If you try reading the first part of TFA as well, you'll see that you don't get Apple Store access at all in some European countries (members of the European Union, mind you, even some in the euro-zone), but you do in Vietnam. How is that again about movies and video again?
Then maybe TFA is wrong - or at least in part. However, March 16th was the date Oracle changed its hardware support policy. Seeing that the Sun acquisition was concluded at the end of January, any new changes of policy most definitely do not include old Sun kit.
Purchased Before March 16, 2010? Doesn't that exclude, like, almost all purchases of Sun hardware?
No 'almost' about it. According to TFA, systems sold before that date come with the 'old' Sun warranty, while the ones after have the 'Oracle Global Warranty'. The two don't mix and the old systems require 'opening a formal service case' to get the firmware that they're entitled to.
True, but selling it at $1.99 is almost definitely guaranteed to bring in more money than selling it at $2.99 in this situation. (Barring the case that selling it at $1.99 brings in fewer customers than selling it at $2.49 would, which is always a possibility.)
No. One trivial example would be when your costs are, say, 2.00. Then you're losing money at 1.99. Still, let's say the total costs per per-unit are 0.99 (a constant value is actually the worst case, as the weight of fixed part of costs drops with the increase in sales) so 1.99 is profitable. Now, profit per unit at 2.99 is twice that at 1.99, so you need to get twice as many customers at the lower price to get the same amount of profit. Considering price scaling of fixed costs, you'll need less than 2x the number of customers, but still the difference is non-zero. OTOH, there is in practice a cut-off in the number of people that are willing to buy your book at any price and it may be that you're selling enough 2.99 books already that dropping the price to 1.99 would need more sales than that cut-off in order to make the same profit. So there is in practice no guarantee of 'more money'. Otherwise you'd just keep on dropping prices to marginal cost + 1 and reap profits from billions of billions of sales.
Point is, it's entirely possible for you to have the maximum profit at 2.49 and have both 2.99 and 1.99 bring in less money. Not all functions are monotonic, and all that jazz.
Apologies. Now that is actually a good point. Of course, you can install an extension to vacuum places.sqlite (or do it manually) and remove residual data from the file. It's still going to be on disk until overwritten, but then the question is where does your need for privacy stop. As far as the browser is concerned, deleting the rows is enough, as nothing running in the browser will have access to the residual data left in the file (hence no css snooping on the history and so on). I would say that deleting should be followed by a VACUUM call anyway (since it's really a good place for it) but that's the devs' call to make. OTOH, if you're worried about someone grepping strings in the file, then you've bigger problems than just the history - it means someone has either local access or at least remote shell access. That's 'slightly' beyond normal expectations of privacy from a mere browser. Regardless, I agree that a vacuum should take place, if only to speed up normal queries to the history.
As far as the bookmarks history goes, it looks like a convenience feature to avoid data loss if the system crashes. Feel free to set browser.bookmarks.max_backups to 0 in about:config. Obscure, yes, but if you need this level of forgetfulness from the browser then you have to dig a little deeper anyway.
However, these problems are not what a regular user would care about, and it's always a fine line to balance between security and usability. The fact that you can take care of them, even though it's far from the most common user scenario, is a plus in my book.
Try deleting your history (everything!) then go to your.mozilla/firefox/{UID}.profile directory. Now...try running 'strings' on your places.sqlite file and try running strings on the files in the bookmarkbackups directory. Yeh, privacy, HUH?
So? let's see... I can do better than strings, that's a sqlite3 file after all. It has a bunch of tables in it, namely moz_anno_attributes, moz_annos, moz_bookmarks, moz_bookmarks_roots, moz_favicons, moz_historyvisits, moz_inputhistory, moz_items_annos, moz_keywords, moz_places.
Of course, some of those are not empty - bookmarks, for instance, if you have any set up, or places, if you have any rss feeds (which you do by default). But do check moz_historyvisits, moz_inputhistory, moz_keywords - empty. So tell me again, where is your problem? And next time please use a coherent argument - having a problem with firefox remembering your bookmarks (bookmarkbackups, ring a bell?) is moronic.
You keep posting these 'facts' about cross-licensing. You're basically wrong. RTF Filing. From Statement of facts, p 4-5
In late 2007, Apple and Nokia began negotiating a potential license agreement for Nokia's patents essential to the ETSI standards (id. 86). Apple admits that, at the start of the negotiations, and again in September 2009, Nokia offered license terms to Nokia's essential patents that did not require Apple to grant any license back to Apple's non-essential patents (id. 86, 91).3 Apple acknowledges its rejection of Nokia's "standard" license terms (id. 85, 91, 92). Apple's unhappiness about these offers seems only to be that Nokia was asking for what Apple considered too much money for Nokia's essential patents (see id. 91).
