Meanwhile, the rest o the world has failed to realize that social conscience is no substitute for economic growth. The us per capital GDP is still 40% more than the EU, making all but the lowest 15-20% of the population better off in the US. If France were a US state, they would be somewhere between Mississippi and Louisiana-- two of the poorest states in the country. Our unemployment is also lower by a signifcant amount. By every economic measure, if you are willing to work in the US you are doing better than Europe. And maybe, just maybe, the fact that we still get to keep some our earnings affects that.
Even in a normal year, (say, two years ago) you have to cut it down to $100 billion or less, roughly about what China spends with with 1/3 the economy, to balance the budget. That would be put us at the lowest percentage of GDP of any first world country with any interest in having a functional military.
If we spend something closer to the percentage that the UK or France spends, we'd still be several hundred billions dollars short of balanced in a normal year.
The matter of the fact is if the cage is big enough, most people don't feel locked in.
The average person is apparently fine not having tethering and the 5-10 other "must have" flavors of apps you can't get on the app store. Or at least, the UI niceties outweigh it in their estimation. I'd actually be really curious to see a number on what portion of android users are actually installing software that is not allowed on the app store.
We need to get over this idea that most consumer give a shit whether something is "open" or not. They care about usability, features, price, and form factor, in some random ordering. Openness is only interesting so far as it impacts those four.
According to your chart, the US spends 607 billion on its entire military.
According to this chart (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget) the budget deficit is about 1.4 trillion.
So if you cut out US military spending entirely, you wouldn't have cut half of the deficit.
If you cut it to 3x what China spends (3 x 85 billion = 255 billion, or a 352 billion dollar cut) you will still have over 1 trillion of deficit.
The US spends a ton on its military. Whether it needs to or not is something that can be debated, as well as whether that money could be better spent elsewhere. But saying that military spending is even the primary reason the US government is bankrupt is just bullshit.
I would think not, considering that they all have them as well. Do you really think Obama (or Bush for that matter... Cheney I don't know) would commit the US and the world to nuclear annihilation because someone invaded, say, Alaska? When your options (for the sake of the argument you're making) are losing Alaska or destroying half of the world?
As long as there is a way out and equal nuclear capacity on both sides, nuclear weapons will not be used. Unless one side is completely backed into a corner, wars will still be decided by conventional arms, as they have been in every conflict since the invention of the super-weapons.
Bully for you. What I personally hate is how many well-off people, who are happy to pay more for their organic food, somehow expect everyone else to as well.
I'm doing great now, and we buy local grass-fed beef and go to overpriced farmer's markets and all that, but I grew up fairly poor, and there's a bit of a difference. Those who advocate organic-only farming and free range chickens and all that are essentially saying that the poor should go back to eating gruel and potatoes.
The argument is that as long as the incentive exists to trick the lights, someone will be doing it. Which do you think politicians (let alone the voting public) care about more, making the city budget line up, or 1s different on a light that in most cases no one will ever test? Saying "we'll just fix the lights" ignores the realities of the situation - if we could work things that way, they probably wouldn't have been broken to begin with.
The problem is not and has never been that politicians are inherently bad horrible people - it is that they have strong incentives to be bad horrible people, and by giving them more powers we increase the incentives in that direction.
I wish I were as wise as ya'll so as to be able to decide which of these great technologies was going to be our best future decision.
The fact is, no one does know, and if they're really sure, they'll invest their own money (ie, buy shares in a company) into it instead of everyone else's (ie, clamoring for energy subsidies).
In general, subsidies have done very poorly at developing practical alternatives and very well at perpetuating inefficient systems that serve as a drag on their economy and real future progress. Compare corn ethanol to the massive boost in investment when oil hit $100 a gallon.
It's not as though we're going to wake up one morning and all the fossil fuels will be gone. There will be a (relatively) steady increase in price that will last decades. At some point along that, it will make sense for people to start investing heavily in finding more efficient alternative energy sources. Until then, these projects are mostly just a way to siphon off government funds on generally pointless endeavors. Not that I blame them - who *doesn't* want the government to pay people to use your product.
