Microsoft will NEVER make money on the XBox platform overall. They lost close to 8 Billion dollars before they started _small_ quarterly profits which will never ever recoup the money lost. And you need to keep in mind when you talk about profits that has only happened because they extended the typical 5 year console cycle to 7 years and just a year after starting to make a profit they are going to start the loss cycle all over again by starting the new console cycle they delayed.
There is a reason Microsoft doesn't break out XBox revenue in their stock reports, the investors would lynch management for the colossal waste of money.
The patents were handed over to a joint venture run by Microsoft and Apple jointly. Yes it will operate like Intellectual Ventures, but it will be used specifically to target competition to the two owners.
You are VERY wrong about them not caring. Apple is adamant about having the carriers involved because overall it nets them far more revenue. Subsidized phone sales through the carriers allows Apple to charge probably 20% more for their product than they could on the open market. Carrier subsidized phones hide the price from consumers.
This is one of the reasons iPhones don't sell as well outside the US. In many other countries phones are sold directly to the consumer, as a result the consumer is well aware of the price they are paying. The net result is they purchase phones less often and price shop more competitively. In the US market the carrier negotiates a price (actually Apple dictates the price and a minimum volume of purchases) the true cost of the purchase is concealed from the customer. That is GOOD for apple. Their phones are very overpriced and have margins the rest of the manufacturers can't sustain.
Make no mistake, if US regulators tried to impose some of the same rules that European nations have imposed (in particular forcing carriers to unbundle the phone subsidy) Apple would actively campaign for the carriers. Hiding the true price is the only reason their sales are as high as they are in the US.
Of course the Fed's have the right to regulate interstate commerce and the airlines in particular. But I don't believe they have a right to regulate the customers of the airlines without a damn good reason and a process to challenge those listings. The airline passenger isn't engaging in interstate commerce, the airline is.
EA and the big publishers are only destroying big publishers. There are a number of great Indie games out there and coming. This is the result of the big studios abandoning PC gaming for the console market (where the only games they publish for PC are console ports). Steam has made indie publishing viable and in the end it's probably we can only hope that it destroys EA and the other big publishers.
The supreme court ruled a long time ago at the start of the war on drugs that the Fed's have the right to restrict intrastate drug production and distribution because it "creates a market". So no such luck there, the Supreme court allowed congress to poke so many holes in states rights that you will have no such luck defending the end of prohibition. As has been said many time, the war on drugs allowed the government far more powers than they ever had in the past or the founders ever intended them to have.
Hell the government can take your property without you ever being convicted of a crime just by claiming it was used in a drug crime. Little or no proof even required and even if they do charge you and you beat bogus charges they can still take the property. The war on drugs ruined much of the real freedom we had and most of the population cheered it away.
The life we know needs certain things, in particular liquid water. That exists very few places. Mars is proven at this point to have had liquid water in the past, none of the other places has.
On the other hand the force necessary to hurl a chunk of mars off the planet would likely kill even microscopic life in the containing object. I find it silly that people are suggesting that could happen. I imagine that an impact of significant enough magnitude to eject rocks from the surface into space would liquify the rocks (and thus killing everything on them) before they were ejected into space. Even if it didn't liquify them they would be heated to thousands of degrees by the instantaneous change in velocity needed to reach exit velocity. Even if you could come up with some bizarre circumstance that could get life bearing rocks into space the radiation between earth and mars would kill almost anything that wasn't 10's or 100's of feet buried in rock. So eve if it's survives the exit and is buried deep enough to survive the journey what on earth sustains it for the journey? It's not like it would have packed a knapsack. Even with food the temperatures would be near zero and very little life can survive being frozen.
To me what kills the idea is just how impossible the odds are. You have several near impossibilities all combined to move life from one planet to another.
You don't need to assume. There are escalating payments with their deal. They basically got the first few years without payment but they have increasing sales goals where they have agreed to by X number of licenses later regardless of whether they sell the phones or not. MS gave Nokia several billion and they will get back every dime plus interest, termination of the contract likely requires a balloon payment of the whole thing immediately.
Nokia is hooked like an Anchor to MS, they will not be getting out of that deal without bankruptcy involved.
There is a seriously major bed bug infestation going on right now on the east coast of North America. There hasn't been this large of a problem with bed bugs in this area for more than 60+ years.
