Sure, IBM has its own Unix OS. My point, though, is that IBM's main business line isn't selling open source software. They may support it, and might even use it in some products, but the main item of value they're selling/being paid for isn't Open Source Software; that's a side issue that they can leverage in order to improve sales of their main products, but isn't the product itself, and isn't the primary driver of revenue for the company. Same with Google: they may open-source some of their software, but it's irrelevant because that's not what they're selling anyway; they're leveraging it to improve/protect their advertising revenues.
And companies like IBM, Google, etc. make billions on the back of open source software. But clearly you're right that this is the exception and can only work in a handful of cases. They must only succeed out of dumb luck, because the model itself can't possibly make any sense. Companies like Google don't know what they're doing.
Google makes its money selling advertising; the software just gets eyeballs to the ads. IBM makes its money selling servers, supercomputers, infrastructure services, microchip designs, etc., not selling software to end users. Do they use open-source software? Sure. But open-source software isn't their product, as such. It's not what people are paying them for.
As evidenced by the fact that only two nuclear weapons have ever been used, while we continue to use less-effective conventional weapons on a regular basis?
Illegal monopoly, my ass. Google has done nothing to protect its monopoly,....
How about dumping a smartphone OS on the market for free while ignoring other people's patents, to protect their market share of mobile searches? Or leveraging their search monopoly to try to drive people towards their other products instead of those offered by competitors? I don't know if once the legal battles are all sorted out it'll turn out that they actually did violate any laws, but it's plausible enough that the government would be remiss in its duties if it didn't bother to find out. Just because Google claims to "do no evil" doesn't mean they're not playing exactly the same games that the other major players (e.g. Microsoft, Apple, et al.) do. Maybe they've done nothing wrong, in which case they've got nothing to worry about. Or on the other hand, maybe they are improperly leveraging their search monopoly, in which case the government can and should intervene.
Paul Thurrott's column on this speaks to that question, and describes the logic of the antitrust investigation pretty succinctly:
Before Apple's entry, publishers set the wholesale price of books, but retailers could determine the final selling price. But Apple changed that, allowing publishers for the first time to determine the final price at which eBooks were sold to consumers. As a result, the average selling price of new eBooks jumped from $9.99 to $14.99.
The EC will try to determine if the firms colluded to fix prices and restrict competition. Both charges should be easily proven.
As I reported in February 2010, while Apple was negotiating with the major publishers, at least one of them, Macmillan, demanded that Amazon raise prices on its Kindle books to match Apple's prices. Amazon, now as then, owns the dominant eBook platform, called Kindle. And Macmillan threatened to pull its books from the Kindle unless Amazon went along with the price hike. After temporarily pulling Macmillan's titles from its store, Amazon capitulated and raised prices as demanded.
"We have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books," Amazon wrote to customers at the time.
Aren't you kind of begging the question there by assuming that anyone producing evidence against those peak oil predictions is necessarily lying? I'm not saying there will never be a production peak/pretending that the supply is infinite, but I'm also not going to assume that a few vociferous alarmists are preaching the gospel truth and anyone who shows evidence to the contrary is a dirty liar...
According to the example given, I'd also have to conclude that land is not real property either. After all, I cannot just take my land and put it elsewhere.
Legally speaking, that's exactly what makes it "real" property: it can't be picked up and moved. Anything you own that can be picked up and moved is "personal" property. They're taxed separately (real estate taxes vs personal property taxes), and many jurisdictions only tax one or the other but not both.
That's true of vaccines intended for children under the age of 6. It is still used in a variety of other vaccines that aren't part of the routine childhood vaccination schedule, though.
While I'm sure there are a few corrupt officers out there, I've legally gained $50 cash I found this way. When no one reclaimed it, they did call be back and I just went down and picked it up.
Well, did he pick it up, remove the SIM card so the owner couldn't just call it and ask about it? Or did he keep it at home waiting for the owner to call and after a few days decided to sell it?
Doesn't matter. The proper approach is to turn it in to the police department, just as if you'd found cash or anything else lying around. If the original owner doesn't claim it within a set time (30-60 days IIRC), they'll call you back and it's yours.
