#11: The PS3 will remain in very short supply, and not come down in price anytime soon.
Ouch, you lost that one already, there are tons of PS3s available at most retail stores (Fry's in Sunnyvale, CA had a bunch yesterday and no one was buying!) Now, the Wii on the other hand...
Great point! Prions defintely show that harmless proteins can turn deadly without any mutations in the gene itself. Could be caused by an interaction with proteins from genes other than the one that expresses the prion itself... sort of like the novel interactions you may get by splicing fish genes into soy...
"No, protein is NOT protein." Or maybe, "PrP-C is not PrP-Sc"...
Actually, I was going to post that the original prion/BSE post was a bit manic, but I agree, it has become interesting:)
I know of no reason why human cells cannot make all the alcohol they really need.
That's because you don't know anything about biochemistry:)
Fermentation happens during anaerobic respiration. Both human cells and yeast cells can go through fermentation, but we generate lactic acid instead of ethanol. Sorry about that, you can't get drunk just by holding your breath...
Did you WATCH the average episode of Battlestar Galactica?! (sure, you were probably not even born then, I understand...) If a 4 year old could spend more than 30 seconds watching Lorne Greene then I will give him/her my 25 year old Cylon Raider (ok I lie, I haven't seen it since I was 11). But anyway, calling the target market 4-10 is just wrong, I think it's more like 8-12, and if you can't learn not to swallow a red plastic missile in SECOND GRADE - well, Ralph Wiggum has sage advice to teach you.
Now I know you're lying! No kid playing around with BASIC would ever use "HELLO, WORLD!" as their first program. Now if you had written:
10 PRINT "YOU SUCK!" 20 GOTO 10
THEN I would have known it was actually your first program in elementary school on that TRS-80 in the lab in fact on all the computers you could get your hands on when the teacher was't looking... Umm. Nevermind. It wasn't me! I was playing with my Logo Turtle the whole time!
In the grand scheme of things, CD's haven't been around all that long. Cassettes and vinyl before that can conceivably make up a good portion of a person's collection.
CDs have been around since *1982*. That is 26 years. That means pretty much anyone under 40 has been exposed to CDs as a primary source of music (and though I am over 30 myself, I can state for a fact my parents, aunts/uncles, and grandparents have ALL switched entirely to CDs - and my mom owns over 1/2 of the original Beatles and Stones on vinyl;) Besides, under 40 makes up pretty much 99%+ of the people who buy music from iTunes, so who cares if the rare aging audiophile (who will hate digital music on principle anyway) has a kick-ass vinyl collection?
"The grand scheme of things" is a pretty useless argument -in the grand scheme of things, printing presses are a new invention - how many hand scribed books have you read?
Actually, there aren't a lot of stereo stations, even today. From what I recall, there are a few big networks, but many channels still broadcast mono. Not that it matters, since television sets are effectively mono as well.
Don't know where you live, but the vast majority of channels in the US are broadcast in stereo these days (whether it's terrestrial, cable, or satellite). Hell, I can get a half dozen terrestrial HD channels with 5.1 surround, and a lot more than that in 5.1 over satellite.
I'd agree that TV speakers are almost universally crappy, but there is a huge difference between a mono and stereo TV - that 2-3' between the speakers is still very noticeable. Not that I would use the TV builtin speakers anyway, ugh.
Actually, I was already being CONSERVATIVE. In any case of network usage (POTS, Cellular, Cable VOD, Internet, whatever) you plan capacity based on estimates of maximum simultaneous users. Those numbers are a lot lower than you'd probably expect - like 5% of the total customers in many cases - and the research I found was about 4.2% for worldwide Internet use. I never said 42% - that's stupid, that would imply that everyone in the world with Internet access is using it over 10 hours a day, when studies have estimated it's more like 30 hours a MONTH.