Apple also admits that "Nokia defined both a portfolio rate and an average per patent royalty rate" that did not require any license-back of non-essential patents (id. Answer to 44). Once again, Apple's only problem with these offers is the amount of money involved (id. 91).
Again, according to Nokia's filing, there was an offer to cross-license, but it was Apple that first made it.
Apple further admits that it was willing to grant Nokia a cross-license to certain Apple patents that are not claimed to be essential to any of the standards listed above (id. 87). Apple avers that, in Spring 2008, Nokia made another license offer, proposing Apple expand its prior offer to give Nokia the right to pick a limited number of Apple non-essential patents that would be licensed (id. 89). Apple states that it rejected the proposal (id.).
But hey, don't let facts get in the way of righteous anger.
At least the packages that are allowed to be installed are signed, which means _someone_ looked at them and approved them.
The thing that I would ask here is whether the user can install a specified older version of a given package. Say, for instance, install the original version from the main repository with a know vulnerability that is patched in the update repo.
ok, let's look at the naive picture. AAPL has about 24.5B in cash and short-term investments as of end of last quarter. That's telling you nothing yet, since the company also has other current and non-current assets, and you have to subtract liabilities. Let's say current assets minus current liabilities (net tangible assets include non-liquid ones and various accounting issues in this market), that's about 18.5B. No sane company would use that completely for acquisitions, today's lending markets being what they are. But still. Now, Nokia has a market cap of some 49B and you bet any hostile takeover[*] would require quite a premium to convince shareholders, plus investment banking fees. Putting that at a 40% extra is very conservative, but let's assume that. You end up with some 70B acquisition costs. So AAPL would have to raise roughly Nokia's market cap beyond their net current assets, which is slightly less than a third of their market cap. Apple's stock would tank if they tried to raise that kind of money, either in the stock market or via bonds, making it even harder to do.
So no, Apple can't buy Nokia.
[1] management is free to refuse a takeover offer. Then, if enough shareholders disagree, they can hold a shareholder meeting, boot management and go ahead with the sale. Then, you have regulators to convince to approve the sale, particularly for such large companies. So it's not that simple even with a public company. Just ask Larry, Oracle has been playing this game a lot lately.
Right. It wasn't that obvious in your initial post, but the strawman is plain to see now. How is this about unlimited time for patents? If Nokia has legitimate patents (as other said, they're not exactly a patent troll - they do have products and a large R&D budget) then it's their duty to the shareholders to sue Apple if Apple uses their tech without a license. To see that, look at the sales drop that Ericsson just reported yesterday (Ericsson being the largest manufacturer of wireless telco equipment) due to cheap Chinese competition - you think the Chinese are paying royalties for their products? Or, to look at Apple itself for an example, take their suit of Psystar - no license to distribute OSX on non-Apple hw, bang! lawsuit.
So drop your strawman about unlimited time patents (as an aside - I think the current time limit is already too long and harms competition, but that's a thorny issue and not at stake here) and ask yourself instead whether the patents are valid and the suit legitimate. Apple being Apple has no bearing on whether they're right or wrong in this.
If I had a dollar for every time someone on/. claims to understand something without really doing so, your posts on this topic alone would already get me some beer. You need to brush up on the notion of quantum collective excitations - any advanced condensed matter book will do. After you do that, reading TFAs might provide you with some answers.
Contrariwise, you're free to apply your 'reasoning' to 'proving' how superconductivity should not exist either.
If you had read T linked FA - fat chance on/., but still - or even if you knew a thing or two about Qt, it would have saved you from making a lame comment.
First: Qt is not just a widget library. It's a full framework that goes well beyond putting things on screens.
Second: What he did modify had nothing to do with widgets. K3b used a KProcess class that employed piping of I/O. In KDE4, that wraps QProcess, which is too high-level for the kind of data-passing throughput required by dvd burning, so he had the class re-written. Yes, the article title is lame (as is its rehashing by the GP post) - forking a class is nothing nearly like forking a framework - but its absurdity should have triggered curiosity instead of look-at-me-I'm-smart comments missing the point.
I agree with the general idea that the GP is talking nonsense (if there was any proof of Microsoft not being a monopoly in his post, it must have been really really well hidden). Some minor corrections though.
A monopoly is not a company that is exclusive in an industry. It's a company that has such an effective control over its industry that most people pretty much equate the company with the industry.
Actually, a monopoly is, technically, a company that can price its product(s) in such a way that it maximizes the operating profit (normally through underproduction) because there are no market forces that would compel it to lower prices. Meaning that the company, not the market, sets the volume and pricing for the product. Public perception is not directly relevant (although it affects things via enforcing or weakening the barriers of entry for potential competitors).