TN is a no-income-tax state: it derives its revenue primarily from sales taxes. Of course they support a federal solution that would require internet retailers to collect sales taxes – without it, the state government's main source of revenue is threatened as retail sales move online. I would be shocked if any governor of Tennessee, from either party, opposed such a law.
Given that developer-unlocking a Windows Phone to allow sideloading of non-Marketplace apps consists of editing a registry key, I really doubt it'll be too difficult to accomplish that feat in Windows 8, which includes a non-metro UI, full root access for the user, and a built-in registry editor.
You tell me, if you come up with the wheel independently.. are you the inventor of it.. simply because nobody before you patented it? Now granted wheel is a bad example since every human has seen one.. but there are many examples in computer science of algorithms that you may come up with that someone may have discovered before you and may or may not even be in wide usage without being patented (say it's in a lib file). If you happen to come up with it independently, you deserve a 20 year monopoly?
Are you an inventor? Sure, if the other guy who came up with it earlier kept it a secret and you independently came up with the same invention, you're both equally inventors of it. Does that necessarily mean you should be granted a patent? No... but then obviousness and such disqualifications could take care of that one if the USPTO actually had the manpower to really evaluate patent applications properly rather than just rubber-stamping them.
I know this is an average, but someone out there must be spending an awful lot of time in the bathroom to compensate for me being on the far left of the average.
Circles, privacy options, hangouts, and keeping games/apps out of the normal social areas.
How is Google+ an exact copy of Facebook with less features again?
Circles are just Facebook Friend Lists by a different name... Privacy options I've found to be more useful (if less discoverable) on Facebook (e.g. you can blacklist Lists, where you can only whitelist Circles)... Facebook has group chat and Skype integration, so there's essentially parity there... you had a point on the absence of games, though Google looks to be moving towards Facebook on that one.
There are a few differences with the G+ news feed - essentially it's a hybrid of Facebook and Twitter, since adding someone to a Circle is a one-way transaction, not requiring the mutual confirmation of adding someone as a Friend on Facebook. But it's still just copying off existing services that most of the market is already happily using.
Which leads to my workaround (effective on AT&T, at least):
On my Windows 7 laptop, I define the tethered connection as a "Public" network, and use the Advanced Firewall settings to make the default behavior for Public networks to be blocking all outgoing connections, except for what I whitelist. I then whitelist specific applications (Firefox, IE, Outlook), so I'm only allowing browser/email/IM traffic through while blocking things like Windows Update, Steam, etc. from generating obviously non-smartphone traffic. So far, it's worked.
There's an inherent second-law-of-thermodynamics downside to splitting water: you will necessarily get less energy out when using the H2 + O2 than you had to put into the water to split it to begin with. It's a fundamental flaw with the concept, not something that can be solved by advances in technology. Whatever the source of energy is that you're using, it'd be more efficient to use it directly. That doesn't mean there might not be some niche applications somewhere where it makes sense to accept that negative efficiency for other reasons, but it does mean that hydrogen from water will never make sense as an infrastructure-level transportation fuel. In those volumes, the wasted energy would be an insurmountable problem, no matter how efficient you can make a fuel cell or other energy conversion device, and no matter how well you can solve storage/transport issues.
Consumers vocally demand better mileage, but in practice, most are not actually willing to pay for it. (Nor, with current numbers, should they be, rationally - you'll never make up the extra purchase price of a hybrid vehicle in the fuel savings.) The Prius has pretty decent sales because it's a status symbol, not because people are saving money by buying it rather than a Ford Fiesta or similar economy cars. It'd take 18 years (at 15k miles/year, $3.50 gas) to make up the extra $9800 you're spending on a Prius vs a Fiesta, not counting things like battery pack maintenance. (Or 11 years to make up the price premium vs a Focus.) People aren't choosing it because it's economical.
The "Hydrogen Economy" is a scam. The cheapest way to make hydrogen is via hydrocarbon fractionation. Both green houses gasses will not be affected or reliance on fossil fuels.
