In our world there are innovators and there are also people that will vow to re-use existing theoretically suboptimal but working, viable solutions with all their known pros and cons until it is absolutely necessary to take the leap of faith and adopt something else. Unfortunately, the second type is the majority, even if it is completely obvious that the dependency of the West on the Middle East is one of its largest weaknesses. I wonder how many slaps does it take for some people to reach the point where the leap of faith is considered the more viable proposition than staying the course.
FTFY?
While I agree with your overall direction, there seemed to be an implicit assumption that we're stuck to oil due to Luddites. There are absolutely valid reasons why we're stuck to oil and we're not going to get beyond it until they can be resolved, likely through a combination of oil becoming less and alternatives becoming more viable.
All of the possibilities for moving away from oil carry their own risks, and while I think we both believe we need to move much more quickly, everybody has their own assessment of the risks, everybody has their own ideas on the part they want to play and it's easy for us to make demands when (naturally) we see so many opportunities from someone else sinking a few billion into R&D.
Car analogy: when we don't have a map, none of the exits are signposted and even the destination is just a vague idea then it's a little boorish to be insulting the driver for our not having arrived yet.
Everybody I know who wants Apple products wants it because it's thin and pretty.
Everybody I know who has Apple products say they want things like longer lasting batteries, but they're already locked into the UI and cult of Jobs or whatever you want to call it so they're not going anywhere and ohh look! The new one's so pretty!
That's a lot less of a dig than it probably appears. Apple does what it does very well.
The balance sheet value is meaningless for valuation. It doesn't even tell you what I'm guessing you think it means, since the balance sheet uses going concern values, not what you'd get for putting the assets on ebay.
Market cap is by far the best valuation. Maybe you think it's overpriced, maybe you think it's underpriced, but the market as a whole thinks this is the right price - by definition in $$$ terms something is worth what it's purchaser will pay for it and that's the market price. It's not relevant that the current market price isn't what you'd get if you wanted to sell a huge stake tomorrow, partly because you don't have a huge stake, partly because if you did you would do a planned sell-off and partly because the same argument goes both ways: if you wanted to buy a huge stake you'd have to pay a lot more than the current price.
The second-best valuation, arguably the best one if you're looking to take a huge/controlling stake, can be achieved by discounting expected future cash flows. While this requires guesstimates of what you think it'll be making in the future and guesstimates of your required return (which also involves guesstimating risk) and is therefore "bullshit", it does at least recognise the purpose in making the investment, something the balance sheet makes absolutely no attempt nor has any pretensions of doing.
Incidentally, goodwill is the difference between the book value of a company purchased and the price GOOG paid. The "intangibles" were the reason GOOG bought the company. A collection of assets and liabilities has zero interest since you could simply setup the same thing yourself. The only reason you buy an existing business is because of things like branding, supplier goodwill, employees... All the stuff that represents the "value" of the business in non-monetary terms, everything else is just a collection of stuff.
Last I heard Apple was making software, engineering how to combine other people's hardware and designing the aesthetics. And most significantly perhaps, marketing it. I'd go so far as to suggest all those other things are part and parcel of the marketing. I thought pretty much all the hardware components were sourced from and put together into final product by the likes of Foxconn, Asustek, Quanta and I guess many others. Even the OS is based on Unix.
Acquiring a major semiconductor company would be unlike Apple, who use Intel chips in their Macs and in the mobile devices the "Apple Ax" chip, which is really an ARM Cortex design tweaked by "Apple" (more literally, probably by Samsung under Apple's direction) and manufactured by Samsung.
Apple stick to their core business pretty well. This relates to the first parent's comment aswell:
And a damn good one it would be. I can't even begin to imagine the profits Dell could reap through the fruits inherited from an AMD buyout. It's much cheaper to manufacture products when you control every aspect of most of the primary components being used. And then also manufacturing facilities.. well, even more so.. wow.
Apple enter into contracts with suppliers for pretty much any non-core activity. Good "partnership" arrangements give them most of the benefits of controlling the supply chain, while at the same time they retain Foxconn et al's specialist skills and economies of scale. I don't mean to be extolling the virtues of Apple, they're just a widely-known example of the strategy.
Ask what benefit there is to be found from buying a supplier then ask if it's possible to obtain much the same from just partnering with them. Say a chip costs AMD $10 to make plus $15 share of the R&D and they sell for $30. There's a $5 margin there if you buy them right? Well maybe, but if you're Dell or Apple you can partner up and say you'll buy a million chips a year for 5 years if they'll sell at $13.
But wait! It costs $25 per chip so that's an $12 loss? Wrong. The $15/chip R&D cost is fixed and it might average out to $10/chip with the new custom. Still a loss? Yeah but the other customers already covered it through their $30 price so incrementally it's a $3 profit. It's actually probably even better than that since other scale economies come into play, plus there's that guaranteed 5 year contract so you can make better, less risky plans.
Even if you couldn't get the cheaper price and the alternative was to buy at $30, there's a nice margin to take hold of by buying them right? Suuuuure... But you just threw down the money to buy the company. Share capital isn't really that far off being a loan when you're a big company, shareholders want their return just like a lender wants their interest. If you're a $10b company and investors expect 10%pa well you'd better make them $1b each year, either in dividends or capital growth (which is really expectation of future dividends). If you raise $5b to buy another company and (assuming risk etc stays the same) only make $1.5b then the whole thing was pointless because it's still 10%.
If you want to buy a company you need to be better than them at what they do, be able to get rid of a load of duplicated costs (i.e. staff), be preying on an undervalued company or simply not be able to achieve a good partnership with them. Otherwise you should be able to get pretty much all the benefits with significantly less risk by partnering up.
Although... There is one other thing. Dell buying AMD results in Dell's competitors being at the mercy of Intel, which would be even closer to monopoly. The counter point however is Dell is also at the mercy of what they can do with AMD. I don't think Dell wants to compete with Intel. Not in the CPU market and not even indirectly with Intel supporting Dell competitors.
Sunk costs should never influence your current investment decision.
FTFY. Sunk costs are still relevant when retrospectively evaluating performance, which I think is what MrQuacker is getting at.
Not that the criticism is necessarily aimed at the BBC. A major source of waste and inefficiency where government is involved (and to a lesser degree at any large organisation), is the uncertainty introduced by politicians continually changing the landscape. The websites may have offered good value for money at the time of purchase and everything may have gone to plan at the BBC end, but they are now infeasible simply due to a change in government.