Remember: a healthy industry has two major competitors slugging each other out at about 40% marketshare each, a third competitor between 15 and 20% marketshare, largely ignored by the first two, and then a myriad of minor competitors making up the rest of the market, filling niche needs in that market. A dominated, but not monopolistic, industry has its number one company at about 60% marketshare, a number two at 30-40%, a number three company trying to get double digit percentages, and possibly a few others eeking out their living in niche markets.
Those are oligopoly examples - in the medium to long term those markets are not very healthy either, as companies will eventually engage in strategy games to maximize profit that will lessen the actual competition. Witness the collusion/price-fixing accusations against NVidia and ATi a while ago.
Anyway, a good proof of Microsoft's monopolistic power is not necessarily the fact that you have little choice in the OS you get with a computer; a much better case for it was the way Microsoft got away with the subscription change in their licensing model - customers hated it as they ended up paying more for less (for example, Microsoft promised an update interval that so far didn't quite happen; another example, many companies ended up buying licenses twice - once the company subscription and one the regular OS license for new computers with Windows preinstalled) and the company made the expected sales and profit anyway. The Linux negotiation weapon that some customers have started to bring up in recent years to force prices lower is another proof - indirect this time, as it shows the original price was set in the absence of any competitive pressure; OTOH, this also shows that Microsoft's price-setting power has finally started to decrease in some fields.
Two people observing the same entangled phonon state won't become entangled, that's just bad reporting. You'll get partial coherence between a bunch of electrons in the retinas, that will last next to no time, and that's all. If you like, the human eye will act as a large reservoir of noise to the photons and make them lose coherence. Having the photons entangle the people is like saying a snowflake can significantly increase your body temperature — the actual effect is way too small to measure and that only at the contact point (by the time the 'change' would propagate its magnitude becomes way lower than the macro uncertainty of the relevant parameters, meaning it's lost in the normal noise).
Your analogy would be better if stated as follows:
You cut the coin (you think it's through the side) and mail the two halves (without looking at them) to Alice and Bob. Alice decides before opening the envelope that you cut the coin vertically through the face and when she checks she sees hers is the left side — then Bob has the right side. Were Alice to decide you cut horizontally, she would have seen either the top or the bottom half.
The spooky part is that you separate the (supports of the future) halves, but Alice's observation performs the actual cutting of the state, including choosing how it's done. Your coin halves are still entangled into a single coin before she looks.
I see that you have a beef with fiat money. Don't let that blind you to other problems.
GSA would have severely limited the exposure of commercial banks to [MA]BS and it would have kept Citi and BAC solvent (which they currently aren't). I never said GSA would have prevented everything, merely that it would have help contain what is now a much larger problem. There is currently no clear solution for the current banking crisis that does not include nationalizing BAC and C - letting one of them fail would make the Lehman fiasco look mild.
The point is that dishonest mortgage brokers and dodgy loans should not have brought commercial banks down as they did. Investment banks were supposed to be a different beast and they were in the business of taking risks. Also, S&L were not affected by SGA in any way, witness the S&L crisis (they loked like banks and quacked like banks but were not banks).
Finally, Greenspan had no direct authority in regulating markets, but his word on financial sector policies was quite heavy against the initiatives that congressional committees tried to have in regulating derivtives markets. Were he not so opposed to it, the picture would likely be different now.
Anyway, the point is that the system was open for speculation and attempts to regulate it were defeated. Too much deregulation can be bad - and in this case, it was. Take a cue from the reasons for GSA in the first place, before labeling it a red herring - if deregulation is so good, why was it passed during the Great Depression era?
P.S. If you're looking for a red herring, Community Reinvestment Act is as big as they come. Look up statistics for subprime loan originators and you'll see that the large majority were not subject to CRA (50+% had originators not under federal supervision, ~30% came from affiliates of banks and thrifts with less supervision and only the remaining 20% came from banks and thrifts - see Barr's testimony). Once again, it's deregulation that let things blow up - or incomplete regulation, if you like.
I'll not argue for regulation as the perfect solution, but this mess is a proof of what markets can do when left to speculate without constraints. Some institutions are too big to be left taking large risky bets.
Glass-Steagall - weakened in 1980, and the remaining parts eliminated in 1999. Were it not, Citi and BAC would not be on the brink of nationalization now.
Greenspan's stubborn refusal to regulate the (currently still) OTC market for CDS. Without it, AIG would not be where it is now, and a lot of now necessary collateral on various banks' balance sheets would be free for notmal operations. And this one is not over yet.
While I'm not certain AC was referring to Glass-Steagall, that is the most textbook example of deregulation that magnified this mess enormously. Apologies, but you are spreading misinformation here.
