Someone builds a web-based tool that millions use, and consumes X amount of energy.
Meanwhile, thanks to this tool, those millions no longer drive around window shopping, or purchasing the wrong product/service, or the not purchasing the product/service they need, etc etc, saving 50X the amount of energy.
And it all gets criticized by a business that puts tons of ink on many thousands of dead trees, sends the result around on trucks and airplanes, and which everyone throws away the next day.
It's mind-blowing to those of us who have been around for a while, but Apple now makes more revenue from iPhones than all of Microsoft put together. Probably more profit as well.
When site review makes comments such as "The back is actually squishy, and you can feel it deform while holding it." I start taking everything else with a grain of salt. To tell if this is true just drive to a store that has them on display and see for yourself.
Or you could just go to the link in the parent post, read the review online, and watch the short videos they made of the back of the tablet deforming and making noises. Unless you suspect an Android fan site of making fake videos in order to criticize an Android tablet.
There are two kinds of people who have read Ayn Rand. Those who misguidedly think that they're entirely self-sufficient, and those who understand that human individuality can only exist and prosper in a healthy society.
“Liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of order” —Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
The average consumer electronics company (including Google in this instance) still does not understand this. Their institutional tendency is to create lots of "good enough" products, cutting every corner they can, then throw it all against the wall and see what sticks. Sure, that's the traditional way, and it can be profitable, but it rarely creates iconic, world-changing products on the level of iPhones and iPads.
I never said or meant it was "a knee-jerk reaction to one Apple product." Clearly Microsoft has also been paying close attention to OS X, the iPod, the iTunes Store, as well as iPhone/iPad/iOS, and they have had their own innovatives. But perhaps I should have said Microsoft hasn't had a workable or successful strategic vision for a while now. Sure, they have new ideas, they just don't seem to work out. Microsoft makes money, but from long-existing products. Even their relatively recent success of the Xbox may not have yet turned a profit, given the billions they sank into getting it going.
(I don't consider the fact that their old pen and tablet products have been subsumed into the current version of Windows means they were successful or even very noteworthy. In history they are footnotes, not milestones and game-changers.
I'm not sure how going from "make phone look like tiny desktop" to "make desktop look like big phone" counts as a "consistent long term strategy," though. Is this "coming full circle" or "going in circles"?
Isn't it amazing how Microsoft seems to have been put on the defensive? What a change from not that long ago, They no longer seem to have much strategic vision, and just respond (usually poorly) to Apple's moves. How freaked out they must be now that the iPhone alone makes Apple more revenue and profit than all of Microsoft.
And besides Play Store does have accountability: every developer has to register, and pay a small one-off registration fee as form of identification.
But as the article points out, Apple requires verification of a developer's identity, and Google does not, so a malware author who gets banned from Play can just sign up under a new identity.
Plus:
Beyond that, Guido said that Apple's iOS ecosystem has put controls in place that squeeze malware authors in other ways. An automated and manual application vetting system includes static analysis of compiled binaries that make it very difficult for developers to merely repackage malicious or legitimate applications for sale on the AppStore. That prevents infections of Trojaned applications like the DroidDream malware, which frequently popped up on Google's Android Market.
You have not been keeping up with demographics. Europe is already headed for a population crash. This is also true in Japan and even Iran, where the birthrate has dropped below the replacement level. In the US, we are at about the replacement level, and much of our growth comes from immigration.
What this means is that the crash many of these societies are headed for is not one of overpopulation, but bankruptcy due to too many people getting pensions. Social Security and other such government schemes are premised on a large number of workers contributing some fraction of their pay to support a smaller number of retirees. However, with a lower birthrate, eventually the proportion of retirees grows. When it gets to the point when there are only two or three workers supporting each retiree, it's the high tax rate that threatens to destroy the society.
I agree that the bloggers had no legal case, but if Arianna had an ounce of class, she'd have cut every blogger a nice check, if not thrown them a giant party as well. She'd still have vastly increased her already immense wealth, and would have been hailed as a hero instead of reviled as a multimillionaire tightwad and hypocrite.
So you're right, it was bureaucrats that likely invented writing.
And yet it was Phoenician traders and merchants who spread a simple phonemic alphabet around the Mediterranean. Such an alphabet was easy to learn and could be used to transcribe many (all?) spoken languages. So thank business for that advance.
How would regulating this be any different than banning steroids in professional sports?