If the person is being bit it is most likely bed bugs. They are parasites that suck blood and because of this they are far worse than cockroaches, they also tend to breed as fast as roaches. The very presence in one room indicates they are present or will soon be present everywhere in the building. Standard treatment protocol for bed bugs is to spray not only the dwelling they are in but every adjacent dwelling area. In an apartment building this would mean the apartment in question plus all the surrounding apartments including above and below. Its not unusual to require treating the entire floor they are found on but the floor above and below as well.
You forgot ferrous metals. Everyone takes ferrous metals even if they don't say they do. Steel and iron are probably the easiest product to recycle and all recycling facilities have ferrous metal removal as a presorting step.
Even if they heated it hot enough to burn the soda to ash (they don't) you would still have raw carbon ash contamination in the final product. Plastic has to be pretty much clean to be recycled because they heat it till it softens then reprocess it into something else.
Or muscle. When you start a restricted caloric intake diet your bodies first reaction is to "eat" excess muscle, and this means any muscle not actively being used every single day.
CFC's are not miracle cooling agents. They work on vapor-compression cycle that takes advantage of thermodynamics to move heat from one place to another. If you put CFCs in a line like water cooling without the normal refrigeration cycle they will perform worse than water at heat removal.
There is a famous saying that if Natural gas was developed and proposed for residential use today (for the first time) everyone would freak out because of how dangerous it is.
Every house in areas that already have natural gas heating already have everything you claim to be worried about.Gas is actually incredibly safe, it needs a precise mixture with oxygen to be explosive or burn. Yet it still kills thousands every year.
Conspiracy theorists give people that expose real conspiracies a bad name. When you have crackpots out there claiming the moon landing never happened and other such BS the real conspiracies are lost in the noise.
There could even be a government conspiracy to hide real conspiracies in the noise of fake ones. Or it could just be a bunch of nut jobs with paranoia, I put my money on the nut jobs..
Many companies (I would wager every one of the fortune 500 and probably any company larger than about 500 employees) have policies forbidding any information whether good or bad. Judging the employee by the minimal response is a mistake on your part.
Why do you assume Microsoft represents the industry?
From my understanding Redhat Support buys you direct access to not only kernel programmers but the distribution people. I've heard of situations where high dollar customers got Redhat to troubleshoot a problem and provide them a custom kernel to fix the problem and then rolled the changes into the main kernel.
Microsoft's business is selling licenses. RedHats business is selling support.
Yes sex slaves was a bad example because as you say legal prostitution would probably negate most of the demand. On the other hand there are plenty of examples where organized crime would exist. Before prohibition made organized crime highly profitable most of the Mafia made their living hijacking trucks and selling the stolen merchandise out of the trunk of a car. In what example would you think that hijacking could be legal?
One of the other major areas that organized crime made money before drugs was in charging businesses "protection". This was naturally extended to ports where the charged shippers "protection". When the major organized crime busting came through and stopped it there were estimates that organized crime was adding 5% to the cost of every single item sold in cities like Chicago and New York.
Because of this it's very likely the currency and IRS controls would have been passed anyway to provide a weapon against this organized crime.
The Bush tax credits were predicated on the assumption of future surpluses that never materialized. Rather than be prudent and wait for the surpluses to materialize Bush reacted and got his filibuster proof Republican congress to pass huge tax cuts. About 50% of the ensuing run up in debt is attributed to those tax cuts.
The only thing Lincoln did to cause an armed rebellion was to get elected. The teapot was already boiling over, it just needed the trigger for it blow up. Lincoln became that trigger because he opposed slavery but had he not we STILL would have ended in civil war at a later date. Slavery had to end and it wasn't going to end at anything but the point of a rifle.
You are aware that the anti-Morsi protest in June was simultaneous in every city in the country right? It wasn't just the protestors in Cario at Tahir square. I've seen estimates from 14 million to nearly 20 million depending on how many little towns with 10000 people you count. These protests also happened under threats that Morsi would deploy the police and Army and fire into the crowds so I have no doubt some people stayed home for fear of being killed. They were some of the largest public demonstrations in the world if not the largest.
Slashdot Mirror
You must be using a different slashdot than me because that's not my experience at all.