So why not just buy Via? They have the license to make x86, and more importantly they have low power CPUs that are ready to go, and with Netbooks and Notebooks taking a big chunk out of the market this would give them a BIG advantage in the market.
3 words: Ownership Transfer Clause
Intel is already waving that sword at the offsprings of their soon-to-be-late AMD competitor (namely, the question whether The Foundry Company will be covered by the x-licenses or not). Usually licensing agreements are set to be terminated if ownership of the licensee passes to a third party, so NVidia might even get a total of zero licenses if it buys Via.
Yes. The article you cited is from 2004. Good morning, Rip van Winkle! There have been a lot of changes.:-)
That's all nice and good, Bruce, but in more recent times (circa 2008) the driver for their Poulsbo chipset is a mess (with a closed-source blob sprinkled on top). Seems rather strange to see in these days of Ati going open source, but there you go. Change, as requested:(
Not only are you wrong about where 0K is, you're also wrong about negative temperatures. Temperature is a statistical measure. A positive temperature corresponds to an equilibrium population distribution across a bunch of energy levels, which will have occupancy probabilities decreasing exponentially with energy. A negative temperature is obtained when the population distribution is inverted, for instance in a 2-level system where an external energy source resonantly pumps up the occupancy of the higher level. Presto, $\exp(-\beta E)$ greater than 1 requires negative $\beta$.
Why create a virus that only hits 7% of computers when you can hit one that hits 85% of computers?
Yeah. Why achieve the fame and glory of being the first to write a real Mac OS X virus? Why feel satisfied in crushing the worldview of every Mac fanboy in existence?
There's just no draw.
The 90s called andd they want their virus-writer stereotype back. In case you haven't noticed, these days big viruses get written for money - huge botnet herds and all that. Search for it on/. if you're really that new here. There is also stealing CC info, but I'd guess the guys writing browser exploits have at least the 2 neurons required to look at the stats of the browsers hitting the sites they infected to see what targets make more sense to code for. Once it makes sense financially to add detection and infection code for Macs, there's little doubt that it will be added. It's a 'free market' and it will behave as such.
So, for glory and fanboy crushing, no draw indeed.
You are shifting targets here - are you sure it was Logic and not Rhetoric classes that you took? There was no argument about 'these multitude of people telling the senator to vote against the bill', or about whether they knew what they opposed in TARP. Just as I'm not going to bring up (any more than this tangent) the question of how many of those supporting TARP were in favor of the bailout and how many in favor of the ridiculous amount of pork riders (4/5+ of the TARP body). That's irrelevant. Let me quote you again:
Most people opposed the $700 billion bailout. I've yet to find a serious economist or capitalist who believes that no action was a valid alternative[...] But, of course, most people haven't taken basic economic courses (much less advanced ones)
You've used the second sentence to imply (via the last one) that the people opposing the bailout were wrong. And yes, we're talking about the voted form of TARP - the original one had even more egregious provisions which didn't make the cut in the end. Now, Friedman is dead, otherwise I'd have had a blast listening to his take on what should have been done. Funny how his disciples have not loudly protested such a massive government intervention in what should be by rights a free market - why, they've even engineered it. Imagine that. Whatever happened to 'markets work' and 'start with a clean slate'? But irony aside, I pointed to you that plenty of highly respected economists opposed this bailout bill. And they know more economy than all of us on/. combined. So I'm asserting that your implication that opposing TARP was wrong and done only by people with no understanding of its economic implication is wrong - both logically and factually.
And a word of advice about your last paragraph - don't trust 'the experts' so blindly, especially those who come forward in press to justify post factum how and why things 'worked'. At least, not without having followed and judged their opinions (and the consistency of those) over a long enough period of time and on more topics. Cherry-picking facts to make a point is a refined art and a modus vivendi for many economic think-tanks - and you'll never even know you're being had if/when it happens. Making one's own mind about something requires more effort and is often at risk of being wrong, but it's essential for pushing one's understanding forward.
Most people opposed the $700 billion bailout. I've yet to find a serious economist or capitalist who believes that no action was a valid alternative--we were a hair away from a complete financial halt in the credit/security market which would have quickly halted our entire economy. But, of course, most people haven't taken basic economic courses (much less advanced ones).
You, on the other hand, appear to have not taken basic Logic courses, much less advanced ones. What you're claiming here is a false dichotomy - no action is not the only alternative to the bailout plan. In fact, there were plenty of highly respected economists - including Nobel Prize winners - that opposed the bailout plan without advocating a no-action policy.
