It is more than that. In the general market, outside of the education market, netbooks are a second computer (third if you count smart phones) not generally a primary computer, as such they are very subject to harsh economic times. Even in the education market, netbook sales will drop due to falling tax incomes.
The interesting thing on the education side, is as more usable education texts become free digital downloads, netbooks actual compete with them and of course are ion fact cheaper to provide than text books (aside from durability issues).
The iPad is of course a niche market, high in marketing and image, which means it will likely flood out it's market very early in it's life leaving it stuck should in fail in broad usability (fit for functional uses that are not better served by other devices ie netbooks and smartphones). The biggest problem for Apple is maintaining sales momentum with a lot of aggressive marketing tactics, including forum flooding, otherwise the iPad will be the newton reborn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton or more colloquially speaking the Edsel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsel of computers. Personally I am betting more Edsel than iPhone (it makes more sense to go 'smartbook' and smartphone, rather than big and and small smartphones).
The reality is the Wii is targeted at a completely different market. These are not gamers, these are random play video game playing families, the bulk of the market. They only play intermittently so they buy the cheapest reasonable console and only a couple of games per year and no hardware add ons, that is it.
Now for you typically insanely greedy corporate gaming executive, that will not feed their disillusions of all being billionaires, that need to be feed by everyone on the face of the plant buying a thousand dollars worth of games each and every year (these are the same idiots from the MPAA and RIAA that also expect everyone, absolutely everyone, to buy $1000 worth of movies and $1000 dollars worth of music and $1000 worth of TV and $1000 worth of crap merchandise).
Nintendo obviously understands it's market and is remaining fairly polite when explaining their position to the gaming publishers, perhaps a little brutal truth mind earn them some peace and quite.
It really depends, in the article they keep wandering from the terms 'downloading' to usage. Usage of course includes uploads and downloads, so for a commercial company distributing content online this becomes prohibitively expensive. For a consumer buying content would have a ISP sales tax added at $1.12 x 2 = $2.24 per gigabyte.
In reality this provides a competitive advantage of $2.24 per gigabyte for the parent ISP to distribute content, allowing them to undercut other online distributors putting them out of business, create a monopoly and then ramp up distribution charges.
When you sell bandwidth, sell bandwidth, don't lie and cheat or came up with make believe bullshit that everyone's bandwidth wont completely crap out at the peak usage times when you wildly over sell it at 10 to 1 ratios or greater. Now to be fair when your charging for downloading more with claims of of people using up bandwidth, then you should also provide proportional refunds for people when even you fail to supply them the speed you claimed, so 50 percent transmission speed, 50 percent refund, when ever the service is down 100 percent refund.
An interesting tax principle. The Australian GST is a federal value added tax http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goods_and_Services_Tax_(Australia)#Economic_and_social_effects_of_the_GST that was used to replace all state sales taxes and thus provide a simplified and uniform across the board taxation basis across all states and that even online sales within Australia now have to in affect pay sales tax. A substantive portion of GST tax income is the redistributed back to each state. This would certainly resolve a lot of internal internet sales problems within the US as well as simplifying cross state border transactions and smuggling.
Online game distribution are really unsafe, for example with Steam if you have a dispute over the payment for one game, they will lock you out of all your games regardless of the value difference (say the game in dispute is worth $10 and you have $1000 worth of games tied to them, tough that's just why extortion can work so well, the loss of being ripped off is far less than the penalty for not paying). This is of course what ultimately will always limit online game sales, corporations and their ass hat executives will simply not be able to resist tilting legal interpretations wildly in their favour (until class action law suits are filed).
So real goods that are not remote controlled by corporate executives do provide a lot more legal protection for the consumer.
For those crimes being accused is sufficient to destroy your life, especially when it often takes a considerable period of time to clear things up, months and often years. The 'other side' is law enforcement and they have no problem tracking accessing you via your ISP. As for selectively breaking into a connection to target a specific person, simple proximity and monitoring over a short time will be sufficient to identify the specific target, upon whom you wish to piggy back questionable traffic.
Not long ago a person was presumed guilty by the RIAA and a civil court a fined hundreds of thousands of dollars, with no physical evidence just the ISP records, with the persons claim that someone broke into their network not being accepted as a defence with out "PROOF OF BREAK IN" ie they were required to prove themselves innocent. Of course that is civil versus criminal but the point can be mute if it is equally punishing at the end of the day.
Oddly enough legally speaking having a completely insecure and open wireless network would be safer than a secured and encrypted network ie on the unsecured one you do not have to prove someone else accessed it.
