I haven't spent any time defending Apple's actions. If the judge says they're guilty, I'm willing to accept that verdict.
The facts on the case remain unchanged, however, and so does my position: Amazon was using deeper pockets to control the market and marginalise any potential competition. They were selling for very slim margins in a way that would be unsustainable for smaller companies and ultimately the industry as a whole, over the long term.
This is why I say Apple gave them a gift by blundering in and disrupting everything. If they'd held on for a little while longer, I strongly suspect we would have seen a different kind of anti-trust case against Amazon, and Apple would have been free to come in and capitalise on THAT. Tactically, it was a poor decision, and now Amazon comes out smelling like a rose and Apple has given people another reason to hate them.
I dare say you're a bit overconfident in this regard. If it were so easy to convince people to only get things from trusted sources and not sketchy links, Windows security would be rock solid.
If there's anything that I've learned over the years, it's that people will go to extraordinary measures to unwittingly sabotage themselves. They'll disable protections and allow anything to be installed. You think that you can't trick an Android user on an unpatched system? I've got a bridge to sell you.
Maybe this particular exploit won't ever be a big issue, but what we're looking at is hundreds of millions of people buying into a system that is remarkably hard to patch properly because it relies on organisations with a vested interest in either selling you a new phone or keeping costs low by not updating old systems. It's no big surprise to me that Samsung is the only manufacturer so far to patch its phones (though as far as I know, they only patched the latest OS anyway).
If it's not this one, it's the next one. That's the true issue with fragmentation. You can't really EOL these products because the source is out there and easy to fork, and so as long as you allow new apps to run on old phones, you'll have this.
The cost of printing, shipping and storage has been pegged at approximately 10-15% of the actual cost of a book. The real costs are associated with writing, editing and marketing.
It's well established as part of the facts of the case that Amazon was paying the publisher price for the books--whatever that was--and selling the kindle versions for less than that. That's how it was below wholesale.
Regardless of what you think of the state of physical book publishing and what that costs, it bears little relevance to this situation at hand. It may be that the publishers are charging more than you think they should, but they were (or are) overcharging everyone equally.
Actually, I'm not making that mistake per se. Keyboards for other languages already enjoy sufficient status in iOS to get their own layout. It would be ridiculous for all languages to use QWERTY as it is. I can set the keyboard layout for a french keyboard to be AZERTY, for instance.
I was only commenting on the QWERTY-English combination, it's true, but other languages have already got their own solutions.
Ah, the important point to be aware of here is that Card uses his own money to fund fighting civil rights for LGBT people. It's relevant because the money that you give to him is money that goes to undermining the secular nature of US law.
I'm Canadian, and I'm not going to spend any money on some guy's books so he can attempt to deny rights to people, even if they live somewhere that I don't.
If the government recognises any marriage at all, it should recognise them all under the same terms and language, simple as that. If they're going to call it 'marriage', everyone should get a marriage. If they're going to call it a civil union, nobody should get a marriage.
The problem is that a government segregation, even just in name, is a tacit acknowledgement that the two systems or the people involved in them are not the same. If they're equal, why would there need to be a distinction between them? That distinction is important for social dynamics. Showing that people are equal at a government level helps to normalise them at a societal level. Clearly that's not all that needs to happen--it's not like racism or sexism have gone away even if non-whites and women are equal under the law--but it's a good start.
The only legal argument that I can muster against distinguishing between the two is that when something is named something different, the lawyers will use that. It's like the bad twist in stories where 'no man' could possibly defeat the evil villain...so the villain is beaten by a woman! In law, calling something by a different name makes it a different thing. If 'marriage' rights are enshrined, then someone will find a way to attack civil unions by claiming they're not the same as marriages. The devil is in the details, so I wouldn't trust it when someone tries to introduce NEW details.
Sure, but if they had taken it slower (I think it was Phil Schiller that said he was trying to get it done quickly before Jobs died), they may have taken the time to properly consider the consequences. They were really toeing the line, and they probably thought they were in the clear, but I guess not.
That's a false equivalence. If I want a widget that Wal-Mart sells, it's not necessarily the case I that I need only buy Brand-X widgets. Brand-Y widgets, which Target sells, are probably just as good.