I was being reasonable, and DID note that most servers are not utilized to their full potential. "since there are a lot more massively underutilized sites out there than heavily loaded sites..." - did you even read what you replied to? In fact part of my point was that (and this is not based on hard numbers but you have already agreed with me) most servers are not utilized to nearly their potential. If "the world is moving to Web 2.0" (which I am not endorsing, just responding:) there really would be more efficient ways of implementing it than AJAX. But it probably won't happen because of inertia/existing infrastructure. Ok, for some reason I have just clarified my post to an AC who didn't even make any valid counterpoints in the first place. I must be bored.
Why would anyone want or need to handle 100,000 users on a single computer? If you have 100,000 *simultaneous* users I guarantee you are using more than 1 server, especially if it's an "AJAX" app...
Breaking it down, let's take the TOTAL number of active Internet users at any moment:
Using an estimate of 1B users worldwide (this is the highest number I saw quoted, probably 700M is more realistic for users that do anything interesting), with an average of about 30 hours per month (30/(24*30))=0.042
1,000,000,000*0.042 = 42,000,000
If every server on the internet could handle 100 simultaneous connections:
42,000,000 / 100 = 420,000
That's 420,000 front end web servers for the entire world. Note that with 100 simultaneous connections each one is not requesting data every second, so that's probably max 10-20 requests per second, which is reasonable.
420,000 front end servers for the entire planet? We could already be at 10x that now (since there are a lot more massively underutilized sites out there than heavily loaded sites...) I couldn't find a good estimate of the total server HARDWARE on the planet, estimates from Netcraft were 100M sites, but 95% of those are probably personal web sites with 100's running on one physical machine...
Anyway, I guess in the end I agree with your final point: HTTP is extremely simple to implement and use, it's statelessness makes things like load balancing, failover, etc easier, but it's definitely not the most efficient way to communicate with a server in a "web application". AJAX is basically a hack to create a very interactive network application using a large existing infrastructure that was never intended to work that way. Worldwide we are paying a big penalty in performance (and power usage, and bandwidth, etc) from HTTP and XML.
It will be interesting to see if bandwidth and CPU performance will always stay ahead of the requirements caused by these inefficiencies. Given that development time (and related to that, cost of development, ie salaries) is probably rising a lot faster than capital costs, I'm guessing they will.
Yahoo finance seems to be the only product they have that is best in class (in my experience).
I'd add Yahoo Messenger to thst list. I have tried almost every IM client out there, and Y!M is miles ahead of anything else. GAIM is nice when you have friends with other IM clients (namely AIM) but pretty much everyone I know uses a Y!M account, whether it's with Y!M or GAIM...
I'm not sure I'd call it "best in class", but Yahoo Music Engine/Yahoo Unlimited/Launchcast are pretty solid as far as streaming music goes. Fairly inexpensive, large catalog, UPnP AV support (so among other things, you can stream from YME to the XBox 360!) Actually, I don't know if there really is a "best in class" in this area - all of the media players/all-you-can-eat music services, etc, have their pros and cons. But I think YME may have more pros than the other ones...
I tried to test this but it is for IE explorer only. So Google wins by default.
I tried to install it on XP with IE and just get the error "Could not access network location %APPDATA%" - had to cancel the installation. I'm not even sure it's meant for IE;)
Have you ever considered market share between 1 iPod and 100+ of WMA devices? I'd wager that if you insist on buying DRMd crap, your chances are far better that you can still play them in Apples cripled universe in a couple years time.
Market share seems fairly orthoganal to your arguments on this thread... my point was that if anything in this case Microsoft is the UNDERDOG who is in fact much more open. As another poster pointed out, MS and WMP11 will sync with a ton of devices WITHOUT bothering with DRM, as well as licensing their DRM to any manufacturers who want it. As I mentioned I have an iPod, but have never bought anything on iTunes. Not really interested in a version of music that makes me jump through hoops just to play it on anything but my iPod or PC. Mostly I was just commenting on the ridiculously biased tone of the article - which in this case is not even accurate.