Not to mention you're wasting all the chemical energy in those carbon bonds by doing so, and converting to a less energy-dense fuel, thus reducing the practical range of vehicles, andall the infrastructure problems with storing/transporting hydrogen, etc. Or if you look at electrolysis, there's the basic second-law issue: you'd be better off just using the electricity directly than splitting water to H2 & O2 then reacting them to get back to H2O. Hydrogen has never been a viable transportation fuel, and never will be. The disadvantages are too fundamental.
I mean really. Was there ever anyone who actually thought that 25mpg was really the best a small sedan could muster?
Of course not. It's just the best that a cheap small sedan can muster. 50 mpg is attainable (when using their formulas, which incentivize plug-in hybrids, etc.), but it will come with a substantial added cost, which most consumers are very unlikely to recover in fuel savings. If you drive 15,000 miles per year, and go from 25 to 50 mpg, you'll be saving about $1000 per year on fuel. So if the car costs $7-8k more, you'll have to keep driving it for 7-8 years to break even compared to the cheaper, less efficient vehicle. Most new-car buyers don't keep vehicles that long. Additionally, because you're using hybrids/EVs to make up much of that difference, you'll have to add in the added economic costs of battery maintenance/replacement (leaving aside the environmental effects of lithium mining, etc.), which will be another $3k or so every 8-10 years, giving added incentive to get rid of the vehicle before that point, and never actually recover the added purchase cost.
The fuel efficiency standards will be met; it can be done, technologically. It will inflate the cost of vehicles and isn't economical despite being more efficient, but it'll happen. It's never been a question of the best a small sedan can muster, but the best level it makes economic sense to invest in.
So I was looking around in my profile, and guess what: There's a "Nickname" field in there - but the profile form explicitly says that it won't be shown in the profile. Why the hell are they doing that? Why have this field if it's not going to be used?
The "Nickname" field is searchable so you could, for example, fill that as "cronot" and anyone from Slashdot who wanted to follow you would be able to find your profile by searching for your username here.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, IBM has its own Unix OS. My point, though, is that IBM's main business line isn't selling open source software. They may support it, and might even use it in some products, but the main item of value they're selling/being paid for isn't Open Source Software; that's a side issue that they can leverage in order to improve sales of their main products, but isn't the product itself, and isn't the primary driver of revenue for the company. Same with Google: they may open-source some of their software, but it's irrelevant because that's not what they're selling anyway; they're leveraging it to improve/protect their advertising revenues.
And companies like IBM, Google, etc. make billions on the back of open source software. But clearly you're right that this is the exception and can only work in a handful of cases. They must only succeed out of dumb luck, because the model itself can't possibly make any sense. Companies like Google don't know what they're doing.
Google makes its money selling advertising; the software just gets eyeballs to the ads. IBM makes its money selling servers, supercomputers, infrastructure services, microchip designs, etc., not selling software to end users. Do they use open-source software? Sure. But open-source software isn't their product, as such. It's not what people are paying them for.
and of course better weapons get used more.
As evidenced by the fact that only two nuclear weapons have ever been used, while we continue to use less-effective conventional weapons on a regular basis?
Illegal monopoly, my ass. Google has done nothing to protect its monopoly, ....
How about dumping a smartphone OS on the market for free while ignoring other people's patents, to protect their market share of mobile searches? Or leveraging their search monopoly to try to drive people towards their other products instead of those offered by competitors? I don't know if once the legal battles are all sorted out it'll turn out that they actually did violate any laws, but it's plausible enough that the government would be remiss in its duties if it didn't bother to find out. Just because Google claims to "do no evil" doesn't mean they're not playing exactly the same games that the other major players (e.g. Microsoft, Apple, et al.) do. Maybe they've done nothing wrong, in which case they've got nothing to worry about. Or on the other hand, maybe they are improperly leveraging their search monopoly, in which case the government can and should intervene.
Modded "Informative"? I think I would've gone for "Funny" ...
Paul Thurrott's column on this speaks to that question, and describes the logic of the antitrust investigation pretty succinctly:
Before Apple's entry, publishers set the wholesale price of books, but retailers could determine the final selling price. But Apple changed that, allowing publishers for the first time to determine the final price at which eBooks were sold to consumers. As a result, the average selling price of new eBooks jumped from $9.99 to $14.99.
