Considering these are basically miniature electric helicopters, I'm not sure a crash is really that big a deal; certainly no more so than a truck crashing in the street while delivering the same package through the FAA-approved route. Plus, whoever it crashed on would get free stuff as compensation.
And everyone now hates Windows because Microsoft pushed a phone interface onto their new desktop and laptop in a vain attempt to convince people to write phone apps.
What does "traction" matter? A good platform is a good platform, and WP is one of, if not the best platform out there right now.
The only person I know who had a Windows phone couldn't wait to get rid of it.
But, that aside, even if it's the best phone OS ever, it's still lumbered with that 'Windows' logo, which most people who've used computers read as 'cheap crap that crashes all the time'.
So how does one account for click-through counters? Sure, one can say that the ad may not get clicked on but the thought is implanted, etc... but there is (unlike radio and TV) at least one metric advertisers can use to determine how effective an online ad is.
But no advertiser wants that used as a metric, because people with an IQ higher than a watermelon only click on ads by mistake, or when they're offering free stuff.
Coke isn't a billion times tastier than Joe's cola. It sells a billion times as much because it's been advertised a billion times as much.
It sells a billion times better because it's available just about everywhere and people know that it tastes like crap, but they don't know whether Joe-Bob's Home Cola tastes better or is recycled pig slurry. Joe-Bob could spend billions advertising Joe-Bob's Recycled Pig-Slurry Cola, and it still wouldn't sell as well as Coke does.
You know what? When I go to the store, I have a shopping list. I buy the things on that list, and I go home. Unless there's a topless chick offering free personal services if I buy her soap brand, I won't be buying it no matter how many times I saw it mentioned on Facebook lately.
But, hey, keep claiming that your adverts work by magic 'fluence if you like. It's either that or back to the dole queue on Monday morning.
robots can do anything man can do and much better at a tenth or hundredth of the cost.
Which robots can cover dozens of miles in a few days, while collecting the most interesting scientific specimens from that area?
The big disadvantage of robots is that they're damn slow. A human could cover the distance the Mars rovers have travelled in a day, but you could put a hundred or more rovers on Mars for the cost of putting one human there.
You completely missed my point. If you try to eliminate the democratic State, the corporation will become the State.
Only if you read too many Cyberpunk novels.
How do you have a corporation without a State, when the very idea of a corporation is the product of the State? How long would Microsoft survive if they had to pay to enforce copyright themselves, without a State to do it for them?
Yes but he hasn't actually done anything that hasn't been done before. You're extrapolating that to things that no one's done before.
No-one in the West has built rockets so cheaply before. Look at Arianespace floundering because they're planning to build a new rocket that no-one will want to use if SpaceX are offering similar reliability for a fraction of the cost.
No-one has ever landed a first stage after launching a rocket into space. SpaceX haven't quite achieved that yet, but their last demo clearly brought it down to sea level and would likely have recovered the stage if it had returned over land.
If I remember correctly, the stage is so light by that point that they believe they can turn around and fly back using 10% of the fuel. That cuts payload somewhat, but a 20% lower payload for 10% of the price would still be a big win.
The other option is to launch such that there's a convenient spot to land around where the stage would come down. That would take much less fuel, but you have to fly it back to the launhch site afterwards.
No one is using the "network transparency" of X11 as it was intended to be used anymore, and has been like this for years. (Unless you use Motif, like 0.0000001% of the X11 apps). NO ONE USES SERVER-CLIENT PAINT PRIMITIVES.
It's just image buffers sended over. Like VNC but without any optimization and using ugly paintig primitive trickeries.
So, then. Explain why scrolling in an X-forwarded text editor is pretty much instant, while I can watch the pixels redraw if I use the same application through VNC?
Ah, because this is just something you read on the Internet, and you don't use X-forwarding every day like I do?
It's an impressive experiment in attempting to create an open world, but as a game it's trudging, boring and ultimately confining. The actual missions in the game have so little creativity, you have to wonder if any part of the game *wasn't* designed by committee.
The only time the consumers can distinguish between German and Mexico-built cars is when the models built at the two plants are different
So the German cars are as unreliable as the Mexican cars? An acquaintance did tell me a while ago that Mercedes had really gone donwnhill in the twenty years he owned them, but I thought at least the German ones would be OK.
