I'm not sure what the "one way might get Apple some cash" is. The problem is that people would be able to sign up and pay for Dropbox directly through an app, with nothing going to Apple. That's not a way for Apple to get some cash. So they block it, with the desired outcome that Dropbox feel the hurt enough that they rebuidl their API to go through Apple's cash filter. Win for Apple. Sure, there's a risk that Dropbox don't do that and those kinds of app simply become impossible on iOS, or that users just have to sign up outside of the iDevice and then connect to their account from the app (which is effectively what I did with Dropbox - I signed up for an account before I ever owned an iPhone and then I installed the app and connected to my account - nothing went to Apple, and if I upgrade my account I'll probably do it over the web and not through the app).
Apple can afford to close a few small doors in the name of maintaining the principle that they always get their cut from all in-app purchases.
Because they are not a monopoly. There is choice in the smartphone & tablet market. If you don't like Apple's walled garden, get an Android. And even if Android had never happened, I still don't think that they would be considered a monopoly because it's an optional technology. You can use a laptop for most things that an iP* can do.
Enough "online backup" services have gone south to make me not want to trust a single supplier - I have Dropbox and Google Drive, and anything that I care about goes into both. I tried SpiderOak but it's a lot less intuitive. Probably a lot more powerful and configurable if I were to spend the time learning it though.
Why would they? If Dropbox were to charge more for in-App purchases than on their web site then there would be an incentive to, but just because 30% of your payment goes to Apple instead of Dropbox, how many people actually care? A few. Not enough to make Apple's share price plunge.
I think it's worth investigating. It seems unlikely that we'll solve the problem by simply reducing the damage that we are doing, so I think we have to take the risk and try to engineer our way past the problem. I have no doubt that there will be mistakes and unexpected consequences, but that's the way of the world.
I think the theory is, that geoengineering is unlikely to succeed in the long term and so it's just kicking the problem into the long grass. I see your point, though, that kind of statement is playing into the hands of AGW deniers by implying that the only reason to worry about AGW is because we have an ulterior motive for making people panic over nothing.
It is my considered opinion that if there is complex life comparable to ours on other planets, it will be astonishingly similar to us - in that it will be dumb, short-sighted, greedy, wasteful, and hazardous to both itself and any other life around it. That's how evolution works - that's [b][i]the[/i][/b] best strategy for dominating your ecosystem and out-competing every other dumb, short-sighted, greedy, wasteful, and hazardous life form that you have to compete with.
Or - if it is enlightened and wise and far-sighted and unlike all the things I listed earlier, then it will have gone through a phase in its development that was astonishingly similar to ours, and will understand very well the predicament that we are in and why we are the way we are. As to whether it will conclude that it is a good idea to help us, or whether it will revert to type and treat us as a dangerous competitor... well, I have no idea of the answer to that one.
Or, maybe I've just been watching too much Babylon 5. But I think I mostly held this opinion already before that.
The physical cost of printing and distributing a book amounts to 10-15% of the cost. Lets assume tha it's 15% and that it drops to 1% for eBooks (you still have to run the servers and deal with administration around the sales of books).
So your $10 printed book gets you $8.50 per copy to pay the author, editor, proofreaders, advertisers, etc.
So you want to move over to eBooks, and you still want to make the same kind of money.
If you just drop the price by the 14% saving and sell it at $8.60, what will that do to your sals? If it stays the same then you have made the same amount of money.
If you drop it by more, then you will only see the benefit [i]if[/i] your sales go up proportionately to the price drop. At the $8.50 price point, I don't think a $1 price drop will significantly boost sales. If you halve the price, will that double sales? I very much doubt it. Maybe. It's a big risk, though, and maybe a few publishers will try it, but there's a limit to how many books any one person can realistically buy and read.
If you drop prices to App Store levels, then a few lucky winners will selll millions of books instead of thousands - but the top sellers are selling that kind of volume anyway at current prices. Many will simply fail to make any significant amount of money.
Very laudable, and this is a great move that I hope more publishers adopt, but one side-effect of this kind of enthusiasm is that the Tor experiment will be hailed as a resounding success because of people exuberantly rushing to support the first major mover in this direction.
You're overstating the case - those viruses and bacteria don't "want" us to die, they "want" us to continue to exist to the extent that our existence provides them with an environment in which they can prosper. If all respiratory life died of the common cold, the common cold virus would itself die out. Diseases that are 100% fatal to their hosts tend to dwindle, and what we are left with today are loads of diseases that have evolved to be less than 100% fatal, because those diseases are more successful since they have a broader base to infect. Life is most effective when it does reach an equilibrium with those organisms on which it depends, which somewhat resembles the "Gaia" theory. Such equilibrium with the dependency chain does not preclude wiping out organisms on which they do not depend though, and occasionally things go spectacularly wrong when a species suddenly spills into an ecosystem which does not have sufficient time to achieve a steady state with it. These occasions are not always caused by man, but man-made examples are easier to find.