Also, I totally disagree that DRM is evil. Most of the current *implementations* have been complete crap, I agree. WMDRM is annoying. Apple's Fairplay is even worse, since generally you can't even licence it. An ideal implementation would allow a LEGAL BUYER of a piece of content total unrestricted access to that content wherever and however they wanted to use it - AND, all future improvements on it - why the hell do I want to pay another $20 for a movie I already bought now that they have figured out how to provide it in a format (HD) that is finally close to the quality they actually intended in the theater!
Also, I saw you mentioned unrestricted access to future generations - I totally agree on that point. My relatively unconsidered opinion is if someone creates original content, they should have the right to charge you whatever they want to view/listen/whatever to it, without having you distribute it to everyone you know for free. If you disagree, then don't pay and don't use it. If you do pay, you should also have the right to access that content in any way you want for as long as you wish. And, once the copyright holder dies (or maybe even a reasonably allowance for spouses, screw descendants) the content is released to the public domain. The biggest evil is not copyright or DRM, it's assignment and enforcement of copyight to corporations who want to extend that copyright indefinitely.
Yeah, it's amazing. Everyone raves about iPod/iTunes but WMP is EVIL!!
better integration with media players sanctioned by them
iPod vs 100+ WMA devices...
integration with their new URGE music service
iTunes Store vs URGE...
more importantly, this version contains the latest in Microsoft DRM software
Fairplay vs WMDRM... one is supported on dozens of devices, the other on 2 (oh, don't forget the crippled Razr, 3!)
Hey, I have an iPod, but why shouldn't Microsoft be able to add the same "features" Apple has to their media player? (they do that with so many other parts of their OS;)
1. Enough people participate to make the cost of ignoring the boycott greater than the cost savings or revenue increase associated with whatever actions prompted the boycott.
2. The company that is being boycotted sees the boycott as being a long-term issue.
Sure, IF that happens, it can be effective. But that doesn't address the root problem of how to get people to boycott a product. The most important factor there is a clear, equivalent alternative. For example, a "don't buy gas" boycott (and those do go around!) is stupid. A "don't buy from Chevron, they are evil and do this and that, please buy from Shell" (not that I have any opinion on Chevron vs Shell, it's just an example) might have a better chance. Burger King vs McDonald's, Best Buy vs Circuit City, whatever.
I guess you did mention that non-commodity goods would help Sony withstand a boycott - but I don't think it's as much withstand as make it a total non-starter. And even in the relatively commodity electronics Sony just has SO many products that it would take a book just to list alternatives (don't buy a Sony TV, buy Panasonic. Don't buy a Sony Walkman, buy an iPod. Don't buy a Sony-Ericsson phone, buy a Nokia... and just try to convince/. readers to buy an XBox360 instead of a PS3;)
You know those American cell phone companies like to charge customers great fees for every little download on a phone. Maybe the cell phone companies threatened to bad the phone if there was no song limit.
That's not a bad theory, it's amazing how they try to get people to pay for things (ringtones, backgrounds, stupid songs/videos) that are freely available if they didn't make it such a pain to put them on the phone.
I just got the Sony Ericsson W810i - only took Cingular about 6 months to finally offer it. Great Walkman phone & decent 2MP camera. But I have to say the syncing software is just barely usable. If Apple made a phone anywhere near the quality of the W810i but usable with iTunes it could destroy these nice-phones-with-horrible-software-support.
While I would not argue that the US educational system is not in need of help, it's totally ridiculous to say it is now a "room full of retards". I assume since you call it "our educational system" you were educated in the US? Are you claiming to be "liquid shit" yourself?
It may be that the system is becoming more stratified than it was 20 years ago - which is not something to be proud of - but honestly at the level (Nobel Prize winners) that this article talks about that's totally irrelevant. The competition for admittance to top American universities is higher than ever. Yes, on a broad scale the US high school educational system could use work. Probably true for the MASSIVE university system as well. But there are hundreds of thousands of highly motivated students at the best universities in the US working their asses off (and millions more that work their asses off no matter where they are) for you to claim that they are a bunch of "retards". How many successes does it take from that pool to produce a few who win these type of awards?
