What did you expect for 99 cents or free? Apple set the bar such that most apps should cost $0.99, same as a single itunes song, which is ridiculous. And consumers are used to that price and refuse to pay higher than that. So you're stuck with cheap apps or costlier in-app purchase apps.
You could make the same argument with Chinese restaurants. If too many of them are built, it might force prices down, and they could not earn a living.
Taxis have a lower barrier to entry. It costs more to get real estate for a restaurant, competent cooks, waiters, and regular supply of meal ingredients compared to simply buying a used car to use as a taxi.
Also the taxi driver can live anywhere in the city or even in the cheap outskirts. A restaurant has to be in an expensive, relatively prime real estate where there is enough foot traffic to generate sales. The supply of such real estate is limited. You can't make much money opening a restaurant out in the boonies. You also can't make money opening a restaurant in a place where there are already half-a-dozen restaurants. So the quota rule applies to restaurants as well as taxis -- too many can't exist in the same place at the same time.
Taxis can pick up fares on the street. Private cars have to be arranged beforehand.
Wrong. If you live in a low-traffic residential area, you have to phone someone to book a taxi. This is conceptually similar to uber's booking except they use old-school phones instead of smartphone apps. No taxi is slowly drifting through quiet neighborhoods looking for customers. Taxis only pick up fares on the street in busy areas such as the mall, market, and downtown areas.
This is a BIG distinction between taxis and Uber. BIG BIG.
That's your opinion, but the facts contradict you completely. Booking is the similar with uber being faster except in the case a taxi is a few feet away from you. The service is similar -- you go from point A to B in a city. The service cost is similar. Any distinction is minor.
The problem is that each Taxi driver is "independent" and has no quota of X% prearranged fares they have to pick up each week/month. If they want to sit at the airport and wait for a fare, they can.
If the taxis have no interest in your money when they can get more elsewhere, there is a supply (of taxis) problem. This can be solved by increasing the max taxi quota in the city.
You also haven't answered the question about what you would call a traditional taxi if it added a internet booking feature.
they're considered something along the line of a limousine or other "for hire" ride service where the driver does not get his business from hails on the street but rather from a dispatch
But don't limousine companies have only a few cars to service clients? Uber has enough cars under its control to replace all traditional taxis. They don't seem comparable due to the scale. Uber is probably calling itself a rideshare/limo service to avoid being called a taxi service and be subject to regulations and limited quota.
Also, computer-generated car booking is almost as fast as manually hailing a cab, unlike phone booking which is extremely slow.
Let me pose another question: if traditional taxis added an internet hailing feature, would they no longer be called cabs? I don't think so.
This is all fine but Uber can't simply add new taxis to the taxi pool without permission of the govt. So you should contact your local politicians to extend the taxi quota to uber.
The quotas exist for many reasons -- too many taxis means the typical taxi driver will starve due to over supply. And the flip side is, too few taxis means the customer will get price gouged.
What if the cores don't become much smaller while cores are added to your PC? Your general desktop/workstation can have up to 16 cores each of which are more powerful than the previous generation core. Should we still do single-threaded programming for any time-critical foo() and run roughly 10 times slower?
There's plenty of code than would benefit from the speedup of multi-core programming, not just some niche code.
If you went and read Linus' rant, then you'll find you are actually reinforcing his argument. He says that except for a handful of edge use-cases, there will be no demand for massively parallel in end user usage and that we shouldn't waste time that could be better spent optimizing the low-core processes.
So, if someone wants to optimize a critical app-specific operation "foo()" in their app and make it to go 4 times faster using 4 cores, they are crazy? Your argument implies that other than these so-called "edge cases" there is no need to improve performance of any other type of code.
But if you were using ios6 or 7, would you notice a big difference from the upgrade? I don't have ios8, but I bet these upgrades don't provide more functionality other than consume more flash storage, waste RAM and the worst, slow down CPU performance on older models so that you are forced to buy a newer model. It's the ultimate trojan horse.
