The great thing about Linux is... You can simply choose to not use Ubuntu. BAM! Problem solved.
Not quite. Linux users do rely on a large amount of other users making it viable and interesting to make applications, drivers, etc. for the platform. The more Ubuntu succeeds in gathering Linux users to their Ubuntu OS, the smaller the rest of the Linux market becomes.
Canonical wants to go their own way in order to distinguish themselves from other distributions in order to gather more Linux market share (larger slice), rather than attempt to cooperate with others to grow the market (larger cake). Canonical does not have the resources to compete with Apple, Google or Microsoft on their own, so their fragmentation of the Linux base will only result in a net loss for Linux and free software.
"And if you get a ticket from a police officer in the US? At least in some states, the officer doesn't need to present any evidence other than their own testimony and you'll be fined."
As I've stated in a reply to someone else, this is in principle just as bad, but simply another battle which may prove more difficult to win. My principle about "no profits in fining" applies to all situations a fine is issued for whatever purpose. There should never be a profit motive involved. That doesn't mean there are no other sinister motives (like a policeman or parking warden with a personal vendetta against you), but I'm willing to bet the profit motive is more common and hurts more people.
"I wonder if the judge stopped to think that this is no different than without the cameras. Tickets are a major revenue source for police departments, to the extent that it is not uncommon to hear of stations which have ticket quotas."
This is in principle just as bad. It is just difficult for the police to be as ruthlessly efficient in person as it is with cameras. And at the very least you get to see the person that issues you a ticket and can ask for the officer's name and number. But mainly just because you are losing one battle doesn't mean you can't go for another.
You missed the part where the judge said it was unconstitutionally difficult to challenge the fine. You're basically at the mercy of the enforcement agency and you have to rely on the accuracy of a company which profits massively from fining you.
I'm not totally against speed cameras, but I believe in one important thing about parking and traffic enforcement; nobody should ever profit from issuing fines, because the incentives to be arseholes are just too big.
Parking and traffic enforcement on public property and public roads should always be performed by public employees and the fines should go to a random, approved charity. The costs of running the operation should come out of tax income and no bonuses or "performance related pay" should ever be given. At least this way you take away the very real profit incentive for fining as many as possible. The sole purpose of parking and traffic enforcement should be to improve safety and flow of traffic.
But also, if you don't know how to program, you should learn, and quick. Not only will it help being able to create and run new simulations, it is also a fantastic fallback.
If you struggle to get a job in a lab afterwards, you could go for scientific/engineering developer with great domain knowledge. Think the guys that write software for bio-engineers.
Origin didn't allow purchasers to pre-load SimCity before its official launch at 12:01am EST this morning, apparently because the development team was "working to polish the game until the very last second"
Hint: you don't "work to polish the game until the last second", you work to polish and then delay launch because you can't be sure of the quality until you've retested and had a solid set of builds passing your regression testing and product testing. Who can possibly think it is a good idea to still be changing software code seconds before the launch?
Server-capacity-FAIL:
Later, even after the problems were officially "resolved," EA warned that "due to server load it may take up to three hours for your game to unlock.
Some online reports indicate that even those with the disc-based retail version of the game were delayed in their installation by Origin server problems.
Got-it-wrong-before-and-still-managed-to-FAIL:
The issues bring to mind the infamous "Error 37" that prevented many Diablo III players from logging into the game in the days after its launch last year, though it's unclear how comparatively widespread SimCity's server issues are
It isn't surprising that EA treats their customers like shit, but it is still infuriating that they can get away with this.
"Cycling increases your respiration rate so produces more CO2 than not cycling"
Walking increases your respiration rate. Your respiration rate is a function of the work your body is doing, both by merely living and by performing external work such as travelling.
Cycling may require a higher work output (i.e. Watts) by cycling, but I'm not sure how your energy usage (i.e. WattHours, Joules, or calories) compares, since the travel time will be less.