Because the linked article is about the current state, the Slashdot article is about the comparison with 2008 and so includes the missing information that the linked article does not.
Fossils ? You think that there has been enough biomass to create this much gas.
Yes. I do think that.
There's a reason it's called Natural Gas, nothing to do with dead flora and fauna.
Plants and animals are part of what is usually referred to as "nature". Prior to life appearing on the planet, there was 1,000 times as much methane in the atmosphere than there is now. Over the last 3 billion years, life has been extracting carbon from the atmosphere and depositing it under the earth in the form of coal, oil, and methane. I think that some of the methane underground is abiotic, but most is indeed "fossil fuel".
But for hacker targets, particularly phishing or personal data theft which the submitter is probably concerned about, desktop market share is the important metric.
I think that is appropriate for trademarks, but I don't think it is for copyright. This is a trade issue and so should be addressed by the FTC - it could be monopolistic practice by Microsoft, or it could be a taxable gift to OnLive.
Gifts above a certain value are taxable. I'm not sure if that counts for gifts between companies. The story about Inida taxing "angel funding" is similar to this, and if one company is creating an uneven playing field by giving gifts to another company then that is not desirable in a free market. It could even come under antitrust, if they are doing this to increase Windows' market share in the mobile virtual desktop space.
That's what a lot of young men really are like. Most, probably. Nearly all the kids I was at school with were quite open in their opinion that girls were sex objects. I believed it for a bit. Briefly.
Mine says I'm in "London, City of" and have downloaded Supernatural, Sanctuary, Twilight Saga, and Jasmine Webb Experience. All completely incorrect. Right country, wrong everything else. This web site is worse than useless.
No, that's male thinking. Human nature doesn't change, there will always be immature cretins whose Y-chromosome gets the better of them regardless of society's progress towards equality.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure what the "one way might get Apple some cash" is. The problem is that people would be able to sign up and pay for Dropbox directly through an app, with nothing going to Apple. That's not a way for Apple to get some cash. So they block it, with the desired outcome that Dropbox feel the hurt enough that they rebuidl their API to go through Apple's cash filter. Win for Apple. Sure, there's a risk that Dropbox don't do that and those kinds of app simply become impossible on iOS, or that users just have to sign up outside of the iDevice and then connect to their account from the app (which is effectively what I did with Dropbox - I signed up for an account before I ever owned an iPhone and then I installed the app and connected to my account - nothing went to Apple, and if I upgrade my account I'll probably do it over the web and not through the app).
Apple can afford to close a few small doors in the name of maintaining the principle that they always get their cut from all in-app purchases.
Because they are not a monopoly. There is choice in the smartphone & tablet market. If you don't like Apple's walled garden, get an Android. And even if Android had never happened, I still don't think that they would be considered a monopoly because it's an optional technology. You can use a laptop for most things that an iP* can do.
Enough "online backup" services have gone south to make me not want to trust a single supplier - I have Dropbox and Google Drive, and anything that I care about goes into both. I tried SpiderOak but it's a lot less intuitive. Probably a lot more powerful and configurable if I were to spend the time learning it though.
Yeah! Wake up, sheeple!
Why would they? If Dropbox were to charge more for in-App purchases than on their web site then there would be an incentive to, but just because 30% of your payment goes to Apple instead of Dropbox, how many people actually care? A few. Not enough to make Apple's share price plunge.
I think it's worth investigating. It seems unlikely that we'll solve the problem by simply reducing the damage that we are doing, so I think we have to take the risk and try to engineer our way past the problem. I have no doubt that there will be mistakes and unexpected consequences, but that's the way of the world.
I think the theory is, that geoengineering is unlikely to succeed in the long term and so it's just kicking the problem into the long grass. I see your point, though, that kind of statement is playing into the hands of AGW deniers by implying that the only reason to worry about AGW is because we have an ulterior motive for making people panic over nothing.
It is my considered opinion that if there is complex life comparable to ours on other planets, it will be astonishingly similar to us - in that it will be dumb, short-sighted, greedy, wasteful, and hazardous to both itself and any other life around it. That's how evolution works - that's [b][i]the[/i][/b] best strategy for dominating your ecosystem and out-competing every other dumb, short-sighted, greedy, wasteful, and hazardous life form that you have to compete with.
