It may not be an SEC requirement, but isn't it an NASD requirement? I've been working at brokerages for the last ten years, and it would have been unthinkable for us not to have our conversations recorded.
It wasn't just the traders and the salesmen, but the analysts as well. Maybe it wasn't a regulatory requirement, but it's definitely part of doing business in securities, because so much is done over the phone. It was actually surprising how little we used those recordings after they were made, but maybe we were just fortunate. Mostly it was to check trades, but the threat was always there that if you gave out inside information, you could be nailed.
Interestingly we were allowed to use mobiles on the trading floor, but I can imagine that people are much more cautious in the US. Post-Spitzer, they are all running very scared. Most US investment bankers that I talk to now, virtually have to append a disclaimer to everything that they say. Must make for some interesting pillow talk.
How much do you actually want to do, while mobile?
on
Is 3G Irrelevant?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Couldn't agree with you more. I have a SonyEricsson P800 running GPRS, and I can use it to check stock prices and sports scores, and, at a pinch, to send email. But in reality, I don't need to use it that much.
If I need to contact someone when I am out in a car, then I can call them. Almost any situation when I am going to do something that I normally do on a computer (eg. edit/read documents or spreadsheets) I am going to want to sit down and do it, whether I do it on my phone, or on my laptop. And any phone that is small enough to be portable is going to be too small to be useful for anything that needs a decent sized screen and a keyboard. Is it so important to be able to send an email from the bus stop? More importantly, you aren't going to be compiling a megabyte sized spreadsheet or document in the brief intervals when you are completely unable to sit down and take out your laptop, or get to an internet cafe.
These limits mean that I don't need that much bandwidth - if you haven't got that much screen to fill, then fewer pixels are required, which means fewer bytes. I've been at conferences with mobile operators, and the only use that these guys can claim for 3G is video, and increasing the amount of bandwidth so they can have more 2G users on their network at one time. I remember having similar conversations with them about WAP - they were hard pressed to come up with an application that I could imagine myself, or a mass market, using. All they came up with for WAP was betting, and for 3G, it's sports highlights. My experience is that if you really care about a sports event, you are going to organise yourself so that you are near a TV while it's on. There is a high-end, limited niche, that will buy 3G to watch video while mobile, but you can't base a billion dollar investment on this segment.
My guess is that operators will roll out 3G networks, but they will be mainly used to increase bandwidth for 2G applications. No one wants video phones in the fixed wire world (except for high end users, who videoconference), and my guess is that they will not want them in the wireless one either. Some people will pay for sports video and similar, and there will be some revenue from this, like for pay-per-view sports. The problem for 3G is that it took so long in coming, that 2G had time to catch up.
Perhaps StarOffice is the right answer to the wrong question. Most of the functions for which we use a computer are very basic - text entry, messaging, numerical spreadsheets. MSOffice has built critical mass because it has all the functions that you might ever need, even if you use them only once every six months.
If you are a large employer, then it's probably in your interest to reduce the number of functions in the software that you give to your workers. If they need a car, you don't give them a Ferrari, do you? What do council workers really do? My guess is that mostly they are interpreting text (ie laws) and transmitting their interpretations to other people, either as text or email. If you can build templates in a basic text processor that will output as a letter, then you don't need to worry too much about having sophisticated word processing. That way they don't waste time playing around with complex programs, and they have fewer opportunities to pursue extra-curricular activities while at work.
The thing is, the Microsoft programs are so good at what they do, everyone has organised their work processes around it. If you could re-engineer those processes, a little, then you could probably significanly reduce the sophistication of the programs that you need. So instead of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, think about changing the shape of the hole a little.
It's true that this is off-topic in that it has nothing to do with database software, but since so much of the discussion has focussed on capitalism, perhaps it's not so off-topic. I think that you are right to question whether it's a good idea for companies to go public, as it's not always a good thing. And I say this as someone who has been a stock analyst for 8 years.
One of the motivations for a company going public is to allow the venture capitalists to cash out, or at least value their holdings. Some (smart) VCs look to make their money back via dividends or cashflow, but most want to sell their stake to some other buyer (one variant of the "bigger fool" theory of investing).
The other motivation for going public is to set a basis for an employee stock program: employers like to give workers an incentive to care about the value of the company, and giving them stock or options is a way to do this. You can do this without a listing, but it's much easier if the company is public. Of course, you can always focus on the bottom line by giving employees a profit share, but then, there would not be any placement fees for the investment bankers.