Surely the reason we cycle at all, is that the act of cycling is more efficient at converting work into miles travelled than walking? Meaning we can travel faster and further for a similar amount of energy spent?
On the other hand, if you had to produce the energy required to run a car yourself, nobody could drive. It is only possible to drive normal cars at lots of miles per hour because of all the work gone into creating fossil fuel over millions of years, something us humans had very little to do with.
Note that I haven't done any research on this, but it doesn't appear as if this but it doesn't appear that this representative has done any research either.
I would argue that it isn't HER child if you emphasised her in order to establish ownership.
I am approaching this from a European perspective, which tends to be that the child does not belong to the parents. Instead the child belongs to itself, and the parents are merely the guardians. From this perspective, the parents autonomy over their children is limited, and life-threatening irrationality should lead to you being relieved of your duties as guardian.
The most obvious example is the case from England of the mother who refused cancer treatment for her child, and ran away with him. Not only was did the English courts decide the treatment had to go ahead despite the mother's wishes, but her documented willingness to run away with the child, meant the child was ordered into foster care.
I can't help but think of the economic outcome of procedures like this once it becomes FDA-approved, mainstream treatment.
Anti-HIV drugs are outrageously expensive, partly because it's a long-term treatment. Incurring this expense at birth would severely affect one's ability to earn a decent living later on, even before being hit my student loans, mortgage, etc.
A new generation of complete povery is imminent.
Did you read the article or the summary? Did you even read the head line? The whole point of the story is the possibility that if treatment is given early enough it can become a functional cure, whereupon you may not need to receive any more treatment, ever, because your immune system can deal with it for the rest of your life.
The whole point of this story is the (possibly) good news that we may avoid exactly what you describe.
While having an HIV-infected mother may give an impression of irresponsibility, there are people out there with no history of promiscuity or drug use that have caught HIV for many different reasons. I won't make judgements based on this.
But the following two newspaper quotes caught my attention.
BBC:
The treatment was continued for 18 months, at which point the child disappeared from the medical system. Five months later the mother and child turned up again but had stopped the treatment in this interim.
Washington Post:
"The child’s mother began missing appointments after a year. At 18 months, the child was no longer on treatment. When the child was brought back to the clinic at 23 months, the viral load was still undetectable, “very much to my surprise,” Gay wrote.
It strikes me as wildly irresponsible to the point of criminal neglect to miss medical appointments for your HIV-infected child. It does not appear as if she was told it was ok not to turn up for these appointments. After all, the doctors expected the HIV infection to return if the drug treatment wasn't kept up. If this had happened, and the child had died, I would have expected the mother to be prosecuted for manslaughter.
"Once there, paediatric HIV specialist Dr Hannah Gay put the infant on a cocktail of three standard HIV-fighting drugs at just 30 hours old, even before laboratory tests came back confirming the infection."
The last part of this sentence states that infection was confirmed. However, I'd be interested to know the rate of false positives versus the rate of false negatives. There is surely always a chance that the positive tests were wrong?
If they don't then IMHO, this is a dead duck. They have a wonderful opportunity to stop the patch/reboot/patch/reboot cycle here
Please... While this is a problem for some, I'm willing to bet the amount of revenue they've lost because of it is incredibly low.
Microsoft are in serious danger of scaring off their massive army of third party developers, exactly the people who have guaranteed them success over nearly 20 years. THIS is their major problem. Metro and the Microsoft App store is a massive "fuck you" to us. This is especially true if you're invested in OpenGL. The amount of work required to bring a professional OpenGL based engineering suite over to Metro is massive.
The only group who isn't driven by fear is libertarians, people who actually have trust in their ability to make a living somehow and survive in an uncertain and changing world, independent of God or government help.
Interestingly enough, you didn't once consider concern for the plight of others in your post, but managed to make it all about the trust in your own abilities. Is it not possible that some may feel perfectly safe in their own position, but believe even the bum down the street has a right to medical care if he gets sick?
