The big problem is with web apps that allow purchases or subscription services.
If you want to create an iOS app (even if the app is free) and it includes a subscription service or sells in-app items, Apple now wants a 30% cut of ANYTHING you buy from the device. Buy an online magazine subscription, or sign up for an MMORPG through your iPad? Apple wants 30% of the fees ONGOING. Want to buy eBooks through Amazon or Sony? 30% goes to them. I mean, come on, these days even the ultra-competitive brick and mortar stores like Walmart don't make THAT much of a margin. So I'm just SURE that policy is not going to increase prices and/or stifle competition with iBooks...
Anyone is free to create something like a eZine, etc. on their website and handle the subscription themselves, but once they want a native app, Apple gets their cut. So yes, it is in Apple's interest to make web apps less usable than regular apps (whether in speed or look and feel).
but because humanity (and more precisely, human bureaucracy) is often far too gaffe-prone to be trusted
Actually, a total of ~4 reactor accidents resulting in actual radiation leakage (and only Chernobyl was significant) out of well over 400 reactors in the world (some operating since the 1950's) seems like a pretty good safety record to me.
I'm sure our record with deaths from hydroelectric dams collapsing or coal/gas plants exploding has been much worse (probably because people inherently respect the dangers of nuclear power, but underestimate the devastation a damn break can cause, resulting in a huge discrepancy in planning and engineering between the two).
I think it's pretty much a given that the existence of a "higher power" will never conclusively be proved or disproved for all people, because it's not based on science, it's based on faith, which doesn't involve evidence.
What it does is provide credible evidence against the creationist statement that it's "impossible" for life to have evolved spontaneously because "it's so complex". Anyone with any scientific knowledge can see that humans have a pretty good chance of creating artificial life as intelligent as we are (eventually), so claiming that only an omnipotent power is capable of it becomes pretty far fetched. But in the end all it's going to do is make those who must believe in a supernatural power move the goalposts yet again...
Those seem to be totally unrelated issues (beyond the part about Apple not giving a shit, I guess).
That was someone taking a GPL game and selling it on the store, where the complaint in the article is about people using hacked iTunes accounts for in-app purchases. It's copyright violation vs. credit card fraud, "apples" and oranges...
Also, the argument that the environment for the experiment was "too perfect" doesn't mean that those molecules could not have been present together in smaller quantities and environments and created smaller numbers of amino acids. Also, the very fact that such a simple experiment was able to create amino acids from basic inorganic molecules shows that it's very possible, just not necessarilt the *exact* mechanism by which it happened...
Uh, that should be "how you can call 1 billion years NOT any time at all". Though I'd hope from the actual context of my post you'd get that I was saying and you're just being nitpicky.
But if you think 1 billion years is not significant in astrophysical as well as evolutionary scales, I can't help ya...
In my undergrad biology lab, we replicated the Miller-Urey experiment that created some amino acids from water and a few gases in a sealed system with a spark gap in a few days.
The earliest known fossil evidence of prokaryotic life is almost 1 billion years after the Earth's formation. I can't imagine how you can call 1 billion years any time at all, even in the scale of the universe:)
But if you are curious about the history and research on the topic, the Wikipedia article isn't half bad...
Occam's razor, take the obvious answer, which is they instituted the same policy as pretty much *everyone* else, and just want 30% of the gross revenue from app store sales.
Plus, if you RTFA, they even state this explicitly:
"The company is offering what Mr. Watson said was a standard split on app sales: 70 percent to the developers, 30 percent to Microsoft."
Right, this is the key bit: and it's different enough than what you're doing
Since Microsoft is probably the only one actually *paying* employees to write Windows Phone 7 apps so far, it would have been reasonable to expect that it's included in a Microsoft engineer's company IP;)
And another thing that REALLY muddies this is telecommuting. Many engineers work at home part of the time (and not always from 9-5) making it nearly impossible to distinguish paid work from "moonlighting"...
Anyway, are you saying that a single programmer is only capable of writing a few lines of code on a project? I didn't say "trivial", just easily doable by one person...
Eh, "whac-a-mole" and "code reviews" are probably stretching the realm of probability. I'm pretty sure the "programming staff" required to implement "mole pops up, detect if whacked" could be done by a single programmer in this mostly mechanical-game-oriented company, making useful code reviews a bit tough. Sounds like it really was a mom-and-pop company, and they just put way too much trust in a real douche bag of an employee...
If HDFury wants to keep their HDMI/HDCP license (and from their website it sounds like they do), they will have to follow the same restrictions as the BD players...
The difference is for some reason people in the US tend to pay for content these days rather than pirate it, which makes it a hell of a lot more *valuable* market...
I guess the other reply explained in detail, but to summarize: they do it by attempting to provide the BEST Market to distribute apps and content, not enforcing the ONLY market like Apple does. Wow, that sounds almost like... "free market"!? (and if Apple ever starts topping 60-70%+ of the phone market share, a pretty convincing argument for an antitrust lawsuit...)
You should look up the actual numbers before you post "facts"...
