Still didn't go far enough. He should have just fallen on his sword an "died on [the] hill" of universal healthcare to get it through. The US desperately needs a European-style healthcare system. Obama should have just taken the political suicide and forced it through by any means necessary.
The satisfaction in knowing he was right, and the realisation of everyone who opposed it after a couple of years of it running will make up for it.
Imagine a world where people were free to change jobs and pursue their (american) dream because they're not trapped by healthcare in their 9-5 (and cannot afford to go it alone). Imagine a world where people don't go bankrupt and drop out of the working population in the long term due to getting a serious illness. Imagine a world where you actually get the treatment or tests the doctor prescribes you, rather than what the non-medically-trained insurance company bean counters think is "more than adequate" for you ("oh, your doctor says to monitor your blood sugar 4 times a day?! pff! what does he know? We will only cover you for two tests per day" [hi, person that I know personally!]).
No need to imagine it - it's every developed country except the US.
I'm not the OP here, but it's more like seeing the users as an antagonist and personally yelling at you rather than at their issues.
For example, the status bar removal situation. We were told in no uncertain terms that it was going away because we didn't need it, and that if you wanted to use it there was an addon.
To put it in Crying Wolf terms:
User: so easy to fend off wolves with this wolf scaring horn.
FF: we're removing the wolf scaring horn, you don't need it. We've put a limited horn function into part of your house totally unrelated to that function.
User: but I used it all the time! Can't you just have an optional wolf scaring horn?
FF: No, there's no space. Some people with smaller houses, vertically, have no room for wolf scaring horns so we're just removing them for everyone. You can install a third party wolf scaring horn though, although the electrical hookup is non standard and it will probably stop working when we repaint your house next month. We're repainting every month now instead of every 6 months by the way.
User: well that's not as good as a native solution, especially if it keeps failing after a house repainting.
FF: We've told the third party makers of things that we've changed our interfaces so that stuff keeps working between repaints, so it's not our fault.
User: well, that doesn't help me if you force me to rely on a third party wolf scaring horn and the guy who makes it doesn't follow your new method for third party horn modifications.
FF: well, tough luck, it's not coming back. You told us to reduce bloat! Here, just use the AwesomeBar! It will distract you.
*****
I understand the massive issues with a project the size and complexity with FF, but it reached a point where we were just going in different directions - I'd been using a gecko-based browser since before it was called FF, running Mozilla from a zip disk alongside Pegasus mail on Win 98, then onto W2k and later OS X, but eventually I realised that I was internally bitching about solving problems with my browser more than I was using it, and I moved to another one.
That's not to say they don't also have problems - Safari has a status bar, but it has memory leaks like you wouldn't believe with AdBlock installed, and Chrome occasionally freaks out with layout, despite using WebKit and the same site in Safari being just fine.
I bear no personal ill-will to the FF developers after many years of use, but it's simply not doing what I want it to do (minimal addons to get the function I want, without updating too frequently).
Not that I think the original post has any merit (Android vs iOS marketshare is hardly a major issue when they move 1 or 2% each way due to noise in the data), but your assertion seems to be that now that the marketshare data says that *Apple* is ahead, that it's due to "frequent upgrades" and "old iPhones sitting in drawers".
Yet, when things like the "Buy One Get One Free" deal on Android handsets from Verizon are mentioned as reasons that Android's numbers were up during that particular quarter are not valid criticisms and just "butthurt fanbois" looking for excuses? (remember, it was trumpeted as Android's triumph over the iPhone since Android was selling at twice the rate of the iPhone 3GS in that quarter since everyone knew the iPhone 4 was coming out).
For what it's worth, I've had two iPhones - my old one went to a new home when I repaired a 3GS and started using that as my primary phone. My sister sold her 3GS when she got a 4S, and my brother... well, he dropped his in the sea, but such is life.
Unless you've got some actual data to back up your claim that iPhone sales are down to frequent upgrade and "disposal" of old phones (now that they're selling faster than Android, and clearly this can only be due to some major flaw of people who buy the phones, else it might be perceived as a "weakness" in Android for some reason) then it's entirely speculative.
From my perspective (ie, anecdotal), all the people I know with iPhones skipped generations when upgrading, if at all (and not due to contract issues - we're not in the US), although I'm not going to suggest that's the norm.
