creator and short term and long term good to society. The false dichotomy of "no rights for artists who don't want their work used for evil propaganda" and "no copying for 8 million years after the death of the artist or the destruction of the earth, whichever is longer" helps no one.
If a company is profitable but isn't paying a dividend, then one of the following must be true:
1) They are investing cash in new businesses or opportunities as quickly as they are bringing it in. A growing business with good opportunities should be doing this instead of paying out a dividend and stunting their growth.
2) They are using their cash to buy back shares in the market. This extra demand for shares makes the price go up
3) They save the cash. This increases the value of the firm and outside investors will bid up the share price ceteris paribus
In all but the first case, the price of the stock in an efficient market must go up. So it is more than mere "hope" that the price goes up if the company doesn't pay a dividend. Unless they are reinvesting (and if they did that they wouldn't pay a dividend either), stock price appreciation is a perfectly valid way to increase shareholder assets.