As someone else have pointed out, this already happens where feasible. But what happens if you have a factory which operates 24/7 with almost everyone being shift workers?
If it was to operate 8 hours per day only, it would need three times the production capacity in order to complete in 8 hours what it normally does in 24. This would mean a massive, costly and inefficient expansion in terms of area and equipment. Equipment which would just sit idle for 16 hours a day.
Also, your shift workers who now may do one night shift in three, would have to always work during the night.
Even though the British pence is worth more than a US dollar cent, it still is practically worthless. The only decent reason I can see for keeping them around is for charities. I always put my coppers (not really copper any more, I know) in the nearest charity box if I can see one and usually bin them if not.
"But every penny saved...", I hear you say. Well it would require me to save three hundred pennies to gain as much as a solitary pint of beer (approximately £3). The effort in keeping coppers just isn't worth it any more. If I received 5 pennies per day and binned them all, it would cost me £18 per year. On a list of potential savings I could make, this would be in the "noise" category. I probably waste hundreds of pounds per year on not making pre-packed lunches.
The pennies are considered rude to give as tips, so you can't do that and so the only valid reason for me to keep pennies around is to avoid receiving more of them. If you have 2 pence on you and you're purchasing something costing £7.02 you could always give the cashier £10 and 2 pence to avoid receiving more pennies. The problem is that people are so bad at mental arithmetic these days they spend ages trying to figure out why you gave them 2 pence.
I would be delighted if the UK got rid of the coppers. Norway got rid of the equivalent (10 oere and 25 oere) two decades ago and are now getting rid of the approximate equivalent of the 5 pence coin (50 oere). Sentimentality is not a good reason to keep coins around. You probably spend more energy in dealing with these pennies and carrying them around than you get from saving them.
... where both parties are waving their metaphorical dicks around trying to make them appear both big and strong.
Microsoft will argue that the amount of revenue possibly generated by Office 365 for Apple means they should get a discount, while Apple will argue that if it is as successful as Microsoft thinks, they should be grateful for the flat percentage rate as the costs may scale super-linearly with volume, as the equipment, experience and facilities necessary to support such a beast start becoming particularly rare.
Apple Maps sucks. There is no two ways about it, and Apple certainly deserves stick for it.
I have also never been to Australia, but I am capable of making a couple of observations: If you're driving to a location you don't know, in an environment where getting lost could get you killed: 1. NEVER rely on one source of information for getting you to your destination. I wouldn't rely solely on Google Maps to get there either, even though Google Maps have been accurate and reliable for me in the past. Check Google Maps and a good old fashioned map before leaving. After all, what happens if you you lose reception or battery half way there? 2. Make sure you bring basic survival gear for your environment; in my home area that would be water, food, very warm clothes, blankets, a spade, a torch and considerably more petrol than you think you need.
"Better question: Would the kids be more interested in six men on Mars, or dozens of robotic missions to all corners of the Solar System that we could afford for the same money."
There's absolutely no question they would be more interested in six men on Mars. If not for the Science, it would basically be an amazing reality show, with real, proper heroes on a desolate and hostile planet, millions of miles from home. If done right, NASA would have several hundreds of millions (if not over a billion) of people across the globe tuning in to find out how their heroes were doing. I wouldn't be surprised if the total revenue (advertisement, DVD/Blueray sales, merchandising) went a long way towards actually paying for the mission.
With all due respect it seems your tolerance levels for corporate weasel speak may have become somewhat inflated. It is up to the users, not Google, to decide whether they "weren't properly served". When Google decided to introduce dedicated customer support to all new customers at the expense of $$ they decided this for the users and guess what, they chose the option which made Google more money.
And given that you were planning to expand your use of free GA, you make it clear that you were actually well served by the existing free solution, so your disclaimer lends further evidence towards this Google statement being untrue.