So, with my own anecdotal data:
Me: 1 phone, 1 sale. (then one broken phone repaired and used. Old iPhone 3G given to family member, so now 2 phones in use) Sister: 2 phones, 2 sales (iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4S. The 3GS was sold to her flatmate for a bottle of vodka) Brother: 1 phone, 1 sale. (iPhone 3GS. dropped into sea. Phone stopped working. started using a Nokia 3210 since he could not afford to buy another smartphone) Aunt: 1 phone, 1 sale: (has been using a 3GS since shortly after it came out. No need to upgrade. Has been offered upgrade twice (4 and 4S) and declined twice) Dad: 1 phone, 1 sale (has been using iPhone 3G since it came out. Spends approximately £400 per month on calls [very frequent international travel as an engineer] has been offered upgrades to 3GS, 4 and 4S, declined all of them. Smashed screen of original 3G in a factory. Repaired with new screen himself). My flatmate: 2 phones, 2 sales (iPhone 3G, iPhone 4S. Gave her 3G to her brother).
I don't know, I mean my data is purely anecdotal, but I don't actually know anyone who has gone 3G > 3GS > 4 > 4S over the lifetime of the iPhone. Similarly, of those who have upgraded, their old phones stayed in use by new users. There muse be some people who do that, but I'm betting based on my extended family and friends that most people don't do it that way, or that their old phones "rot in a drawer" after upgrade.
Where's that image meme of Bush with the tagline "I fucked it all up but thanks for blaming it on the black guy".
Ideally Obama wouldn't have extended them, but he really had no choice - you saw that the Tea Party were willing to force the country to default over taxes, and you think he'd be able to pass a 2 trillion dollar tax hike for rich people?
MS bought $150 million in non-voting stock as part of a legal settlement. At the time it was a nice amount of money, but nowhere near "saving Apple's ass". They then subsequently sold it off for some reason. Pity, since they flushed about $6 billion down the hole by selling early.
Good in theory, but they were already a very strong export economy before the Euro, and before the major implosions of some of the weaker, US-like-on-taxation economies (like Ireland, and to an extreme extent, Greece) imploded. Of course they were in favour of it as a very large and stable economy at the heart of the European economic engine, but to claim that it's purely down to them making hay off the back of weaker Euro economies is simply disingenuous.
No, all it does is drive the prices of those electronics beyond the reach of most of your population.
Take steel tariffs for example - you can put massive import duties on foreign steel to protect your national steel makers, but all this does in the long term is drive up the price of steel, which is felt further along the chain by the construction industry (or anyone who buys steel to make things). They either eat that cost or they pass it on to their consumers. If you artificially set the price of steel then very little in the way of efficiency or modernisation then happens (at least voluntarily) - why bother when the price of your product is protected by tariffs.
Meanwhile, the cheaper steel is now in lower demand and other countries with no serious import tariffs on it can buy it for less. Your own country is then also less able to manage price fluctuations, since the domestic makers are banking on the forced high price.
So to bring it back to Apple - no, they didn't pull out of Brazil, but the net result is even more unaffordable products. If you think the price of Apple goods are expensive in the US, just wait until you see them in proportion to a Brazillian average income.
No, not at all - the trade deficit needs to be addressed as well as the federal deficit.
However, the solution to a trade gap is not protectionism. It may help in the short term, and appear to be an ideal solution but it only hurts the economy as a whole and stifles growth. It may be legal, but it's not smart.
Your assertion that imposing import tariffs punitively on strong export economies as the solution to America's own trade gap is simply naive. There's a reason that countries like Germany have a strong net exporting economy, and it's not protectionism. Hobbling the imports from strong economies is also not the way to pull yourselves up to be able to compete.
And here I thought Apple made computers only for really dumb, clueless "lusers" who can't handle a "more advanced" computer without a "dumbed down" interface.
I think you should box up that iPad and return it to the store - you're clearly too dumb to own a computer or computing device.
Or you could be trolling.
I'm leaning towards the former, but then you are posting on slashdot, so you can at least manage to do things like logging into websites and entering text.
Baffled that you couldn't solve that iPad problem though. Maybe you'd never heard of Google before now? It's a great website that lets you look for things. It has lots of results! It's, dare I say, "magical"!
Of course - when has that ever been in doubt? They're just store members, with some training on hardware and software problems - like "the geek squad" or "the tech guys" in other branded stores.
You can lampoon them for the branding, but they're just staff doing the best they can. They do repair hardware too, but in the case of phones it is much more economic to give the customer a new one (or sell them a new one if they are out of warranty) than it is to repair them individually. They will get repaired, just in a central location - they don't landfill the broken ones.
So, iPhone not under warranty then. If it was under warranty they'd have just given you a new one.
If it's broken (what did you expect them to do purely in software?) it's such a small device, with few pieces, that any hardware failure is just more economic to swap for a new phone (and cheaper to sell you a refurb than run a repair on the one you own). They'll then take all the broken phones and repair and refurbish them as appropriate in bulk, rather than doing them on a case by case basis.