A 747 gets about 90 miles per gallon per passenger.
An reasonably fuel efficient automobile can get 30 miles per gallon on the highway, so if the car carries 5 passengers it can easily do over 100 miles per gallon per passenger. A full bus can get 300 miles per gallon per passenger. Airplanes win on long distance speed, but NOT efficiency.
A reasonably full diesel *train* can get 400+ miles per gallon per passenger. Electric powered trains can be even more efficient in equivalent energy used since they can use regenerative braking.
A high speed train could easily replace an airplane in California, where the high costs and time overhead is bad enough that many people just drive from the Bay Area to LA - it's cheaper and not that much slower (door to door about 6 hours driving, where it's still almost 3 hours door to door with a plane). If a train could do it in 3 hours and cost half of what a plane does (with a much more comfortable trip) it could be very competitive.
Yeah, but those other causes almost seem like someone claiming a murder defense due to the gun having a "hair trigger". Threre was still some bad driving involved. Neither floor mats nor sticky pedals prevent someone from stomping the brakes (and if you don't believe brakes trump accelerator go try it on your car, it might not be pretty but you won't be barreling down the highway at 80mph...)
Palin ("Pulling a"): Quitting when faced with adversity; Abandoning the responsibility entrusted to you; Quitting after realizing you can't withstand basic criticisms and complications of your job.
So, they have now determined there are a bunch of habitable planets by a telescope that
"looks for the data signatures of planets by measuring tiny decreases in the brightness of stars when planets cross in front of, or transit, them. The size of the planet can be derived from the change in the star's brightness. The temperature can be estimated from the characteristics of the star it orbits and the planet's orbital period."
NOTHING in the actual NASA article said these planets are "habitable." Why? Because luckily NASA still hires scientists. Just wish/. would have 1/10th their standards. I mean, jeez, are you guys trying to one-up Gizmodo for sensationalistic sci/tech-headlines?
Slashdot Mirror
The big problem is with web apps that allow purchases or subscription services.
If you want to create an iOS app (even if the app is free) and it includes a subscription service or sells in-app items, Apple now wants a 30% cut of ANYTHING you buy from the device. Buy an online magazine subscription, or sign up for an MMORPG through your iPad? Apple wants 30% of the fees ONGOING. Want to buy eBooks through Amazon or Sony? 30% goes to them. I mean, come on, these days even the ultra-competitive brick and mortar stores like Walmart don't make THAT much of a margin. So I'm just SURE that policy is not going to increase prices and/or stifle competition with iBooks...
Anyone is free to create something like a eZine, etc. on their website and handle the subscription themselves, but once they want a native app, Apple gets their cut. So yes, it is in Apple's interest to make web apps less usable than regular apps (whether in speed or look and feel).
Except that Apple passed Microsoft on the scale of shady practices and corporate self interest (not to mention market cap) a while ago...
but because humanity (and more precisely, human bureaucracy) is often far too gaffe-prone to be trusted
Actually, a total of ~4 reactor accidents resulting in actual radiation leakage (and only Chernobyl was significant) out of well over 400 reactors in the world (some operating since the 1950's) seems like a pretty good safety record to me.
I'm sure our record with deaths from hydroelectric dams collapsing or coal/gas plants exploding has been much worse (probably because people inherently respect the dangers of nuclear power, but underestimate the devastation a damn break can cause, resulting in a huge discrepancy in planning and engineering between the two).
I think it's pretty much a given that the existence of a "higher power" will never conclusively be proved or disproved for all people, because it's not based on science, it's based on faith, which doesn't involve evidence.
What it does is provide credible evidence against the creationist statement that it's "impossible" for life to have evolved spontaneously because "it's so complex". Anyone with any scientific knowledge can see that humans have a pretty good chance of creating artificial life as intelligent as we are (eventually), so claiming that only an omnipotent power is capable of it becomes pretty far fetched. But in the end all it's going to do is make those who must believe in a supernatural power move the goalposts yet again...
Those seem to be totally unrelated issues (beyond the part about Apple not giving a shit, I guess).
That was someone taking a GPL game and selling it on the store, where the complaint in the article is about people using hacked iTunes accounts for in-app purchases. It's copyright violation vs. credit card fraud, "apples" and oranges...
Your Google search turned up a fundamentalist Christian website dedicated to disproving the topic. VERY unbiased science there...
As most of these sites, it's basically filled with logical fallacies and based on 50 year old scientific knowledge.
Turns out they created a LOT more amino acids than they knew how to detect in 1953...
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/10/old_scientists_never_clean_out.php
Also, the argument that the environment for the experiment was "too perfect" doesn't mean that those molecules could not have been present together in smaller quantities and environments and created smaller numbers of amino acids. Also, the very fact that such a simple experiment was able to create amino acids from basic inorganic molecules shows that it's very possible, just not necessarilt the *exact* mechanism by which it happened...
Uh, that should be "how you can call 1 billion years NOT any time at all". Though I'd hope from the actual context of my post you'd get that I was saying and you're just being nitpicky.