The EC will try to determine if the firms colluded to fix prices and restrict competition. Both charges should be easily proven.
As I reported in February 2010, while Apple was negotiating with the major publishers, at least one of them, Macmillan, demanded that Amazon raise prices on its Kindle books to match Apple's prices. Amazon, now as then, owns the dominant eBook platform, called Kindle. And Macmillan threatened to pull its books from the Kindle unless Amazon went along with the price hike. After temporarily pulling Macmillan's titles from its store, Amazon capitulated and raised prices as demanded.
"We have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books," Amazon wrote to customers at the time.
And http://whysiriwhy.com
Aren't you kind of begging the question there by assuming that anyone producing evidence against those peak oil predictions is necessarily lying? I'm not saying there will never be a production peak/pretending that the supply is infinite, but I'm also not going to assume that a few vociferous alarmists are preaching the gospel truth and anyone who shows evidence to the contrary is a dirty liar ...
According to the example given, I'd also have to conclude that land is not real property either. After all, I cannot just take my land and put it elsewhere.
Legally speaking, that's exactly what makes it "real" property: it can't be picked up and moved. Anything you own that can be picked up and moved is "personal" property. They're taxed separately (real estate taxes vs personal property taxes), and many jurisdictions only tax one or the other but not both.
Well, yeah, Ron Paul wants to do away with almost the entire federal government.
That's true of vaccines intended for children under the age of 6. It is still used in a variety of other vaccines that aren't part of the routine childhood vaccination schedule, though.
While I'm sure there are a few corrupt officers out there, I've legally gained $50 cash I found this way. When no one reclaimed it, they did call be back and I just went down and picked it up.
Well, did he pick it up, remove the SIM card so the owner couldn't just call it and ask about it? Or did he keep it at home waiting for the owner to call and after a few days decided to sell it?
Doesn't matter. The proper approach is to turn it in to the police department, just as if you'd found cash or anything else lying around. If the original owner doesn't claim it within a set time (30-60 days IIRC), they'll call you back and it's yours.
TN is a no-income-tax state: it derives its revenue primarily from sales taxes. Of course they support a federal solution that would require internet retailers to collect sales taxes – without it, the state government's main source of revenue is threatened as retail sales move online. I would be shocked if any governor of Tennessee, from either party, opposed such a law.
Given that developer-unlocking a Windows Phone to allow sideloading of non-Marketplace apps consists of editing a registry key, I really doubt it'll be too difficult to accomplish that feat in Windows 8, which includes a non-metro UI, full root access for the user, and a built-in registry editor.
You tell me, if you come up with the wheel independently .. are you the inventor of it .. simply because nobody before you patented it? Now granted wheel is a bad example since every human has seen one .. but there are many examples in computer science of algorithms that you may come up with that someone may have discovered before you and may or may not even be in wide usage without being patented (say it's in a lib file). If you happen to come up with it independently, you deserve a 20 year monopoly?
Are you an inventor? Sure, if the other guy who came up with it earlier kept it a secret and you independently came up with the same invention, you're both equally inventors of it. Does that necessarily mean you should be granted a patent? No ... but then obviousness and such disqualifications could take care of that one if the USPTO actually had the manpower to really evaluate patent applications properly rather than just rubber-stamping them.
I know this is an average, but someone out there must be spending an awful lot of time in the bathroom to compensate for me being on the far left of the average.
Yeah, they're called women.
Circles, privacy options, hangouts, and keeping games/apps out of the normal social areas.
How is Google+ an exact copy of Facebook with less features again?
Circles are just Facebook Friend Lists by a different name ... Privacy options I've found to be more useful (if less discoverable) on Facebook (e.g. you can blacklist Lists, where you can only whitelist Circles) ... Facebook has group chat and Skype integration, so there's essentially parity there ... you had a point on the absence of games, though Google looks to be moving towards Facebook on that one.
There are a few differences with the G+ news feed - essentially it's a hybrid of Facebook and Twitter, since adding someone to a Circle is a one-way transaction, not requiring the mutual confirmation of adding someone as a Friend on Facebook. But it's still just copying off existing services that most of the market is already happily using.