Or instead of crippling yourselves with trade manipulation you could just repeal the Bush Era Tax Cuts - there's 2 trillion right there, that barely touches the bottom 90% of earners and yet will cost the US 2 trillion dollars - more than twice the "expensive, wasteful, ill-affordable" healthcare bill.
Get your house in order before blaming countries like Germany, who have built a very strong export economy, for harming your own. You'd hardly say that Germany was in the position it's in by being like China in the way it goes about becoming a large net exporter - this is not simply about "restoring manufacturing" - it's not as simple as that by a long shot.
So the Android phones that are made in the same factory aren't as profitable.... why?
If it were solely down to the Chinese labour (who are not slaves btw, but we'll ignore the hyperbole) then there would be considerably more highly profitable electronics manufacturers.
That's what I mean by jumping off point. You have to take it in stages unless you want to risk a manned Mars base from the outset - right now we've found it hard to run a self sustaining isolated environment *on earth* let alone on another rock. You learn on the Moon, with a shorter lifeline to Earth, even if it's energy-expensive and not long-term viable, then you move outwards. The point is to cut our teeth in the "relative safety" of the Moon before we are confident about going further abroad.
Twenty years later than it should have been on the table.
We should have had a base up there for years - an ideal place to serve as a jumping off point for science elsewhere in the solar system, even if the Moon itself is "barren".
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Still didn't go far enough. He should have just fallen on his sword an "died on [the] hill" of universal healthcare to get it through. The US desperately needs a European-style healthcare system. Obama should have just taken the political suicide and forced it through by any means necessary.
The satisfaction in knowing he was right, and the realisation of everyone who opposed it after a couple of years of it running will make up for it.
Imagine a world where people were free to change jobs and pursue their (american) dream because they're not trapped by healthcare in their 9-5 (and cannot afford to go it alone). Imagine a world where people don't go bankrupt and drop out of the working population in the long term due to getting a serious illness. Imagine a world where you actually get the treatment or tests the doctor prescribes you, rather than what the non-medically-trained insurance company bean counters think is "more than adequate" for you ("oh, your doctor says to monitor your blood sugar 4 times a day?! pff! what does he know? We will only cover you for two tests per day" [hi, person that I know personally!]).
No need to imagine it - it's every developed country except the US.
Don;t need to mothball a carrier to do that. Just repeal the Bush Era tax cuts. 2 trillion right there.
Won't even hurt anyone in the bottom 90%. Then you can look at mothballing carriers and looking at social security reform etc.
Oh I agree - like I say, I appreciate the difficulties of such a large project.
The status bar addon isn't something I want to install, so I did move on - to another browser. No hard feelings.
I'm not the OP here, but it's more like seeing the users as an antagonist and personally yelling at you rather than at their issues.
For example, the status bar removal situation. We were told in no uncertain terms that it was going away because we didn't need it, and that if you wanted to use it there was an addon.
To put it in Crying Wolf terms:
User: so easy to fend off wolves with this wolf scaring horn.
FF: we're removing the wolf scaring horn, you don't need it. We've put a limited horn function into part of your house totally unrelated to that function.
User: but I used it all the time! Can't you just have an optional wolf scaring horn?
FF: No, there's no space. Some people with smaller houses, vertically, have no room for wolf scaring horns so we're just removing them for everyone. You can install a third party wolf scaring horn though, although the electrical hookup is non standard and it will probably stop working when we repaint your house next month. We're repainting every month now instead of every 6 months by the way.
User: well that's not as good as a native solution, especially if it keeps failing after a house repainting.
FF: We've told the third party makers of things that we've changed our interfaces so that stuff keeps working between repaints, so it's not our fault.
User: well, that doesn't help me if you force me to rely on a third party wolf scaring horn and the guy who makes it doesn't follow your new method for third party horn modifications.
FF: well, tough luck, it's not coming back. You told us to reduce bloat! Here, just use the AwesomeBar! It will distract you.
*****
I understand the massive issues with a project the size and complexity with FF, but it reached a point where we were just going in different directions - I'd been using a gecko-based browser since before it was called FF, running Mozilla from a zip disk alongside Pegasus mail on Win 98, then onto W2k and later OS X, but eventually I realised that I was internally bitching about solving problems with my browser more than I was using it, and I moved to another one.
That's not to say they don't also have problems - Safari has a status bar, but it has memory leaks like you wouldn't believe with AdBlock installed, and Chrome occasionally freaks out with layout, despite using WebKit and the same site in Safari being just fine.