But if you think 1 billion years is not significant in astrophysical as well as evolutionary scales, I can't help ya...
In my undergrad biology lab, we replicated the Miller-Urey experiment that created some amino acids from water and a few gases in a sealed system with a spark gap in a few days.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment
The earliest known fossil evidence of prokaryotic life is almost 1 billion years after the Earth's formation. I can't imagine how you can call 1 billion years any time at all, even in the scale of the universe :)
But if you are curious about the history and research on the topic, the Wikipedia article isn't half bad...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis
Better than what I was thinking, which is the Biggest Loser with some help from laxatives...
Yeah, you are misunderstanding.
Occam's razor, take the obvious answer, which is they instituted the same policy as pretty much *everyone* else, and just want 30% of the gross revenue from app store sales.
Plus, if you RTFA, they even state this explicitly:
"The company is offering what Mr. Watson said was a standard split on app sales: 70 percent to the developers, 30 percent to Microsoft."
Right, this is the key bit: and it's different enough than what you're doing
Since Microsoft is probably the only one actually *paying* employees to write Windows Phone 7 apps so far, it would have been reasonable to expect that it's included in a Microsoft engineer's company IP ;)
And another thing that REALLY muddies this is telecommuting. Many engineers work at home part of the time (and not always from 9-5) making it nearly impossible to distinguish paid work from "moonlighting"...
Depends, is it a real mole or a plastic one?
Anyway, are you saying that a single programmer is only capable of writing a few lines of code on a project? I didn't say "trivial", just easily doable by one person...
Eh, "whac-a-mole" and "code reviews" are probably stretching the realm of probability. I'm pretty sure the "programming staff" required to implement "mole pops up, detect if whacked" could be done by a single programmer in this mostly mechanical-game-oriented company, making useful code reviews a bit tough. Sounds like it really was a mom-and-pop company, and they just put way too much trust in a real douche bag of an employee...
The Caddyshack quotes would be endless...
Hah, it told me Comcast had up to 1Gbps service available in my neighborhood. Riiiight...
If HDFury wants to keep their HDMI/HDCP license (and from their website it sounds like they do), they will have to follow the same restrictions as the BD players...
Wait, so then it was the victim who was psychic? So why didn't he just get out of the way?
The difference is for some reason people in the US tend to pay for content these days rather than pirate it, which makes it a hell of a lot more *valuable* market...
I guess the other reply explained in detail, but to summarize: they do it by attempting to provide the BEST Market to distribute apps and content, not enforcing the ONLY market like Apple does. Wow, that sounds almost like... "free market"!? (and if Apple ever starts topping 60-70%+ of the phone market share, a pretty convincing argument for an antitrust lawsuit...)
Doh, I assumed Valeria Rossi was a woman, so I didn't make the connection to "the guy". Damn Italians and their men's names ending with a... :)
Not likely, as it's already pretty well established he has connections to the mob (as in the mafia...)
You should look up the actual numbers before you post "facts"...
A 747 gets about 90 miles per gallon per passenger.
An reasonably fuel efficient automobile can get 30 miles per gallon on the highway, so if the car carries 5 passengers it can easily do over 100 miles per gallon per passenger. A full bus can get 300 miles per gallon per passenger. Airplanes win on long distance speed, but NOT efficiency.
A reasonably full diesel *train* can get 400+ miles per gallon per passenger. Electric powered trains can be even more efficient in equivalent energy used since they can use regenerative braking.
A high speed train could easily replace an airplane in California, where the high costs and time overhead is bad enough that many people just drive from the Bay Area to LA - it's cheaper and not that much slower (door to door about 6 hours driving, where it's still almost 3 hours door to door with a plane). If a train could do it in 3 hours and cost half of what a plane does (with a much more comfortable trip) it could be very competitive.
Yeah, but those other causes almost seem like someone claiming a murder defense due to the gun having a "hair trigger". Threre was still some bad driving involved. Neither floor mats nor sticky pedals prevent someone from stomping the brakes (and if you don't believe brakes trump accelerator go try it on your car, it might not be pretty but you won't be barreling down the highway at 80mph...)
That's ok, we just need to make her name a ubiquitous term so her trademark protection will be lost.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericized_trademarks
Culling a few from Urban Dictionary, how about:
Palin ("Pulling a"): Quitting when faced with adversity; Abandoning the responsibility entrusted to you; Quitting after realizing you can't withstand basic criticisms and complications of your job.
"NASA Finds Family of Habitable Planets"
So, they have now determined there are a bunch of habitable planets by a telescope that
"looks for the data signatures of planets by measuring tiny decreases in the brightness of stars when planets cross in front of, or transit, them. The size of the planet can be derived from the change in the star's brightness. The temperature can be estimated from the characteristics of the star it orbits and the planet's orbital period."
NOTHING in the actual NASA article said these planets are "habitable." Why? Because luckily NASA still hires scientists. Just wish /. would have 1/10th their standards. I mean, jeez, are you guys trying to one-up Gizmodo for sensationalistic sci/tech-headlines?