I think that after the excesses of the last decade, you will get some companies thinking about whether they should be public - it is hard work, and the VCs won't thank you, but there is a lot to be said for it. Far too many dot-coms went public too early - there is a lot to be said for companies selling stock only when they are mature, generating steady profits, and paying dividends.
You forgot the parrot! How can some spotty MP3-ripper in his parents' basement be deemed a pirate, without a parrot on his shoulder?
You raise an interesting point, and I'm surprised that Napster, Kazaa, et al haven't used in their defence against the RIAA. In fact, Kevin Mitnick could have claimed that he's not a hacker, following the Webster's dictionary definition of hacker:
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]
Hack \Hack\, v. i.
To ride or drive as one does with a hack horse; to ride at an ordinary pace, or over the roads, as distinguished from riding across country or in military fashion.
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]
I just read the biography of an Australian salvage expert, Mike Hatcher, which tells the sad story of how they lost a diver who jumped into the water around a pump that was acting as a sort of vacuum cleaner, saying "It's my own private jacuzzi!" Unfortunately, because the water with all that air in it had a lot less buoyancy, and he happened to be wearing a weight belt, he sank immediately to the bottom (>100 ft) and was drowned. Sounds like the same effect.
The beginning of the end started when the equipment manufacturers started producing boxes that allowed VoIP calls to have the same quality as circuit-switched ones. We all probably make a lot more IP calls than we are aware of.
The quicker companies do this, the better it will be for their margins - this news from Sprint probably doesn't mean much for their users, but their shareholders should be happy. The cost of carrying VoIP is much lower, which is what allows those calling card companies to stay in business.
They have been on sale in Russia for at least six months. Cost about 1500 dollars. We've been sorely tempted, but the wife decided to get a cute little mobile phone with rhinestones that light up when she gets a call.
In Russia, they advertised the magnetic strips as being useful to stop the Trilobyte getting carried away, and visiting your neighbours and vacuuming their apartment as well. I guess the old Soviet habit of visiting your neighbour (as in "Visit the USSR, before it visits you") dies hard.
At the risk of seeming pedantic (with an opening like that, how can I be anything else?) I should point out that Shrek is an ogre, not a troll.
I know this, because my 3 year old daughter is watching it at the moment, a welcome relief from Toy Story 2, which she has already watched three times today. She normally manages to limit herself to Shrek only once or twice a day.
No doubt some warped geek will come up with some "fan" "art" based on these two as well. In fact, I fully expect some warped geek to reply to this post with some existing porno versions of these cartoons.
Part of the reason for this is regulatory, the other part is semantic. To some extent you are complaining about the fact that they didn't announce the merger until they announce it. But for there to be a state of the world where they had announced the merger, there must have been a state of the world when they did not announce it. You can't complain about the non-announced state of the world, because it only comes into being as a result of the announced state of the world. Enough semantics/quasi-logic - there are good legal reasons.
These deals are highly complex, and you can only announce them once all of the legal details are done, which may come two months after you agree on price (or a formula to determine the price, if you are buying with your own stock), and the agreement on price may come several months after the initial agreement to transact. Any confirmation of talks, or preliminary agreement, could have been construed as a confirmation of a deal, which was not yet finalized. So they have to deny the talks, until everything is done. Otherwise you will have the SEC, Elliott Spitzer, 100 civil suits, and an army of nazi frogmen crawling all over your company in the split second that it takes to say the words "selective disclosure" and "insider trading".
Why is it amazing? Surely this is the one meal in your life where you needn't worry about the health consequences? Myself, I would choose an immortality pill for my last meal, but there's probably a rule against that.
I saw a BBC report on Sealand in respect to data protection - apparently they have had a lot of enquiries from financial companies for off-site data backup. I think that everyone in this business has reviewed their backup strategies following 9/11, and given that this is not a major cost item for an investement bank, there is no harm in having your data in a different jurisdiction, as well as in a different location. Of course this may be a response to the New York Attorney General's investigations as well.
Your're living in a self-invented utopia, lulled into submission by our Big Brother media, which is just a servant of the Overlords! This so-called act, passed by the so-called Congress, is in fact a cunning ploy, designed to create a secret police that will track everything that you do with your computers. Just because you've never heard of them, just goes to show how successful they are in keeping in a secret.