Ok, after that seemingly pro US rant... imagine if the US had spent an extra $80B a year towards this educational system rather than the military fiasco we are currently involved in? Do some math, and that is a FULL RIDE for over 4 MILLION students a year (and this is assuming ridiculous private school tuitions of ~20k+). That is over 1/4 of the TOTAL college enrollment. If you assume that the majority of those 15M+ students are at subsidized public or community colleges, it's probably over 1/2. How's that for effective use of funds?
Exactly! He must be the richest hypocrite on the planet. Yahoo overpaid for that crappy company by about 95%. He does freely admit his goal from the start was to own a professional basketball team, so I guess he is at least a smart hypocrite.
Damn, you beat me to it! That's what I was thinking, too.
Risking $500k a day in fines from a country with 10 million residents? No WAY it's remotely worth it, they couldn't make 1/10 of that from Belgian operations. Shutting down google.be would be fairly harsh to the Belgian citizens who probably couldn't care less about the ruling, but hey, they'd care after that.
Actually, let's do some calculations for fun...
Google had gross revenue of $6B last year. That's $1 per person on the planet per YEAR (obviously not everyone on the planet uses Google but this will work for a rough estimate). Say Belgium would then be responsible for $10M a year. That's under $30k a day. Assume Belgians are avid Google users and round it up to $50k per day, and hey, my 1/10 estimate above wasn't too bad...
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Genius? I think most everyone here would agree genius implies "extraordinary talent and creative ability" - ie able to create NEW ideas. He basically proved extremely capable of working the system. Wow. If he really wants to go off and take the time to prove himself capable of original thought, great, but otherwise it sounds like law may be his ideal field...
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#11: The PS3 will remain in very short supply, and not come down in price anytime soon.
Ouch, you lost that one already, there are tons of PS3s available at most retail stores (Fry's in Sunnyvale, CA had a bunch yesterday and no one was buying!) Now, the Wii on the other hand...
Clearly the right answer is just to eat all of the hippies. It's politically savvy to - no one would be left to complain!
Lrrr from the planet Omicron Persei VIII already tried that, and it just made his hands look huge.
Great point! Prions defintely show that harmless proteins can turn deadly without any mutations in the gene itself. Could be caused by an interaction with proteins from genes other than the one that expresses the prion itself... sort of like the novel interactions you may get by splicing fish genes into soy...
:)
"No, protein is NOT protein." Or maybe, "PrP-C is not PrP-Sc"...
Actually, I was going to post that the original prion/BSE post was a bit manic, but I agree, it has become interesting
I know of no reason why human cells cannot make all the alcohol they really need.
:)
That's because you don't know anything about biochemistry
Fermentation happens during anaerobic respiration. Both human cells and yeast cells can go through fermentation, but we generate lactic acid instead of ethanol. Sorry about that, you can't get drunk just by holding your breath...
Did you WATCH the average episode of Battlestar Galactica?! (sure, you were probably not even born then, I understand...) If a 4 year old could spend more than 30 seconds watching Lorne Greene then I will give him/her my 25 year old Cylon Raider (ok I lie, I haven't seen it since I was 11). But anyway, calling the target market 4-10 is just wrong, I think it's more like 8-12, and if you can't learn not to swallow a red plastic missile in SECOND GRADE - well, Ralph Wiggum has sage advice to teach you.
Now I know you're lying! No kid playing around with BASIC would ever use "HELLO, WORLD!" as their first program. Now if you had written:
10 PRINT "YOU SUCK!"
20 GOTO 10
THEN I would have known it was actually your first program in elementary school on that TRS-80 in the lab in fact on all the computers you could get your hands on when the teacher was't looking...
Umm. Nevermind. It wasn't me! I was playing with my Logo Turtle the whole time!
In the grand scheme of things, CD's haven't been around all that long. Cassettes and vinyl before that can conceivably make up a good portion of a person's collection.
;) Besides, under 40 makes up pretty much 99%+ of the people who buy music from iTunes, so who cares if the rare aging audiophile (who will hate digital music on principle anyway) has a kick-ass vinyl collection?