Besides, Paulson hasn't even started applying the bailout in the voted form yet - instead, he's using the first tranche of the money for a 'new and improved plan' - buying stakes in banks. Now the trick question is, where is that specified in the bailout plan? It was about illiquid mortgage-derived assets, right? the government was going to buy them to inject liquidity in what was a frozen market so that the assets can be priced again and marking them to market is no longer a huge liability for the banks... and so on - right? Well, it's probably in the part that gives the Treasury sweeping powers to expand the program to whatever other assets it sees fit. Apparently preferred shares qualify. I'll wait for you to explain to me now how this action is better than initial plan, worse, or it is in fact the original plan and the toxic MBSs had tried to escape in the clever disguise of preferred shares in the nation's largest banks.
Slashdot Mirror
If you try reading the first part of TFA as well, you'll see that you don't get Apple Store access at all in some European countries (members of the European Union, mind you, even some in the euro-zone), but you do in Vietnam. How is that again about movies and video again?
Then maybe TFA is wrong - or at least in part. However, March 16th was the date Oracle changed its hardware support policy. Seeing that the Sun acquisition was concluded at the end of January, any new changes of policy most definitely do not include old Sun kit.
Purchased Before March 16, 2010? Doesn't that exclude, like, almost all purchases of Sun hardware?
No 'almost' about it. According to TFA, systems sold before that date come with the 'old' Sun warranty, while the ones after have the 'Oracle Global Warranty'. The two don't mix and the old systems require 'opening a formal service case' to get the firmware that they're entitled to.
Ahem.
True, but selling it at $1.99 is almost definitely guaranteed to bring in more money than selling it at $2.99 in this situation. (Barring the case that selling it at $1.99 brings in fewer customers than selling it at $2.49 would, which is always a possibility.)
No. One trivial example would be when your costs are, say, 2.00. Then you're losing money at 1.99. Still, let's say the total costs per per-unit are 0.99 (a constant value is actually the worst case, as the weight of fixed part of costs drops with the increase in sales) so 1.99 is profitable. Now, profit per unit at 2.99 is twice that at 1.99, so you need to get twice as many customers at the lower price to get the same amount of profit. Considering price scaling of fixed costs, you'll need less than 2x the number of customers, but still the difference is non-zero. OTOH, there is in practice a cut-off in the number of people that are willing to buy your book at any price and it may be that you're selling enough 2.99 books already that dropping the price to 1.99 would need more sales than that cut-off in order to make the same profit. So there is in practice no guarantee of 'more money'. Otherwise you'd just keep on dropping prices to marginal cost + 1 and reap profits from billions of billions of sales.
Point is, it's entirely possible for you to have the maximum profit at 2.49 and have both 2.99 and 1.99 bring in less money. Not all functions are monotonic, and all that jazz.
Apologies. Now that is actually a good point. Of course, you can install an extension to vacuum places.sqlite (or do it manually) and remove residual data from the file. It's still going to be on disk until overwritten, but then the question is where does your need for privacy stop. As far as the browser is concerned, deleting the rows is enough, as nothing running in the browser will have access to the residual data left in the file (hence no css snooping on the history and so on). I would say that deleting should be followed by a VACUUM call anyway (since it's really a good place for it) but that's the devs' call to make. OTOH, if you're worried about someone grepping strings in the file, then you've bigger problems than just the history - it means someone has either local access or at least remote shell access. That's 'slightly' beyond normal expectations of privacy from a mere browser. Regardless, I agree that a vacuum should take place, if only to speed up normal queries to the history.
As far as the bookmarks history goes, it looks like a convenience feature to avoid data loss if the system crashes. Feel free to set browser.bookmarks.max_backups to 0 in about:config. Obscure, yes, but if you need this level of forgetfulness from the browser then you have to dig a little deeper anyway.
However, these problems are not what a regular user would care about, and it's always a fine line to balance between security and usability. The fact that you can take care of them, even though it's far from the most common user scenario, is a plus in my book.
Try deleting your history (everything!) then go to your .mozilla/firefox/{UID}.profile directory. Now...try running 'strings' on your places.sqlite file and try running strings on the files in the bookmarkbackups directory. Yeh, privacy, HUH?
So? let's see... I can do better than strings, that's a sqlite3 file after all. It has a bunch of tables in it, namely moz_anno_attributes, moz_annos, moz_bookmarks, moz_bookmarks_roots, moz_favicons, moz_historyvisits, moz_inputhistory, moz_items_annos, moz_keywords, moz_places.
Of course, some of those are not empty - bookmarks, for instance, if you have any set up, or places, if you have any rss feeds (which you do by default). But do check moz_historyvisits, moz_inputhistory, moz_keywords - empty. So tell me again, where is your problem? And next time please use a coherent argument - having a problem with firefox remembering your bookmarks (bookmarkbackups, ring a bell?) is moronic.