I recommend that you do as I do, cover your computer in tinfoil and never switch it on, or plug it into anything. It's the only way, I tell you! Together, we CAN defeat them!
This is a good article, and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in this subject. One thing that the article, and the discussion on this board does not make clear is that it is not Marvel that made $400 million in revenue from the movie, but the studio. Marvel's profits from the film are the fee that it got from the studio ($12 million IIRC) and whatever share of the gross or net that it negotiated, minus whatever Marvel's applicable costs might be.
It should be no problem working out the revenues, as this is presumably whatever the studio paid. As for Marvel's applicable costs, it looks like these are not defined in the contract, and this may be the core of the argument, if Marvel is taking unrelated items, like its president's alimony payments, and charging them against the revenues from Spiderman.
But it seems fairly clear that Stan Lee does not have any points in the net of the film, but in Marvel's net from the film, which is a very different thing. The other thing to bear in mind is the question of risk. If the film had bombed, then the studio really would have made a loss, and Marvel would have got zero points from the net (if they had such an agreement with the studio) but Stan Lee would still have got his million dollars. Maybe the studios don't create anything, but they put up the money, so they deserve a reward for taking the risk.
For instance, when you put your money in a mutual fund, the fund manager has the ideas about where to invest the money, and gets a fee for this, and maybe a success fee as well. But you get the bulk of the reward, because it's your money, and if the idea doesn't work out, then you bear the cost.
Based on information from the Yahoo! group dedicated to the Sony Ericsson P800, it won't be ready until January. This comes from someone who works for Ericsson in the UK.
It seems that they are having problems with the firmware. Certainly the demo version that I played with a month ago hung after a couple of minutes playing with it. The person demonstrating it said that I should test out the features that I was most interested in, because this model tended to crash within a couple of minutes. So I guess it's not quite ready for prime time.
But you could include virtual pedestrians that you could run over, thus giving you the satisfaction of a hit, without any actual bloodshed. Unless, of course, the computer decided to play an evil trick, and display a virtual pedestrian in a location that, in the real world, is occupied by something else, like a building.
I'm based outside the UK, and it was never clear to me how the Pogo works if you put in the SIM card of another provider, especially if it was outside the UK.
Is it that you use Pogo's own site as a sort of proxy server, accessing through your service provider's GPRS connection? Or would you have to access an ISP back in the UK? If the latter, it's only practical inside the UK.
Still, it is a nice piece of kit, and the form factor looked quite good, if a little on the fat side. Glad to hear that they are doing well, because it should set an important precedent for the mobile data market in general, and it's nice to see a small company actually delivering and carving out a market share.
I was at a conference with a guy from Qualcomm the other day, talking about their CDMA-450 technology, which is basically their CDMA-2000, only operating on the 450MHz band (or maybe 400). The NMT-450 operators in Russia are looking at this as a way of upgrading their networks.
I said that I thought this lacked the critical mass, and the momentum to really compete with GSM 2.5G as a mobile voice/data solution, particularly when you look at how ghastly the handsets are for CDMA450. He said that even so, there is a use for CDMA 450 as a fixed wireless technology.
This makes a lot of sense, because laying cable in urban Russia is a bureaucratic nightmare, not to mention the fact that your competitors may control the ducts that you want to use. Even when you can lay cable, it's much more fun building a wireless link in a climate like ours. Actually my last mile in my apartment at home is wireless (point to point microwave, rather than cellular) and I'm very happy with it. And there is a real shortage of fixed lines in Moscow - one of my colleagues had to wait two years for a line to be installed by the public operator. I was told four years when I asked.
The other thing that I heard at the same conference was that in those areas where the license payment was sensible, 3G would be used to build extra capacity in the wireless network, on the assumption that there are quadra-mode (?tetra-mode) handsets to work on all 3 GSM standards, and W-CDMA. I've seen mention of these handsets already, although given how long it's taken with 2.5G, I'm not holding my breath.
I like your basic idea, but it seems to me that what the pharma companies and the govt see as a reasonable rate of return will be two very different numbers. The pharma companies will say that they need to generate lots of income, so that their shareholders can make out like bandits, like Pfizer's did (I mean financially of course).
The government will say no, you should make a return related to your cost of capital. Then the companies will inflate the cost of development of their drugs, or will throw in all their R&D from failed/rejected drugs (like Hollywood studios tend to throw all their costs into the budgets of successful films, so that a percentage of the net is equal to zero). In general , it will all be a regulatory nightmare, which could make tax-financed healthcare for poor people seem positively libertarian.