You are forced to buy new hardware because if you stick with the older version OS, you can't download apps from the app store (since most apps get updated to use the latest version of the OS) and if you upgrade to the newest OS, everything is slow, sluggish and unpleasant.
Only morons say "crime doesn't pay," because it pays a lot.
Here's an idea: Start your own airline with these features and see how long it lasts.
Why won't it last? If airlines charge more for traveling less distance, then they must be making a profit on both the popular (short-but-expensive) and not-so-popular (long-but-cheap) routes. You don't go out of business if you're making a profit.
You just pointed out the fallacy of your argument. Libraries.
Although amazon subscription and a public library have very similar models (except for the monthly/yearly fee for amazon), the reality of using them is very different.
On Amazon, you can read one of the subscribed books at any time you want with a few clicks or taps. With a public library, you have to reserve the book (there are fewer copies than amazon) many days in advance. When the other patron has returned the book, you have to physically go to the library within set window of time to pick it up. If another patron wants the book before you've finished it within the 2 week window, you have to return it to the library. In short, physical libraries are a real hassle which is why they are not a significant threat to bookstores.
In contrast, the Amazon (virtual library) subscription service provides most the benefits of owning a book without actually paying the full price. So why would any reader not want to use it? The problem is it screws the authors by underpaying them, so in the long term all the good and excellent authors will stay away from it whereas the average and mediocre authors will prefer it.
The problem still persists - good reads should be able to fetch more (and more per page) than bad reads.
Good and bad read is subjective. The amount paid should be based on the full retail price of the book. If Amazon is paying a fixed $X for Y number of pages or Z% of the book, that's obviously a crap model. Paperback novels cost $8-$29 and technical books cost $50-$150. If the reader reads only 50% of each type of book, shouldn't there be a difference on how much the tech book author is paid versus the novelist from "the pot?"
99% of free/cheap mobile games are super simple to play and have no depth compared to their console competitors. As a book world analogy, that would be like comparing short stories to novels.
Amazon is yet again screwing authors, just like paper book publishers in the past, by offering them something like $1.33 per book read. If this model continues, your books will be crappy and culture-less or the authors will have to starve (again).
These authors are better of selling/hosting the books themselves. But marketing will be a lot tougher with that route.
It may soon be "boo hoo" for the readers as well. If Amazon won't pay enough, expect new books to be cheaper, matching how much readers pay per book. Nobody is going to spend years writing books if it only brings then $3.99 per reader or less.
So change that. We can work to subvert tracking online and campaign against tracking (and for regulation) at the same time.
If the solution meant changing the Internet Protocol, can that be accomplished without a huge cost?
Unless we don't really want privacy. But I hope that is not the case.
Yes, the subservient sheeple, the boot-lickers of authority figures, have no problem sharing their data to big authority. The remaining people will not agree this bullshit.
What the anti-immigration people don't understand is that there is a huge variation in ability between competent programmers and exceptional ones, and while you can train people to be competent, you can't train them to be exceptional.
Then why are exceptional and competent programmers paid roughly the same salary?
I see a function called double which implicitly takes a parameter n and returns true if n = 0, and false otherwise. Would it have killed them to separate the parameter from the "body", and used proper names?
You have to get used to that. In functional programming, parentheses are usually used to denote function calls. For eg: x = foo(bar(10), 20);// C (let x (foo (bar 10) 20)// lisp
I reject the entire concept that an idea can be your property.
It sure as hell is the property of the person who created it. What was your involvement/support in creating that idea? Nothing. Who made you and your kind god to decide what the price of such thing should be? By rejecting the notion of idea as property, you can steal it for free.
Property can really only be physical.
Property is composed of ideas + raw material. Most raw materials are cheap and plentiful on the planet, good ideas are not. The value of the product comes from the ideas that conceive it and the skill and labor that mold and combine the raw material into a product. Therefore you are paying for ideas and product manufacturing skill when you buy a product.
But everyone gets a chance at it, and the inventor is already compensated.