If I want to buy Game of Thrones, I can't buy some off-label Game of Thrones and get the same thing. They're not equivalent. If Amazon is selling it at lower than their cost basically 100% of the time, how can a competitor hope to break into the market?
Basically, they can't. Not in a meaningful fashion. This is why Amazon still rules the roost when it comes to book sales.
Amazon's wrong doesn't absolve Apple in particular; the judge thinks what Apple was doing was shady, and so I'll accept that decision since they know more about the legality of such things than I do. I maintain, however, that given the course that Amazon was on, they would've been subject to an anti-trust trial at some point. They were using their near monopoly position to maintain that position and keep other entrants out of the marketplace. If sales are anything to go on, they were doing a good job.
Prices couldn't go down; Amazon was selling below wholesale as a means to control the market. Apple's got deep pockets too, so they probably could've done the same, but it's not really a sustainable business model.
Really, Apple's error here was not understanding the legal position that this put them in. They should've waited for what I think was the inevitable anti-trust case against Amazon and entered the market afterwards. This was a freebie given to Amazon and Apple detractors by some Apple executives being impatient.
The way Amazon was doing business before this all went down was a sure-fire track to an anti-trust case. They priced books below their own wholesale costs to keep competitors out of the business (the margins on Kindles are pretty slim to nil; I don't think you can even call the cheap books a loss leader, since it just leads to more losses). They controlled (still control?) over 90% of the eBook business, and their DRM BS isn't even compatible with the DRM BS that other companies use. (I can buy books from the Kobo bookstore and use a Sony eReader, for instance. And vice versa. No such luck if I buy a Kindle book, though. I have to have a Kindle.)
Apple did Amazon a favour by stepping in and gathering the publishers together. Now Apple's lost a lawsuit, but as far as I know, the agency model will still persist. Amazon dodged a bullet there.
Read 'Sex at Dawn'. Or one of several well-researched books on the topic.
First of all, I don't think you can claim that 'we are naturally almost monogamous'. There are several cultures (that still exist!) that were never monogamous and don't hew to the scheme of rich men and several wives.
Don't 'Flintstonize' the past. That is, don't assume what's happening now is the same thing that has been happening in the past, just slightly more advanced. Monogamy hasn't really been the state of affairs except for the last few hundred years at best. Casual and secretive non-monogamy has been happening for a long time.
Lastly, consider this: there are countries in the Middle East where adultery is a capital crime. They'll KILL you for having an affair.
There are more than 0 affairs that occur in those states, and they do, in fact, kill the people involved.
What creature on Earth needs to be threatened with death to adhere to its natural inclinations? Moreover, which creature will actually run counter to its 'natural' inclination and risk death for a few moments of sweaty, non-procreative activity.
Monogamy is a social construct, which is fine. Humans have those and we work with them. That doesn't make it the only social construct, the most natural social construct, the best social construct or even the CORRECT social construct.
I'd submit that the biggest change that mobile keyboards need is to move letters that are similarly replaceable in words further apart.
For instance: bit but bot
The three vowels are packed together. Regardless of your input method, you'll probably have to place your finger over more than one of those letters. It doesn't help to have autocorrect either, since it's just as likely to provide a valid but incorrect choice--unless the system has contextual correction. Ideally, the vowels should be as far spread apart as possible. Other similarly replaceable letters should also be moved apart. Letters that rarely replace one another (a and z, say) should be close together. I've got pretty slender fingers and I still mistype all over the place. The iPhone's autocorrect is quite good, and appears to me to autocorrect based on what side of the letter you typed (that is, it seems to be able to tell the difference between you typing on the left side of i or the right, allowing it to occasionally correctly guess between 'but' and 'bot', even if you put your finger mostly on the i) but even still, it's too easy to confuse the letters.
Well, there's certainly proof that Dvorak reduces hand movement; because the most used letters are in the home row, there's a lot less stretching for letters that you need with weak fingers. So from that perspective, Dvorak would be both easier and more comfortable. Anecdotally, my hands are less tired and more comfortable at the end of the day.
It's not optimal--there's a group of people (you'll have to google it; I don't have a link on me) that work on alternate keyboard layouts algorithmically using genetic algorithms to find layouts that ARE more optimal.