PS the first step of breaking into people's computers is breaking into their network especially their internal network versus secured beyond the firewall internet connection (well, hopefully at least that). In charged political times and under social economic stresses, these destructive attacks become more prevalent, the real point is innocent until proven guilty needs to be at the forefront of all computer and network based crimes, especially when it comes to confiscation of technological devices for forensic analysis until the investigation is completed months or years later.
That of course points to a failure by Halliburton rather than a failure of BP. Halliburton certainly seems to have inserted itself into some of the worst disasters for the US. Hurricane Katrina relief mismanagement, the Iraq war from start to eventually finish and now this Oil rig explosion, the deaths of many oil workers and a major environmental disaster.
It would seem BP's only hope of survival will be to ensure Halliburton gets the blame it seemingly richly deserves. Hallibutron already seems to be working on it's defence by getting the political right to obfuscate and confuse the issue, to try and prevent criminal prosecutions and to give it time to protect it's assets by shifting them overseas. Of course to be truly alarmist, you would have to mix in a hurricane and the central rising core surrounded by lightning strikes, a fuel air explosion of truly immense proportions, positively nuclear in scope, question is would the detonation blow out the storm.
Of course these kits can be used far more destructively than just for free browsing. By penetrating a secure and encrypted connection, the legal holder of that connection is far more likely to be held criminally liable for the activity on their network.
Guilty until proven innocent for child porn, threats of violence against politicians and, terrorist related speech, these kits are quite dangerous. In China of course their version of the three worst things to do on the internet are speaking out for freedom, democracy and an end to government corruption, of course those is a far more risky activities to do in China.
Any political candidates out there, don't be cheap, wire up you homes because wireless could be the end of your career.
Economies of scale are largely a lie beyond a nominal size, what you mean to say is establishing a monopoly and specifically an uncompetitive monopoly, especially keeping in mind the period of history that Adam Smith originates from as well as the limits of understanding of modern business techniques and the impact of computerisation something of course far beyond 16th century business thinking, well before phone lines, so more accurately that would be archaic backward thinking boob on line two, too which the appropriate answer is hang up perhaps they wont call back.
As too the nonsense about one or a hundred companies going broke, buffoon, separate management at each company, as such one bunch of thieves can only impact one company at a time with limited risk upon the rest of the economy, that is the whole bloody point. Also smaller companies have significantly less influence upon government as well as the regulatory environment.
It is called small business, where management directly interacts with customers and management carries the full consequences for bad business decisions. Not that this stops sociopaths from being destructive in this business area as well, they simply can't do as much damage. Major restrictions in the allowed size of corporations is required to limit the harm caused by limited liabilities (share holders not liable for the debts of the companies they have part ownership of).
For corporations, there is a validated and accurate test for detecting sociopaths (those with a genetic absence of conscience and empathy) so simple testing and exclusion is sufficient to resolve that problem. Whilst narcissists can also be damaging they generally lack the abilities to succeed outside of mass media, other than as puppets of the sociopaths who do the plotting and scheming whilst the narcissist presents the public face (think the Cheney Bush partnership).
The rewards offered need to match the psychology of the desired work force, while still providing for an acceptable life style. Where the government provides a significant portion of important elements of a liveable society this free business from those costs ie. universal health care, free public education, welfare support for unemployment or injury, low cost quality housing, readily accessible low cost public transport. Full provision of these public services de-stresses a society as such, there is less pressure to earn more by what ever means possible, just in case you need it, this provides a more stable and honest work force.
Greed can never be sated, in point of fact, greed is not so much driven by what they get but in what they can deny you, exclusivity, the rest of society starving and desperate whilst they wallow in excess (more than they can consume in a thousand life times).
The best way forward is to create your own channel. Gave up cable more than 5 years ago and spent that money on buying content. Now the large screen TV is just background running what ever content strikes my mood from my media library. That passive content is all rather boring and really is only background to computer activities, whether it be browsing, games, forums, news etc. all done in the foreground with a second screen up close on custom table with keyboard all placed nicely over the recliner chair arm.
Free to air is a memory watched once so far this year because of guests. I prefer my TV series bought as a full season and my news online from independent sources and reality TV and sports as a bad memory;D.
Accidents are not to be confused with criminal negligence. An accident is what happens when you 'spill the milk' at home, when a oil platform goes up in flames, blows up and they can't shut down the flow of oil, that is criminal negligence.
Corporate executives need to start going to jail for their corrupt bonus inflating shortcuts, that they are guilty of a crime is self evident, what needs to happen for a change is the individuals responsible need to be pursued and prosecuted no matter where they are in the world, that chain of command needs to be followed up by harsher sentences for greater responsibility and larger salaries.