I bear no personal ill-will to the FF developers after many years of use, but it's simply not doing what I want it to do (minimal addons to get the function I want, without updating too frequently).
Not that I think the original post has any merit (Android vs iOS marketshare is hardly a major issue when they move 1 or 2% each way due to noise in the data), but your assertion seems to be that now that the marketshare data says that *Apple* is ahead, that it's due to "frequent upgrades" and "old iPhones sitting in drawers".
Yet, when things like the "Buy One Get One Free" deal on Android handsets from Verizon are mentioned as reasons that Android's numbers were up during that particular quarter are not valid criticisms and just "butthurt fanbois" looking for excuses? (remember, it was trumpeted as Android's triumph over the iPhone since Android was selling at twice the rate of the iPhone 3GS in that quarter since everyone knew the iPhone 4 was coming out).
For what it's worth, I've had two iPhones - my old one went to a new home when I repaired a 3GS and started using that as my primary phone. My sister sold her 3GS when she got a 4S, and my brother... well, he dropped his in the sea, but such is life.
Unless you've got some actual data to back up your claim that iPhone sales are down to frequent upgrade and "disposal" of old phones (now that they're selling faster than Android, and clearly this can only be due to some major flaw of people who buy the phones, else it might be perceived as a "weakness" in Android for some reason) then it's entirely speculative.
From my perspective (ie, anecdotal), all the people I know with iPhones skipped generations when upgrading, if at all (and not due to contract issues - we're not in the US), although I'm not going to suggest that's the norm.
So, with my own anecdotal data:
Me: 1 phone, 1 sale. (then one broken phone repaired and used. Old iPhone 3G given to family member, so now 2 phones in use)
Sister: 2 phones, 2 sales (iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4S. The 3GS was sold to her flatmate for a bottle of vodka)
Brother: 1 phone, 1 sale. (iPhone 3GS. dropped into sea. Phone stopped working. started using a Nokia 3210 since he could not afford to buy another smartphone)
Aunt: 1 phone, 1 sale: (has been using a 3GS since shortly after it came out. No need to upgrade. Has been offered upgrade twice (4 and 4S) and declined twice)
Dad: 1 phone, 1 sale (has been using iPhone 3G since it came out. Spends approximately £400 per month on calls [very frequent international travel as an engineer] has been offered upgrades to 3GS, 4 and 4S, declined all of them. Smashed screen of original 3G in a factory. Repaired with new screen himself).
My flatmate: 2 phones, 2 sales (iPhone 3G, iPhone 4S. Gave her 3G to her brother).
I don't know, I mean my data is purely anecdotal, but I don't actually know anyone who has gone 3G > 3GS > 4 > 4S over the lifetime of the iPhone. Similarly, of those who have upgraded, their old phones stayed in use by new users. There muse be some people who do that, but I'm betting based on my extended family and friends that most people don't do it that way, or that their old phones "rot in a drawer" after upgrade.
Then the Raspberry Pi is not the ideal HTPC box for your needs?
Nice buck passing.
Where's that image meme of Bush with the tagline "I fucked it all up but thanks for blaming it on the black guy".
Ideally Obama wouldn't have extended them, but he really had no choice - you saw that the Tea Party were willing to force the country to default over taxes, and you think he'd be able to pass a 2 trillion dollar tax hike for rich people?
By playing a trailer available on Apple's site?
Mhmm.
It has an H.264 hardware decoder.
Interesting, given that I've been on the site for more than 10 years and have plenty of criticisms of Apple.
I think the whole "person X is a shill for company Y because they have a different opinion to me" stuff on slashdot is just weak.
Also, you forgot to log in. Try not to forget next time.
See this pie chart for the breakdown of profit, according to Apple's own numbers:
http://cdn.macrumors.com/article-new/2012/01/appleq112bottomchart.jpg
The iTunes store is a very small piece of the puzzle.
Microsoft did not "rescue" Apple. This false statement gets passed around here like it's gospel, and yet it's trivially easy to look up.
They bought $150 million in non-voting stock as part of a settlement, which was a nice chunk of cash, but nowhere near rescuing Apple.
They then sold that stock for cheap, and missed out on $6 billion, had they held onto it.
How could they regret something they didn't do?
MS bought $150 million in non-voting stock as part of a legal settlement. At the time it was a nice amount of money, but nowhere near "saving Apple's ass". They then subsequently sold it off for some reason. Pity, since they flushed about $6 billion down the hole by selling early.
Good in theory, but they were already a very strong export economy before the Euro, and before the major implosions of some of the weaker, US-like-on-taxation economies (like Ireland, and to an extreme extent, Greece) imploded. Of course they were in favour of it as a very large and stable economy at the heart of the European economic engine, but to claim that it's purely down to them making hay off the back of weaker Euro economies is simply disingenuous.