Oh please, what utter melodrama. You make it sound like they sound every Android entrant on to the market indiscriminately. They don't. There are more Android vendors that haven't been sued than those that have. And you've got Motorola, who decided to sue Microsoft but it turns out that that was a bad idea, and Google bought them knowing full well that if Motorola won, there'd be a lot of money in it for them.
Complain about the IP system if you want, that's fine. It's busted, we all know it. But in the framework of the law, these lawsuits have at least some merit.
Samsung is the big Android dog, and they got their asses sued because their phones looked remarkably like Apple's phones for quite a while. But unless I'm mistaken, Apple hasn't taken, say, Sony to court over anything. But Sony's phones don't look anything like the iPhone and never have. Huh, what a coincidence.
I suspect a lot of the active jailbreakers are people that just enjoy the challenge of it.
I jailbroke my phone earlier this year, and really, I don't see how anyone could really deal with it, especially with my old iPhone 4. The app quality isn't there, the stability isn't there, and it generally just killed my battery life without making me substantially happier with the device I have.
So I agree, sort of. If you're the kind of person that likes a highly customisable phone and wants to fiddle with it, why spend the money on a phone that gets in the way of that? If you want an iPhone, buy an iPhone and be happy with your iPhone. It's a big wide open market.
Then don't buy from eBay. There are plenty of local sellers. If you live somewhere remote, this may be slightly more of an inconvenience, but in that case, I suggest that you buy from shops that have good ratings and high reliability. Prices might go up slightly because people will have to buy phones through a trusted third party, but that's not the worst thing in the world, if we're honest.
I agree, in particular because I recently switched back to Opera. I use feedly on my iPhone and iPad, but I don't really use those much at work. I still like browsing articles while waiting for compiles to finish, though, so it's a bit lame to not have a reader that works in my browser.:/
There are lots of societal models that rely considerably less on parents specifically to raise children. It's obviously a benefit to have a stable family in which to raise children, but that doesn't mean that it's the only good way to do it. Socioeconomic status is a better predictor of child outcomes than most other metrics, which says to me that it just takes the stability and resources that most middle class families find with two parents--a single parent (say, a mother that adopts a child, or is artificially inseminated) with an exceptional amount of money will raise children largely indistinguishable behaviourally from children of two parent homes.
Honestly, it's a bit culturally short-sighted to claim that the nuclear family is the best way, particularly in light of how often this model seems to fail in the modern era in the western world.
Further to that, it's not clear that the stock price of any given company at any given time is entirely related to its performance. If the world were rational, Apple would still have a high stock price because they still make enormous profits. As a long term bet, they're fairly solid. Their price to earnings ratio is incredibly good.
Apple makes more profits in a quarter than Amazon has, cumulatively, over its entire history. (http://go.bloomberg.com/market-now/2013/01/23/apples-profit-vs-amazons-promise/) So naturally Apple's stock price drops while Amazon's stock price goes up. What?
But this is an offshoot of the weird way that we think the stock market is supposed to work now. It used to be that you invested in the long term in a company because you believed that they could produce something, and their success would mean your success. Now institutional buyers with the ability to lift or tank a stock irrespective of what anyone believes the true long-term prospects are cause wild stock swings and the world looks on and think that means something.
I own 3 shares of Apple. That's all I decided I wanted to afford (at the time I bought them, that was around $1000 of stock). I figure a lot of individual stockholders are like me, with modest investments. We're not the ones causing these swings with buying and selling. The success of Apple's stock isn't really related to what the public thinks of their products or how the public views Apple's future prospects.
Keep in mind that Samsung's (or HTCs) phones don't cost any less. Apple gives you a roughly equivalent product for the same price.
You can think of it as Apple making money off of its aggressive business dealings with other companies. They set up supply lines and inventory in such a way that they don't pay as much for components, but keep the price the same for me.
All my Apple stuff is high build quality and lasts a long time. It's good value for money, and the resale value is high. I prefer it this way to paying much lower prices and wondering when the other shoe is going to drop. (I'm the same way with bikes. I pay more for certain parts because I know the build quality is exemplary and lasts a long time. I could have some other parts that are lighter and cheaper, but they wear out faster. You get what you pay for.)
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I haven't spent any time defending Apple's actions. If the judge says they're guilty, I'm willing to accept that verdict.
The facts on the case remain unchanged, however, and so does my position: Amazon was using deeper pockets to control the market and marginalise any potential competition. They were selling for very slim margins in a way that would be unsustainable for smaller companies and ultimately the industry as a whole, over the long term.