The root of the issue manifests itself in everything. Government-influenced organisations rarely buy equipment but instead take leasing options, even if they are much more expensive, because they can't amortise the cost of a purchase over several year's budgets. Staff at organisations that have funding guaranteed only for short periods need to be paid more to compensate for the short-term contract (and they spend a lot of their time completing funding applications for next year). Want to guess why the Scottish Parliament building went 10x over budget? Politicians continually quibbled and changed the spec of their offices even while all the builders were on site. It got so bad that I even had a contractor bemoaning his disgust at getting paid full rate to be sitting drinking tea with the boys day-in, day-out, despite the personal windfall, particularly since they couldn't be released to go do something useful because they were contractually obliged to be on site.
For the avoidance of doubt, I'm not advocating small government, but rather that if politicians really wish to "cut waste" the first thing they need to do is stop themselves from continually meddling in everything and the second thing is to set reasonably long term funding that people can actually plan with.
I won't be sad the day the movie industry goes out of business. I've found other ways to find entertainment which does not involve them. Everything does not have to last forever.
The movie industry isn't going out of business. Even if we're to accept that MPAA members are all in deep trouble then what we'd be looking at is a change in the movie industry. Maybe the industry would be unrecognisable compared to it's current form, but for better or worse capitalism marches on.
The malware defeats your bank's measures by performing a man-in-the-middle attack. When you point your browser at your bank's website the malware steps in and it accesses your bank and sends you a copy of the page. You enter the details of your supplier but the malware substitutes their own account details. You then dutifully go through the security routine, unwittingly authorising the wrong account. iTAN is completely defeated by both phishing and man-in-the-middle, all it is any good for is against key loggers.
My bank uses a card+reader system. Every time you set up a new supplier you have to enter into the website their account number and account holder's name, which the bank checks in real time. You then put your card in your reader (which looks like a little calculator) and enter a code of which half comes from the bank website and half are digits of the payee's account number. Your reader then responds that the bank website is genuine, then generates a code which you enter into the bank website, so the bank knows you are genuine.
Let's be clear, I'm only ever giving them a code that should only work with the payee account details I already knew. How can even man-in-the-middle beat that? Yet apparently it can. The best I can think of is that at the first stage with the reader, the fake website prompts the user with the full code to enter into the reader and deletes the text reminding you that some of it should match your intended account number. Or maybe it's cracked the reader codes, I don't know.
I'm starting to think I should try modifying an Ubuntu live DVD so it's preconfigured to ignore HDD and block out everything but my bank. I'd still have to save files to USB though.
Anyone have experience with Rapport? Is it some lightweight thing you just run when you want to access internet banking or is it some nuisance running all the time?
The technologies available for backbones already are fast enough for the next decade or so. The main problem is the 'last mile'.
I have 20mbit ("up to 24mbit") ADSL in the UK. However the only times I have noticed the bandwidth being fully utilised is when downloading from a specific Ubuntu mirror, iPlayer and occasionally when downloading from MS. Otherwise frankly I consider 8mbit a good source. This is irrespective of time of day.
Hardly an empirical study, but the only conclusion I can draw is that in practice the home-to-cabinet is far from being the bottleneck for me, and for people with even bog-standard connections even a small improvement will quickly be met with bottlenecks elsewhere.
Also, bear in mind the government is throwing £830m at upgrading "the last mile" by 2015, including quite a lot of FTTH.
Regardless, on the backbone scale economics are important. Even if you were right that existing technology may be able to provide the capacity for the next decade, the cost is at least as important.
Not forgetting that it takes a long time to go from starting the research to installing the finished product. Research is done today for tomorrow.
According to Auletta, 80% of AOL's profits come from subscribers, and 75% of those subscribers are paying for something they don't actually need. [...] seventy-five percent of the people who subscribe to AOL's dial-up service don't need it.'"
WTF is this gibberish? My best guess is 80% of profits come from all subscribers (an irrelevant "fact") and 75% of dial-up subscribers do not need the dial-up, which is interesting only if there's too many of them to account for the folks who have it as back-up. Mish-mash the two together into the gibberish summary however and you have what looks like 80% of AOL profits come from dial-up subscribers of whom 75% don't need it.
I did consider that it is possible (however implausible) that indeed summary intended to say the latter, in which I call BS. The 10K shows subscriber sales of $244.8m and total net profit of $171.6m (80% of which is $137m). So we'd be saying that, at an absolute minimum, requiring dial-up to have zero cost, over 56% of ALL of AOL's subscriber sales is for dial-up?
If that wasn't implausible enough, summary implies 75% of dial-up customers don't need it because they have cable/dsl, so we're getting an absolute minimum of 56% of $sales from an absolute maximum of 75% of the number of subscriber customers, hence (though I really don't trust my maths here) dial-up must cost >70% more than cable/dsl subscription does? I can't be arsed trying to get around AOL's country redirect to find out what the dial-up subscription costs since it isn't even advertised in the UK and AOL have one of those country redirects.
I'm going to call BS even on the idea that 80% of profit comes from all subscribers, since that'd require an epic 56% net profit ratio, oh and anyway 42% actually came from "discontinued operations" and, since I'm guessing dial-up operations are continuing, that does not leave the necessary 80% for subscriptions.
Am I missing some other, actually plausable interpretation of the summary? Am I totally not getting something, perhaps due to standard practice in US that isn't ver here?
Incidentally there is no useful reportable segment info in the 10K so I've no idea how these figures were calculated, though they do look suspiciously round.
Parent is confused. Accountancy qualifications are tied to the issuing professional bodies, which are mostly geographically restricted in some sense. An American CPA is not even a member the same body as the UK CPA. While their members have the same designated letters, the organisations themselves actually have different names and are not associated. See British Chartered Accountants.
Historically the main reason for the geographical relevance is the recognition of professionals as national law has developed, and continued through to today partly due to differing accounting standards but mostly due to governments wanting to maintain influence over the professional bodies that are allowed to carry out an independent audit. This can get a bit confused though in that all the main qualifications are internationally valued, much like a degree at a good university, and much like at those universities a fair share of the crop have come from all over the world to study there.
In terms of the quality of a UK CPA, well I'm not familiar with many CPAs but I'd hesitate to rely on anecdotal experience such as yours anyway. The CPA is a speciality for government organisations, can I assume that is where your CPA friends will have been working? If so they will have negligible experience of large parts of the CA syllabus: no tax, probably little of the audit and slightly different financial reports. The workload in studying for the CA is epic and complex, it does make a big difference if you're reinforcing class stuff with experience at work. Plus I find it easy to imagine the scenario and form an approach to an exam question because from working in a practice I have grown accustomed to the constant barrage of new clients with new issues day in, day out.