You keep posting these 'facts' about cross-licensing. You're basically wrong. RTF Filing. From Statement of facts, p 4-5
In late 2007, Apple and Nokia began negotiating a potential license agreement for Nokia's patents essential to the ETSI standards (id. 86). Apple admits that, at the start of the negotiations, and again in September 2009, Nokia offered license terms to Nokia's essential patents that did not require Apple to grant any license back to Apple's non-essential patents (id. 86, 91).3 Apple acknowledges its rejection of Nokia's "standard" license terms (id. 85, 91, 92). Apple's unhappiness about these offers seems only to be that Nokia was asking for what Apple considered too much money for Nokia's essential patents (see id. 91).
Apple also admits that "Nokia defined both a portfolio rate and an average per patent royalty rate" that did not require any
license-back of non-essential patents (id. Answer to 44). Once again, Apple's only problem with these offers is the amount of money involved (id. 91).
Again, according to Nokia's filing, there was an offer to cross-license, but it was Apple that first made it.
Apple further admits that it was willing to grant Nokia a cross-license to certain Apple patents that are not claimed to be essential to any of the standards listed above (id. 87). Apple avers that, in Spring 2008, Nokia made another license offer, proposing Apple expand its prior offer to give Nokia the right to pick a limited number of Apple non-essential patents that would be licensed (id. 89). Apple states that it rejected the proposal (id.).
But hey, don't let facts get in the way of righteous anger.
The thing that I would ask here is whether the user can install a specified older version of a given package. Say, for instance, install the original version from the main repository with a know vulnerability that is patched in the update repo.
Are you that simple?
ok, let's look at the naive picture. AAPL has about 24.5B in cash and short-term investments as of end of last quarter. That's telling you nothing yet, since the company also has other current and non-current assets, and you have to subtract liabilities. Let's say current assets minus current liabilities (net tangible assets include non-liquid ones and various accounting issues in this market), that's about 18.5B. No sane company would use that completely for acquisitions, today's lending markets being what they are. But still. Now, Nokia has a market cap of some 49B and you bet any hostile takeover[*] would require quite a premium to convince shareholders, plus investment banking fees. Putting that at a 40% extra is very conservative, but let's assume that. You end up with some 70B acquisition costs. So AAPL would have to raise roughly Nokia's market cap beyond their net current assets, which is slightly less than a third of their market cap. Apple's stock would tank if they tried to raise that kind of money, either in the stock market or via bonds, making it even harder to do.
So no, Apple can't buy Nokia.
[1] management is free to refuse a takeover offer. Then, if enough shareholders disagree, they can hold a shareholder meeting, boot management and go ahead with the sale. Then, you have regulators to convince to approve the sale, particularly for such large companies. So it's not that simple even with a public company. Just ask Larry, Oracle has been playing this game a lot lately.
Right. It wasn't that obvious in your initial post, but the strawman is plain to see now. How is this about unlimited time for patents? If Nokia has legitimate patents (as other said, they're not exactly a patent troll - they do have products and a large R&D budget) then it's their duty to the shareholders to sue Apple if Apple uses their tech without a license. To see that, look at the sales drop that Ericsson just reported yesterday (Ericsson being the largest manufacturer of wireless telco equipment) due to cheap Chinese competition - you think the Chinese are paying royalties for their products? Or, to look at Apple itself for an example, take their suit of Psystar - no license to distribute OSX on non-Apple hw, bang! lawsuit.
So drop your strawman about unlimited time patents (as an aside - I think the current time limit is already too long and harms competition, but that's a thorny issue and not at stake here) and ask yourself instead whether the patents are valid and the suit legitimate. Apple being Apple has no bearing on whether they're right or wrong in this.
If I had a dollar for every time someone on /. claims to understand something without really doing so, your posts on this topic alone would already get me some beer. You need to brush up on the notion of quantum collective excitations - any advanced condensed matter book will do. After you do that, reading TFAs might provide you with some answers.
Contrariwise, you're free to apply your 'reasoning' to 'proving' how superconductivity should not exist either.
If you had read T linked FA - fat chance on /., but still - or even if you knew a thing or two about Qt, it would have saved you from making a lame comment.
First: Qt is not just a widget library. It's a full framework that goes well beyond putting things on screens.
Second: What he did modify had nothing to do with widgets. K3b used a KProcess class that employed piping of I/O. In KDE4, that wraps QProcess, which is too high-level for the kind of data-passing throughput required by dvd burning, so he had the class re-written. Yes, the article title is lame (as is its rehashing by the GP post) - forking a class is nothing nearly like forking a framework - but its absurdity should have triggered curiosity instead of look-at-me-I'm-smart comments missing the point.
I agree with the general idea that the GP is talking nonsense (if there was any proof of Microsoft not being a monopoly in his post, it must have been really really well hidden). Some minor corrections though.
A monopoly is not a company that is exclusive in an industry. It's a company that has such an effective control over its industry that most people pretty much equate the company with the industry.