This is why I say Apple gave them a gift by blundering in and disrupting everything. If they'd held on for a little while longer, I strongly suspect we would have seen a different kind of anti-trust case against Amazon, and Apple would have been free to come in and capitalise on THAT. Tactically, it was a poor decision, and now Amazon comes out smelling like a rose and Apple has given people another reason to hate them.
I dare say you're a bit overconfident in this regard. If it were so easy to convince people to only get things from trusted sources and not sketchy links, Windows security would be rock solid.
If there's anything that I've learned over the years, it's that people will go to extraordinary measures to unwittingly sabotage themselves. They'll disable protections and allow anything to be installed. You think that you can't trick an Android user on an unpatched system? I've got a bridge to sell you.
Maybe this particular exploit won't ever be a big issue, but what we're looking at is hundreds of millions of people buying into a system that is remarkably hard to patch properly because it relies on organisations with a vested interest in either selling you a new phone or keeping costs low by not updating old systems. It's no big surprise to me that Samsung is the only manufacturer so far to patch its phones (though as far as I know, they only patched the latest OS anyway).
If it's not this one, it's the next one. That's the true issue with fragmentation. You can't really EOL these products because the source is out there and easy to fork, and so as long as you allow new apps to run on old phones, you'll have this.
The cost of printing, shipping and storage has been pegged at approximately 10-15% of the actual cost of a book. The real costs are associated with writing, editing and marketing.
It's well established as part of the facts of the case that Amazon was paying the publisher price for the books--whatever that was--and selling the kindle versions for less than that. That's how it was below wholesale.
Regardless of what you think of the state of physical book publishing and what that costs, it bears little relevance to this situation at hand. It may be that the publishers are charging more than you think they should, but they were (or are) overcharging everyone equally.
Actually, I'm not making that mistake per se. Keyboards for other languages already enjoy sufficient status in iOS to get their own layout. It would be ridiculous for all languages to use QWERTY as it is. I can set the keyboard layout for a french keyboard to be AZERTY, for instance.
I was only commenting on the QWERTY-English combination, it's true, but other languages have already got their own solutions.
Ah, the important point to be aware of here is that Card uses his own money to fund fighting civil rights for LGBT people. It's relevant because the money that you give to him is money that goes to undermining the secular nature of US law.
I'm Canadian, and I'm not going to spend any money on some guy's books so he can attempt to deny rights to people, even if they live somewhere that I don't.
If the government recognises any marriage at all, it should recognise them all under the same terms and language, simple as that. If they're going to call it 'marriage', everyone should get a marriage. If they're going to call it a civil union, nobody should get a marriage.
The problem is that a government segregation, even just in name, is a tacit acknowledgement that the two systems or the people involved in them are not the same. If they're equal, why would there need to be a distinction between them? That distinction is important for social dynamics. Showing that people are equal at a government level helps to normalise them at a societal level. Clearly that's not all that needs to happen--it's not like racism or sexism have gone away even if non-whites and women are equal under the law--but it's a good start.
The only legal argument that I can muster against distinguishing between the two is that when something is named something different, the lawyers will use that. It's like the bad twist in stories where 'no man' could possibly defeat the evil villain...so the villain is beaten by a woman! In law, calling something by a different name makes it a different thing. If 'marriage' rights are enshrined, then someone will find a way to attack civil unions by claiming they're not the same as marriages. The devil is in the details, so I wouldn't trust it when someone tries to introduce NEW details.
Thanks. :(
Sure, but if they had taken it slower (I think it was Phil Schiller that said he was trying to get it done quickly before Jobs died), they may have taken the time to properly consider the consequences. They were really toeing the line, and they probably thought they were in the clear, but I guess not.
That's a false equivalence. If I want a widget that Wal-Mart sells, it's not necessarily the case I that I need only buy Brand-X widgets. Brand-Y widgets, which Target sells, are probably just as good.
If I want to buy Game of Thrones, I can't buy some off-label Game of Thrones and get the same thing. They're not equivalent. If Amazon is selling it at lower than their cost basically 100% of the time, how can a competitor hope to break into the market?
Basically, they can't. Not in a meaningful fashion. This is why Amazon still rules the roost when it comes to book sales.