Google did this to increase their profits for the benefit of their share holders and employees. There is nothing wrong with it, but they should have called the spade a spade.
"You know, your argument would be more persuasive if you knew the difference between a million and a billion."
Absolutely. The story makes a pretty big claim of $47.9 billion in improper payments reported in 2010 (*) so it seems unnecessary for the argument to inflate the $112 million in "improper payments" for rehabilitation wheel chairs over a 6-month period.
Also the testimony is very unclear as to what percentage of these "improper payments" were actually fraud or wrongly awarded. The numbers include documentation errors, so they may include a large portion of claims which were genuine and required, but poorly written and documented.
(*) It is a little unclear whether these were for cases from 2010 or simply found in 2010 due to a massive one-time investigation.
I just don't understand why they have to blatantly lie like that. There is nothing wrong which changing your pricing strategies to improve your income. Google even retained the free service for existing users, so it can hardly be seen as a bait and switch
If they had said; "we believe the service is good value at $$ and providing the free service doesn't provide us with enough revenue", I would have completely understood it. Weasel speak was utterly unnecessary in this case and makes me wonder if some people are just so accustomed to lying that they can't avoid it.
It is also their strength. Apple have always preferred a tight product line up and fewer sales at high margins. That is their business model. It was nearly by accident that the iPod and iPhone got so massively popular.
They still sell fuckloads of phones and make exceptional profits.
Then you are not reading your legal documents very well. It says black on white there in your own source that this applies to civil law, not criminal law.
Since we were talking about Julian Assange and his potential criminal case it should be obvious that civil case law is irrelevant.
Also this document appears to be mainly about US law, with a brief mention of English family law.
When you make the strong claim that the UK (btw there is no such thing as British law) already bases its justice system on balance of probability, shouldn't you at least provide a source?
Slashdot Mirror
The great thing about Linux is... You can simply choose to not use Ubuntu. BAM! Problem solved.
Not quite. Linux users do rely on a large amount of other users making it viable and interesting to make applications, drivers, etc. for the platform. The more Ubuntu succeeds in gathering Linux users to their Ubuntu OS, the smaller the rest of the Linux market becomes.
Canonical wants to go their own way in order to distinguish themselves from other distributions in order to gather more Linux market share (larger slice), rather than attempt to cooperate with others to grow the market (larger cake). Canonical does not have the resources to compete with Apple, Google or Microsoft on their own, so their fragmentation of the Linux base will only result in a net loss for Linux and free software.
"And if you get a ticket from a police officer in the US? At least in some states, the officer doesn't need to present any evidence other than their own testimony and you'll be fined."
As I've stated in a reply to someone else, this is in principle just as bad, but simply another battle which may prove more difficult to win. My principle about "no profits in fining" applies to all situations a fine is issued for whatever purpose. There should never be a profit motive involved. That doesn't mean there are no other sinister motives (like a policeman or parking warden with a personal vendetta against you), but I'm willing to bet the profit motive is more common and hurts more people.
"I wonder if the judge stopped to think that this is no different than without the cameras. Tickets are a major revenue source for police departments, to the extent that it is not uncommon to hear of stations which have ticket quotas."
This is in principle just as bad. It is just difficult for the police to be as ruthlessly efficient in person as it is with cameras. And at the very least you get to see the person that issues you a ticket and can ask for the officer's name and number. But mainly just because you are losing one battle doesn't mean you can't go for another.
You missed the part where the judge said it was unconstitutionally difficult to challenge the fine. You're basically at the mercy of the enforcement agency and you have to rely on the accuracy of a company which profits massively from fining you.
I'm not totally against speed cameras, but I believe in one important thing about parking and traffic enforcement; nobody should ever profit from issuing fines, because the incentives to be arseholes are just too big.