Actually, a monopoly is, technically, a company that can price its product(s) in such a way that it maximizes the operating profit (normally through underproduction) because there are no market forces that would compel it to lower prices. Meaning that the company, not the market, sets the volume and pricing for the product. Public perception is not directly relevant (although it affects things via enforcing or weakening the barriers of entry for potential competitors).
Remember: a healthy industry has two major competitors slugging each other out at about 40% marketshare each, a third competitor between 15 and 20% marketshare, largely ignored by the first two, and then a myriad of minor competitors making up the rest of the market, filling niche needs in that market. A dominated, but not monopolistic, industry has its number one company at about 60% marketshare, a number two at 30-40%, a number three company trying to get double digit percentages, and possibly a few others eeking out their living in niche markets.
Those are oligopoly examples - in the medium to long term those markets are not very healthy either, as companies will eventually engage in strategy games to maximize profit that will lessen the actual competition. Witness the collusion/price-fixing accusations against NVidia and ATi a while ago.
Anyway, a good proof of Microsoft's monopolistic power is not necessarily the fact that you have little choice in the OS you get with a computer; a much better case for it was the way Microsoft got away with the subscription change in their licensing model - customers hated it as they ended up paying more for less (for example, Microsoft promised an update interval that so far didn't quite happen; another example, many companies ended up buying licenses twice - once the company subscription and one the regular OS license for new computers with Windows preinstalled) and the company made the expected sales and profit anyway. The Linux negotiation weapon that some customers have started to bring up in recent years to force prices lower is another proof - indirect this time, as it shows the original price was set in the absence of any competitive pressure; OTOH, this also shows that Microsoft's price-setting power has finally started to decrease in some fields.
" Tahoma doesn't provide protection to existing browser principals."
That's it. I'm switching to Comic Sans.
Two people observing the same entangled phonon state won't become entangled, that's just bad reporting. You'll get partial coherence between a bunch of electrons in the retinas, that will last next to no time, and that's all. If you like, the human eye will act as a large reservoir of noise to the photons and make them lose coherence. Having the photons entangle the people is like saying a snowflake can significantly increase your body temperature — the actual effect is way too small to measure and that only at the contact point (by the time the 'change' would propagate its magnitude becomes way lower than the macro uncertainty of the relevant parameters, meaning it's lost in the normal noise).
Your analogy would be better if stated as follows:
The spooky part is that you separate the (supports of the future) halves, but Alice's observation performs the actual cutting of the state, including choosing how it's done. Your coin halves are still entangled into a single coin before she looks.
I see that you have a beef with fiat money. Don't let that blind you to other problems.
GSA would have severely limited the exposure of commercial banks to [MA]BS and it would have kept Citi and BAC solvent (which they currently aren't). I never said GSA would have prevented everything, merely that it would have help contain what is now a much larger problem. There is currently no clear solution for the current banking crisis that does not include nationalizing BAC and C - letting one of them fail would make the Lehman fiasco look mild.
The point is that dishonest mortgage brokers and dodgy loans should not have brought commercial banks down as they did. Investment banks were supposed to be a different beast and they were in the business of taking risks. Also, S&L were not affected by SGA in any way, witness the S&L crisis (they loked like banks and quacked like banks but were not banks).
Finally, Greenspan had no direct authority in regulating markets, but his word on financial sector policies was quite heavy against the initiatives that congressional committees tried to have in regulating derivtives markets. Were he not so opposed to it, the picture would likely be different now.
Anyway, the point is that the system was open for speculation and attempts to regulate it were defeated. Too much deregulation can be bad - and in this case, it was. Take a cue from the reasons for GSA in the first place, before labeling it a red herring - if deregulation is so good, why was it passed during the Great Depression era?
P.S. If you're looking for a red herring, Community Reinvestment Act is as big as they come. Look up statistics for subprime loan originators and you'll see that the large majority were not subject to CRA (50+% had originators not under federal supervision, ~30% came from affiliates of banks and thrifts with less supervision and only the remaining 20% came from banks and thrifts - see Barr's testimony). Once again, it's deregulation that let things blow up - or incomplete regulation, if you like.
I'll not argue for regulation as the perfect solution, but this mess is a proof of what markets can do when left to speculate without constraints. Some institutions are too big to be left taking large risky bets.
2 examples:
While I'm not certain AC was referring to Glass-Steagall, that is the most textbook example of deregulation that magnified this mess enormously. Apologies, but you are spreading misinformation here.
So why not just buy Via? They have the license to make x86, and more importantly they have low power CPUs that are ready to go, and with Netbooks and Notebooks taking a big chunk out of the market this would give them a BIG advantage in the market.