Nah, no problem, already had the telephoto camera guy out in the carpark taking photos of the place where I worked and everyone coming or going, that was many years ago along with the invite to one of those "how can we be not so evil" private conferences. I got involved with a local politician and their drive for legislation for the use of free open source software and wrote up some spiel for them to use, now that put me under the M$ enemy of the state microscope, all the rest since then has just been fun and games, well, at least from my perspective safely ensconced in Adelaide, Australia. As for Steve "Uncle Fester" Ballmer, he is far more M$'s investors and, staff problem than he is mine;D.
The problem with claims about the quality of M$'s online stuff, is the double speak inherent in those losses. Most of those losses are driven by advertising costs, M$ paying other online and old world media companies to advertise the quality of M$'s advertising but if M$'s advertsing is so good why are they spending all that money advertising else where.
The reality is that the aggressive M$, dog eat dog, prove your profit basis, employment conditions, marketing, where accountants and lawyers take total precedence and creative people are driven away to their competitors, means the company operates in a creativity vacuum and filling that vacuum with PR=B$ claims of the opposite does not make it true. Anybody that challenges the Steve Ballmer ideology is driven from the company.
So can MSN expand, certainly, all it has to do is drop M$ and the Ballmer crowd and head off in it's own direction. Forget all the B$ make the executives look good name changes, forget about being a marketing arm for the rest of M$, embrace the coolness of FOSS and leave behind the dead weights of windows, zune, bing and especially Steve Ballmer.
That is just so offensively wrong, nobody ostracises themselves by not uses facebook, facebook is just another social media site that has it's moment in the sun and fades away, as fashion changes. People attempting to monetise other peoples social interaction always accelerates the process but it is inevitable. Just like any other social location, the hip clubs, the top pubs etc. they always become unpopular as the new crowd shifts elsewhere to a place that is now perceived as being more up to date.
Of course that whole you aren't cool if you don't use it is just marketing bullshit, disgusting peer pressure manipulations, FUD at it's most deceitful.
Looking for social media sites then let the current cool source of knowledge lead you there http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media, and who knows what future knowledge sites will lead you to what future social media sites but one thing is for certain the most popular sites will continually change, some will last longer than others, knowledge aggregation is more straight forward that social media with all of it's, well, social implications.
Carl Sagan's assumption was a basis of logical decision making in government, he failed to take into account the negative impact psychopaths and narcissists have upon the evolution of human society. That overall level of self destructiveness expressed in human social interaction, the insanity of a society that preys upon itself up to and including it's own self destruction, all driven by a genetically defective minority, which the rest of human society is now only just starting to recognise and come to grips with. A defective genetic trait that has killed hundreds of millions over thousands of years, who in the distant and even recent past were celebrated for their inhumane destructiveness and self glorification of their ego. A slippery lot, emperors, kings, princes, presidents, corporate executives, generalissimos et al homicidal maniacs all and still approximately 1 percent of the human population when it comes to psycopaths.
The whole concept is one of paranoia. Considering the age of the galaxy, advanced species could be of immense ages. Any new interstellar aggressor species would find itself confronted by a whole range of progressively more advanced species each in turn more capable of deploying more advanced and often more subtle forms of social stabilisation. The simplest method by which to judge species and what measures may be required to control threats implied by them, is the way in which they interact with less advanced species.
Much the same way a species upon it's own planet would be judged by the way they interact with each other, with suppositions of racial differences where none exist, of artificial regional divides, specifically demonstrated where a species one region preys upon and exploits the same species in another region, with claims of racial differences to hide, degenerative social diseases, like psychopathy and narcissism.
So any threatening species would be dealt with, likely well before they became destructive upon an interstellar basis. The greater the gap in advancement the less likely communication will occur, as there will always be more similarly advanced species to fill that interaction and monitoring gap, who in turn would be monitored by next nearest level of advancement.
Besides planets in reality are pretty crappy resources for any interstellar species, nebula and dust clouds have stupendously huge quantities of material available, sufficient to make thousands even millions of suns, already in affect mined, granulated to a fine powder and just requiring filtering to extract the desired elements.
Humanity has to be far more concerned with how they interact with each other and how that interaction could be interpreted from an external viewpoint and whether it could be considered as potentially threatening and what actions are required to nip the threat in the bud. Whether it be social modification and, or culling of specific socially destructive elements.
In this case, although fair, India is really just wanting to maintain the current trade balance with more western money coming to line the pockets of a handful of rich Indians who ruthlessly exploit all those Indians working in poverty (who on the whole a looking to emigrate to more modern democracies rather than continue to be exploited).