Amazon's wrong doesn't absolve Apple in particular; the judge thinks what Apple was doing was shady, and so I'll accept that decision since they know more about the legality of such things than I do. I maintain, however, that given the course that Amazon was on, they would've been subject to an anti-trust trial at some point. They were using their near monopoly position to maintain that position and keep other entrants out of the marketplace. If sales are anything to go on, they were doing a good job.
Prices couldn't go down; Amazon was selling below wholesale as a means to control the market. Apple's got deep pockets too, so they probably could've done the same, but it's not really a sustainable business model.
Really, Apple's error here was not understanding the legal position that this put them in. They should've waited for what I think was the inevitable anti-trust case against Amazon and entered the market afterwards. This was a freebie given to Amazon and Apple detractors by some Apple executives being impatient.
The way Amazon was doing business before this all went down was a sure-fire track to an anti-trust case. They priced books below their own wholesale costs to keep competitors out of the business (the margins on Kindles are pretty slim to nil; I don't think you can even call the cheap books a loss leader, since it just leads to more losses). They controlled (still control?) over 90% of the eBook business, and their DRM BS isn't even compatible with the DRM BS that other companies use. (I can buy books from the Kobo bookstore and use a Sony eReader, for instance. And vice versa. No such luck if I buy a Kindle book, though. I have to have a Kindle.)
Apple did Amazon a favour by stepping in and gathering the publishers together. Now Apple's lost a lawsuit, but as far as I know, the agency model will still persist. Amazon dodged a bullet there.
Sorry, you're going to have to explain that.
Read 'Sex at Dawn'. Or one of several well-researched books on the topic.
First of all, I don't think you can claim that 'we are naturally almost monogamous'. There are several cultures (that still exist!) that were never monogamous and don't hew to the scheme of rich men and several wives.
Don't 'Flintstonize' the past. That is, don't assume what's happening now is the same thing that has been happening in the past, just slightly more advanced. Monogamy hasn't really been the state of affairs except for the last few hundred years at best. Casual and secretive non-monogamy has been happening for a long time.
Lastly, consider this: there are countries in the Middle East where adultery is a capital crime. They'll KILL you for having an affair.
There are more than 0 affairs that occur in those states, and they do, in fact, kill the people involved.
What creature on Earth needs to be threatened with death to adhere to its natural inclinations? Moreover, which creature will actually run counter to its 'natural' inclination and risk death for a few moments of sweaty, non-procreative activity.
Monogamy is a social construct, which is fine. Humans have those and we work with them. That doesn't make it the only social construct, the most natural social construct, the best social construct or even the CORRECT social construct.
I'd submit that the biggest change that mobile keyboards need is to move letters that are similarly replaceable in words further apart.
For instance:
bit
but
bot
The three vowels are packed together. Regardless of your input method, you'll probably have to place your finger over more than one of those letters. It doesn't help to have autocorrect either, since it's just as likely to provide a valid but incorrect choice--unless the system has contextual correction. Ideally, the vowels should be as far spread apart as possible. Other similarly replaceable letters should also be moved apart. Letters that rarely replace one another (a and z, say) should be close together. I've got pretty slender fingers and I still mistype all over the place. The iPhone's autocorrect is quite good, and appears to me to autocorrect based on what side of the letter you typed (that is, it seems to be able to tell the difference between you typing on the left side of i or the right, allowing it to occasionally correctly guess between 'but' and 'bot', even if you put your finger mostly on the i) but even still, it's too easy to confuse the letters.
Well, there's certainly proof that Dvorak reduces hand movement; because the most used letters are in the home row, there's a lot less stretching for letters that you need with weak fingers. So from that perspective, Dvorak would be both easier and more comfortable. Anecdotally, my hands are less tired and more comfortable at the end of the day.
It's not optimal--there's a group of people (you'll have to google it; I don't have a link on me) that work on alternate keyboard layouts algorithmically using genetic algorithms to find layouts that ARE more optimal.
My standard comment when talking about 'French Roast' is that it's code for, "shit, we burnt this batch."
A Panamanian coffee (Esmeralda) has won tasting competitions a few times. Some of the best coffee in the world comes out of the Americas.
As long as the plantation is run well and is interested in producing good coffee, there are a lot of places that good coffee can come from.