Parking and traffic enforcement on public property and public roads should always be performed by public employees and the fines should go to a random, approved charity. The costs of running the operation should come out of tax income and no bonuses or "performance related pay" should ever be given. At least this way you take away the very real profit incentive for fining as many as possible. The sole purpose of parking and traffic enforcement should be to improve safety and flow of traffic.
But also, if you don't know how to program, you should learn, and quick. Not only will it help being able to create and run new simulations, it is also a fantastic fallback.
If you struggle to get a job in a lab afterwards, you could go for scientific/engineering developer with great domain knowledge. Think the guys that write software for bio-engineers.
Not-knowing-what-regressions-are-FAIL:
Origin didn't allow purchasers to pre-load SimCity before its official launch at 12:01am EST this morning, apparently because the development team was "working to polish the game until the very last second"
Hint: you don't "work to polish the game until the last second", you work to polish and then delay launch because you can't be sure of the quality until you've retested and had a solid set of builds passing your regression testing and product testing. Who can possibly think it is a good idea to still be changing software code seconds before the launch?
Server-capacity-FAIL:
Later, even after the problems were officially "resolved," EA warned that "due to server load it may take up to three hours for your game to unlock.
Invasive-DRM-where-you-make-legitimate-users-suffer-disproportionally-for-your-FAILures:
Some online reports indicate that even those with the disc-based retail version of the game were delayed in their installation by Origin server problems.
Got-it-wrong-before-and-still-managed-to-FAIL:
The issues bring to mind the infamous "Error 37" that prevented many Diablo III players from logging into the game in the days after its launch last year, though it's unclear how comparatively widespread SimCity's server issues are
It isn't surprising that EA treats their customers like shit, but it is still infuriating that they can get away with this.
"Cycling increases your respiration rate so produces more CO2 than not cycling"
Walking increases your respiration rate. Your respiration rate is a function of the work your body is doing, both by merely living and by performing external work such as travelling.
Cycling may require a higher work output (i.e. Watts) by cycling, but I'm not sure how your energy usage (i.e. WattHours, Joules, or calories) compares, since the travel time will be less.
Surely the reason we cycle at all, is that the act of cycling is more efficient at converting work into miles travelled than walking? Meaning we can travel faster and further for a similar amount of energy spent?
On the other hand, if you had to produce the energy required to run a car yourself, nobody could drive. It is only possible to drive normal cars at lots of miles per hour because of all the work gone into creating fossil fuel over millions of years, something us humans had very little to do with.
Note that I haven't done any research on this, but it doesn't appear as if this but it doesn't appear that this representative has done any research either.
I would argue that it isn't HER child if you emphasised her in order to establish ownership.
I am approaching this from a European perspective, which tends to be that the child does not belong to the parents. Instead the child belongs to itself, and the parents are merely the guardians. From this perspective, the parents autonomy over their children is limited, and life-threatening irrationality should lead to you being relieved of your duties as guardian.
The most obvious example is the case from England of the mother who refused cancer treatment for her child, and ran away with him. Not only was did the English courts decide the treatment had to go ahead despite the mother's wishes, but her documented willingness to run away with the child, meant the child was ordered into foster care.
I can't help but think of the economic outcome of procedures like this once it becomes FDA-approved, mainstream treatment.
Anti-HIV drugs are outrageously expensive, partly because it's a long-term treatment. Incurring this expense at birth would severely affect one's ability to earn a decent living later on, even before being hit my student loans, mortgage, etc.
A new generation of complete povery is imminent.
Did you read the article or the summary? Did you even read the head line? The whole point of the story is the possibility that if treatment is given early enough it can become a functional cure, whereupon you may not need to receive any more treatment, ever, because your immune system can deal with it for the rest of your life.
The whole point of this story is the (possibly) good news that we may avoid exactly what you describe.
While having an HIV-infected mother may give an impression of irresponsibility, there are people out there with no history of promiscuity or drug use that have caught HIV for many different reasons. I won't make judgements based on this.
But the following two newspaper quotes caught my attention.