I believe the post is setting an upper bound on piracy, not a lower one. In the specific situation of the iphone, this metric sets an upper bound on sales lost of 10%, unless for some reason pirates would have been much more willing to buy your application than non-pirates.
This metric on PCs would indeed set an upper limit of 100%, which is less useful. But that doesn't mean it isn't valid case study for how much using downloads to estimate piracy rates over-states lost sales.
Except for, in general, we do not prosecute for future crimes.
I agree 100% that what apple is doing is lame and sleazy, but I think it's a pretty far stretch to say it's illegal under anti-trust. They don't have anywhere close to a monopoly, and the scope of what they are forbidding is pretty limited and has a fairly strong reason aside from being anti-competitive (they want ipod apps to look and act like ipod apps, not flash apps).
I'd say at least 75% of the people I knew in CS originally got interested in the subject at least partially because of video games. Most people eventually move on to other areas, either because they don't want to deal with the harder math and classes involved, they don't want to move to one of the few areas that has game development, or they read about how horrible the working conditions and want to have a life outside of that instead.
But most of us started there. If there had been a video game dev track at my college, I would have been in it. I practically was, with all of the 3d graphics coding and gaming capstone I took.
And the military sim market is definitely a growing poor man's gaming industry. It's where I ended up... and it's fun, but nowhere close to as "glamorous" as a real game shop. I remember begging out boss to let us even do light maps, but it just isn't a priority.
Oh, it matters. It matters in whether they want mcnuggets or Wendy's chicken nuggets. I don't see it matters that much when choosing between fast food and something healthy, because the taste is just so different. It's a lot easier yo make food taste good by just adding more salt , sugar and fat than it is to make something healthy taste good. Especially for children, who tend to have simpler tastes. As I said, taste is the big factor, the toys are more of a tie-breaker.
I have a friend who manages a Wendy's. Their stuff is actually somewhat close to real food, at least compared to McDonald's. The ingredient costs at Wendy's are maybe 30% of the total cost of the food. At McDonald's it's more like 20%.
Doesn't really make a Baconator any better for you, though.
Sometimes I want to personally punch whoever decided to associate healthy food with over-priced, "organic", overly-done-up small proportions served with bad coffee.
Interesting fact - potatoes quickly replaced the old-world standard vegetable turnips as the poor man's food of choice, because they are significantly more nutritious.
Jesus fucking christ. Who do you think sells all the great vegetables and healthy foods that the kids should be eating? Dole, a corporation so huge it can take out third world governments.
If having a toy with a meal really made *that* big of a difference to children's eating choices, don't you think ever banana in the world would come with a free sponge bob action figure?
Kids eat junk because it's tasty, the billion dollars in brainwashing money is just to help them decide which junk they eat. I don't care how much you forcefully restrict how "bad" foods are presented to children, they're still going to win out over good foods or the people who make money on good foods would already be pushing the presentation bit just as strongly as McDonald's.
No one's being "taken advantage of." Parents are being sold a product that they know is unhealthy and they're choosing it anyway because they care more about taste and convenience and familiarity than they do about health.
To paraphrase Scott Adams: Fat people are fat because they like food more than they like being thin.
Except for the fact that the majority of our current modern ideas stem from the enlightenment and the massive economic boom of the industrial revolution. Prior to those ideas, the muslim world could have said the very same thing about Europe, and they would have been right.
At any point in history there are certain cultures that are more ahead because they had some new cultural innovation that everyone else is still catching up to.
The other thing the "ZOMG MEAT IS SO NOT GREEN" whiners forget is that in commercial arable farming, you take a bit of land and strip *every single living thing* off it, and out of the soil to the depth of about half a metre. Once it's thoroughly killed and sterilised, you can let Monsanto in to plant their frankencorn. Yay for ecology.
Definitely true. And if they didn't, they'd need twice the surface area to be able to feed our population. So it's a big mess either way. Existing has an environmental impact.