Oh please, what utter melodrama. You make it sound like they sound every Android entrant on to the market indiscriminately. They don't. There are more Android vendors that haven't been sued than those that have. And you've got Motorola, who decided to sue Microsoft but it turns out that that was a bad idea, and Google bought them knowing full well that if Motorola won, there'd be a lot of money in it for them.
Complain about the IP system if you want, that's fine. It's busted, we all know it. But in the framework of the law, these lawsuits have at least some merit.
Samsung is the big Android dog, and they got their asses sued because their phones looked remarkably like Apple's phones for quite a while. But unless I'm mistaken, Apple hasn't taken, say, Sony to court over anything. But Sony's phones don't look anything like the iPhone and never have. Huh, what a coincidence.
I suspect a lot of the active jailbreakers are people that just enjoy the challenge of it.
I jailbroke my phone earlier this year, and really, I don't see how anyone could really deal with it, especially with my old iPhone 4. The app quality isn't there, the stability isn't there, and it generally just killed my battery life without making me substantially happier with the device I have.
So I agree, sort of. If you're the kind of person that likes a highly customisable phone and wants to fiddle with it, why spend the money on a phone that gets in the way of that? If you want an iPhone, buy an iPhone and be happy with your iPhone. It's a big wide open market.
Then don't buy from eBay. There are plenty of local sellers. If you live somewhere remote, this may be slightly more of an inconvenience, but in that case, I suggest that you buy from shops that have good ratings and high reliability. Prices might go up slightly because people will have to buy phones through a trusted third party, but that's not the worst thing in the world, if we're honest.
I agree, in particular because I recently switched back to Opera. I use feedly on my iPhone and iPad, but I don't really use those much at work. I still like browsing articles while waiting for compiles to finish, though, so it's a bit lame to not have a reader that works in my browser. :/
There are lots of societal models that rely considerably less on parents specifically to raise children. It's obviously a benefit to have a stable family in which to raise children, but that doesn't mean that it's the only good way to do it. Socioeconomic status is a better predictor of child outcomes than most other metrics, which says to me that it just takes the stability and resources that most middle class families find with two parents--a single parent (say, a mother that adopts a child, or is artificially inseminated) with an exceptional amount of money will raise children largely indistinguishable behaviourally from children of two parent homes.
Honestly, it's a bit culturally short-sighted to claim that the nuclear family is the best way, particularly in light of how often this model seems to fail in the modern era in the western world.
Further to that, it's not clear that the stock price of any given company at any given time is entirely related to its performance. If the world were rational, Apple would still have a high stock price because they still make enormous profits. As a long term bet, they're fairly solid. Their price to earnings ratio is incredibly good.
Apple makes more profits in a quarter than Amazon has, cumulatively, over its entire history. (http://go.bloomberg.com/market-now/2013/01/23/apples-profit-vs-amazons-promise/) So naturally Apple's stock price drops while Amazon's stock price goes up. What?
But this is an offshoot of the weird way that we think the stock market is supposed to work now. It used to be that you invested in the long term in a company because you believed that they could produce something, and their success would mean your success. Now institutional buyers with the ability to lift or tank a stock irrespective of what anyone believes the true long-term prospects are cause wild stock swings and the world looks on and think that means something.
I own 3 shares of Apple. That's all I decided I wanted to afford (at the time I bought them, that was around $1000 of stock). I figure a lot of individual stockholders are like me, with modest investments. We're not the ones causing these swings with buying and selling. The success of Apple's stock isn't really related to what the public thinks of their products or how the public views Apple's future prospects.
Anecdotes aren't data, I know, but my worthless anecdote was a counter to the worthless assertion that the parent made. :)
Keep in mind that Samsung's (or HTCs) phones don't cost any less. Apple gives you a roughly equivalent product for the same price.
You can think of it as Apple making money off of its aggressive business dealings with other companies. They set up supply lines and inventory in such a way that they don't pay as much for components, but keep the price the same for me.
All my Apple stuff is high build quality and lasts a long time. It's good value for money, and the resale value is high. I prefer it this way to paying much lower prices and wondering when the other shoe is going to drop. (I'm the same way with bikes. I pay more for certain parts because I know the build quality is exemplary and lasts a long time. I could have some other parts that are lighter and cheaper, but they wear out faster. You get what you pay for.)