No, all it does is drive the prices of those electronics beyond the reach of most of your population.
Take steel tariffs for example - you can put massive import duties on foreign steel to protect your national steel makers, but all this does in the long term is drive up the price of steel, which is felt further along the chain by the construction industry (or anyone who buys steel to make things). They either eat that cost or they pass it on to their consumers. If you artificially set the price of steel then very little in the way of efficiency or modernisation then happens (at least voluntarily) - why bother when the price of your product is protected by tariffs.
Meanwhile, the cheaper steel is now in lower demand and other countries with no serious import tariffs on it can buy it for less. Your own country is then also less able to manage price fluctuations, since the domestic makers are banking on the forced high price.
So to bring it back to Apple - no, they didn't pull out of Brazil, but the net result is even more unaffordable products. If you think the price of Apple goods are expensive in the US, just wait until you see them in proportion to a Brazillian average income.
No, not at all - the trade deficit needs to be addressed as well as the federal deficit.
However, the solution to a trade gap is not protectionism. It may help in the short term, and appear to be an ideal solution but it only hurts the economy as a whole and stifles growth. It may be legal, but it's not smart.
Your assertion that imposing import tariffs punitively on strong export economies as the solution to America's own trade gap is simply naive. There's a reason that countries like Germany have a strong net exporting economy, and it's not protectionism. Hobbling the imports from strong economies is also not the way to pull yourselves up to be able to compete.
Perhaps they're just modding it down because it's trolling?
I mean, I'm willing to listen to a reasoned argument that the GP post should not receive a troll moderation - I'd be interested to hear your points.
I disagree with mod-bombing - all it does is create echo chambers with identical opinions.
And here I thought Apple made computers only for really dumb, clueless "lusers" who can't handle a "more advanced" computer without a "dumbed down" interface.
I think you should box up that iPad and return it to the store - you're clearly too dumb to own a computer or computing device.
Or you could be trolling.
I'm leaning towards the former, but then you are posting on slashdot, so you can at least manage to do things like logging into websites and entering text.
Baffled that you couldn't solve that iPad problem though. Maybe you'd never heard of Google before now? It's a great website that lets you look for things. It has lots of results! It's, dare I say, "magical"!
Of course - when has that ever been in doubt? They're just store members, with some training on hardware and software problems - like "the geek squad" or "the tech guys" in other branded stores.
You can lampoon them for the branding, but they're just staff doing the best they can. They do repair hardware too, but in the case of phones it is much more economic to give the customer a new one (or sell them a new one if they are out of warranty) than it is to repair them individually. They will get repaired, just in a central location - they don't landfill the broken ones.
So, iPhone not under warranty then. If it was under warranty they'd have just given you a new one.
If it's broken (what did you expect them to do purely in software?) it's such a small device, with few pieces, that any hardware failure is just more economic to swap for a new phone (and cheaper to sell you a refurb than run a repair on the one you own). They'll then take all the broken phones and repair and refurbish them as appropriate in bulk, rather than doing them on a case by case basis.
Or instead of crippling yourselves with trade manipulation you could just repeal the Bush Era Tax Cuts - there's 2 trillion right there, that barely touches the bottom 90% of earners and yet will cost the US 2 trillion dollars - more than twice the "expensive, wasteful, ill-affordable" healthcare bill.
Get your house in order before blaming countries like Germany, who have built a very strong export economy, for harming your own. You'd hardly say that Germany was in the position it's in by being like China in the way it goes about becoming a large net exporter - this is not simply about "restoring manufacturing" - it's not as simple as that by a long shot.
So the Android phones that are made in the same factory aren't as profitable.... why?
If it were solely down to the Chinese labour (who are not slaves btw, but we'll ignore the hyperbole) then there would be considerably more highly profitable electronics manufacturers.
They make almost nothing on those things - practically noise in the data as far as profit goes.
The vast, vast bulk of their profits are in hardware sales.
That's what I mean by jumping off point. You have to take it in stages unless you want to risk a manned Mars base from the outset - right now we've found it hard to run a self sustaining isolated environment *on earth* let alone on another rock. You learn on the Moon, with a shorter lifeline to Earth, even if it's energy-expensive and not long-term viable, then you move outwards. The point is to cut our teeth in the "relative safety" of the Moon before we are confident about going further abroad.
Twenty years later than it should have been on the table.
We should have had a base up there for years - an ideal place to serve as a jumping off point for science elsewhere in the solar system, even if the Moon itself is "barren".