And why should they get a chance? What exactly have they done to deserve this chance? Absolutely nothing, they are just a bunch of evil freeloaders! Well, the inventor has probably been compensated enough according to you, but not according to the inventor.
I want the inventor(s) paid well, and I want it to be related to the actual value of the invention.
To your perceived actual value of the invention? Why should anyone care? The price is set by whatever the inventor can get from the market, not that set by a committee of socialist morons.
What I want to eliminate is the monopoly, because that's an albatross around everyone else's neck, a huge, hemorrhoidal, bleeding, infected open sore on the ass of progress.
Maybe you should learn the ABCs of something before writing on the subject. Every company makes profits due to barriers to entry to competitors. Some examples of barriers are, access to huge capital, favorable real estate, good product design, smart employees, etc. And patents are another type of barrier to entry for competitors and they are completely legal. The intention of patents is that the person who invented the product or sold the invention to makes the profits and not someone who had nothing to do with it.
Are you willing to share 10% of your salary with homeless people? If no, then why should any inventor share his invention with any other people?
If we're going to have patents, why not make them last forever and cover everything?
Yes, there's not much logical reason to time limit the validity of patents, except perhaps the sky high pricing of patented goods. Maybe patented goods should cost less after a while, but not completely free like it is right now.
Let every school pay a fee for teaching Newton's methods and algebra
Algebra and Newton's methods are laws of nature and cannot be patented. However, the discoverers of these laws should be similarly rewarded using a different type of patent system. After all, the technological progress of the entire society is built upon just the works of these idea people, the scientists, mathematicians and patent holders.
Software patents are utter bullshit from word one. They should just go away and stay away.
The main thing wrong with software patents is the nonobviousness bar. That bar should be a lot higher that it is before a patent is accepted. Something like the one-click patent should not be allowed.
Hardware patents are something else, but it's pretty clear they are being *very* poorly managed.
Digital hardware is not very different software, it's just more parallel and more limited than software. Verilog/VHDL are very similar to C/Ada.
Perhaps a way for society to pay for an invention, and once that's been done, it goes right into the "available to everyone" pool.
LOL, doesn't the current patent system already do that? Oh, you meant a system where the customers (society) decide the price of a patent and pay only once, like a salary. That's stupid, because customers will always low-ball what they want to pay, especially the open source folks, who think everything should be free. The price of any goods/service should be set by the seller, not the buyer. The buyer only has the right to buy or not buy. Anything else is fascism or communism.
Panels of experts setting perceived value and an immediate payment being made, followed by a revisit ten years later to determine how it all went, with extra reward possible if the invention's impact was underestimated?
LOLOL, nobody knows how much a patent is worth beforehand. It could be worthless, or a few bucks, or billions. Unless these experts are mind readers, there's no way they can estimate the price of the patent. You just want to create a system where the patent holders are royally screwed and you can get their ideas for cheap.
Slashdot Mirror
What did you expect for 99 cents or free? Apple set the bar such that most apps should cost $0.99, same as a single itunes song, which is ridiculous. And consumers are used to that price and refuse to pay higher than that. So you're stuck with cheap apps or costlier in-app purchase apps.
Don't you mean the OS vendor shouldn't allow internet connection for an OS with more holes than swiss cheese?
Taxis have a lower barrier to entry. It costs more to get real estate for a restaurant, competent cooks, waiters, and regular supply of meal ingredients compared to simply buying a used car to use as a taxi.
Also the taxi driver can live anywhere in the city or even in the cheap outskirts. A restaurant has to be in an expensive, relatively prime real estate where there is enough foot traffic to generate sales. The supply of such real estate is limited. You can't make much money opening a restaurant out in the boonies. You also can't make money opening a restaurant in a place where there are already half-a-dozen restaurants. So the quota rule applies to restaurants as well as taxis -- too many can't exist in the same place at the same time.