CDs have been around since *1982*. That is 26 years. That means pretty much anyone under 40 has been exposed to CDs as a primary source of music (and though I am over 30 myself, I can state for a fact my parents, aunts/uncles, and grandparents have ALL switched entirely to CDs - and my mom owns over 1/2 of the original Beatles and Stones on vinyl
"The grand scheme of things" is a pretty useless argument -in the grand scheme of things, printing presses are a new invention - how many hand scribed books have you read?
I think the $10,000 referred to reports a while back that the Army was paying $10,000 for screwdrivers (and toilet seats, and...)
Actually, there aren't a lot of stereo stations, even today. From what I recall, there are a few big networks, but many channels still broadcast mono. Not that it matters, since television sets are effectively mono as well.
Don't know where you live, but the vast majority of channels in the US are broadcast in stereo these days (whether it's terrestrial, cable, or satellite). Hell, I can get a half dozen terrestrial HD channels with 5.1 surround, and a lot more than that in 5.1 over satellite.
I'd agree that TV speakers are almost universally crappy, but there is a huge difference between a mono and stereo TV - that 2-3' between the speakers is still very noticeable. Not that I would use the TV builtin speakers anyway, ugh.
At that point our houses will be grown instead of constructed, so there won't be a need to fasten things together in the first place :)
Actually, I was already being CONSERVATIVE. In any case of network usage (POTS, Cellular, Cable VOD, Internet, whatever) you plan capacity based on estimates of maximum simultaneous users. Those numbers are a lot lower than you'd probably expect - like 5% of the total customers in many cases - and the research I found was about 4.2% for worldwide Internet use. I never said 42% - that's stupid, that would imply that everyone in the world with Internet access is using it over 10 hours a day, when studies have estimated it's more like 30 hours a MONTH.
:) there really would be more efficient ways of implementing it than AJAX. But it probably won't happen because of inertia/existing infrastructure. Ok, for some reason I have just clarified my post to an AC who didn't even make any valid counterpoints in the first place. I must be bored.
I was being reasonable, and DID note that most servers are not utilized to their full potential. "since there are a lot more massively underutilized sites out there than heavily loaded sites..." - did you even read what you replied to? In fact part of my point was that (and this is not based on hard numbers but you have already agreed with me) most servers are not utilized to nearly their potential. If "the world is moving to Web 2.0" (which I am not endorsing, just responding
Why would anyone want or need to handle 100,000 users on a single computer? If you have 100,000 *simultaneous* users I guarantee you are using more than 1 server, especially if it's an "AJAX" app...
Breaking it down, let's take the TOTAL number of active Internet users at any moment:
Using an estimate of 1B users worldwide (this is the highest number I saw quoted, probably 700M is more realistic for users that do anything interesting), with an average of about 30 hours per month (30/(24*30))=0.042
1,000,000,000*0.042 = 42,000,000
If every server on the internet could handle 100 simultaneous connections:
42,000,000 / 100 = 420,000
That's 420,000 front end web servers for the entire world. Note that with 100 simultaneous connections each one is not requesting data every second, so that's probably max 10-20 requests per second, which is reasonable.
420,000 front end servers for the entire planet? We could already be at 10x that now (since there are a lot more massively underutilized sites out there than heavily loaded sites...) I couldn't find a good estimate of the total server HARDWARE on the planet, estimates from Netcraft were 100M sites, but 95% of those are probably personal web sites with 100's running on one physical machine...
Anyway, I guess in the end I agree with your final point: HTTP is extremely simple to implement and use, it's statelessness makes things like load balancing, failover, etc easier, but it's definitely not the most efficient way to communicate with a server in a "web application". AJAX is basically a hack to create a very interactive network application using a large existing infrastructure that was never intended to work that way. Worldwide we are paying a big penalty in performance (and power usage, and bandwidth, etc) from HTTP and XML.
It will be interesting to see if bandwidth and CPU performance will always stay ahead of the requirements caused by these inefficiencies. Given that development time (and related to that, cost of development, ie salaries) is probably rising a lot faster than capital costs, I'm guessing they will.