The other thing to bear in mind is that the drug companies benefit a lot from government sponsored research, often not in the countries where they pay their taxes. Again, this is hard to quantify, but unless the companies are really willing to show all the numbers for their costs, in an honest way, then there's no harm in using this as an argument against firms that whine about how they need to cover their costs.
I agree that Tomb Raider is not the most female friendly game out there, but my wife got hooked on it, although this may be because it was the first real game that she got into. It was much harder to wrest my copy of The Sims away from her.
Having said that, maybe women just aren't interested in beta testing games - they can be frustrating enough when they work, but it would be even more annoying if you didn't know whether your failure to progress was because you hadn't worked out the game, or because there was a bug. Maybe the general female mind is less captivated by this kind of problem solving test, and I know that this is a massive generalisation.
The exception to this principle is of course Kim, Mike Doonesbury's girlfriend, but then I sometimes wonder whether she is real or not.
Not trying to be funny, or anything, but isn't Australia in the same position as the UK, in that it doesn't have a written constitution? Just a network of constitutional laws and acts, and a supporting set of court judgements that delineate the powers of the state. I apologize for my ignorance, but if Australia is in the same position as the UK, then there is a problem with constitional rights, because there is nowhere that these rights are explicitly stated.
For instance, with regard to freedom of speech, the UK government can use something called a D-notice to suppress press reports that it doesn't like, although there has been a lot of controversy about this, and I think that the use of this power is limited by the courts. I don't claim to be a big expert on this.
I live in Russia, and used to work for a multilateral organisation here. We were always happy that our phones were bugged, because then the Russians might actually believe that we meant the advice that we gave them.
Amen to that - my father also has diabetes. One thing that I've been on the lookout for is the Glucowatch. I've seen it advertised, there's a site that says that it's coming real soon now, but then, it's been saying that for over a year.
IIRC, the idea is that the watch can measure blood sugar by measuring the conductivity of the skin, which is a good geeky application. Has anyone heard any more about this? It was last heard of in FDA testing.
Slashdot Mirror
It may not be an SEC requirement, but isn't it an NASD requirement? I've been working at brokerages for the last ten years, and it would have been unthinkable for us not to have our conversations recorded.
It wasn't just the traders and the salesmen, but the analysts as well. Maybe it wasn't a regulatory requirement, but it's definitely part of doing business in securities, because so much is done over the phone. It was actually surprising how little we used those recordings after they were made, but maybe we were just fortunate. Mostly it was to check trades, but the threat was always there that if you gave out inside information, you could be nailed.
Interestingly we were allowed to use mobiles on the trading floor, but I can imagine that people are much more cautious in the US. Post-Spitzer, they are all running very scared. Most US investment bankers that I talk to now, virtually have to append a disclaimer to everything that they say. Must make for some interesting pillow talk.
Couldn't agree with you more. I have a SonyEricsson P800 running GPRS, and I can use it to check stock prices and sports scores, and, at a pinch, to send email. But in reality, I don't need to use it that much.
If I need to contact someone when I am out in a car, then I can call them. Almost any situation when I am going to do something that I normally do on a computer (eg. edit/read documents or spreadsheets) I am going to want to sit down and do it, whether I do it on my phone, or on my laptop. And any phone that is small enough to be portable is going to be too small to be useful for anything that needs a decent sized screen and a keyboard. Is it so important to be able to send an email from the bus stop? More importantly, you aren't going to be compiling a megabyte sized spreadsheet or document in the brief intervals when you are completely unable to sit down and take out your laptop, or get to an internet cafe.
These limits mean that I don't need that much bandwidth - if you haven't got that much screen to fill, then fewer pixels are required, which means fewer bytes. I've been at conferences with mobile operators, and the only use that these guys can claim for 3G is video, and increasing the amount of bandwidth so they can have more 2G users on their network at one time. I remember having similar conversations with them about WAP - they were hard pressed to come up with an application that I could imagine myself, or a mass market, using. All they came up with for WAP was betting, and for 3G, it's sports highlights. My experience is that if you really care about a sports event, you are going to organise yourself so that you are near a TV while it's on. There is a high-end, limited niche, that will buy 3G to watch video while mobile, but you can't base a billion dollar investment on this segment.