Greenies and farmers always seem to be talking past each other on this point.
Meat livestock was developed to be able to produce food on areas where you can't really grow human edible crops, generally because it's too dry or hilly, or the soil is too poor. You can produce a fair number of cattle this way. This is how most of the developing world does it, and how a fair number of farmers still do it in the US.
However, because they grow slower and not as big that way, most modern cattle is grass-fed for the first half of their life before being being put in a feedlot to fatten. This requires a fair amount of grain, the total amount depending on how long they are in the lot and what portion of their growth is meant to take place there. There is obviously an equilibrium point somewhere along this where beef starts to be less efficient to eat than eating the corn direction.
Some farmers and commercial farms put the young cattle in the feedlot earlier, and feed them grain from the start. This makes them grow faster and takes less acreage, but it requires a ton of grain. The numbers you hear cited by vegetarians to support their cause as more ecologically sound almost *always* cite this number for the pounds of grain it takes to make one pound of beef.
So, some level of beef production is definitely more efficient than growing corn, because you can raise beef cattle in areas where you really can't grow corn. However, our current methods and amount of production generally exceed this.
However, the industry standard is not to sit every steer down in a lot for his entire life and feed him nothing but grain. Mostly because this *is* as inefficient as the anti-beef people claim. The way cattle are actually raised in general is somewhere in the middle.
Just from my own experience, it seems like there are a bunch of different things going on when you try to multitask.
There are things you have practiced so much that your brain no longer has to think about them - like say, walking, or driving when there are no changes in the road or other cars. Let's call these "background processes" although in terms of computer architecture it's more like you've delegated the work to a specialized unit like a GPU. I can generally walk and do multiple things at once with the conscious part of your brain. The thing is that this requires the background process to be both well=practiced and unchanging. If the road ahead of you is empty, you can drive for miles without really consciously thinking about the road, sometimes even missing your exit by miles without realizing it. But if a deer jumps out or someone cuts in front of you, that part of your processing can't handle it, and you have to go back to the active part quickly or you're going to crash.
I've also noticed something like what this article is talking about, where it seems like you're processing things in parallel, sort of like a multi-core system. You're just doing two active thinking things at once. Some people are better than others at this. Personally, when thinking in this mode, I have a hard time handling more than two things or so, as this article says I should, and my performance in both those tasks decreases. I've also noticed that certain types of tasks are harder to do this with - I only seem to be able to have one input and one output stream open at a time. Have you ever failed at talking to someone on the phone while writing something else (or listening to your wife while also reading slashdot)? If you're actively processing both at the same time, it can be pretty hard.
But this is where I get to what people never seem to mention when they talk about multitasking, which is how I personally handle greater than 2 things at once. It's like a time-slicing model. There is a (sometimes large) portion of my attention that is thinking nothing but "do this task, then do this next task, then go back to this other task." Sometimes it's shorter slices than others. Like with the wife and slashdot model - I have to listen, then read a sentence while she pauses, then go back to listening. You sort of jump between each task quickly, get it back to a steady state, then jump to your other task and try to do some work on it before the last one needs attention again. As long as I am focusing on the multitasking queue and not too much on any individual task, I can do a lot of things this way, and I think it's how most people end up handling large numbers of tasks. The problem is first that there is a lot of overhead, and second that if you end up locking onto one task (and starving your scheduling thread, essentially) you can not realize how much time has passed and let the other tasks all go to shit. This is more of the driver who talks on his cell phone but is still actively paying attention to the road (instead of just going on autopilot) and will therefore occasionally miss bits of the conversation or shift lanes later than he is supposed to because he's thinking about remembering both of them.
Does that sound familiar to anyone? Just realized that model has been floating in my head for forever, but I don't know if anyone else thinks that way.
So, here's something. Every financial advisor I've talked to said that any sort of fancy adjustable rate mortgage is/was a horrible idea. So did most of the articles I read online. The only people saying that it's a great idea? The people selling them.
Stop comparing mortgage brokers to doctors and start comparing them to used car salesmen, which is a much more similar career path. Should we still be expecting people to take their advice uncritically?