Back on topic, the CPA in summary isn't the same as Steve Jobs because the CPA blatantly runs a personal service company, funnelling "salary" as dividends to minimise tax. Steve Jobs doesn't have the same control at Apple (well, not for what matters here) and it's mainly for performance incentive reasons that his remuneration comes through granting of shares and options. I'm not a tax specialist and it may be a bit above my grade even in the UK anyway, but my understanding is after some allowances most of it is taxed as if it were salary (and indeed the Steve Jobs link in TFA does include the text "After a portion of these shares was withheld for the payment of taxes [...]").
While we're at it, "summary" also refers to a different tax-avoidance/evasion issue in the latter parts of the text, transfer pricing. This isn't really relevant to the personal taxes of the persons mentioned in summary, it's more a multinational corporation avoidance technique.
ISPs seem to be confused about who is en route to achieving monopoly powers.
In the UK, consumers have a real choice of ISPs and negligible brand loyalty to any of them. iPlayer, Facebook, Google and YouTube on the other hand border on being a staple part of lifestyle. Most people I know also use iPlayer and I'm quite certain they'd all change ISP if theirs stopped delivering it. On that subject, TFA is on shaky ground about contract lock-in because ceasing to provide a significant service is a failure to deliver/material variation which renders the contract unenforceable, and, in my (limited) understanding of contract law, it is nigh on impossible to have valid terms in standard-form contracts to waive such rights.
OK, ISPs could speed up certain companies and not others, and this could get to a point where they're not literally barring access but it's impractical for bandwidth heavy content to compete without doing so. But you're still going to have consumers who are more concerned about content and you're still going to have the 3rd party options like Akamai. The risk for consumers, as the article correctly points out, is the barriers that are created preventing new startups gaining traction.
If it wasn't enough that people are already more bothered about the content than their ISP, all of those companies have various content-sharing and other agreements already, they are clearly not averse to forming agreements on other issues. The balance of power is forming overwhelmingly in the hands of the big content providers.
ISPs should think twice. Some content providers are already showing signs of some monopoly power and by creating further barriers to competition the ISP is throwing itself towards an inevitable conclusion: the content providers charging the ISP.
Man, the whining about games being different is just laughable and highlights the ignorance, arrogance and the plain lack of basic consumer-focused business sense that is endemic in most industries that involve copyright.
Although... There is one true difference between a used car/home sale and a used game sale: the margins on the second sale.
Say a Taurus priced new $25,000, of which dealer makes $2,500, and buyer can trade-in after 3 years for $9,000 (to be sold at $10,000, again a 10% margin).
Ford gets $22,500;
Dealer gets $3,500;
Buyer 1 pays net $16,000;
Buyer 2 pays net $10,000.
Clearly the price of a Taurus can be MUCH higher because all the resale market does is provide a mechanism that is IDENTICAL to a $26,000 price split between two people with dealer extracting only 13.5% out of the transaction.
Now say Halo 8 priced new $60, of which store makes $15, buyer can trade-in for $15 which store resells for $45.
Bungie gets $45
Store gets $45
Buyer 1 pays net $45
Buyer 2 pays net $45
The situation looks a little different no? There is $90 revenue being split and the store is taking 50%. It's even more if Buyer 2 also trades in.
The same solution is returned if we approach the problem from a different angle. If there is no resale market, the buyers need another method to maintain their net cost.
Taurus Buyer 1 needs to maintain the approx $5,333pa cost so keeps his car almost 5 years. Assuming Buyer 2 was scrapping his s/h car after 3 years, he needs to maintain $3,333pa so buys new and keeps for 7.5 years. Therefore Ford sells 5 cars for net $22.5k each every 15 years, almost exactly the same as with the retail market!
But with no game resale market, assuming Buyer 1 and Buyer 2 have a more or less fixed budget of $45 per month, Bungie sells 18 games per year for net $45. With the resale market they sell 12.
OK, so I have a major assumption in both examples that all buyers have a fixed budget available and it is always spent. True, gamers may save money on games and spend that on a DVD. But they're also saving money on DVD's and buying games and frankly there is no argument that consumers shouldn't be saving money.
Consumers are not the problem. Resale is not the problem. Store margins on resale is the problem (for publishers).
Even if Sony has the better of possible intentions with this, they'll immediately be faced with publishers seeking to take control of the online authentication in order to lock specific games to specific consoles and hence kill the resale market. This is also likely to be more of a problem for even those who always buy new and never sell, since any activation limit is more likely to cause problems when they take their game round to play at their friend's house.
Publishers seem even more pissed at the resale market than piracy. There is some logic to it, since on the resale market gamers are actually handing over money and a sale being made, it's just that they're cut out the loop. Obviously reality is a bit more complicated than that, I'm not saying I agree with the point, but a second-hand sale does look a lot more like a lost sale to the publisher than with piracy where the vast majority of the time the pirate never had any intentions of paying anyone.
I don't have the breakdown but (and I may be giving too much benefit of the doubt) the £400k should cover far more than pressing delete on a database. There's destroying the storage medium, security to make sure nobody's walking out with data... Not forgetting the costs of actually dismantling equipment, and I wouldn't be surprised if there are significant figures for an early property lease termination penalty, dilapidations and staff redundancies.
To digress a little, no it is not uncommon for staff employed at one governmental organisation to be paid a tax-free redundancy even when immediately re-employed at another.
Anyway, the main reason £400k is considered surprisingly small is because what frequently happens when a UK governmental project is scrapped is that there is a contractor somewhere due to be paid a fortune in "lost profits". While such arrangements are common in business, the level of compensation usually seems grossly inflated for government contracts, even allowing for the large scale. It's generally thought this is due to a combination of politicians/civil servants behave rather less cautiously when committing public money; supplier companies being all-too aware of the probability of cancellations of government projects and/or what everybody really thinks: because it becomes that much less likely the politician's pet project will be scrapped no matter how hated. That's not to forget fraud and under-the-table deals, but habit in the UK is not to attribute politicians with true malice what can be explained by arrogance and incompetence.
How could breach of contract EVER be a crime?? It is a breach of contract, not a violation of a law, when you breach a contract you get the consequences listed in the contract, or if you refuse them a civil law suit, but not a fine and not a prison sentence.
My reading of TFA is that breach of the AUP itself was not what made this illegal. The AUP was merely the mechanism that had communicated to (or perhaps reminded) Ms Giles that her use was unauthorised.
Similarly, say a self-employed personal is contracted in to provide some sort of safety role, in the knowledge that the other party would be wholly reliant on their performance for safety, then recklessly fails to fulfil that role. The contractor may then be up for involuntary manslaughter not because of breach of contract but incidentally for the same reasons that he might also be sued for breach of contract.
Obviously there are still some issues here, like it appears rather easy to find yourself breaching your "authorised use" compared to the tests required to establish a criminal negligence in a manslaughter. Perhaps relevant though that this was a restricted database and Giles' employment position indicates she should have full appreciation of the restrictions and implications. That is very different to some garbage click-though AUP on home software.