The continued low level shared piracy will mean that content full of promises and temptations, the carrot, which is far cheaper than the stick, which itself inevitably breaks upon the backs of the poor with the subsequent violent consequences. The exploiters of course only care about today and in the end always believe they will be able to escape to another country with their profits, this becomes far more problematic with countries armed with nuclear weapons. Vengeful revolutionaries armed with nuclear weapons are likely to take a very dim view of profit based political asylum.
There are already three at risk of revolution nuclear armed countries, it appears that this number will continue to grow over time. There is nothing like the country with the most nukes prattling on about first strike to accelerate the process with the inevitable consequence.
More specifically they are not charging for Ubuntu they are charging for Canonicals services http://www.ubuntu.com/support/services. More logically if Mark Shuttleworth really does want to push Canonical forward, than a cooperative franchise set up will likely be the best route to established localised support services upon a global basis. Then using the distributed abilities of all those franchises whether local retail or local commercial services to support the various distributions of Ubuntu produced by Canonical.
The franchise chain could also be used as a retail chain to freely distribute the operating system at a local level and of course to sell non operating system products, including proprietary software linux games, hardware consumables, souvenirs, distributed MMOG (part of cloud computing), training and accreditation services and of course localised neighbourhood services and support (even for M$ Windoze machines).
What will really happen when IPv$4 address space runs out, hmm, easy. Corporations with loads of IPv4 addresses will seek to inflate the price of those addresses, so that they can be rented out a much higher prices. Those corporations with high numbers of addresses will seek to disrupt the take up of IPv6 for as long as possible and make it;s implementation as awkward and expensive as possible.
Supply and demand, induced scarcity greatly inflates profit margins, expect millions upon millions of IPv4 addresses to point to absolutely no where, just remain off the market to inflate the return on the available for hire only addresses.
Ultimately the driver of IPv6 uptake will have to be the government as corporate greed will prefer the profits available with a scarcity of IPv4 addresses at least for those corporations with heaps of unused currently uncapitalised addresses.
The underlying reality is he did not stand up just for his rights, he stood up and took the flack defending every bodies rights. A conscious personal sacrifice he made to protect others as he well knew he would likely suffer for it. What he did next was of far greater import, proving that the particular police administration would, lie and with hold evidence in order to protect illegal activities and obvious indication that a much deeper investigation is required of that particular police department.
It is high time that all police officers carry smart phones with remote blue tooth video cameras fitted to their badges which must be on display at all times whilst on duty. Two functions, one as a means by which to reference the law, which they should do for any citizen upon request and, the second the live recording and transmittal of any arrest or similar interaction with any person.
Why would you favour one over the other, feel comfortable to chastise and boycott them both, along with any other company that makes use of offensive labour conditions to inflate their profit margins.
Naughty, naughty, typical price for mouse was between $37 and $42, there was only one open box price for $23 but hey, deception and M$ marketing go hand in hand.
The reality is M$ is more of public target because of the premium they charge for their product. Obviously, ruthlessly exploiting labour to produce product at a very low cost has absolutely nothing to do with selling the product at a low price and everything to do with inflating the profit margins compared to producing the product under fair and reasonable labour and environmental conditions.
Forget the excuses about selling product at low prices, this is all about unemployment high wage labour locally and when they are desperate enough re-employing them under corporate preferred labour laws, cents per hour, unlimited overtime etc., as obviously there is sufficient mark-up in M$ mice to pay higher wages but the rats at the top prefer to keep it all to themselves.
More dangerous is the definition of what is or is not significant copyright infringement, especially when it is linked to "no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain", using P2P would be considered significant due to the number of people the infringing content is made available to and hence a criminal not a civil offence, which is their obvious intent. Now add seizure of assets "any related materials and implements used in the commission of the alleged offence", which of course could not only includes the computer but the house within which the computer was housed.
Most conspicuous in it's absence was anything related to false charges being placed and, suitable remedial penalties, for infringing free speech rights and, invasion of privacy in false investigations.
To rub salt into the wound, "Parties shall put in place a special allocation Fund to finance ACTA initiatives on capacity building and technical assistance", they expect the tax payer to pay for it all, including the cost of forcing it on "developing countries" (I would assume those a countries rich in primary resources and exploitable labour).
Brings to mind exactly why demos exist in the first place. So many bullshit reviews, so much deceitful advertising, so many lies and exaggerations. So some companies in order to promote their games were forced to produce demos because according to the advertising all games were equally perfect, whilst in reality the majority were crap and only a minority were, well a long way from perfect but at least they were fun to learn and play.
Basically it is typical executive B$ and spin, about how good they are and how they will make the coming billions of dollars, to squeeze out a million dollar pay rise. Demos only existed because of lies in the first place, if companies told the truth for a change, demos would no longer be required. Now of course corporate marketing executives telling the truth is as likely to happen, well, the mind boggles as to what kind of infinitely improbable event could match a corporate marketing executive telling the truth.