No, they aren't overpriced *if* you need their specific combination of features and you're willing to pay a (at this point, small) premium for the case and OS.
If however, your needs don't neatly align with Apple's designs (say you only need the minimal processing requirements of a netbook, or you don't care if the battery in your desktop replacement only lasts 2 1/2 hours because you'll just carry a spare or two) then they're overpriced.
Why is it so terribly hard for slashdot groupthink to realize that different computing users have different requirements in their computer?
Personally, given my general need for a desktop-replacement level portable system that *doesn't* weigh a ton and still had good battery life, the low end macbook pro's definitly have a price premium, but it's nowhere close to 2x.
Cognitivie dissonance alone can't account for the fact that despite being so "overpriced" Apple consistently has the highest user satisfaction rating.
"The iPhone accounted for 16.6% of global smartphone shipments in the fourth quarter, compared to 18.1% in the third quarter, ABI Research said. The last time Apple slipped in market share quarter-over-quarter was in 2008, when iPhone shipments fell to 10.7% from 12.9% during the same time frame."
And obviously it doesn't deter *all* players, or none of these games would be so popular. But it does drastically reduce the number of people to whom the game appeals.
There's a reason that "casual" games tend to follow the tetris model while "hardcore" games are more similar to chess' competition.
I don't mind getting my face shoved in the dirt a few times as long as I feel I'm making some progress. But I'm a young man with an excess of testosterone and a competitive streak. My mother does *not* enjoy that learning experience. She is, btw, the best tetris player I've ever met in person.
Heh, the original study I'm trying to remember was from the Department of Transportation, but I couldn't find it in my personal forum post limit of under 2 google searches so I just linked motorist. I'm sure you take as much time and care to cite full sources when you write slashdot posts as would be expected for an academic paper or a wikipedia article, but I'm in a little more of a hurry.
Slashdot Mirror
Meanwhile, the rest o the world has failed to realize that social conscience is no substitute for economic growth. The us per capital GDP is still 40% more than the EU, making all but the lowest 15-20% of the population better off in the US. If France were a US state, they would be somewhere between Mississippi and Louisiana-- two of the poorest states in the country. Our unemployment is also lower by a signifcant amount. By every economic measure, if you are willing to work in the US you are doing better than Europe. And maybe, just maybe, the fact that we still get to keep some our earnings affects that.
Even in a normal year, (say, two years ago) you have to cut it down to $100 billion or less, roughly about what China spends with with 1/3 the economy, to balance the budget. That would be put us at the lowest percentage of GDP of any first world country with any interest in having a functional military.
If we spend something closer to the percentage that the UK or France spends, we'd still be several hundred billions dollars short of balanced in a normal year.
The matter of the fact is if the cage is big enough, most people don't feel locked in.
The average person is apparently fine not having tethering and the 5-10 other "must have" flavors of apps you can't get on the app store. Or at least, the UI niceties outweigh it in their estimation. I'd actually be really curious to see a number on what portion of android users are actually installing software that is not allowed on the app store.
We need to get over this idea that most consumer give a shit whether something is "open" or not. They care about usability, features, price, and form factor, in some random ordering. Openness is only interesting so far as it impacts those four.
How does that math work?
According to your chart, the US spends 607 billion on its entire military.
According to this chart (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget) the budget deficit is about 1.4 trillion.
So if you cut out US military spending entirely, you wouldn't have cut half of the deficit.
If you cut it to 3x what China spends (3 x 85 billion = 255 billion, or a 352 billion dollar cut) you will still have over 1 trillion of deficit.
The US spends a ton on its military. Whether it needs to or not is something that can be debated, as well as whether that money could be better spent elsewhere. But saying that military spending is even the primary reason the US government is bankrupt is just bullshit.
I would think not, considering that they all have them as well. Do you really think Obama (or Bush for that matter... Cheney I don't know) would commit the US and the world to nuclear annihilation because someone invaded, say, Alaska? When your options (for the sake of the argument you're making) are losing Alaska or destroying half of the world?