So... A major dataset is what people doing those jobs told them? Most people have performed few different roles and for few employers. Most people have no idea, except that the grass is always greener elsewhere.
True this is my impression based on anecdotal evidence, but since I work as an accountant and most of my time is out at a client, I get to observe and interact with lots of different people at work and see their payroll. And for some reason people have a habit of confiding in me, I think they're looking for some independent assurance on just how overworked and underpaid they are.
Or aren't. I can recount stories, but it just ends in a muddle because none of them really have any clue whether they're being overworked or underpaid. There is some kind of masochistic humour to be had though when (and this happens so often it's a standing office joke) you have to sympathise with someone saying they wished they make close to what you do, only to later do the payroll section and find they make 25-50% more.
Apparently in the US the fatality rate is 1 per 125m "vehicle miles of travel". I couldn't find a reliable average number of fatalities per fatal accident, so I couldn't work out a "miles per fatal accident", though obviously would be higher.
Unfortunately I couldn't easily find any reliable accident statistics, a 6m figure (1 per 0.5m miles) is bandied about a bit but seems to stem from some ambulance-chasing lawyer outfit.
Personally I find that an astonishingly impressive safety record. Ample room for improvement for sure, but does give me doubts that computers are anywhere near as capable.
That said, using statistics for context does throw up some oddities. Like, why we shouldn't be at all concerned about terrorism, and wondering why smoking is still legal and even socially acceptable (yes I am a smoker, and do think the habit is utterly idiotic).
Well the layout is immediately more interesting, but more to the point, hover over the icons and you'll be reminded of varied, interesting places in FO3 or mostly samey, bland places in NV.
Having combed the southern 2/3rd's of the map below the Strip area, so far everything in NV seems samey and frankly bland. The only points of any interest have been, well maybe Goldsprings, REPCONN Test Site and Helios One.
With FO3 there was a constant feel of adventure. Starting off in Vault 101, out into Springvale (a dull town but a "whoa" moment), on to Megaton... I even remember the SuperDuperMart. TenPenny Tower? And it keeps it up from there. Travelling above ground or Metro?
With FO3 it's easy to imagine they had dozens of little teams to design each point and all wanted to leave their mark on the game. NV feels more like one uninspired team endlessly churning out areas of mediocrity. Half the points are shacks, or might as well be.
Investigating the maps a little makes it extremely clear in my mind which was the more enjoyable game: FO3, NV.
Then there's the characters, the humour, the music...
From the article, there's just under 60,000 cameras now. Six crimes solved per day times 365 days = about 2,200 crimes solved. So that's about one crime solved per 30 cameras per year.
Going from 1/1000 to 1/30 is a massive improvement, though I'm guessing that the difference isn't just the police program reaching maturity or something like that. For starters, I'll bet they count crimes differently between the two programs.
Still, even the modern figure seems pretty bad. So you've got 30 cameras up all year, with all the needed infrastructure behind these 30 cameras, and all together, they solved one crime. A quarter million hours of surveillance (30 cameras * 24 hours * 365 days) and you only solve one crime.
Apples and oranges I'm afraid. TFA refers to 2,512 crimes solved with the help of CCTV in London, while the just under 60,000 cameras refers to the whole of Britain. This figure also, I assume, refers to ones with a police or other government agency employee at the other end, but from the text the chap from the Met appears to be referring to all forms of CCTV.
Even if the figures were all apples-to-apples they wouldn't be worth analysing anyway. What does "help solve" mean? Actually, I'm a bit concerned what they mean by "crimes" since they later see fit to reduce it to "suspects caught", oh and by the way those 4 "suspected murderers" - suspected? I thought these crimes were solved?
What do they mean "five wanted gunmen"? So... Are we saying the CCTV merely helped them locate people they were already looking for? That has value and everything but the further we get through the article the further we get away from the initial impression where CCTV stills are being paraded in court as Exhibit A.
The entire article is meaningless gibberish. The most I can take from it is that this is the best the Met can do to talk up the effectiveness of the cameras. On the plus side, they are clearly really really bad at fudging the data to look good.
TFA is reporting a 100% success rate, but don't assume every 6950 is going to mod as well as this batch. It may be that the foundry have utterly nailed this chip and every single one is going to roll out at 6970 spec. But, it's probably just scale economies on the initial supply, scale economies do change over time. It might also be that *spins wheel* they deliberately did this because the 6970 is the only fully tested board yet. Or *spins wheel* they wanted these rumours to help sell their cards.
Or *spins wheel* their BIOS is coping brilliantly with potential problems, so even failures are being perceived as successes. For example, AMD's new approach is to underclock cards when they get near the TDP limit. Perhaps a "genuine" 6970 is only ever downclocking itself on Furmark, while the modded 6950's are doing so much more easily - quite plausable given you still only have the 6950 power connectors.
Anyone planning on buying one of these cards just found another reason to grab one sooner rather than later, but personally I'm going to be waiting a while anyway before considering modding mine.
The scheme was never really forcing an opt-out. Despite Vaisey's rhetoric it was only ever going to be basically an attempt to formulate an industry standard feature (and a shared expense) and ISPs would then choose which way to set the default (opt-in or opt-out).
Given that some people evidently do want to block porn, for reasons that are frankly none of my business, I don't see what the problem is with the concept. I don't see why others can't have the choice just because it doesn't appeal to me. Bear in mind opting would be just another check-box in your account settings web page of your ISP - who already knows what sites you're looking at young man!
Obviously there's the major issue of how to update the filters, and how to control who does that. I'm not pretending to have a solution for that. But as far as the fundamental point goes, I have a hard time arguing against personal choice.
The CGI puppy in the mentioned Andrex advert looks awful. Good effects shouldn't lift your suspension of disbelief if you're at least trying to go with it. A problem I have with CGI is it often tries to be completely realistic and so in doing so fails utterly. Toy Story animation is awesome partly because you can slip into the animated world, everything is consistent. But move the setting into the real world and anything wrong stands out and is jarring. That CGI puppy looks awful in a way that a very basic cartoon puppy wouldn't.
Given it follows Nolan's brilliant "how did we get here" Cafe scene in inception where he plays the audience's familiarity with movie editing, and Ariadne's lines, I'm tempted to assume (though not convinced) that he had similar intentions with the folding city a little later. The effects are very well done yet the imperfection is jarring and starts pulling you out of the movie in much the same way as the dreamer starts rejecting the reality.
So CGI has become cheap. Unfortunately I think this has left us with cheap CGI. The computing may be impressive but they're missing the talented professionals who know how to make it work. The old films with once-groundbreaking effects still look better than many today, despite all the developments, because it still takes talent to use it.