Yahoo finance seems to be the only product they have that is best in class (in my experience).
I'd add Yahoo Messenger to thst list. I have tried almost every IM client out there, and Y!M is miles ahead of anything else. GAIM is nice when you have friends with other IM clients (namely AIM) but pretty much everyone I know uses a Y!M account, whether it's with Y!M or GAIM...
I'm not sure I'd call it "best in class", but Yahoo Music Engine/Yahoo Unlimited/Launchcast are pretty solid as far as streaming music goes. Fairly inexpensive, large catalog, UPnP AV support (so among other things, you can stream from YME to the XBox 360!) Actually, I don't know if there really is a "best in class" in this area - all of the media players/all-you-can-eat music services, etc, have their pros and cons. But I think YME may have more pros than the other ones...
Someone put that in our Bugzilla quips a while back - it's still one of my favorites!
My conspiracy theory is that XML was secretly invented by Intel in order to require 3GHz processors for the simplest of tasks.
I tried to test this but it is for IE explorer only. So Google wins by default.
;)
I tried to install it on XP with IE and just get the error "Could not access network location %APPDATA%" - had to cancel the installation. I'm not even sure it's meant for IE
Have you ever considered market share between 1 iPod and 100+ of WMA devices? I'd wager that if you insist on buying DRMd crap, your chances are far better that you can still play them in Apples cripled universe in a couple years time.
Market share seems fairly orthoganal to your arguments on this thread... my point was that if anything in this case Microsoft is the UNDERDOG who is in fact much more open. As another poster pointed out, MS and WMP11 will sync with a ton of devices WITHOUT bothering with DRM, as well as licensing their DRM to any manufacturers who want it. As I mentioned I have an iPod, but have never bought anything on iTunes. Not really interested in a version of music that makes me jump through hoops just to play it on anything but my iPod or PC. Mostly I was just commenting on the ridiculously biased tone of the article - which in this case is not even accurate.
Also, I totally disagree that DRM is evil. Most of the current *implementations* have been complete crap, I agree. WMDRM is annoying. Apple's Fairplay is even worse, since generally you can't even licence it. An ideal implementation would allow a LEGAL BUYER of a piece of content total unrestricted access to that content wherever and however they wanted to use it - AND, all future improvements on it - why the hell do I want to pay another $20 for a movie I already bought now that they have figured out how to provide it in a format (HD) that is finally close to the quality they actually intended in the theater!
Also, I saw you mentioned unrestricted access to future generations - I totally agree on that point. My relatively unconsidered opinion is if someone creates original content, they should have the right to charge you whatever they want to view/listen/whatever to it, without having you distribute it to everyone you know for free. If you disagree, then don't pay and don't use it. If you do pay, you should also have the right to access that content in any way you want for as long as you wish. And, once the copyright holder dies (or maybe even a reasonably allowance for spouses, screw descendants) the content is released to the public domain. The biggest evil is not copyright or DRM, it's assignment and enforcement of copyight to corporations who want to extend that copyright indefinitely.
Yeah, it's amazing. Everyone raves about iPod/iTunes but WMP is EVIL!!
;)
better integration with media players sanctioned by them
iPod vs 100+ WMA devices...
integration with their new URGE music service
iTunes Store vs URGE...
more importantly, this version contains the latest in Microsoft DRM software
Fairplay vs WMDRM... one is supported on dozens of devices, the other on 2 (oh, don't forget the crippled Razr, 3!)
Hey, I have an iPod, but why shouldn't Microsoft be able to add the same "features" Apple has to their media player? (they do that with so many other parts of their OS
Boycotts are very effective provided that:
/. readers to buy an XBox360 instead of a PS3 ;)
1. Enough people participate to make the cost of ignoring the boycott greater than the cost savings or revenue increase associated with whatever actions prompted the boycott.