I'm not sure that 'as good as European cars' is really a selling point, when the car buying books I've been looking at recently mostly say 'don't buy European cars, they're crap'. Then again, that may be because they're made in Mexico.
Is it the case that the original publisher is also doing the e-book? I know sometimes authors retain rights to the e-book that the publisher doesn't get, and they may have chosen a bad e-book publishing model.
Most of the really badly fomatted ebooks I've seen come from trade publishers just OCR-ing the paper book and uploading it without further editing. I've seen a few badly formatted backlist ebooks from authors, but most take a lot more pride in their books than their publisher would.
Threaten to pull all movies from Amazon, create and promote a new partnership with (for example) Overstock.com or create their own direct distribution branch.
Ha-ha. You're funny.
If WB pull their movies off Amazon, I just stop buying WB movies. Few people are going to set up a separate account for every movie company, they just want to buy all their crap from one site with one account.
The only reservaton I have is the idea that one gigantic business is somehow going to treat me better than another gigantic business. Giant Douche versus Shit Sandwich comes to mind...
Except Amazon has great customer service, while Big Movie regards customers as an annoyance.
That might change, but, right now, I'll take Amazon over any big movie company any day.
While I agree in principle that publisher's are a bit superfluous to the publishing equation, acting solely as a middle man, you did leave out one major point regarding their value add. They provide substantial marketing muscle that it's not clear Amazon would provide to an individual author alone.
Sure, if you're Stephen King. Not if you're Joe Newbie who just sold them his new book for a $5,000 advance.
How much marketing do you think they're going to throw at a book if they're only willing to pay the author $5,000?
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Considering these are basically miniature electric helicopters, I'm not sure a crash is really that big a deal; certainly no more so than a truck crashing in the street while delivering the same package through the FAA-approved route. Plus, whoever it crashed on would get free stuff as compensation.
And everyone now hates Windows because Microsoft pushed a phone interface onto their new desktop and laptop in a vain attempt to convince people to write phone apps.
What does "traction" matter? A good platform is a good platform, and WP is one of, if not the best platform out there right now.
The only person I know who had a Windows phone couldn't wait to get rid of it.
But, that aside, even if it's the best phone OS ever, it's still lumbered with that 'Windows' logo, which most people who've used computers read as 'cheap crap that crashes all the time'.
So how does one account for click-through counters? Sure, one can say that the ad may not get clicked on but the thought is implanted, etc... but there is (unlike radio and TV) at least one metric advertisers can use to determine how effective an online ad is.
But no advertiser wants that used as a metric, because people with an IQ higher than a watermelon only click on ads by mistake, or when they're offering free stuff.
The fact that you are no longer 'in play' doesn't mean you are brand immune.
It means advertising to me is worthless.
Besides which, I don't use the same brands as my parents; I use the brands which work best for me out of those I've tried.
So you pre-pick the brand of soap your going to buy?
Uh, yes.
Coke isn't a billion times tastier than Joe's cola. It sells a billion times as much because it's been advertised a billion times as much.
It sells a billion times better because it's available just about everywhere and people know that it tastes like crap, but they don't know whether Joe-Bob's Home Cola tastes better or is recycled pig slurry. Joe-Bob could spend billions advertising Joe-Bob's Recycled Pig-Slurry Cola, and it still wouldn't sell as well as Coke does.
You must be a marketer.
You know what? When I go to the store, I have a shopping list. I buy the things on that list, and I go home. Unless there's a topless chick offering free personal services if I buy her soap brand, I won't be buying it no matter how many times I saw it mentioned on Facebook lately.
But, hey, keep claiming that your adverts work by magic 'fluence if you like. It's either that or back to the dole queue on Monday morning.
robots can do anything man can do and much better at a tenth or hundredth of the cost.
Which robots can cover dozens of miles in a few days, while collecting the most interesting scientific specimens from that area?
The big disadvantage of robots is that they're damn slow. A human could cover the distance the Mars rovers have travelled in a day, but you could put a hundred or more rovers on Mars for the cost of putting one human there.
You completely missed my point. If you try to eliminate the democratic State, the corporation will become the State.
Only if you read too many Cyberpunk novels.