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It is more than that. In the general market, outside of the education market, netbooks are a second computer (third if you count smart phones) not generally a primary computer, as such they are very subject to harsh economic times. Even in the education market, netbook sales will drop due to falling tax incomes.
The interesting thing on the education side, is as more usable education texts become free digital downloads, netbooks actual compete with them and of course are ion fact cheaper to provide than text books (aside from durability issues).
The iPad is of course a niche market, high in marketing and image, which means it will likely flood out it's market very early in it's life leaving it stuck should in fail in broad usability (fit for functional uses that are not better served by other devices ie netbooks and smartphones). The biggest problem for Apple is maintaining sales momentum with a lot of aggressive marketing tactics, including forum flooding, otherwise the iPad will be the newton reborn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton or more colloquially speaking the Edsel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsel of computers. Personally I am betting more Edsel than iPhone (it makes more sense to go 'smartbook' and smartphone, rather than big and and small smartphones).
The reality is the Wii is targeted at a completely different market. These are not gamers, these are random play video game playing families, the bulk of the market. They only play intermittently so they buy the cheapest reasonable console and only a couple of games per year and no hardware add ons, that is it.
Now for you typically insanely greedy corporate gaming executive, that will not feed their disillusions of all being billionaires, that need to be feed by everyone on the face of the plant buying a thousand dollars worth of games each and every year (these are the same idiots from the MPAA and RIAA that also expect everyone, absolutely everyone, to buy $1000 worth of movies and $1000 dollars worth of music and $1000 worth of TV and $1000 worth of crap merchandise).
Nintendo obviously understands it's market and is remaining fairly polite when explaining their position to the gaming publishers, perhaps a little brutal truth mind earn them some peace and quite.
It really depends, in the article they keep wandering from the terms 'downloading' to usage. Usage of course includes uploads and downloads, so for a commercial company distributing content online this becomes prohibitively expensive. For a consumer buying content would have a ISP sales tax added at $1.12 x 2 = $2.24 per gigabyte.
In reality this provides a competitive advantage of $2.24 per gigabyte for the parent ISP to distribute content, allowing them to undercut other online distributors putting them out of business, create a monopoly and then ramp up distribution charges.
When you sell bandwidth, sell bandwidth, don't lie and cheat or came up with make believe bullshit that everyone's bandwidth wont completely crap out at the peak usage times when you wildly over sell it at 10 to 1 ratios or greater. Now to be fair when your charging for downloading more with claims of of people using up bandwidth, then you should also provide proportional refunds for people when even you fail to supply them the speed you claimed, so 50 percent transmission speed, 50 percent refund, when ever the service is down 100 percent refund.
An interesting tax principle. The Australian GST is a federal value added tax http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goods_and_Services_Tax_(Australia)#Economic_and_social_effects_of_the_GST that was used to replace all state sales taxes and thus provide a simplified and uniform across the board taxation basis across all states and that even online sales within Australia now have to in affect pay sales tax. A substantive portion of GST tax income is the redistributed back to each state. This would certainly resolve a lot of internal internet sales problems within the US as well as simplifying cross state border transactions and smuggling.
Online game distribution are really unsafe, for example with Steam if you have a dispute over the payment for one game, they will lock you out of all your games regardless of the value difference (say the game in dispute is worth $10 and you have $1000 worth of games tied to them, tough that's just why extortion can work so well, the loss of being ripped off is far less than the penalty for not paying). This is of course what ultimately will always limit online game sales, corporations and their ass hat executives will simply not be able to resist tilting legal interpretations wildly in their favour (until class action law suits are filed).
So real goods that are not remote controlled by corporate executives do provide a lot more legal protection for the consumer.
For those crimes being accused is sufficient to destroy your life, especially when it often takes a considerable period of time to clear things up, months and often years. The 'other side' is law enforcement and they have no problem tracking accessing you via your ISP. As for selectively breaking into a connection to target a specific person, simple proximity and monitoring over a short time will be sufficient to identify the specific target, upon whom you wish to piggy back questionable traffic.
Not long ago a person was presumed guilty by the RIAA and a civil court a fined hundreds of thousands of dollars, with no physical evidence just the ISP records, with the persons claim that someone broke into their network not being accepted as a defence with out "PROOF OF BREAK IN" ie they were required to prove themselves innocent. Of course that is civil versus criminal but the point can be mute if it is equally punishing at the end of the day.
Oddly enough legally speaking having a completely insecure and open wireless network would be safer than a secured and encrypted network ie on the unsecured one you do not have to prove someone else accessed it.