2. The company that is being boycotted sees the boycott as being a long-term issue.
Sure, IF that happens, it can be effective. But that doesn't address the root problem of how to get people to boycott a product. The most important factor there is a clear, equivalent alternative. For example, a "don't buy gas" boycott (and those do go around!) is stupid. A "don't buy from Chevron, they are evil and do this and that, please buy from Shell" (not that I have any opinion on Chevron vs Shell, it's just an example) might have a better chance. Burger King vs McDonald's, Best Buy vs Circuit City, whatever.
I guess you did mention that non-commodity goods would help Sony withstand a boycott - but I don't think it's as much withstand as make it a total non-starter. And even in the relatively commodity electronics Sony just has SO many products that it would take a book just to list alternatives (don't buy a Sony TV, buy Panasonic. Don't buy a Sony Walkman, buy an iPod. Don't buy a Sony-Ericsson phone, buy a Nokia... and just try to convince
True, isn't the whole point of the article that he is now looking back and comparing the Mac to his old Windows PC?
You know those American cell phone companies like to charge customers great fees for every little download on a phone. Maybe the cell phone companies threatened to bad the phone if there was no song limit.
That's not a bad theory, it's amazing how they try to get people to pay for things (ringtones, backgrounds, stupid songs/videos) that are freely available if they didn't make it such a pain to put them on the phone.
I just got the Sony Ericsson W810i - only took Cingular about 6 months to finally offer it. Great Walkman phone & decent 2MP camera. But I have to say the syncing software is just barely usable. If Apple made a phone anywhere near the quality of the W810i but usable with iTunes it could destroy these nice-phones-with-horrible-software-support.
While I would not argue that the US educational system is not in need of help, it's totally ridiculous to say it is now a "room full of retards". I assume since you call it "our educational system" you were educated in the US? Are you claiming to be "liquid shit" yourself?
It may be that the system is becoming more stratified than it was 20 years ago - which is not something to be proud of - but honestly at the level (Nobel Prize winners) that this article talks about that's totally irrelevant. The competition for admittance to top American universities is higher than ever. Yes, on a broad scale the US high school educational system could use work. Probably true for the MASSIVE university system as well. But there are hundreds of thousands of highly motivated students at the best universities in the US working their asses off (and millions more that work their asses off no matter where they are) for you to claim that they are a bunch of "retards". How many successes does it take from that pool to produce a few who win these type of awards?
Ok, after that seemingly pro US rant... imagine if the US had spent an extra $80B a year towards this educational system rather than the military fiasco we are currently involved in? Do some math, and that is a FULL RIDE for over 4 MILLION students a year (and this is assuming ridiculous private school tuitions of ~20k+). That is over 1/4 of the TOTAL college enrollment. If you assume that the majority of those 15M+ students are at subsidized public or community colleges, it's probably over 1/2. How's that for effective use of funds?
Exactly! He must be the richest hypocrite on the planet. Yahoo overpaid for that crappy company by about 95%. He does freely admit his goal from the start was to own a professional basketball team, so I guess he is at least a smart hypocrite.
Damn, you beat me to it! That's what I was thinking, too.
Risking $500k a day in fines from a country with 10 million residents? No WAY it's remotely worth it, they couldn't make 1/10 of that from Belgian operations. Shutting down google.be would be fairly harsh to the Belgian citizens who probably couldn't care less about the ruling, but hey, they'd care after that.
Actually, let's do some calculations for fun...
Google had gross revenue of $6B last year. That's $1 per person on the planet per YEAR (obviously not everyone on the planet uses Google but this will work for a rough estimate). Say Belgium would then be responsible for $10M a year. That's under $30k a day. Assume Belgians are avid Google users and round it up to $50k per day, and hey, my 1/10 estimate above wasn't too bad...
What I see: ...
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1. Tags
Really?? What I see:
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An error occurred while connecting to the database. Details of this error have been sent to an administrator.
Please check back later!
Go go Web 2.0!
What a waste of a genius. A lawyer.
Genius? I think most everyone here would agree genius implies "extraordinary talent and creative ability" - ie able to create NEW ideas. He basically proved extremely capable of working the system. Wow. If he really wants to go off and take the time to prove himself capable of original thought, great, but otherwise it sounds like law may be his ideal field...