Microsoft will NEVER make money on the XBox platform overall. They lost close to 8 Billion dollars before they started _small_ quarterly profits which will never ever recoup the money lost. And you need to keep in mind when you talk about profits that has only happened because they extended the typical 5 year console cycle to 7 years and just a year after starting to make a profit they are going to start the loss cycle all over again by starting the new console cycle they delayed.
There is a reason Microsoft doesn't break out XBox revenue in their stock reports, the investors would lynch management for the colossal waste of money.
The patents were handed over to a joint venture run by Microsoft and Apple jointly. Yes it will operate like Intellectual Ventures, but it will be used specifically to target competition to the two owners.
You are VERY wrong about them not caring. Apple is adamant about having the carriers involved because overall it nets them far more revenue. Subsidized phone sales through the carriers allows Apple to charge probably 20% more for their product than they could on the open market. Carrier subsidized phones hide the price from consumers.
This is one of the reasons iPhones don't sell as well outside the US. In many other countries phones are sold directly to the consumer, as a result the consumer is well aware of the price they are paying. The net result is they purchase phones less often and price shop more competitively. In the US market the carrier negotiates a price (actually Apple dictates the price and a minimum volume of purchases) the true cost of the purchase is concealed from the customer. That is GOOD for apple. Their phones are very overpriced and have margins the rest of the manufacturers can't sustain.
Make no mistake, if US regulators tried to impose some of the same rules that European nations have imposed (in particular forcing carriers to unbundle the phone subsidy) Apple would actively campaign for the carriers. Hiding the true price is the only reason their sales are as high as they are in the US.
Where "around" = within 100 miles of any international border (not just the mexican)..
Of course the Fed's have the right to regulate interstate commerce and the airlines in particular. But I don't believe they have a right to regulate the customers of the airlines without a damn good reason and a process to challenge those listings. The airline passenger isn't engaging in interstate commerce, the airline is.
EA and the big publishers are only destroying big publishers. There are a number of great Indie games out there and coming. This is the result of the big studios abandoning PC gaming for the console market (where the only games they publish for PC are console ports). Steam has made indie publishing viable and in the end it's probably we can only hope that it destroys EA and the other big publishers.
The supreme court ruled a long time ago at the start of the war on drugs that the Fed's have the right to restrict intrastate drug production and distribution because it "creates a market". So no such luck there, the Supreme court allowed congress to poke so many holes in states rights that you will have no such luck defending the end of prohibition. As has been said many time, the war on drugs allowed the government far more powers than they ever had in the past or the founders ever intended them to have.
Hell the government can take your property without you ever being convicted of a crime just by claiming it was used in a drug crime. Little or no proof even required and even if they do charge you and you beat bogus charges they can still take the property. The war on drugs ruined much of the real freedom we had and most of the population cheered it away.
The life we know needs certain things, in particular liquid water. That exists very few places. Mars is proven at this point to have had liquid water in the past, none of the other places has.
On the other hand the force necessary to hurl a chunk of mars off the planet would likely kill even microscopic life in the containing object. I find it silly that people are suggesting that could happen. I imagine that an impact of significant enough magnitude to eject rocks from the surface into space would liquify the rocks (and thus killing everything on them) before they were ejected into space. Even if it didn't liquify them they would be heated to thousands of degrees by the instantaneous change in velocity needed to reach exit velocity. Even if you could come up with some bizarre circumstance that could get life bearing rocks into space the radiation between earth and mars would kill almost anything that wasn't 10's or 100's of feet buried in rock. So eve if it's survives the exit and is buried deep enough to survive the journey what on earth sustains it for the journey? It's not like it would have packed a knapsack. Even with food the temperatures would be near zero and very little life can survive being frozen.
To me what kills the idea is just how impossible the odds are. You have several near impossibilities all combined to move life from one planet to another.
You don't need to assume. There are escalating payments with their deal. They basically got the first few years without payment but they have increasing sales goals where they have agreed to by X number of licenses later regardless of whether they sell the phones or not. MS gave Nokia several billion and they will get back every dime plus interest, termination of the contract likely requires a balloon payment of the whole thing immediately.
Nokia is hooked like an Anchor to MS, they will not be getting out of that deal without bankruptcy involved.
Idle hands are the devils work.
This expression has been in existence in one form or another since before Shakespeare.
There is a seriously major bed bug infestation going on right now on the east coast of North America. There hasn't been this large of a problem with bed bugs in this area for more than 60+ years.