PS the first step of breaking into people's computers is breaking into their network especially their internal network versus secured beyond the firewall internet connection (well, hopefully at least that). In charged political times and under social economic stresses, these destructive attacks become more prevalent, the real point is innocent until proven guilty needs to be at the forefront of all computer and network based crimes, especially when it comes to confiscation of technological devices for forensic analysis until the investigation is completed months or years later.
That of course points to a failure by Halliburton rather than a failure of BP. Halliburton certainly seems to have inserted itself into some of the worst disasters for the US. Hurricane Katrina relief mismanagement, the Iraq war from start to eventually finish and now this Oil rig explosion, the deaths of many oil workers and a major environmental disaster.
It would seem BP's only hope of survival will be to ensure Halliburton gets the blame it seemingly richly deserves. Hallibutron already seems to be working on it's defence by getting the political right to obfuscate and confuse the issue, to try and prevent criminal prosecutions and to give it time to protect it's assets by shifting them overseas. Of course to be truly alarmist, you would have to mix in a hurricane and the central rising core surrounded by lightning strikes, a fuel air explosion of truly immense proportions, positively nuclear in scope, question is would the detonation blow out the storm.
Of course these kits can be used far more destructively than just for free browsing. By penetrating a secure and encrypted connection, the legal holder of that connection is far more likely to be held criminally liable for the activity on their network.
Guilty until proven innocent for child porn, threats of violence against politicians and, terrorist related speech, these kits are quite dangerous. In China of course their version of the three worst things to do on the internet are speaking out for freedom, democracy and an end to government corruption, of course those is a far more risky activities to do in China.
Any political candidates out there, don't be cheap, wire up you homes because wireless could be the end of your career.
Economies of scale are largely a lie beyond a nominal size, what you mean to say is establishing a monopoly and specifically an uncompetitive monopoly, especially keeping in mind the period of history that Adam Smith originates from as well as the limits of understanding of modern business techniques and the impact of computerisation something of course far beyond 16th century business thinking, well before phone lines, so more accurately that would be archaic backward thinking boob on line two, too which the appropriate answer is hang up perhaps they wont call back.
As too the nonsense about one or a hundred companies going broke, buffoon, separate management at each company, as such one bunch of thieves can only impact one company at a time with limited risk upon the rest of the economy, that is the whole bloody point. Also smaller companies have significantly less influence upon government as well as the regulatory environment.
For corporations, there is a validated and accurate test for detecting sociopaths (those with a genetic absence of conscience and empathy) so simple testing and exclusion is sufficient to resolve that problem. Whilst narcissists can also be damaging they generally lack the abilities to succeed outside of mass media, other than as puppets of the sociopaths who do the plotting and scheming whilst the narcissist presents the public face (think the Cheney Bush partnership).
The rewards offered need to match the psychology of the desired work force, while still providing for an acceptable life style. Where the government provides a significant portion of important elements of a liveable society this free business from those costs ie. universal health care, free public education, welfare support for unemployment or injury, low cost quality housing, readily accessible low cost public transport. Full provision of these public services de-stresses a society as such, there is less pressure to earn more by what ever means possible, just in case you need it, this provides a more stable and honest work force.
Greed can never be sated, in point of fact, greed is not so much driven by what they get but in what they can deny you, exclusivity, the rest of society starving and desperate whilst they wallow in excess (more than they can consume in a thousand life times).
The best way forward is to create your own channel. Gave up cable more than 5 years ago and spent that money on buying content. Now the large screen TV is just background running what ever content strikes my mood from my media library. That passive content is all rather boring and really is only background to computer activities, whether it be browsing, games, forums, news etc. all done in the foreground with a second screen up close on custom table with keyboard all placed nicely over the recliner chair arm.
Free to air is a memory watched once so far this year because of guests. I prefer my TV series bought as a full season and my news online from independent sources and reality TV and sports as a bad memory ;D.
Accidents are not to be confused with criminal negligence. An accident is what happens when you 'spill the milk' at home, when a oil platform goes up in flames, blows up and they can't shut down the flow of oil, that is criminal negligence.
Corporate executives need to start going to jail for their corrupt bonus inflating shortcuts, that they are guilty of a crime is self evident, what needs to happen for a change is the individuals responsible need to be pursued and prosecuted no matter where they are in the world, that chain of command needs to be followed up by harsher sentences for greater responsibility and larger salaries.