Because regulating drugs is rather different than regulating the display of photographs of clothed people based on their body type? Can you imagine having to submit every fashion photo to some government committee, which would then argue over whether each model was appropriately non-skinny? I'd call it Orwellian but it's too silly for that.
But if this idiotic proposal becomes law, I suggest men rally and demand the end to all the unrealistically handsome and ripped men on the covers of every romance novel. It's horribly harmful to the self-esteem of all men who don't look like Fabio.
Because in the United States if an infant is born weighing only 400 grams and not breathing, a doctor will likely spend lot of time and money trying to revive that infant. If the infant does not survive — and the mortality rate for such infants is in excess of 50 percent — that sequence of events will be recorded as a live birth and then a death. In many countries, however, (including many European countries) such severe medical intervention would not be attempted and, moreover, regardless of whether or not it was, this would be recorded as a fetal death rather than a live birth. That unfortunate infant would never show up in infant mortality statistics.
As for Cuba specifically, why should we believe their health statistics any more than their election results?
We all should have standing to take action when the commons could be violated, and the way we do that is through government regulation.
I'm not a libertarian purist, so I'll agree that a theoretical pure libertarian state would have a problem handling this sort of case. But let's look at the real world, where we are spending billions of dollars employing ten of thousands of people in the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Agriculture, the Office of the Surgeon General, and who knows how many other bureaucracies at the federal and state level, all supposedly devoted to protecting us from health threats of this very sort. And yet, here we are.
What does that tell you about the ways in which government regulation, which often sounds great in theory, actually works in the real world?
They're thinking emotionally. The anti-global warming crowd did a very good in turning this into a personal emotional issue.
As opposed to the always calm, unemotional arguments of environmentalists and global warming activists? Come on, there's plenty of emotion (if not outright hysteria) on both sides.
The Heartland people are making themselves look bad with these silly threats, though, which will lose them the sympathy they should get as victims of a forgery-based smear job.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone builds a web-based tool that millions use, and consumes X amount of energy. Meanwhile, thanks to this tool, those millions no longer drive around window shopping, or purchasing the wrong product/service, or the not purchasing the product/service they need, etc etc, saving 50X the amount of energy.
And it all gets criticized by a business that puts tons of ink on many thousands of dead trees, sends the result around on trucks and airplanes, and which everyone throws away the next day.
It's mind-blowing to those of us who have been around for a while, but Apple now makes more revenue from iPhones than all of Microsoft put together. Probably more profit as well.
Or you could just go to the link in the parent post, read the review online, and watch the short videos they made of the back of the tablet deforming and making noises. Unless you suspect an Android fan site of making fake videos in order to criticize an Android tablet.
There are two kinds of people who have read Ayn Rand. Those who misguidedly think that they're entirely self-sufficient, and those who understand that human individuality can only exist and prosper in a healthy society.
“Liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of order” —Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
But to bring this comment back on topic, I would say Level 7 by Mordecai Roshwald.
Exactly. One good term for this is "attention to detail," and it's not merely a brand strategy, it's at the core of Apple's philosophy and success. It can go to seemingly absurd lengths, like Steve Jobs making Sunday phone calls because the second "o" in the Google icon on the iPhone had an incorrect yellow gradient, but the net result is a hugely successful company.
The average consumer electronics company (including Google in this instance) still does not understand this. Their institutional tendency is to create lots of "good enough" products, cutting every corner they can, then throw it all against the wall and see what sticks. Sure, that's the traditional way, and it can be profitable, but it rarely creates iconic, world-changing products on the level of iPhones and iPads.
I never said or meant it was "a knee-jerk reaction to one Apple product." Clearly Microsoft has also been paying close attention to OS X, the iPod, the iTunes Store, as well as iPhone/iPad/iOS, and they have had their own innovatives. But perhaps I should have said Microsoft hasn't had a workable or successful strategic vision for a while now. Sure, they have new ideas, they just don't seem to work out. Microsoft makes money, but from long-existing products. Even their relatively recent success of the Xbox may not have yet turned a profit, given the billions they sank into getting it going.
(I don't consider the fact that their old pen and tablet products have been subsumed into the current version of Windows means they were successful or even very noteworthy. In history they are footnotes, not milestones and game-changers.
I'm not sure how going from "make phone look like tiny desktop" to "make desktop look like big phone" counts as a "consistent long term strategy," though. Is this "coming full circle" or "going in circles"?
Isn't it amazing how Microsoft seems to have been put on the defensive? What a change from not that long ago, They no longer seem to have much strategic vision, and just respond (usually poorly) to Apple's moves. How freaked out they must be now that the iPhone alone makes Apple more revenue and profit than all of Microsoft.