My guess is that operators will roll out 3G networks, but they will be mainly used to increase bandwidth for 2G applications. No one wants video phones in the fixed wire world (except for high end users, who videoconference), and my guess is that they will not want them in the wireless one either. Some people will pay for sports video and similar, and there will be some revenue from this, like for pay-per-view sports. The problem for 3G is that it took so long in coming, that 2G had time to catch up.
Perhaps StarOffice is the right answer to the wrong question. Most of the functions for which we use a computer are very basic - text entry, messaging, numerical spreadsheets. MSOffice has built critical mass because it has all the functions that you might ever need, even if you use them only once every six months.
If you are a large employer, then it's probably in your interest to reduce the number of functions in the software that you give to your workers. If they need a car, you don't give them a Ferrari, do you? What do council workers really do? My guess is that mostly they are interpreting text (ie laws) and transmitting their interpretations to other people, either as text or email. If you can build templates in a basic text processor that will output as a letter, then you don't need to worry too much about having sophisticated word processing. That way they don't waste time playing around with complex programs, and they have fewer opportunities to pursue extra-curricular activities while at work.
The thing is, the Microsoft programs are so good at what they do, everyone has organised their work processes around it. If you could re-engineer those processes, a little, then you could probably significanly reduce the sophistication of the programs that you need. So instead of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, think about changing the shape of the hole a little.
It's true that this is off-topic in that it has nothing to do with database software, but since so much of the discussion has focussed on capitalism, perhaps it's not so off-topic. I think that you are right to question whether it's a good idea for companies to go public, as it's not always a good thing. And I say this as someone who has been a stock analyst for 8 years.
One of the motivations for a company going public is to allow the venture capitalists to cash out, or at least value their holdings. Some (smart) VCs look to make their money back via dividends or cashflow, but most want to sell their stake to some other buyer (one variant of the "bigger fool" theory of investing).
The other motivation for going public is to set a basis for an employee stock program: employers like to give workers an incentive to care about the value of the company, and giving them stock or options is a way to do this. You can do this without a listing, but it's much easier if the company is public. Of course, you can always focus on the bottom line by giving employees a profit share, but then, there would not be any placement fees for the investment bankers.
I think that after the excesses of the last decade, you will get some companies thinking about whether they should be public - it is hard work, and the VCs won't thank you, but there is a lot to be said for it. Far too many dot-coms went public too early - there is a lot to be said for companies selling stock only when they are mature, generating steady profits, and paying dividends.
You forgot the parrot! How can some spotty MP3-ripper in his parents' basement be deemed a pirate, without a parrot on his shoulder?
You raise an interesting point, and I'm surprised that Napster, Kazaa, et al haven't used in their defence against the RIAA. In fact, Kevin Mitnick could have claimed that he's not a hacker, following the Webster's dictionary definition of hacker:
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]
Hack \Hack\, v. i.
To ride or drive as one does with a hack horse; to ride at an ordinary pace, or over the roads, as distinguished from riding across country or in military fashion.
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]
Hack \Hack\, v. t. (Football)
To kick the shins of (an opposing payer).
From hyperdictionary.com
I just read the biography of an Australian salvage expert, Mike Hatcher, which tells the sad story of how they lost a diver who jumped into the water around a pump that was acting as a sort of vacuum cleaner, saying "It's my own private jacuzzi!" Unfortunately, because the water with all that air in it had a lot less buoyancy, and he happened to be wearing a weight belt, he sank immediately to the bottom (>100 ft) and was drowned. Sounds like the same effect.
The beginning of the end started when the equipment manufacturers started producing boxes that allowed VoIP calls to have the same quality as circuit-switched ones. We all probably make a lot more IP calls than we are aware of.
The quicker companies do this, the better it will be for their margins - this news from Sprint probably doesn't mean much for their users, but their shareholders should be happy. The cost of carrying VoIP is much lower, which is what allows those calling card companies to stay in business.
They have been on sale in Russia for at least six months. Cost about 1500 dollars. We've been sorely tempted, but the wife decided to get a cute little mobile phone with rhinestones that light up when she gets a call.
In Russia, they advertised the magnetic strips as being useful to stop the Trilobyte getting carried away, and visiting your neighbours and vacuuming their apartment as well. I guess the old Soviet habit of visiting your neighbour (as in "Visit the USSR, before it visits you") dies hard.
At the risk of seeming pedantic (with an opening like that, how can I be anything else?) I should point out that Shrek is an ogre, not a troll.