Nah, no problem, already had the telephoto camera guy out in the carpark taking photos of the place where I worked and everyone coming or going, that was many years ago along with the invite to one of those "how can we be not so evil" private conferences. I got involved with a local politician and their drive for legislation for the use of free open source software and wrote up some spiel for them to use, now that put me under the M$ enemy of the state microscope, all the rest since then has just been fun and games, well, at least from my perspective safely ensconced in Adelaide, Australia. As for Steve "Uncle Fester" Ballmer, he is far more M$'s investors and, staff problem than he is mine ;D.
The problem with claims about the quality of M$'s online stuff, is the double speak inherent in those losses. Most of those losses are driven by advertising costs, M$ paying other online and old world media companies to advertise the quality of M$'s advertising but if M$'s advertsing is so good why are they spending all that money advertising else where.
The reality is that the aggressive M$, dog eat dog, prove your profit basis, employment conditions, marketing, where accountants and lawyers take total precedence and creative people are driven away to their competitors, means the company operates in a creativity vacuum and filling that vacuum with PR=B$ claims of the opposite does not make it true. Anybody that challenges the Steve Ballmer ideology is driven from the company.
So can MSN expand, certainly, all it has to do is drop M$ and the Ballmer crowd and head off in it's own direction. Forget all the B$ make the executives look good name changes, forget about being a marketing arm for the rest of M$, embrace the coolness of FOSS and leave behind the dead weights of windows, zune, bing and especially Steve Ballmer.
That is just so offensively wrong, nobody ostracises themselves by not uses facebook, facebook is just another social media site that has it's moment in the sun and fades away, as fashion changes. People attempting to monetise other peoples social interaction always accelerates the process but it is inevitable. Just like any other social location, the hip clubs, the top pubs etc. they always become unpopular as the new crowd shifts elsewhere to a place that is now perceived as being more up to date.
Of course that whole you aren't cool if you don't use it is just marketing bullshit, disgusting peer pressure manipulations, FUD at it's most deceitful.
Looking for social media sites then let the current cool source of knowledge lead you there http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media, and who knows what future knowledge sites will lead you to what future social media sites but one thing is for certain the most popular sites will continually change, some will last longer than others, knowledge aggregation is more straight forward that social media with all of it's, well, social implications.
Carl Sagan's assumption was a basis of logical decision making in government, he failed to take into account the negative impact psychopaths and narcissists have upon the evolution of human society. That overall level of self destructiveness expressed in human social interaction, the insanity of a society that preys upon itself up to and including it's own self destruction, all driven by a genetically defective minority, which the rest of human society is now only just starting to recognise and come to grips with. A defective genetic trait that has killed hundreds of millions over thousands of years, who in the distant and even recent past were celebrated for their inhumane destructiveness and self glorification of their ego. A slippery lot, emperors, kings, princes, presidents, corporate executives, generalissimos et al homicidal maniacs all and still approximately 1 percent of the human population when it comes to psycopaths.
The whole concept is one of paranoia. Considering the age of the galaxy, advanced species could be of immense ages. Any new interstellar aggressor species would find itself confronted by a whole range of progressively more advanced species each in turn more capable of deploying more advanced and often more subtle forms of social stabilisation. The simplest method by which to judge species and what measures may be required to control threats implied by them, is the way in which they interact with less advanced species.
Much the same way a species upon it's own planet would be judged by the way they interact with each other, with suppositions of racial differences where none exist, of artificial regional divides, specifically demonstrated where a species one region preys upon and exploits the same species in another region, with claims of racial differences to hide, degenerative social diseases, like psychopathy and narcissism.
So any threatening species would be dealt with, likely well before they became destructive upon an interstellar basis. The greater the gap in advancement the less likely communication will occur, as there will always be more similarly advanced species to fill that interaction and monitoring gap, who in turn would be monitored by next nearest level of advancement.
Besides planets in reality are pretty crappy resources for any interstellar species, nebula and dust clouds have stupendously huge quantities of material available, sufficient to make thousands even millions of suns, already in affect mined, granulated to a fine powder and just requiring filtering to extract the desired elements.
Humanity has to be far more concerned with how they interact with each other and how that interaction could be interpreted from an external viewpoint and whether it could be considered as potentially threatening and what actions are required to nip the threat in the bud. Whether it be social modification and, or culling of specific socially destructive elements.
In this case, although fair, India is really just wanting to maintain the current trade balance with more western money coming to line the pockets of a handful of rich Indians who ruthlessly exploit all those Indians working in poverty (who on the whole a looking to emigrate to more modern democracies rather than continue to be exploited).
The continued low level shared piracy will mean that content full of promises and temptations, the carrot, which is far cheaper than the stick, which itself inevitably breaks upon the backs of the poor with the subsequent violent consequences. The exploiters of course only care about today and in the end always believe they will be able to escape to another country with their profits, this becomes far more problematic with countries armed with nuclear weapons. Vengeful revolutionaries armed with nuclear weapons are likely to take a very dim view of profit based political asylum.