Wrong. If you live in a low-traffic residential area, you have to phone someone to book a taxi. This is conceptually similar to uber's booking except they use old-school phones instead of smartphone apps. No taxi is slowly drifting through quiet neighborhoods looking for customers. Taxis only pick up fares on the street in busy areas such as the mall, market, and downtown areas.
That's your opinion, but the facts contradict you completely. Booking is the similar with uber being faster except in the case a taxi is a few feet away from you. The service is similar -- you go from point A to B in a city. The service cost is similar. Any distinction is minor.
If the taxis have no interest in your money when they can get more elsewhere, there is a supply (of taxis) problem. This can be solved by increasing the max taxi quota in the city.
You also haven't answered the question about what you would call a traditional taxi if it added a internet booking feature.
But don't limousine companies have only a few cars to service clients? Uber has enough cars under its control to replace all traditional taxis. They don't seem comparable due to the scale. Uber is probably calling itself a rideshare/limo service to avoid being called a taxi service and be subject to regulations and limited quota.
Also, computer-generated car booking is almost as fast as manually hailing a cab, unlike phone booking which is extremely slow.
Let me pose another question: if traditional taxis added an internet hailing feature, would they no longer be called cabs? I don't think so.
This is all fine but Uber can't simply add new taxis to the taxi pool without permission of the govt. So you should contact your local politicians to extend the taxi quota to uber.
The quotas exist for many reasons -- too many taxis means the typical taxi driver will starve due to over supply. And the flip side is, too few taxis means the customer will get price gouged.
What if the cores don't become much smaller while cores are added to your PC? Your general desktop/workstation can have up to 16 cores each of which are more powerful than the previous generation core. Should we still do single-threaded programming for any time-critical foo() and run roughly 10 times slower?
There's plenty of code than would benefit from the speedup of multi-core programming, not just some niche code.
So, if someone wants to optimize a critical app-specific operation "foo()" in their app and make it to go 4 times faster using 4 cores, they are crazy?
Your argument implies that other than these so-called "edge cases" there is no need to improve performance of any other type of code.
But if you were using ios6 or 7, would you notice a big difference from the upgrade? I don't have ios8, but I bet these upgrades don't provide more functionality other than consume more flash storage, waste RAM and the worst, slow down CPU performance on older models so that you are forced to buy a newer model. It's the ultimate trojan horse.
You are forced to buy new hardware because if you stick with the older version OS, you can't download apps from the app store (since most apps get updated to use the latest version of the OS) and if you upgrade to the newest OS, everything is slow, sluggish and unpleasant.
Only morons say "crime doesn't pay," because it pays a lot.
Then what's wrong with consumers picking the cheapest available option? The airlines should have no right to sue this clever person.
Why won't it last? If airlines charge more for traveling less distance, then they must be making a profit on both the popular (short-but-expensive) and not-so-popular (long-but-cheap) routes. You don't go out of business if you're making a profit.
Although amazon subscription and a public library have very similar models (except for the monthly/yearly fee for amazon), the reality of using them is very different.
On Amazon, you can read one of the subscribed books at any time you want with a few clicks or taps. With a public library, you have to reserve the book (there are fewer copies than amazon) many days in advance. When the other patron has returned the book, you have to physically go to the library within set window of time to pick it up. If another patron wants the book before you've finished it within the 2 week window, you have to return it to the library. In short, physical libraries are a real hassle which is why they are not a significant threat to bookstores.
In contrast, the Amazon (virtual library) subscription service provides most the benefits of owning a book without actually paying the full price. So why would any reader not want to use it? The problem is it screws the authors by underpaying them, so in the long term all the good and excellent authors will stay away from it whereas the average and mediocre authors will prefer it.
Good and bad read is subjective. The amount paid should be based on the full retail price of the book. If Amazon is paying a fixed $X for Y number of pages or Z% of the book, that's obviously a crap model. Paperback novels cost $8-$29 and technical books cost $50-$150. If the reader reads only 50% of each type of book, shouldn't there be a difference on how much the tech book author is paid versus the novelist from "the pot?"