I know this, because my 3 year old daughter is watching it at the moment, a welcome relief from Toy Story 2, which she has already watched three times today. She normally manages to limit herself to Shrek only once or twice a day.
No doubt some warped geek will come up with some "fan" "art" based on these two as well. In fact, I fully expect some warped geek to reply to this post with some existing porno versions of these cartoons.
Part of the reason for this is regulatory, the other part is semantic. To some extent you are complaining about the fact that they didn't announce the merger until they announce it. But for there to be a state of the world where they had announced the merger, there must have been a state of the world when they did not announce it. You can't complain about the non-announced state of the world, because it only comes into being as a result of the announced state of the world. Enough semantics/quasi-logic - there are good legal reasons.
These deals are highly complex, and you can only announce them once all of the legal details are done, which may come two months after you agree on price (or a formula to determine the price, if you are buying with your own stock), and the agreement on price may come several months after the initial agreement to transact. Any confirmation of talks, or preliminary agreement, could have been construed as a confirmation of a deal, which was not yet finalized. So they have to deny the talks, until everything is done. Otherwise you will have the SEC, Elliott Spitzer, 100 civil suits, and an army of nazi frogmen crawling all over your company in the split second that it takes to say the words "selective disclosure" and "insider trading".
Why is it amazing? Surely this is the one meal in your life where you needn't worry about the health consequences? Myself, I would choose an immortality pill for my last meal, but there's probably a rule against that.
No you weren't.
And thank God it didn't
I saw a BBC report on Sealand in respect to data protection - apparently they have had a lot of enquiries from financial companies for off-site data backup. I think that everyone in this business has reviewed their backup strategies following 9/11, and given that this is not a major cost item for an investement bank, there is no harm in having your data in a different jurisdiction, as well as in a different location. Of course this may be a response to the New York Attorney General's investigations as well.
Your're living in a self-invented utopia, lulled into submission by our Big Brother media, which is just a servant of the Overlords! This so-called act, passed by the so-called Congress, is in fact a cunning ploy, designed to create a secret police that will track everything that you do with your computers. Just because you've never heard of them, just goes to show how successful they are in keeping in a secret.
I recommend that you do as I do, cover your computer in tinfoil and never switch it on, or plug it into anything. It's the only way, I tell you! Together, we CAN defeat them!
This is a good article, and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in this subject. One thing that the article, and the discussion on this board does not make clear is that it is not Marvel that made $400 million in revenue from the movie, but the studio. Marvel's profits from the film are the fee that it got from the studio ($12 million IIRC) and whatever share of the gross or net that it negotiated, minus whatever Marvel's applicable costs might be.
It should be no problem working out the revenues, as this is presumably whatever the studio paid. As for Marvel's applicable costs, it looks like these are not defined in the contract, and this may be the core of the argument, if Marvel is taking unrelated items, like its president's alimony payments, and charging them against the revenues from Spiderman.
But it seems fairly clear that Stan Lee does not have any points in the net of the film, but in Marvel's net from the film, which is a very different thing. The other thing to bear in mind is the question of risk. If the film had bombed, then the studio really would have made a loss, and Marvel would have got zero points from the net (if they had such an agreement with the studio) but Stan Lee would still have got his million dollars. Maybe the studios don't create anything, but they put up the money, so they deserve a reward for taking the risk.
For instance, when you put your money in a mutual fund, the fund manager has the ideas about where to invest the money, and gets a fee for this, and maybe a success fee as well. But you get the bulk of the reward, because it's your money, and if the idea doesn't work out, then you bear the cost.
Based on information from the Yahoo! group dedicated to the Sony Ericsson P800, it won't be ready until January. This comes from someone who works for Ericsson in the UK.
It seems that they are having problems with the firmware. Certainly the demo version that I played with a month ago hung after a couple of minutes playing with it. The person demonstrating it said that I should test out the features that I was most interested in, because this model tended to crash within a couple of minutes. So I guess it's not quite ready for prime time.
But you could include virtual pedestrians that you could run over, thus giving you the satisfaction of a hit, without any actual bloodshed. Unless, of course, the computer decided to play an evil trick, and display a virtual pedestrian in a location that, in the real world, is occupied by something else, like a building.
I'm based outside the UK, and it was never clear to me how the Pogo works if you put in the SIM card of another provider, especially if it was outside the UK.
Is it that you use Pogo's own site as a sort of proxy server, accessing through your service provider's GPRS connection? Or would you have to access an ISP back in the UK? If the latter, it's only practical inside the UK.