How do you have a corporation without a State, when the very idea of a corporation is the product of the State? How long would Microsoft survive if they had to pay to enforce copyright themselves, without a State to do it for them?
Yes but he hasn't actually done anything that hasn't been done before. You're extrapolating that to things that no one's done before.
No-one in the West has built rockets so cheaply before. Look at Arianespace floundering because they're planning to build a new rocket that no-one will want to use if SpaceX are offering similar reliability for a fraction of the cost.
No-one has ever landed a first stage after launching a rocket into space. SpaceX haven't quite achieved that yet, but their last demo clearly brought it down to sea level and would likely have recovered the stage if it had returned over land.
Why can't you just drive it back? It's got fins; surely it has wheels too!
Yeah, but it corners like a whale.
If I remember correctly, the stage is so light by that point that they believe they can turn around and fly back using 10% of the fuel. That cuts payload somewhat, but a 20% lower payload for 10% of the price would still be a big win.
The other option is to launch such that there's a convenient spot to land around where the stage would come down. That would take much less fuel, but you have to fly it back to the launhch site afterwards.
No one is using the "network transparency" of X11 as it was intended to be used anymore, and has been like this for years. (Unless you use Motif, like 0.0000001% of the X11 apps). NO ONE USES SERVER-CLIENT PAINT PRIMITIVES.
It's just image buffers sended over. Like VNC but without any optimization and using ugly paintig primitive trickeries.
So, then. Explain why scrolling in an X-forwarded text editor is pretty much instant, while I can watch the pixels redraw if I use the same application through VNC?
Ah, because this is just something you read on the Internet, and you don't use X-forwarding every day like I do?
It's an impressive experiment in attempting to create an open world, but as a game it's trudging, boring and ultimately confining. The actual missions in the game have so little creativity, you have to wonder if any part of the game *wasn't* designed by committee.
But, uh, that's the same as GTA3 and GTA4.
They were probably planning to charge players $50 to activate this 'DLC'.
You can already run your programs on a mainframe - just as fast as this microprocessor BS would be, if not more so.
The only time the consumers can distinguish between German and Mexico-built cars is when the models built at the two plants are different
So the German cars are as unreliable as the Mexican cars? An acquaintance did tell me a while ago that Mercedes had really gone donwnhill in the twenty years he owned them, but I thought at least the German ones would be OK.
I'm not sure that 'as good as European cars' is really a selling point, when the car buying books I've been looking at recently mostly say 'don't buy European cars, they're crap'. Then again, that may be because they're made in Mexico.
More than the author is capable of on his own if he was willing to accept a $5,000 advance..
So, where are the TV ads for Joe Newbie's book? Where are the newspaper ads? Where are the billboards?
They're not there, because the publisher won't spend a cent advertising his book to readers, if they think it's only going to make $5,000.
Is it the case that the original publisher is also doing the e-book? I know sometimes authors retain rights to the e-book that the publisher doesn't get, and they may have chosen a bad e-book publishing model.
Most of the really badly fomatted ebooks I've seen come from trade publishers just OCR-ing the paper book and uploading it without further editing. I've seen a few badly formatted backlist ebooks from authors, but most take a lot more pride in their books than their publisher would.
Threaten to pull all movies from Amazon, create and promote a new partnership with (for example) Overstock.com or create their own direct distribution branch.
Ha-ha. You're funny.
If WB pull their movies off Amazon, I just stop buying WB movies. Few people are going to set up a separate account for every movie company, they just want to buy all their crap from one site with one account.
The only reservaton I have is the idea that one gigantic business is somehow going to treat me better than another gigantic business. Giant Douche versus Shit Sandwich comes to mind...
Except Amazon has great customer service, while Big Movie regards customers as an annoyance.
That might change, but, right now, I'll take Amazon over any big movie company any day.
While I agree in principle that publisher's are a bit superfluous to the publishing equation, acting solely as a middle man, you did leave out one major point regarding their value add. They provide substantial marketing muscle that it's not clear Amazon would provide to an individual author alone.
Sure, if you're Stephen King. Not if you're Joe Newbie who just sold them his new book for a $5,000 advance.
How much marketing do you think they're going to throw at a book if they're only willing to pay the author $5,000?
Duh. So it can sell that information to advertisers to serve targetted ads.