99% of free/cheap mobile games are super simple to play and have no depth compared to their console competitors. As a book world analogy, that would be like comparing short stories to novels.
Amazon is yet again screwing authors, just like paper book publishers in the past, by offering them something like $1.33 per book read. If this model continues, your books will be crappy and culture-less or the authors will have to starve (again).
These authors are better of selling/hosting the books themselves. But marketing will be a lot tougher with that route.
It may soon be "boo hoo" for the readers as well. If Amazon won't pay enough, expect new books to be cheaper, matching how much readers pay per book. Nobody is going to spend years writing books if it only brings then $3.99 per reader or less.
Yes, there might be huge market for these tiny antennas if they work at a satisfactory distance from the OTA transmitting antennas.
Cherry mx blue switch - loudest
Cherry mx brown switch - quieter
Cherry mx red switch - very quiet
Check out this video
If the solution meant changing the Internet Protocol, can that be accomplished without a huge cost?
Yes, the subservient sheeple, the boot-lickers of authority figures, have no problem sharing their data to big authority. The remaining people will not agree this bullshit.
Then why are exceptional and competent programmers paid roughly the same salary?
You have to get used to that. In functional programming, parentheses are usually used to denote function calls. For eg:
// C // lisp
x = foo(bar(10), 20);
(let x (foo (bar 10) 20)
Why? Should readers purchase multiple copies, one for paper and another for the ebook version?
It sure as hell is the property of the person who created it. What was your involvement/support in creating that idea? Nothing. Who made you and your kind god to decide what the price of such thing should be? By rejecting the notion of idea as property, you can steal it for free.
Property is composed of ideas + raw material. Most raw materials are cheap and plentiful on the planet, good ideas are not. The value of the product comes from the ideas that conceive it and the skill and labor that mold and combine the raw material into a product. Therefore you are paying for ideas and product manufacturing skill when you buy a product.
And why should they get a chance? What exactly have they done to deserve this chance? Absolutely nothing, they are just a bunch of evil freeloaders! Well, the inventor has probably been compensated enough according to you, but not according to the inventor.
To your perceived actual value of the invention? Why should anyone care? The price is set by whatever the inventor can get from the market, not that set by a committee of socialist morons.
Maybe you should learn the ABCs of something before writing on the subject. Every company makes profits due to barriers to entry to competitors. Some examples of barriers are, access to huge capital, favorable real estate, good product design, smart employees, etc. And patents are another type of barrier to entry for competitors and they are completely legal. The intention of patents is that the person who invented the product or sold the invention to makes the profits and not someone who had nothing to do with it.
Are you willing to share 10% of your salary with homeless people? If no, then why should any inventor share his invention with any other people?
Yes, there's not much logical reason to time limit the validity of patents, except perhaps the sky high pricing of patented goods. Maybe patented goods should cost less after a while, but not completely free like it is right now.
Algebra and Newton's methods are laws of nature and cannot be patented. However, the discoverers of these laws should be similarly rewarded using a different type of patent system. After all, the technological progress of the entire society is built upon just the works of these idea people, the scientists, mathematicians and patent holders.
The main thing wrong with software patents is the nonobviousness bar. That bar should be a lot higher that it is before a patent is accepted. Something like the one-click patent should not be allowed.
Digital hardware is not very different software, it's just more parallel and more limited than software.
Verilog/VHDL are very similar to C/Ada.
LOL, doesn't the current patent system already do that? Oh, you meant a system where the customers (society) decide the price of a patent and pay only once, like a salary. That's stupid, because customers will always low-ball what they want to pay, especially the open source folks, who think everything should be free. The price of any goods/service should be set by the seller, not the buyer. The buyer only has the right to buy or not buy. Anything else is fascism or communism.
LOLOL, nobody knows how much a patent is worth beforehand. It could be worthless, or a few bucks, or billions. Unless these experts are mind readers, there's no way they can estimate the price of the patent. You just want to create a system where the patent holders are royally screwed and you can get their ideas for cheap.