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In our world there are innovators and there are also people that will vow to re-use existing theoretically suboptimal but working, viable solutions with all their known pros and cons until it is absolutely necessary to take the leap of faith and adopt something else. Unfortunately, the second type is the majority, even if it is completely obvious that the dependency of the West on the Middle East is one of its largest weaknesses. I wonder how many slaps does it take for some people to reach the point where the leap of faith is considered the more viable proposition than staying the course.
FTFY?
While I agree with your overall direction, there seemed to be an implicit assumption that we're stuck to oil due to Luddites. There are absolutely valid reasons why we're stuck to oil and we're not going to get beyond it until they can be resolved, likely through a combination of oil becoming less and alternatives becoming more viable.
All of the possibilities for moving away from oil carry their own risks, and while I think we both believe we need to move much more quickly, everybody has their own assessment of the risks, everybody has their own ideas on the part they want to play and it's easy for us to make demands when (naturally) we see so many opportunities from someone else sinking a few billion into R&D.
Car analogy: when we don't have a map, none of the exits are signposted and even the destination is just a vague idea then it's a little boorish to be insulting the driver for our not having arrived yet.
Everybody I know who wants Apple products wants it because it's thin and pretty.
Everybody I know who has Apple products say they want things like longer lasting batteries, but they're already locked into the UI and cult of Jobs or whatever you want to call it so they're not going anywhere and ohh look! The new one's so pretty!
That's a lot less of a dig than it probably appears. Apple does what it does very well.
The balance sheet value is meaningless for valuation. It doesn't even tell you what I'm guessing you think it means, since the balance sheet uses going concern values, not what you'd get for putting the assets on ebay.
Market cap is by far the best valuation. Maybe you think it's overpriced, maybe you think it's underpriced, but the market as a whole thinks this is the right price - by definition in $$$ terms something is worth what it's purchaser will pay for it and that's the market price. It's not relevant that the current market price isn't what you'd get if you wanted to sell a huge stake tomorrow, partly because you don't have a huge stake, partly because if you did you would do a planned sell-off and partly because the same argument goes both ways: if you wanted to buy a huge stake you'd have to pay a lot more than the current price.
The second-best valuation, arguably the best one if you're looking to take a huge/controlling stake, can be achieved by discounting expected future cash flows. While this requires guesstimates of what you think it'll be making in the future and guesstimates of your required return (which also involves guesstimating risk) and is therefore "bullshit", it does at least recognise the purpose in making the investment, something the balance sheet makes absolutely no attempt nor has any pretensions of doing.
Incidentally, goodwill is the difference between the book value of a company purchased and the price GOOG paid. The "intangibles" were the reason GOOG bought the company. A collection of assets and liabilities has zero interest since you could simply setup the same thing yourself. The only reason you buy an existing business is because of things like branding, supplier goodwill, employees... All the stuff that represents the "value" of the business in non-monetary terms, everything else is just a collection of stuff.
Last I heard Apple was making software, engineering how to combine other people's hardware and designing the aesthetics. And most significantly perhaps, marketing it. I'd go so far as to suggest all those other things are part and parcel of the marketing. I thought pretty much all the hardware components were sourced from and put together into final product by the likes of Foxconn, Asustek, Quanta and I guess many others. Even the OS is based on Unix.
Acquiring a major semiconductor company would be unlike Apple, who use Intel chips in their Macs and in the mobile devices the "Apple Ax" chip, which is really an ARM Cortex design tweaked by "Apple" (more literally, probably by Samsung under Apple's direction) and manufactured by Samsung.
Apple stick to their core business pretty well. This relates to the first parent's comment aswell:
Apple enter into contracts with suppliers for pretty much any non-core activity. Good "partnership" arrangements give them most of the benefits of controlling the supply chain, while at the same time they retain Foxconn et al's specialist skills and economies of scale. I don't mean to be extolling the virtues of Apple, they're just a widely-known example of the strategy.
Ask what benefit there is to be found from buying a supplier then ask if it's possible to obtain much the same from just partnering with them. Say a chip costs AMD $10 to make plus $15 share of the R&D and they sell for $30. There's a $5 margin there if you buy them right? Well maybe, but if you're Dell or Apple you can partner up and say you'll buy a million chips a year for 5 years if they'll sell at $13.
But wait! It costs $25 per chip so that's an $12 loss? Wrong. The $15/chip R&D cost is fixed and it might average out to $10/chip with the new custom. Still a loss? Yeah but the other customers already covered it through their $30 price so incrementally it's a $3 profit. It's actually probably even better than that since other scale economies come into play, plus there's that guaranteed 5 year contract so you can make better, less risky plans.
Even if you couldn't get the cheaper price and the alternative was to buy at $30, there's a nice margin to take hold of by buying them right? Suuuuure... But you just threw down the money to buy the company. Share capital isn't really that far off being a loan when you're a big company, shareholders want their return just like a lender wants their interest. If you're a $10b company and investors expect 10%pa well you'd better make them $1b each year, either in dividends or capital growth (which is really expectation of future dividends). If you raise $5b to buy another company and (assuming risk etc stays the same) only make $1.5b then the whole thing was pointless because it's still 10%.
If you want to buy a company you need to be better than them at what they do, be able to get rid of a load of duplicated costs (i.e. staff), be preying on an undervalued company or simply not be able to achieve a good partnership with them. Otherwise you should be able to get pretty much all the benefits with significantly less risk by partnering up.
Although... There is one other thing. Dell buying AMD results in Dell's competitors being at the mercy of Intel, which would be even closer to monopoly. The counter point however is Dell is also at the mercy of what they can do with AMD. I don't think Dell wants to compete with Intel. Not in the CPU market and not even indirectly with Intel supporting Dell competitors.
Sunk costs should never influence your current investment decision.
FTFY. Sunk costs are still relevant when retrospectively evaluating performance, which I think is what MrQuacker is getting at.
Not that the criticism is necessarily aimed at the BBC. A major source of waste and inefficiency where government is involved (and to a lesser degree at any large organisation), is the uncertainty introduced by politicians continually changing the landscape. The websites may have offered good value for money at the time of purchase and everything may have gone to plan at the BBC end, but they are now infeasible simply due to a change in government.
The root of the issue manifests itself in everything. Government-influenced organisations rarely buy equipment but instead take leasing options, even if they are much more expensive, because they can't amortise the cost of a purchase over several year's budgets. Staff at organisations that have funding guaranteed only for short periods need to be paid more to compensate for the short-term contract (and they spend a lot of their time completing funding applications for next year). Want to guess why the Scottish Parliament building went 10x over budget? Politicians continually quibbled and changed the spec of their offices even while all the builders were on site. It got so bad that I even had a contractor bemoaning his disgust at getting paid full rate to be sitting drinking tea with the boys day-in, day-out, despite the personal windfall, particularly since they couldn't be released to go do something useful because they were contractually obliged to be on site.