As long as there is a way out and equal nuclear capacity on both sides, nuclear weapons will not be used. Unless one side is completely backed into a corner, wars will still be decided by conventional arms, as they have been in every conflict since the invention of the super-weapons.
Bully for you. What I personally hate is how many well-off people, who are happy to pay more for their organic food, somehow expect everyone else to as well.
I'm doing great now, and we buy local grass-fed beef and go to overpriced farmer's markets and all that, but I grew up fairly poor, and there's a bit of a difference. Those who advocate organic-only farming and free range chickens and all that are essentially saying that the poor should go back to eating gruel and potatoes.
The argument is that as long as the incentive exists to trick the lights, someone will be doing it. Which do you think politicians (let alone the voting public) care about more, making the city budget line up, or 1s different on a light that in most cases no one will ever test? Saying "we'll just fix the lights" ignores the realities of the situation - if we could work things that way, they probably wouldn't have been broken to begin with.
The problem is not and has never been that politicians are inherently bad horrible people - it is that they have strong incentives to be bad horrible people, and by giving them more powers we increase the incentives in that direction.
I wish I were as wise as ya'll so as to be able to decide which of these great technologies was going to be our best future decision.
The fact is, no one does know, and if they're really sure, they'll invest their own money (ie, buy shares in a company) into it instead of everyone else's (ie, clamoring for energy subsidies).
In general, subsidies have done very poorly at developing practical alternatives and very well at perpetuating inefficient systems that serve as a drag on their economy and real future progress. Compare corn ethanol to the massive boost in investment when oil hit $100 a gallon.
It's not as though we're going to wake up one morning and all the fossil fuels will be gone. There will be a (relatively) steady increase in price that will last decades. At some point along that, it will make sense for people to start investing heavily in finding more efficient alternative energy sources. Until then, these projects are mostly just a way to siphon off government funds on generally pointless endeavors. Not that I blame them - who *doesn't* want the government to pay people to use your product.
I believe the post is setting an upper bound on piracy, not a lower one. In the specific situation of the iphone, this metric sets an upper bound on sales lost of 10%, unless for some reason pirates would have been much more willing to buy your application than non-pirates.
This metric on PCs would indeed set an upper limit of 100%, which is less useful. But that doesn't mean it isn't valid case study for how much using downloads to estimate piracy rates over-states lost sales.
Except for, in general, we do not prosecute for future crimes.
I agree 100% that what apple is doing is lame and sleazy, but I think it's a pretty far stretch to say it's illegal under anti-trust. They don't have anywhere close to a monopoly, and the scope of what they are forbidding is pretty limited and has a fairly strong reason aside from being anti-competitive (they want ipod apps to look and act like ipod apps, not flash apps).
I'd say at least 75% of the people I knew in CS originally got interested in the subject at least partially because of video games. Most people eventually move on to other areas, either because they don't want to deal with the harder math and classes involved, they don't want to move to one of the few areas that has game development, or they read about how horrible the working conditions and want to have a life outside of that instead.
But most of us started there. If there had been a video game dev track at my college, I would have been in it. I practically was, with all of the 3d graphics coding and gaming capstone I took.
And the military sim market is definitely a growing poor man's gaming industry. It's where I ended up... and it's fun, but nowhere close to as "glamorous" as a real game shop. I remember begging out boss to let us even do light maps, but it just isn't a priority.
Oh, it matters. It matters in whether they want mcnuggets or Wendy's chicken nuggets. I don't see it matters that much when choosing between fast food and something healthy, because the taste is just so different. It's a lot easier yo make food taste good by just adding more salt , sugar and fat than it is to make something healthy taste good. Especially for children, who tend to have simpler tastes. As I said, taste is the big factor, the toys are more of a tie-breaker.
I have a friend who manages a Wendy's. Their stuff is actually somewhat close to real food, at least compared to McDonald's. The ingredient costs at Wendy's are maybe 30% of the total cost of the food. At McDonald's it's more like 20%.