BBC:
The treatment was continued for 18 months, at which point the child disappeared from the medical system. Five months later the mother and child turned up again but had stopped the treatment in this interim.
Washington Post:
"The child’s mother began missing appointments after a year. At 18 months, the child was no longer on treatment. When the child was brought back to the clinic at 23 months, the viral load was still undetectable, “very much to my surprise,” Gay wrote.
It strikes me as wildly irresponsible to the point of criminal neglect to miss medical appointments for your HIV-infected child. It does not appear as if she was told it was ok not to turn up for these appointments. After all, the doctors expected the HIV infection to return if the drug treatment wasn't kept up. If this had happened, and the child had died, I would have expected the mother to be prosecuted for manslaughter.
"Once there, paediatric HIV specialist Dr Hannah Gay put the infant on a cocktail of three standard HIV-fighting drugs at just 30 hours old, even before laboratory tests came back confirming the infection."
The last part of this sentence states that infection was confirmed. However, I'd be interested to know the rate of false positives versus the rate of false negatives. There is surely always a chance that the positive tests were wrong?
If they don't then IMHO, this is a dead duck. They have a wonderful opportunity to stop the patch/reboot/patch/reboot cycle here
Please... While this is a problem for some, I'm willing to bet the amount of revenue they've lost because of it is incredibly low.
Microsoft are in serious danger of scaring off their massive army of third party developers, exactly the people who have guaranteed them success over nearly 20 years. THIS is their major problem. Metro and the Microsoft App store is a massive "fuck you" to us. This is especially true if you're invested in OpenGL. The amount of work required to bring a professional OpenGL based engineering suite over to Metro is massive.
The only group who isn't driven by fear is libertarians, people who actually have trust in their ability to make a living somehow and survive in an uncertain and changing world, independent of God or government help.
Interestingly enough, you didn't once consider concern for the plight of others in your post, but managed to make it all about the trust in your own abilities. Is it not possible that some may feel perfectly safe in their own position, but believe even the bum down the street has a right to medical care if he gets sick?
As someone else have pointed out, this already happens where feasible. But what happens if you have a factory which operates 24/7 with almost everyone being shift workers?
If it was to operate 8 hours per day only, it would need three times the production capacity in order to complete in 8 hours what it normally does in 24. This would mean a massive, costly and inefficient expansion in terms of area and equipment. Equipment which would just sit idle for 16 hours a day.
Also, your shift workers who now may do one night shift in three, would have to always work during the night.
Even though the British pence is worth more than a US dollar cent, it still is practically worthless. The only decent reason I can see for keeping them around is for charities. I always put my coppers (not really copper any more, I know) in the nearest charity box if I can see one and usually bin them if not.
"But every penny saved...", I hear you say. Well it would require me to save three hundred pennies to gain as much as a solitary pint of beer (approximately £3). The effort in keeping coppers just isn't worth it any more. If I received 5 pennies per day and binned them all, it would cost me £18 per year. On a list of potential savings I could make, this would be in the "noise" category. I probably waste hundreds of pounds per year on not making pre-packed lunches.
The pennies are considered rude to give as tips, so you can't do that and so the only valid reason for me to keep pennies around is to avoid receiving more of them. If you have 2 pence on you and you're purchasing something costing £7.02 you could always give the cashier £10 and 2 pence to avoid receiving more pennies. The problem is that people are so bad at mental arithmetic these days they spend ages trying to figure out why you gave them 2 pence.
I would be delighted if the UK got rid of the coppers. Norway got rid of the equivalent (10 oere and 25 oere) two decades ago and are now getting rid of the approximate equivalent of the 5 pence coin (50 oere). Sentimentality is not a good reason to keep coins around. You probably spend more energy in dealing with these pennies and carrying them around than you get from saving them.
... where both parties are waving their metaphorical dicks around trying to make them appear both big and strong.