For the avoidance of doubt, I'm not advocating small government, but rather that if politicians really wish to "cut waste" the first thing they need to do is stop themselves from continually meddling in everything and the second thing is to set reasonably long term funding that people can actually plan with.
I won't be sad the day the movie industry goes out of business. I've found other ways to find entertainment which does not involve them. Everything does not have to last forever.
The movie industry isn't going out of business. Even if we're to accept that MPAA members are all in deep trouble then what we'd be looking at is a change in the movie industry. Maybe the industry would be unrecognisable compared to it's current form, but for better or worse capitalism marches on.
The malware defeats your bank's measures by performing a man-in-the-middle attack. When you point your browser at your bank's website the malware steps in and it accesses your bank and sends you a copy of the page. You enter the details of your supplier but the malware substitutes their own account details. You then dutifully go through the security routine, unwittingly authorising the wrong account. iTAN is completely defeated by both phishing and man-in-the-middle, all it is any good for is against key loggers.
My bank uses a card+reader system. Every time you set up a new supplier you have to enter into the website their account number and account holder's name, which the bank checks in real time. You then put your card in your reader (which looks like a little calculator) and enter a code of which half comes from the bank website and half are digits of the payee's account number. Your reader then responds that the bank website is genuine, then generates a code which you enter into the bank website, so the bank knows you are genuine.
Let's be clear, I'm only ever giving them a code that should only work with the payee account details I already knew. How can even man-in-the-middle beat that? Yet apparently it can. The best I can think of is that at the first stage with the reader, the fake website prompts the user with the full code to enter into the reader and deletes the text reminding you that some of it should match your intended account number. Or maybe it's cracked the reader codes, I don't know.
I'm starting to think I should try modifying an Ubuntu live DVD so it's preconfigured to ignore HDD and block out everything but my bank. I'd still have to save files to USB though.
Anyone have experience with Rapport? Is it some lightweight thing you just run when you want to access internet banking or is it some nuisance running all the time?
The technologies available for backbones already are fast enough for the next decade or so. The main problem is the 'last mile'.
I have 20mbit ("up to 24mbit") ADSL in the UK. However the only times I have noticed the bandwidth being fully utilised is when downloading from a specific Ubuntu mirror, iPlayer and occasionally when downloading from MS. Otherwise frankly I consider 8mbit a good source. This is irrespective of time of day.
Hardly an empirical study, but the only conclusion I can draw is that in practice the home-to-cabinet is far from being the bottleneck for me, and for people with even bog-standard connections even a small improvement will quickly be met with bottlenecks elsewhere.
Also, bear in mind the government is throwing £830m at upgrading "the last mile" by 2015, including quite a lot of FTTH.
Regardless, on the backbone scale economics are important. Even if you were right that existing technology may be able to provide the capacity for the next decade, the cost is at least as important.
Not forgetting that it takes a long time to go from starting the research to installing the finished product. Research is done today for tomorrow.
WTF is this gibberish? My best guess is 80% of profits come from all subscribers (an irrelevant "fact") and 75% of dial-up subscribers do not need the dial-up, which is interesting only if there's too many of them to account for the folks who have it as back-up. Mish-mash the two together into the gibberish summary however and you have what looks like 80% of AOL profits come from dial-up subscribers of whom 75% don't need it.
I did consider that it is possible (however implausible) that indeed summary intended to say the latter, in which I call BS. The 10K shows subscriber sales of $244.8m and total net profit of $171.6m (80% of which is $137m). So we'd be saying that, at an absolute minimum, requiring dial-up to have zero cost, over 56% of ALL of AOL's subscriber sales is for dial-up?
If that wasn't implausible enough, summary implies 75% of dial-up customers don't need it because they have cable/dsl, so we're getting an absolute minimum of 56% of $sales from an absolute maximum of 75% of the number of subscriber customers, hence (though I really don't trust my maths here) dial-up must cost >70% more than cable/dsl subscription does? I can't be arsed trying to get around AOL's country redirect to find out what the dial-up subscription costs since it isn't even advertised in the UK and AOL have one of those country redirects.
I'm going to call BS even on the idea that 80% of profit comes from all subscribers, since that'd require an epic 56% net profit ratio, oh and anyway 42% actually came from "discontinued operations" and, since I'm guessing dial-up operations are continuing, that does not leave the necessary 80% for subscriptions.
Am I missing some other, actually plausable interpretation of the summary? Am I totally not getting something, perhaps due to standard practice in US that isn't ver here?
Incidentally there is no useful reportable segment info in the 10K so I've no idea how these figures were calculated, though they do look suspiciously round.
Parent is confused. Accountancy qualifications are tied to the issuing professional bodies, which are mostly geographically restricted in some sense. An American CPA is not even a member the same body as the UK CPA. While their members have the same designated letters, the organisations themselves actually have different names and are not associated. See British Chartered Accountants.
Historically the main reason for the geographical relevance is the recognition of professionals as national law has developed, and continued through to today partly due to differing accounting standards but mostly due to governments wanting to maintain influence over the professional bodies that are allowed to carry out an independent audit. This can get a bit confused though in that all the main qualifications are internationally valued, much like a degree at a good university, and much like at those universities a fair share of the crop have come from all over the world to study there.
In terms of the quality of a UK CPA, well I'm not familiar with many CPAs but I'd hesitate to rely on anecdotal experience such as yours anyway. The CPA is a speciality for government organisations, can I assume that is where your CPA friends will have been working? If so they will have negligible experience of large parts of the CA syllabus: no tax, probably little of the audit and slightly different financial reports. The workload in studying for the CA is epic and complex, it does make a big difference if you're reinforcing class stuff with experience at work. Plus I find it easy to imagine the scenario and form an approach to an exam question because from working in a practice I have grown accustomed to the constant barrage of new clients with new issues day in, day out.
Back on topic, the CPA in summary isn't the same as Steve Jobs because the CPA blatantly runs a personal service company, funnelling "salary" as dividends to minimise tax. Steve Jobs doesn't have the same control at Apple (well, not for what matters here) and it's mainly for performance incentive reasons that his remuneration comes through granting of shares and options. I'm not a tax specialist and it may be a bit above my grade even in the UK anyway, but my understanding is after some allowances most of it is taxed as if it were salary (and indeed the Steve Jobs link in TFA does include the text "After a portion of these shares was withheld for the payment of taxes [...]").