Still, it is a nice piece of kit, and the form factor looked quite good, if a little on the fat side. Glad to hear that they are doing well, because it should set an important precedent for the mobile data market in general, and it's nice to see a small company actually delivering and carving out a market share.
I was at a conference with a guy from Qualcomm the other day, talking about their CDMA-450 technology, which is basically their CDMA-2000, only operating on the 450MHz band (or maybe 400). The NMT-450 operators in Russia are looking at this as a way of upgrading their networks.
I said that I thought this lacked the critical mass, and the momentum to really compete with GSM 2.5G as a mobile voice/data solution, particularly when you look at how ghastly the handsets are for CDMA450. He said that even so, there is a use for CDMA 450 as a fixed wireless technology.
This makes a lot of sense, because laying cable in urban Russia is a bureaucratic nightmare, not to mention the fact that your competitors may control the ducts that you want to use. Even when you can lay cable, it's much more fun building a wireless link in a climate like ours. Actually my last mile in my apartment at home is wireless (point to point microwave, rather than cellular) and I'm very happy with it. And there is a real shortage of fixed lines in Moscow - one of my colleagues had to wait two years for a line to be installed by the public operator. I was told four years when I asked.
The other thing that I heard at the same conference was that in those areas where the license payment was sensible, 3G would be used to build extra capacity in the wireless network, on the assumption that there are quadra-mode (?tetra-mode) handsets to work on all 3 GSM standards, and W-CDMA. I've seen mention of these handsets already, although given how long it's taken with 2.5G, I'm not holding my breath.
I like your basic idea, but it seems to me that what the pharma companies and the govt see as a reasonable rate of return will be two very different numbers. The pharma companies will say that they need to generate lots of income, so that their shareholders can make out like bandits, like Pfizer's did (I mean financially of course).
The government will say no, you should make a return related to your cost of capital. Then the companies will inflate the cost of development of their drugs, or will throw in all their R&D from failed/rejected drugs (like Hollywood studios tend to throw all their costs into the budgets of successful films, so that a percentage of the net is equal to zero). In general , it will all be a regulatory nightmare, which could make tax-financed healthcare for poor people seem positively libertarian.
The other thing to bear in mind is that the drug companies benefit a lot from government sponsored research, often not in the countries where they pay their taxes. Again, this is hard to quantify, but unless the companies are really willing to show all the numbers for their costs, in an honest way, then there's no harm in using this as an argument against firms that whine about how they need to cover their costs.
I agree that Tomb Raider is not the most female friendly game out there, but my wife got hooked on it, although this may be because it was the first real game that she got into. It was much harder to wrest my copy of The Sims away from her.
Having said that, maybe women just aren't interested in beta testing games - they can be frustrating enough when they work, but it would be even more annoying if you didn't know whether your failure to progress was because you hadn't worked out the game, or because there was a bug. Maybe the general female mind is less captivated by this kind of problem solving test, and I know that this is a massive generalisation.
The exception to this principle is of course Kim, Mike Doonesbury's girlfriend, but then I sometimes wonder whether she is real or not.
You can gather all your Sims around the local McDonalds, and have your very own anti-globalisation protest.
...but will you be able to install the operating system of your choice on them, just like in the real world? Or not, as the case may be.
Not trying to be funny, or anything, but isn't Australia in the same position as the UK, in that it doesn't have a written constitution? Just a network of constitutional laws and acts, and a supporting set of court judgements that delineate the powers of the state. I apologize for my ignorance, but if Australia is in the same position as the UK, then there is a problem with constitional rights, because there is nowhere that these rights are explicitly stated.
For instance, with regard to freedom of speech, the UK government can use something called a D-notice to suppress press reports that it doesn't like, although there has been a lot of controversy about this, and I think that the use of this power is limited by the courts. I don't claim to be a big expert on this.
I live in Russia, and used to work for a multilateral organisation here. We were always happy that our phones were bugged, because then the Russians might actually believe that we meant the advice that we gave them.
Amen to that - my father also has diabetes. One thing that I've been on the lookout for is the Glucowatch. I've seen it advertised, there's a site that says that it's coming real soon now, but then, it's been saying that for over a year. IIRC, the idea is that the watch can measure blood sugar by measuring the conductivity of the skin, which is a good geeky application. Has anyone heard any more about this? It was last heard of in FDA testing.