Doesn't really make a Baconator any better for you, though.
Hells yes!
Sometimes I want to personally punch whoever decided to associate healthy food with over-priced, "organic", overly-done-up small proportions served with bad coffee.
Interesting fact - potatoes quickly replaced the old-world standard vegetable turnips as the poor man's food of choice, because they are significantly more nutritious.
Jesus fucking christ. Who do you think sells all the great vegetables and healthy foods that the kids should be eating? Dole, a corporation so huge it can take out third world governments.
If having a toy with a meal really made *that* big of a difference to children's eating choices, don't you think ever banana in the world would come with a free sponge bob action figure?
Kids eat junk because it's tasty, the billion dollars in brainwashing money is just to help them decide which junk they eat. I don't care how much you forcefully restrict how "bad" foods are presented to children, they're still going to win out over good foods or the people who make money on good foods would already be pushing the presentation bit just as strongly as McDonald's.
No one's being "taken advantage of." Parents are being sold a product that they know is unhealthy and they're choosing it anyway because they care more about taste and convenience and familiarity than they do about health.
To paraphrase Scott Adams: Fat people are fat because they like food more than they like being thin.
Except for the fact that the majority of our current modern ideas stem from the enlightenment and the massive economic boom of the industrial revolution. Prior to those ideas, the muslim world could have said the very same thing about Europe, and they would have been right.
At any point in history there are certain cultures that are more ahead because they had some new cultural innovation that everyone else is still catching up to.
The other thing the "ZOMG MEAT IS SO NOT GREEN" whiners forget is that in commercial arable farming, you take a bit of land and strip *every single living thing* off it, and out of the soil to the depth of about half a metre. Once it's thoroughly killed and sterilised, you can let Monsanto in to plant their frankencorn. Yay for ecology.
Definitely true. And if they didn't, they'd need twice the surface area to be able to feed our population. So it's a big mess either way. Existing has an environmental impact.
Greenies and farmers always seem to be talking past each other on this point.
Meat livestock was developed to be able to produce food on areas where you can't really grow human edible crops, generally because it's too dry or hilly, or the soil is too poor. You can produce a fair number of cattle this way. This is how most of the developing world does it, and how a fair number of farmers still do it in the US.
However, because they grow slower and not as big that way, most modern cattle is grass-fed for the first half of their life before being being put in a feedlot to fatten. This requires a fair amount of grain, the total amount depending on how long they are in the lot and what portion of their growth is meant to take place there. There is obviously an equilibrium point somewhere along this where beef starts to be less efficient to eat than eating the corn direction.
Some farmers and commercial farms put the young cattle in the feedlot earlier, and feed them grain from the start. This makes them grow faster and takes less acreage, but it requires a ton of grain. The numbers you hear cited by vegetarians to support their cause as more ecologically sound almost *always* cite this number for the pounds of grain it takes to make one pound of beef.
So, some level of beef production is definitely more efficient than growing corn, because you can raise beef cattle in areas where you really can't grow corn. However, our current methods and amount of production generally exceed this.
However, the industry standard is not to sit every steer down in a lot for his entire life and feed him nothing but grain. Mostly because this *is* as inefficient as the anti-beef people claim. The way cattle are actually raised in general is somewhere in the middle.
Just from my own experience, it seems like there are a bunch of different things going on when you try to multitask.
There are things you have practiced so much that your brain no longer has to think about them - like say, walking, or driving when there are no changes in the road or other cars. Let's call these "background processes" although in terms of computer architecture it's more like you've delegated the work to a specialized unit like a GPU. I can generally walk and do multiple things at once with the conscious part of your brain. The thing is that this requires the background process to be both well=practiced and unchanging. If the road ahead of you is empty, you can drive for miles without really consciously thinking about the road, sometimes even missing your exit by miles without realizing it. But if a deer jumps out or someone cuts in front of you, that part of your processing can't handle it, and you have to go back to the active part quickly or you're going to crash.