While we're at it, "summary" also refers to a different tax-avoidance/evasion issue in the latter parts of the text, transfer pricing. This isn't really relevant to the personal taxes of the persons mentioned in summary, it's more a multinational corporation avoidance technique.
ISPs seem to be confused about who is en route to achieving monopoly powers.
In the UK, consumers have a real choice of ISPs and negligible brand loyalty to any of them. iPlayer, Facebook, Google and YouTube on the other hand border on being a staple part of lifestyle. Most people I know also use iPlayer and I'm quite certain they'd all change ISP if theirs stopped delivering it. On that subject, TFA is on shaky ground about contract lock-in because ceasing to provide a significant service is a failure to deliver/material variation which renders the contract unenforceable, and, in my (limited) understanding of contract law, it is nigh on impossible to have valid terms in standard-form contracts to waive such rights.
OK, ISPs could speed up certain companies and not others, and this could get to a point where they're not literally barring access but it's impractical for bandwidth heavy content to compete without doing so. But you're still going to have consumers who are more concerned about content and you're still going to have the 3rd party options like Akamai. The risk for consumers, as the article correctly points out, is the barriers that are created preventing new startups gaining traction.
If it wasn't enough that people are already more bothered about the content than their ISP, all of those companies have various content-sharing and other agreements already, they are clearly not averse to forming agreements on other issues. The balance of power is forming overwhelmingly in the hands of the big content providers.
ISPs should think twice. Some content providers are already showing signs of some monopoly power and by creating further barriers to competition the ISP is throwing itself towards an inevitable conclusion: the content providers charging the ISP.
Man, the whining about games being different is just laughable and highlights the ignorance, arrogance and the plain lack of basic consumer-focused business sense that is endemic in most industries that involve copyright.
Although... There is one true difference between a used car/home sale and a used game sale: the margins on the second sale.
Say a Taurus priced new $25,000, of which dealer makes $2,500, and buyer can trade-in after 3 years for $9,000 (to be sold at $10,000, again a 10% margin).
Ford gets $22,500;
Dealer gets $3,500;
Buyer 1 pays net $16,000;
Buyer 2 pays net $10,000.
Clearly the price of a Taurus can be MUCH higher because all the resale market does is provide a mechanism that is IDENTICAL to a $26,000 price split between two people with dealer extracting only 13.5% out of the transaction.
Now say Halo 8 priced new $60, of which store makes $15, buyer can trade-in for $15 which store resells for $45.
Bungie gets $45
Store gets $45
Buyer 1 pays net $45
Buyer 2 pays net $45
The situation looks a little different no? There is $90 revenue being split and the store is taking 50%. It's even more if Buyer 2 also trades in.
The same solution is returned if we approach the problem from a different angle. If there is no resale market, the buyers need another method to maintain their net cost.
Taurus Buyer 1 needs to maintain the approx $5,333pa cost so keeps his car almost 5 years. Assuming Buyer 2 was scrapping his s/h car after 3 years, he needs to maintain $3,333pa so buys new and keeps for 7.5 years. Therefore Ford sells 5 cars for net $22.5k each every 15 years, almost exactly the same as with the retail market!
But with no game resale market, assuming Buyer 1 and Buyer 2 have a more or less fixed budget of $45 per month, Bungie sells 18 games per year for net $45. With the resale market they sell 12.
OK, so I have a major assumption in both examples that all buyers have a fixed budget available and it is always spent. True, gamers may save money on games and spend that on a DVD. But they're also saving money on DVD's and buying games and frankly there is no argument that consumers shouldn't be saving money.
Consumers are not the problem. Resale is not the problem. Store margins on resale is the problem (for publishers).
Even if Sony has the better of possible intentions with this, they'll immediately be faced with publishers seeking to take control of the online authentication in order to lock specific games to specific consoles and hence kill the resale market. This is also likely to be more of a problem for even those who always buy new and never sell, since any activation limit is more likely to cause problems when they take their game round to play at their friend's house.
Publishers seem even more pissed at the resale market than piracy. There is some logic to it, since on the resale market gamers are actually handing over money and a sale being made, it's just that they're cut out the loop. Obviously reality is a bit more complicated than that, I'm not saying I agree with the point, but a second-hand sale does look a lot more like a lost sale to the publisher than with piracy where the vast majority of the time the pirate never had any intentions of paying anyone.
I don't have the breakdown but (and I may be giving too much benefit of the doubt) the £400k should cover far more than pressing delete on a database. There's destroying the storage medium, security to make sure nobody's walking out with data... Not forgetting the costs of actually dismantling equipment, and I wouldn't be surprised if there are significant figures for an early property lease termination penalty, dilapidations and staff redundancies.
To digress a little, no it is not uncommon for staff employed at one governmental organisation to be paid a tax-free redundancy even when immediately re-employed at another.
Anyway, the main reason £400k is considered surprisingly small is because what frequently happens when a UK governmental project is scrapped is that there is a contractor somewhere due to be paid a fortune in "lost profits". While such arrangements are common in business, the level of compensation usually seems grossly inflated for government contracts, even allowing for the large scale. It's generally thought this is due to a combination of politicians/civil servants behave rather less cautiously when committing public money; supplier companies being all-too aware of the probability of cancellations of government projects and/or what everybody really thinks: because it becomes that much less likely the politician's pet project will be scrapped no matter how hated. That's not to forget fraud and under-the-table deals, but habit in the UK is not to attribute politicians with true malice what can be explained by arrogance and incompetence.
How could breach of contract EVER be a crime?? It is a breach of contract, not a violation of a law, when you breach a contract you get the consequences listed in the contract, or if you refuse them a civil law suit, but not a fine and not a prison sentence.
My reading of TFA is that breach of the AUP itself was not what made this illegal. The AUP was merely the mechanism that had communicated to (or perhaps reminded) Ms Giles that her use was unauthorised.
Similarly, say a self-employed personal is contracted in to provide some sort of safety role, in the knowledge that the other party would be wholly reliant on their performance for safety, then recklessly fails to fulfil that role. The contractor may then be up for involuntary manslaughter not because of breach of contract but incidentally for the same reasons that he might also be sued for breach of contract.
Obviously there are still some issues here, like it appears rather easy to find yourself breaching your "authorised use" compared to the tests required to establish a criminal negligence in a manslaughter. Perhaps relevant though that this was a restricted database and Giles' employment position indicates she should have full appreciation of the restrictions and implications. That is very different to some garbage click-though AUP on home software.
Fun (but somewhat disturbing) fact--
Some species of dolphin have prehensile penises, and have been shown to pick up and manipulate objects using their genital slits.
(Star shoots over head while jingle plays)
"The more you know!"
And the japanese haven't made porn about it yet?
You're aware of rule 34C, right?