There are already three at risk of revolution nuclear armed countries, it appears that this number will continue to grow over time. There is nothing like the country with the most nukes prattling on about first strike to accelerate the process with the inevitable consequence.
More specifically they are not charging for Ubuntu they are charging for Canonicals services http://www.ubuntu.com/support/services. More logically if Mark Shuttleworth really does want to push Canonical forward, than a cooperative franchise set up will likely be the best route to established localised support services upon a global basis. Then using the distributed abilities of all those franchises whether local retail or local commercial services to support the various distributions of Ubuntu produced by Canonical.
The franchise chain could also be used as a retail chain to freely distribute the operating system at a local level and of course to sell non operating system products, including proprietary software linux games, hardware consumables, souvenirs, distributed MMOG (part of cloud computing), training and accreditation services and of course localised neighbourhood services and support (even for M$ Windoze machines).
What will really happen when IPv$4 address space runs out, hmm, easy. Corporations with loads of IPv4 addresses will seek to inflate the price of those addresses, so that they can be rented out a much higher prices. Those corporations with high numbers of addresses will seek to disrupt the take up of IPv6 for as long as possible and make it;s implementation as awkward and expensive as possible.
Supply and demand, induced scarcity greatly inflates profit margins, expect millions upon millions of IPv4 addresses to point to absolutely no where, just remain off the market to inflate the return on the available for hire only addresses.
Ultimately the driver of IPv6 uptake will have to be the government as corporate greed will prefer the profits available with a scarcity of IPv4 addresses at least for those corporations with heaps of unused currently uncapitalised addresses.
The underlying reality is he did not stand up just for his rights, he stood up and took the flack defending every bodies rights. A conscious personal sacrifice he made to protect others as he well knew he would likely suffer for it. What he did next was of far greater import, proving that the particular police administration would, lie and with hold evidence in order to protect illegal activities and obvious indication that a much deeper investigation is required of that particular police department.
It is high time that all police officers carry smart phones with remote blue tooth video cameras fitted to their badges which must be on display at all times whilst on duty. Two functions, one as a means by which to reference the law, which they should do for any citizen upon request and, the second the live recording and transmittal of any arrest or similar interaction with any person.
Why would you favour one over the other, feel comfortable to chastise and boycott them both, along with any other company that makes use of offensive labour conditions to inflate their profit margins.
Naughty, naughty, typical price for mouse was between $37 and $42, there was only one open box price for $23 but hey, deception and M$ marketing go hand in hand.
The reality is M$ is more of public target because of the premium they charge for their product. Obviously, ruthlessly exploiting labour to produce product at a very low cost has absolutely nothing to do with selling the product at a low price and everything to do with inflating the profit margins compared to producing the product under fair and reasonable labour and environmental conditions.
Forget the excuses about selling product at low prices, this is all about unemployment high wage labour locally and when they are desperate enough re-employing them under corporate preferred labour laws, cents per hour, unlimited overtime etc., as obviously there is sufficient mark-up in M$ mice to pay higher wages but the rats at the top prefer to keep it all to themselves.
More dangerous is the definition of what is or is not significant copyright infringement, especially when it is linked to "no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain", using P2P would be considered significant due to the number of people the infringing content is made available to and hence a criminal not a civil offence, which is their obvious intent. Now add seizure of assets "any related materials and implements used in the commission of the alleged offence", which of course could not only includes the computer but the house within which the computer was housed.
Most conspicuous in it's absence was anything related to false charges being placed and, suitable remedial penalties, for infringing free speech rights and, invasion of privacy in false investigations.
To rub salt into the wound, "Parties shall put in place a special allocation Fund to finance ACTA initiatives on capacity building and technical assistance", they expect the tax payer to pay for it all, including the cost of forcing it on "developing countries" (I would assume those a countries rich in primary resources and exploitable labour).
Brings to mind exactly why demos exist in the first place. So many bullshit reviews, so much deceitful advertising, so many lies and exaggerations. So some companies in order to promote their games were forced to produce demos because according to the advertising all games were equally perfect, whilst in reality the majority were crap and only a minority were, well a long way from perfect but at least they were fun to learn and play.
Basically it is typical executive B$ and spin, about how good they are and how they will make the coming billions of dollars, to squeeze out a million dollar pay rise. Demos only existed because of lies in the first place, if companies told the truth for a change, demos would no longer be required. Now of course corporate marketing executives telling the truth is as likely to happen, well, the mind boggles as to what kind of infinitely improbable event could match a corporate marketing executive telling the truth.