3 words: Ownership Transfer Clause
Intel is already waving that sword at the offsprings of their soon-to-be-late AMD competitor (namely, the question whether The Foundry Company will be covered by the x-licenses or not). Usually licensing agreements are set to be terminated if ownership of the licensee passes to a third party, so NVidia might even get a total of zero licenses if it buys Via.
Yes. The article you cited is from 2004. Good morning, Rip van Winkle! There have been a lot of changes. :-)
That's all nice and good, Bruce, but in more recent times (circa 2008) the driver for their Poulsbo chipset is a mess (with a closed-source blob sprinkled on top). Seems rather strange to see in these days of Ati going open source, but there you go. Change, as requested :(
Not only are you wrong about where 0K is, you're also wrong about negative temperatures. Temperature is a statistical measure. A positive temperature corresponds to an equilibrium population distribution across a bunch of energy levels, which will have occupancy probabilities decreasing exponentially with energy. A negative temperature is obtained when the population distribution is inverted, for instance in a 2-level system where an external energy source resonantly pumps up the occupancy of the higher level. Presto, $\exp(-\beta E)$ greater than 1 requires negative $\beta$.
You can invest in the potential downfall of many securities. Which, by the way, was what many of the financial companies and hedge funds did.
Except, you know, when said securities are on the official 'cannot be shorted' list, as seen in the US and (still) in the UK.
Why create a virus that only hits 7% of computers when you can hit one that hits 85% of computers?
Yeah. Why achieve the fame and glory of being the first to write a real Mac OS X virus? Why feel satisfied in crushing the worldview of every Mac fanboy in existence?
There's just no draw.
The 90s called andd they want their virus-writer stereotype back. In case you haven't noticed, these days big viruses get written for money - huge botnet herds and all that. Search for it on /. if you're really that new here. There is also stealing CC info, but I'd guess the guys writing browser exploits have at least the 2 neurons required to look at the stats of the browsers hitting the sites they infected to see what targets make more sense to code for. Once it makes sense financially to add detection and infection code for Macs, there's little doubt that it will be added. It's a 'free market' and it will behave as such.
So, for glory and fanboy crushing, no draw indeed.
You are shifting targets here - are you sure it was Logic and not Rhetoric classes that you took? There was no argument about 'these multitude of people telling the senator to vote against the bill', or about whether they knew what they opposed in TARP. Just as I'm not going to bring up (any more than this tangent) the question of how many of those supporting TARP were in favor of the bailout and how many in favor of the ridiculous amount of pork riders (4/5+ of the TARP body). That's irrelevant. Let me quote you again:
You've used the second sentence to imply (via the last one) that the people opposing the bailout were wrong. And yes, we're talking about the voted form of TARP - the original one had even more egregious provisions which didn't make the cut in the end. Now, Friedman is dead, otherwise I'd have had a blast listening to his take on what should have been done. Funny how his disciples have not loudly protested such a massive government intervention in what should be by rights a free market - why, they've even engineered it. Imagine that. Whatever happened to 'markets work' and 'start with a clean slate'? But irony aside, I pointed to you that plenty of highly respected economists opposed this bailout bill. And they know more economy than all of us on /. combined. So I'm asserting that your implication that opposing TARP was wrong and done only by people with no understanding of its economic implication is wrong - both logically and factually.
And a word of advice about your last paragraph - don't trust 'the experts' so blindly, especially those who come forward in press to justify post factum how and why things 'worked'. At least, not without having followed and judged their opinions (and the consistency of those) over a long enough period of time and on more topics. Cherry-picking facts to make a point is a refined art and a modus vivendi for many economic think-tanks - and you'll never even know you're being had if/when it happens. Making one's own mind about something requires more effort and is often at risk of being wrong, but it's essential for pushing one's understanding forward.
You, on the other hand, appear to have not taken basic Logic courses, much less advanced ones. What you're claiming here is a false dichotomy - no action is not the only alternative to the bailout plan. In fact, there were plenty of highly respected economists - including Nobel Prize winners - that opposed the bailout plan without advocating a no-action policy.
Besides, Paulson hasn't even started applying the bailout in the voted form yet - instead, he's using the first tranche of the money for a 'new and improved plan' - buying stakes in banks. Now the trick question is, where is that specified in the bailout plan? It was about illiquid mortgage-derived assets, right? the government was going to buy them to inject liquidity in what was a frozen market so that the assets can be priced again and marking them to market is no longer a huge liability for the banks ... and so on - right? Well, it's probably in the part that gives the Treasury sweeping powers to expand the program to whatever other assets it sees fit. Apparently preferred shares qualify. I'll wait for you to explain to me now how this action is better than initial plan, worse, or it is in fact the original plan and the toxic MBSs had tried to escape in the clever disguise of preferred shares in the nation's largest banks.