Or - if it is enlightened and wise and far-sighted and unlike all the things I listed earlier, then it will have gone through a phase in its development that was astonishingly similar to ours, and will understand very well the predicament that we are in and why we are the way we are. As to whether it will conclude that it is a good idea to help us, or whether it will revert to type and treat us as a dangerous competitor... well, I have no idea of the answer to that one.
Or, maybe I've just been watching too much Babylon 5. But I think I mostly held this opinion already before that.
The physical cost of printing and distributing a book amounts to 10-15% of the cost. Lets assume tha it's 15% and that it drops to 1% for eBooks (you still have to run the servers and deal with administration around the sales of books).
So your $10 printed book gets you $8.50 per copy to pay the author, editor, proofreaders, advertisers, etc.
So you want to move over to eBooks, and you still want to make the same kind of money.
If you just drop the price by the 14% saving and sell it at $8.60, what will that do to your sals? If it stays the same then you have made the same amount of money.
If you drop it by more, then you will only see the benefit [i]if[/i] your sales go up proportionately to the price drop. At the $8.50 price point, I don't think a $1 price drop will significantly boost sales. If you halve the price, will that double sales? I very much doubt it. Maybe. It's a big risk, though, and maybe a few publishers will try it, but there's a limit to how many books any one person can realistically buy and read.
If you drop prices to App Store levels, then a few lucky winners will selll millions of books instead of thousands - but the top sellers are selling that kind of volume anyway at current prices. Many will simply fail to make any significant amount of money.
Very laudable, and this is a great move that I hope more publishers adopt, but one side-effect of this kind of enthusiasm is that the Tor experiment will be hailed as a resounding success because of people exuberantly rushing to support the first major mover in this direction.
You're overstating the case - those viruses and bacteria don't "want" us to die, they "want" us to continue to exist to the extent that our existence provides them with an environment in which they can prosper. If all respiratory life died of the common cold, the common cold virus would itself die out. Diseases that are 100% fatal to their hosts tend to dwindle, and what we are left with today are loads of diseases that have evolved to be less than 100% fatal, because those diseases are more successful since they have a broader base to infect. Life is most effective when it does reach an equilibrium with those organisms on which it depends, which somewhat resembles the "Gaia" theory. Such equilibrium with the dependency chain does not preclude wiping out organisms on which they do not depend though, and occasionally things go spectacularly wrong when a species suddenly spills into an ecosystem which does not have sufficient time to achieve a steady state with it. These occasions are not always caused by man, but man-made examples are easier to find.
And cancer causes cell phones.
Because the linked article is about the current state, the Slashdot article is about the comparison with 2008 and so includes the missing information that the linked article does not.
Fossils ? You think that there has been enough biomass to create this much gas.
Yes. I do think that.
There's a reason it's called Natural Gas, nothing to do with dead flora and fauna.
Plants and animals are part of what is usually referred to as "nature". Prior to life appearing on the planet, there was 1,000 times as much methane in the atmosphere than there is now. Over the last 3 billion years, life has been extracting carbon from the atmosphere and depositing it under the earth in the form of coal, oil, and methane. I think that some of the methane underground is abiotic, but most is indeed "fossil fuel".
...that the US is going to invade us or bring about regime change!
Android may use the Linux kernel, but it isn't kernel exploits that are the main concern, it's app API exploits.
But for hacker targets, particularly phishing or personal data theft which the submitter is probably concerned about, desktop market share is the important metric.
I just tried that and it doesn't make any difference.
I think that is appropriate for trademarks, but I don't think it is for copyright. This is a trade issue and so should be addressed by the FTC - it could be monopolistic practice by Microsoft, or it could be a taxable gift to OnLive.
No, but if market is being disrupted by a large gift of free licences to one party, then the FTC could ask the IRS to tax them on that gift.
Gifts above a certain value are taxable. I'm not sure if that counts for gifts between companies. The story about Inida taxing "angel funding" is similar to this, and if one company is creating an uneven playing field by giving gifts to another company then that is not desirable in a free market. It could even come under antitrust, if they are doing this to increase Windows' market share in the mobile virtual desktop space.
Netcraft has confirmed it.
Seriously though - I like Google+ and I use it all the time and so do a lot of my friends.
That's what a lot of young men really are like. Most, probably. Nearly all the kids I was at school with were quite open in their opinion that girls were sex objects. I believed it for a bit. Briefly.
Mine says I'm in "London, City of" and have downloaded Supernatural, Sanctuary, Twilight Saga, and Jasmine Webb Experience. All completely incorrect. Right country, wrong everything else. This web site is worse than useless.
No, that's male thinking. Human nature doesn't change, there will always be immature cretins whose Y-chromosome gets the better of them regardless of society's progress towards equality.