So... A major dataset is what people doing those jobs told them? Most people have performed few different roles and for few employers. Most people have no idea, except that the grass is always greener elsewhere.
True this is my impression based on anecdotal evidence, but since I work as an accountant and most of my time is out at a client, I get to observe and interact with lots of different people at work and see their payroll. And for some reason people have a habit of confiding in me, I think they're looking for some independent assurance on just how overworked and underpaid they are.
Or aren't. I can recount stories, but it just ends in a muddle because none of them really have any clue whether they're being overworked or underpaid. There is some kind of masochistic humour to be had though when (and this happens so often it's a standing office joke) you have to sympathise with someone saying they wished they make close to what you do, only to later do the payroll section and find they make 25-50% more.
Apparently in the US the fatality rate is 1 per 125m "vehicle miles of travel". I couldn't find a reliable average number of fatalities per fatal accident, so I couldn't work out a "miles per fatal accident", though obviously would be higher.
Unfortunately I couldn't easily find any reliable accident statistics, a 6m figure (1 per 0.5m miles) is bandied about a bit but seems to stem from some ambulance-chasing lawyer outfit.
Personally I find that an astonishingly impressive safety record. Ample room for improvement for sure, but does give me doubts that computers are anywhere near as capable.
That said, using statistics for context does throw up some oddities. Like, why we shouldn't be at all concerned about terrorism, and wondering why smoking is still legal and even socially acceptable (yes I am a smoker, and do think the habit is utterly idiotic).
Well the layout is immediately more interesting, but more to the point, hover over the icons and you'll be reminded of varied, interesting places in FO3 or mostly samey, bland places in NV.
Having combed the southern 2/3rd's of the map below the Strip area, so far everything in NV seems samey and frankly bland. The only points of any interest have been, well maybe Goldsprings, REPCONN Test Site and Helios One.
With FO3 there was a constant feel of adventure. Starting off in Vault 101, out into Springvale (a dull town but a "whoa" moment), on to Megaton... I even remember the SuperDuperMart. TenPenny Tower? And it keeps it up from there. Travelling above ground or Metro?
With FO3 it's easy to imagine they had dozens of little teams to design each point and all wanted to leave their mark on the game. NV feels more like one uninspired team endlessly churning out areas of mediocrity. Half the points are shacks, or might as well be.
Investigating the maps a little makes it extremely clear in my mind which was the more enjoyable game:
FO3, NV.
Then there's the characters, the humour, the music...
Well, it would seem to be much better.
From the article, there's just under 60,000 cameras now. Six crimes solved per day times 365 days = about 2,200 crimes solved. So that's about one crime solved per 30 cameras per year.
Going from 1/1000 to 1/30 is a massive improvement, though I'm guessing that the difference isn't just the police program reaching maturity or something like that. For starters, I'll bet they count crimes differently between the two programs.
Still, even the modern figure seems pretty bad. So you've got 30 cameras up all year, with all the needed infrastructure behind these 30 cameras, and all together, they solved one crime. A quarter million hours of surveillance (30 cameras * 24 hours * 365 days) and you only solve one crime.
Apples and oranges I'm afraid. TFA refers to 2,512 crimes solved with the help of CCTV in London, while the just under 60,000 cameras refers to the whole of Britain. This figure also, I assume, refers to ones with a police or other government agency employee at the other end, but from the text the chap from the Met appears to be referring to all forms of CCTV.
Even if the figures were all apples-to-apples they wouldn't be worth analysing anyway. What does "help solve" mean? Actually, I'm a bit concerned what they mean by "crimes" since they later see fit to reduce it to "suspects caught", oh and by the way those 4 "suspected murderers" - suspected? I thought these crimes were solved?
What do they mean "five wanted gunmen"? So... Are we saying the CCTV merely helped them locate people they were already looking for? That has value and everything but the further we get through the article the further we get away from the initial impression where CCTV stills are being paraded in court as Exhibit A.
The entire article is meaningless gibberish. The most I can take from it is that this is the best the Met can do to talk up the effectiveness of the cameras. On the plus side, they are clearly really really bad at fudging the data to look good.
TFA is reporting a 100% success rate, but don't assume every 6950 is going to mod as well as this batch. It may be that the foundry have utterly nailed this chip and every single one is going to roll out at 6970 spec. But, it's probably just scale economies on the initial supply, scale economies do change over time. It might also be that *spins wheel* they deliberately did this because the 6970 is the only fully tested board yet. Or *spins wheel* they wanted these rumours to help sell their cards.
Or *spins wheel* their BIOS is coping brilliantly with potential problems, so even failures are being perceived as successes. For example, AMD's new approach is to underclock cards when they get near the TDP limit. Perhaps a "genuine" 6970 is only ever downclocking itself on Furmark, while the modded 6950's are doing so much more easily - quite plausable given you still only have the 6950 power connectors.
Anyone planning on buying one of these cards just found another reason to grab one sooner rather than later, but personally I'm going to be waiting a while anyway before considering modding mine.
The scheme was never really forcing an opt-out. Despite Vaisey's rhetoric it was only ever going to be basically an attempt to formulate an industry standard feature (and a shared expense) and ISPs would then choose which way to set the default (opt-in or opt-out).
Given that some people evidently do want to block porn, for reasons that are frankly none of my business, I don't see what the problem is with the concept. I don't see why others can't have the choice just because it doesn't appeal to me. Bear in mind opting would be just another check-box in your account settings web page of your ISP - who already knows what sites you're looking at young man!
Obviously there's the major issue of how to update the filters, and how to control who does that. I'm not pretending to have a solution for that. But as far as the fundamental point goes, I have a hard time arguing against personal choice.
The CGI puppy in the mentioned Andrex advert looks awful. Good effects shouldn't lift your suspension of disbelief if you're at least trying to go with it. A problem I have with CGI is it often tries to be completely realistic and so in doing so fails utterly. Toy Story animation is awesome partly because you can slip into the animated world, everything is consistent. But move the setting into the real world and anything wrong stands out and is jarring. That CGI puppy looks awful in a way that a very basic cartoon puppy wouldn't.
Given it follows Nolan's brilliant "how did we get here" Cafe scene in inception where he plays the audience's familiarity with movie editing, and Ariadne's lines, I'm tempted to assume (though not convinced) that he had similar intentions with the folding city a little later. The effects are very well done yet the imperfection is jarring and starts pulling you out of the movie in much the same way as the dreamer starts rejecting the reality.
So CGI has become cheap. Unfortunately I think this has left us with cheap CGI. The computing may be impressive but they're missing the talented professionals who know how to make it work. The old films with once-groundbreaking effects still look better than many today, despite all the developments, because it still takes talent to use it.