Which leads to my workaround (effective on AT&T, at least):
On my Windows 7 laptop, I define the tethered connection as a "Public" network, and use the Advanced Firewall settings to make the default behavior for Public networks to be blocking all outgoing connections, except for what I whitelist. I then whitelist specific applications (Firefox, IE, Outlook), so I'm only allowing browser/email/IM traffic through while blocking things like Windows Update, Steam, etc. from generating obviously non-smartphone traffic. So far, it's worked.
I Am Legion.
Is that the one with a herd of zombie pigs running off the cliff?
There's an inherent second-law-of-thermodynamics downside to splitting water: you will necessarily get less energy out when using the H2 + O2 than you had to put into the water to split it to begin with. It's a fundamental flaw with the concept, not something that can be solved by advances in technology. Whatever the source of energy is that you're using, it'd be more efficient to use it directly. That doesn't mean there might not be some niche applications somewhere where it makes sense to accept that negative efficiency for other reasons, but it does mean that hydrogen from water will never make sense as an infrastructure-level transportation fuel. In those volumes, the wasted energy would be an insurmountable problem, no matter how efficient you can make a fuel cell or other energy conversion device, and no matter how well you can solve storage/transport issues.
Consumers vocally demand better mileage, but in practice, most are not actually willing to pay for it. (Nor, with current numbers, should they be, rationally - you'll never make up the extra purchase price of a hybrid vehicle in the fuel savings.) The Prius has pretty decent sales because it's a status symbol, not because people are saving money by buying it rather than a Ford Fiesta or similar economy cars. It'd take 18 years (at 15k miles/year, $3.50 gas) to make up the extra $9800 you're spending on a Prius vs a Fiesta, not counting things like battery pack maintenance. (Or 11 years to make up the price premium vs a Focus.) People aren't choosing it because it's economical.
The "Hydrogen Economy" is a scam. The cheapest way to make hydrogen is via hydrocarbon fractionation. Both green houses gasses will not be affected or reliance on fossil fuels.
Not to mention you're wasting all the chemical energy in those carbon bonds by doing so, and converting to a less energy-dense fuel, thus reducing the practical range of vehicles, andall the infrastructure problems with storing/transporting hydrogen, etc. Or if you look at electrolysis, there's the basic second-law issue: you'd be better off just using the electricity directly than splitting water to H2 & O2 then reacting them to get back to H2O. Hydrogen has never been a viable transportation fuel, and never will be. The disadvantages are too fundamental.
I mean really. Was there ever anyone who actually thought that 25mpg was really the best a small sedan could muster?
Of course not. It's just the best that a cheap small sedan can muster. 50 mpg is attainable (when using their formulas, which incentivize plug-in hybrids, etc.), but it will come with a substantial added cost, which most consumers are very unlikely to recover in fuel savings. If you drive 15,000 miles per year, and go from 25 to 50 mpg, you'll be saving about $1000 per year on fuel. So if the car costs $7-8k more, you'll have to keep driving it for 7-8 years to break even compared to the cheaper, less efficient vehicle. Most new-car buyers don't keep vehicles that long. Additionally, because you're using hybrids/EVs to make up much of that difference, you'll have to add in the added economic costs of battery maintenance/replacement (leaving aside the environmental effects of lithium mining, etc.), which will be another $3k or so every 8-10 years, giving added incentive to get rid of the vehicle before that point, and never actually recover the added purchase cost.
The fuel efficiency standards will be met; it can be done, technologically. It will inflate the cost of vehicles and isn't economical despite being more efficient, but it'll happen. It's never been a question of the best a small sedan can muster, but the best level it makes economic sense to invest in.
So I was looking around in my profile, and guess what: There's a "Nickname" field in there - but the profile form explicitly says that it won't be shown in the profile. Why the hell are they doing that? Why have this field if it's not going to be used?
The "Nickname" field is searchable so you could, for example, fill that as "cronot" and anyone from Slashdot who wanted to follow you would be able to find your profile by searching for your username here.