I've also noticed something like what this article is talking about, where it seems like you're processing things in parallel, sort of like a multi-core system. You're just doing two active thinking things at once. Some people are better than others at this. Personally, when thinking in this mode, I have a hard time handling more than two things or so, as this article says I should, and my performance in both those tasks decreases. I've also noticed that certain types of tasks are harder to do this with - I only seem to be able to have one input and one output stream open at a time. Have you ever failed at talking to someone on the phone while writing something else (or listening to your wife while also reading slashdot)? If you're actively processing both at the same time, it can be pretty hard.
But this is where I get to what people never seem to mention when they talk about multitasking, which is how I personally handle greater than 2 things at once. It's like a time-slicing model. There is a (sometimes large) portion of my attention that is thinking nothing but "do this task, then do this next task, then go back to this other task." Sometimes it's shorter slices than others. Like with the wife and slashdot model - I have to listen, then read a sentence while she pauses, then go back to listening. You sort of jump between each task quickly, get it back to a steady state, then jump to your other task and try to do some work on it before the last one needs attention again. As long as I am focusing on the multitasking queue and not too much on any individual task, I can do a lot of things this way, and I think it's how most people end up handling large numbers of tasks. The problem is first that there is a lot of overhead, and second that if you end up locking onto one task (and starving your scheduling thread, essentially) you can not realize how much time has passed and let the other tasks all go to shit. This is more of the driver who talks on his cell phone but is still actively paying attention to the road (instead of just going on autopilot) and will therefore occasionally miss bits of the conversation or shift lanes later than he is supposed to because he's thinking about remembering both of them.
Does that sound familiar to anyone? Just realized that model has been floating in my head for forever, but I don't know if anyone else thinks that way.
So, here's something. Every financial advisor I've talked to said that any sort of fancy adjustable rate mortgage is/was a horrible idea. So did most of the articles I read online. The only people saying that it's a great idea? The people selling them.
Stop comparing mortgage brokers to doctors and start comparing them to used car salesmen, which is a much more similar career path. Should we still be expecting people to take their advice uncritically?
This gets so ridiculous.
No, they aren't overpriced *if* you need their specific combination of features and you're willing to pay a (at this point, small) premium for the case and OS.
If however, your needs don't neatly align with Apple's designs (say you only need the minimal processing requirements of a netbook, or you don't care if the battery in your desktop replacement only lasts 2 1/2 hours because you'll just carry a spare or two) then they're overpriced.
Why is it so terribly hard for slashdot groupthink to realize that different computing users have different requirements in their computer?
Personally, given my general need for a desktop-replacement level portable system that *doesn't* weigh a ton and still had good battery life, the low end macbook pro's definitly have a price premium, but it's nowhere close to 2x.
Cognitivie dissonance alone can't account for the fact that despite being so "overpriced" Apple consistently has the highest user satisfaction rating.
Except for they don't. By a long shot. They just have a near monopoly on buzz about smart phones.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/telecom/business/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222600940
"The iPhone accounted for 16.6% of global smartphone shipments in the fourth quarter, compared to 18.1% in the third quarter, ABI Research said. The last time Apple slipped in market share quarter-over-quarter was in 2008, when iPhone shipments fell to 10.7% from 12.9% during the same time frame."
18% is not a monopoly.
And obviously it doesn't deter *all* players, or none of these games would be so popular. But it does drastically reduce the number of people to whom the game appeals.
There's a reason that "casual" games tend to follow the tetris model while "hardcore" games are more similar to chess' competition.
I don't mind getting my face shoved in the dirt a few times as long as I feel I'm making some progress. But I'm a young man with an excess of testosterone and a competitive streak. My mother does *not* enjoy that learning experience. She is, btw, the best tetris player I've ever met in person.
Heh, the original study I'm trying to remember was from the Department of Transportation, but I couldn't find it in my personal forum post limit of under 2 google searches so I just linked motorist. I'm sure you take as much time and care to cite full sources when you write slashdot posts as would be expected for an academic paper or a wikipedia article, but I'm in a little more of a hurry.