Microsoft will argue that the amount of revenue possibly generated by Office 365 for Apple means they should get a discount, while Apple will argue that if it is as successful as Microsoft thinks, they should be grateful for the flat percentage rate as the costs may scale super-linearly with volume, as the equipment, experience and facilities necessary to support such a beast start becoming particularly rare.
Apple Maps sucks. There is no two ways about it, and Apple certainly deserves stick for it.
I have also never been to Australia, but I am capable of making a couple of observations:
If you're driving to a location you don't know, in an environment where getting lost could get you killed:
1. NEVER rely on one source of information for getting you to your destination. I wouldn't rely solely on Google Maps to get there either, even though Google Maps have been accurate and reliable for me in the past. Check Google Maps and a good old fashioned map before leaving. After all, what happens if you you lose reception or battery half way there?
2. Make sure you bring basic survival gear for your environment; in my home area that would be water, food, very warm clothes, blankets, a spade, a torch and
considerably more petrol than you think you need.
"Better question: Would the kids be more interested in six men on Mars, or dozens of robotic missions to all corners of the Solar System that we could afford for the same money."
There's absolutely no question they would be more interested in six men on Mars. If not for the Science, it would basically be an amazing reality show, with real, proper heroes on a desolate and hostile planet, millions of miles from home. If done right, NASA would have several hundreds of millions (if not over a billion) of people across the globe tuning in to find out how their heroes were doing. I wouldn't be surprised if the total revenue (advertisement, DVD/Blueray sales, merchandising) went a long way towards actually paying for the mission.
Nobody is going to do that for a robotic rover.
With all due respect it seems your tolerance levels for corporate weasel speak may have become somewhat inflated. It is up to the users, not Google, to decide whether they "weren't properly served". When Google decided to introduce dedicated customer support to all new customers at the expense of $$ they decided this for the users and guess what, they chose the option which made Google more money.
And given that you were planning to expand your use of free GA, you make it clear that you were actually well served by the existing free solution, so your disclaimer lends further evidence towards this Google statement being untrue.
Google did this to increase their profits for the benefit of their share holders and employees. There is nothing wrong with it, but they should have called the spade a spade.
"You know, your argument would be more persuasive if you knew the difference between a million and a billion."
Absolutely. The story makes a pretty big claim of $47.9 billion in improper payments reported in 2010 (*) so it seems unnecessary for the argument to inflate the $112 million in "improper payments" for rehabilitation wheel chairs over a 6-month period.
Also the testimony is very unclear as to what percentage of these "improper payments" were actually fraud or wrongly awarded. The numbers include documentation errors, so they may include a large portion of claims which were genuine and required, but poorly written and documented.
(*) It is a little unclear whether these were for cases from 2010 or simply found in 2010 due to a massive one-time investigation.
I just don't understand why they have to blatantly lie like that. There is nothing wrong which changing your pricing strategies to improve your income. Google even retained the free service for existing users, so it can hardly be seen as a bait and switch
If they had said; "we believe the service is good value at $$ and providing the free service doesn't provide us with enough revenue", I would have completely understood it. Weasel speak was utterly unnecessary in this case and makes me wonder if some people are just so accustomed to lying that they can't avoid it.
It is also their strength. Apple have always preferred a tight product line up and fewer sales at high margins. That is their business model. It was nearly by accident that the iPod and iPhone got so massively popular.
They still sell fuckloads of phones and make exceptional profits.
Is this actually true? If so, isn't it utterly pathetic that nobody stood up to this guy by running against him?
Then you are not reading your legal documents very well. It says black on white there in your own source that this applies to civil law, not criminal law.
Since we were talking about Julian Assange and his potential criminal case it should be obvious that civil case law is irrelevant.
Also this document appears to be mainly about US law, with a brief mention of English family law.
When you make the strong claim that the UK (btw there is no such thing as British law) already bases its justice system on balance of probability, shouldn't you at least provide a source?