In all of 2011, when the Apple TV did not see an update, the company sold a total of 2.8 million devices in the 12-month span. But the company is easily on pace to beat that, with 2.7 million sold through the first five months of 2012.
...is that it will attract the Eddorians.
Not only that, some VCR remotes had a button specifically designed to make it easy to skip commercials: each press skipped by forward 30 seconds.
The original driving distraction controversy was the car radio. There were a number of attempts to ban them. More.
And besides Play Store does have accountability: every developer has to register, and pay a small one-off registration fee as form of identification.
But as the article points out, Apple requires verification of a developer's identity, and Google does not, so a malware author who gets banned from Play can just sign up under a new identity.
Plus:
Beyond that, Guido said that Apple's iOS ecosystem has put controls in place that squeeze malware authors in other ways. An automated and manual application vetting system includes static analysis of compiled binaries that make it very difficult for developers to merely repackage malicious or legitimate applications for sale on the AppStore. That prevents infections of Trojaned applications like the DroidDream malware, which frequently popped up on Google's Android Market.
You have not been keeping up with demographics. Europe is already headed for a population crash. This is also true in Japan and even Iran, where the birthrate has dropped below the replacement level. In the US, we are at about the replacement level, and much of our growth comes from immigration.
What this means is that the crash many of these societies are headed for is not one of overpopulation, but bankruptcy due to too many people getting pensions. Social Security and other such government schemes are premised on a large number of workers contributing some fraction of their pay to support a smaller number of retirees. However, with a lower birthrate, eventually the proportion of retirees grows. When it gets to the point when there are only two or three workers supporting each retiree, it's the high tax rate that threatens to destroy the society.
I agree that the bloggers had no legal case, but if Arianna had an ounce of class, she'd have cut every blogger a nice check, if not thrown them a giant party as well. She'd still have vastly increased her already immense wealth, and would have been hailed as a hero instead of reviled as a multimillionaire tightwad and hypocrite.
Compare her with Keanu Reeves, who gave $72 million of his Matrix film earnings to the stunt and special effects crews. That's real class.
And yet it was Phoenician traders and merchants who spread a simple phonemic alphabet around the Mediterranean. Such an alphabet was easy to learn and could be used to transcribe many (all?) spoken languages. So thank business for that advance.
Even so, I question the value of the Google Floor Wax/Dessert Topping project.
There was even a "Smart Case" for the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 that was a blatant ripoff of Apple's "Smart Cover." It wasn't made by Samsung directly, but by a firm with close ties to them, and apparently with Samsung approval.
The second link is full of footnotes, many to peer-reviewed journals.
OK, how's this?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1615029/
http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA547ComparativeHealth.html
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db23.pdf
Because regulating drugs is rather different than regulating the display of photographs of clothed people based on their body type? Can you imagine having to submit every fashion photo to some government committee, which would then argue over whether each model was appropriately non-skinny? I'd call it Orwellian but it's too silly for that.
But if this idiotic proposal becomes law, I suggest men rally and demand the end to all the unrealistically handsome and ripped men on the covers of every romance novel. It's horribly harmful to the self-esteem of all men who don't look like Fabio.
As for Cuba specifically, why should we believe their health statistics any more than their election results?
I'm not a libertarian purist, so I'll agree that a theoretical pure libertarian state would have a problem handling this sort of case. But let's look at the real world, where we are spending billions of dollars employing ten of thousands of people in the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Agriculture, the Office of the Surgeon General, and who knows how many other bureaucracies at the federal and state level, all supposedly devoted to protecting us from health threats of this very sort. And yet, here we are.
What does that tell you about the ways in which government regulation, which often sounds great in theory, actually works in the real world?
Interestingly, OS X Mountain Lion will include some built-in sharing features, and while Vimeo is included, YouTube is not. Ever since Android, Google has not been getting much love from Apple....
As opposed to the always calm, unemotional arguments of environmentalists and global warming activists? Come on, there's plenty of emotion (if not outright hysteria) on both sides.
Many of the documents seem to be genuine, but the "smoking gun" document that everyone is quoting looks like a fake. This possibility seems to have been raised first here on Slashdot by eldavojohn, and Megan McArdle of The Atlantic has written extensively about it.
The Heartland people are making themselves look bad with these silly threats, though, which will lose them the sympathy they should get as victims of a forgery-based smear job.