If the person is being bit it is most likely bed bugs. They are parasites that suck blood and because of this they are far worse than cockroaches, they also tend to breed as fast as roaches. The very presence in one room indicates they are present or will soon be present everywhere in the building. Standard treatment protocol for bed bugs is to spray not only the dwelling they are in but every adjacent dwelling area. In an apartment building this would mean the apartment in question plus all the surrounding apartments including above and below. Its not unusual to require treating the entire floor they are found on but the floor above and below as well.
Bed bugs are nasty business.
Welcome to slashdot, enjoy your stay.
Editorial review? Not here!
You forgot ferrous metals. Everyone takes ferrous metals even if they don't say they do. Steel and iron are probably the easiest product to recycle and all recycling facilities have ferrous metal removal as a presorting step.
Even if they heated it hot enough to burn the soda to ash (they don't) you would still have raw carbon ash contamination in the final product. Plastic has to be pretty much clean to be recycled because they heat it till it softens then reprocess it into something else.
Or muscle. When you start a restricted caloric intake diet your bodies first reaction is to "eat" excess muscle, and this means any muscle not actively being used every single day.
CFC's are not miracle cooling agents. They work on vapor-compression cycle that takes advantage of thermodynamics to move heat from one place to another. If you put CFCs in a line like water cooling without the normal refrigeration cycle they will perform worse than water at heat removal.
There is a famous saying that if Natural gas was developed and proposed for residential use today (for the first time) everyone would freak out because of how dangerous it is.
Every house in areas that already have natural gas heating already have everything you claim to be worried about.Gas is actually incredibly safe, it needs a precise mixture with oxygen to be explosive or burn. Yet it still kills thousands every year.
Its paranoia like yours that handicaps society.
Conspiracy theorists give people that expose real conspiracies a bad name. When you have crackpots out there claiming the moon landing never happened and other such BS the real conspiracies are lost in the noise.
There could even be a government conspiracy to hide real conspiracies in the noise of fake ones. Or it could just be a bunch of nut jobs with paranoia, I put my money on the nut jobs..
Many companies (I would wager every one of the fortune 500 and probably any company larger than about 500 employees) have policies forbidding any information whether good or bad. Judging the employee by the minimal response is a mistake on your part.
Why do you assume Microsoft represents the industry?
From my understanding Redhat Support buys you direct access to not only kernel programmers but the distribution people. I've heard of situations where high dollar customers got Redhat to troubleshoot a problem and provide them a custom kernel to fix the problem and then rolled the changes into the main kernel.
Microsoft's business is selling licenses. RedHats business is selling support.
Yes sex slaves was a bad example because as you say legal prostitution would probably negate most of the demand. On the other hand there are plenty of examples where organized crime would exist. Before prohibition made organized crime highly profitable most of the Mafia made their living hijacking trucks and selling the stolen merchandise out of the trunk of a car. In what example would you think that hijacking could be legal?
One of the other major areas that organized crime made money before drugs was in charging businesses "protection". This was naturally extended to ports where the charged shippers "protection". When the major organized crime busting came through and stopped it there were estimates that organized crime was adding 5% to the cost of every single item sold in cities like Chicago and New York.
Because of this it's very likely the currency and IRS controls would have been passed anyway to provide a weapon against this organized crime.
The Bush tax credits were predicated on the assumption of future surpluses that never materialized. Rather than be prudent and wait for the surpluses to materialize Bush reacted and got his filibuster proof Republican congress to pass huge tax cuts. About 50% of the ensuing run up in debt is attributed to those tax cuts.
The only thing Lincoln did to cause an armed rebellion was to get elected. The teapot was already boiling over, it just needed the trigger for it blow up. Lincoln became that trigger because he opposed slavery but had he not we STILL would have ended in civil war at a later date. Slavery had to end and it wasn't going to end at anything but the point of a rifle.
You are aware that the anti-Morsi protest in June was simultaneous in every city in the country right? It wasn't just the protestors in Cario at Tahir square. I've seen estimates from 14 million to nearly 20 million depending on how many little towns with 10000 people you count. These protests also happened under threats that Morsi would deploy the police and Army and fire into the crowds so I have no doubt some people stayed home for fear of being killed. They were some of the largest public demonstrations in the world if not the largest.