I don't see how antitrust is necessary in this case. In the dense suburban area I grew up in, there was only one newspaper my family ever considered - the large, liberal, city newspaper. Our neighbors also only considered one newspaper - the local, conservative newspaper. There were only two newspapers that served out region, and everyone knew which they wanted. There was no true competition.
As I understand it, most of the US is like this. I don't know the history of the industry, and I'm sure there was competition at some point, but I can't think of any cities that are served by multiple large newspapers (and no, I don't count the New York Post!). Perhaps the industry already colluded at a regional level, and now they need to do something similar at a national or international level.
Frankly, I think it's a bit dangerous. I come from a city that has a terrible large newspaper (San Diego Tribune), and it sucks that we don't have more choice. If this happened at a national level, the entire print industry would die in one fell swoop. This "paywall" also sounds dangerous. I already get most of my news for free, and I know the demand for paid news has fallen. Perhaps this last ditch effort indicates the industry is already dead.
Nothing about what CBS did was a good idea, and I will emphasize here that I am highly critical of them over this fiasco. But your assertion that smart people don't use last.fm is completely wrong and IMO leaning on flamebait - last.fm is made for music lovers, and is arguably the best way to find new music in the world. Collaborative filtering is a powerful thing.
People on Slashdot who were never the target audience of last.fm have no right to tell those of us who are that we shouldn't use it.
I use the service, and will continue to. I, like most other users, publicly let anyone see what I listen to. In fact, that's the main functionality of the service as far as I am concerned (that and the recommendations). I find Last.fm very useful, and hey, it's free. Also, this information was supposedly leaked by people in Last.fm themselves - if so, I get the feeling they feel empowered against CBS from all this; they probably won't let CBS break contracts like this again. CBS has egg on their face.
While I'm uncomfortable with my IP address given out, I don't consider it the biggest breach of confidentiality; IP addresses should not be considered a secret. I visit 100s of sites, and they all know my IP. I use bit torrent, where 100s of other people know my IP. Anyway, the RIAA cannot use my IP to incriminate me, because the tags my scrobbler send to them are not proof that I listened to that music because plenty of music is mistagged.
I realize people here may not care for my disregard for my privacy online, but I'd counter that you are insane if you think you actually have privacy on free online sites.
It seems to me like this is one of those situations where someone's feelings got hurt, and they are trying to use the internet to punish the other side. I hate when people do this; if you think you were wronged, act like an adult. From the twitter posts, it seems like Palm's Ambassador is a normal guy who was a bit stressed, and felt he was being pestered. The Pre Dev Camp people should have remained consistent: "During the planning phases of the event we agreed that the community would live and thrive with or without Palm, Inc.'s support or participation. To that end, we assumed we'd get no support from Palm"
I don't see the problem here. It really would be plagiarism to copy paste one of those plots into your paper and claim you generated it yourself.
I think we would need a lawyer for any further analysis, but I never really did think I could just gather a bunch of PDFs from Alpha (e.g. pages of common probability distributions) and claim the compiled book as my own.
Craigslist has the support of the people. Why wouldn't they? It's free, has no ads, and always works as promised. There are no ulterior motives, Craig isn't looking to get wealthy. The government shutting down or censoring Craigslist would be the fast path to a miniature revolt. I don't see any elected official actually doing anything to it.
Besides, it's not like Craigs list has given up its first amendment rights. If they ever wanted to, they could use them in a court of law. My guess is they just wanted to avoid court because it would cut into their already-small profits.
"The article's name is 'Top 10 most disappointing technologies'. Maybe the marketshare of Ubuntu has somewhat lagged behind what people hoped for"
Seems consistent to me...
I wouldn't call Ubuntu a failure (I have it running on my laptop), but it's disappointing that the market share (especially among netbooks) isn't higher.
Yeah, I don't see why they are referring to this as a "server", it's bad PR. No ISP technically lets you run a server, so why would a provider let you run one through their cell towers?
Instead, they should call it a personal data syncing app or something.
You should consider (gently) replying to negative reviews on Amazon with your side of the story, and with a link to the errata. The errata really does make it look like the errors are benign and won't technically mislead the reader. Oh, and make your errata page more professional, moving GIFs are so 1999.
Knowing that a book is still "supported" by the author would really put me at ease that I'm not throwing away 50 dollars.
Why haven't ad providers tried to go to war with adblock? The rules in the main ABP filterset are generally pretty simple, like ad1.* ad2.* etc.
Why not acquire random domains and dynamically create links to the ads on these servers? I could see ABP blocking the first japi1fas6df.com/273849.gif, but not the 1000th. Is there a technical reason why this would be infeasible?
Am I the only one who assumed they are targeting business travelers? 13 dollars is nothing to them, literally - their company pays for it.
Internet on the plane is an awesome concept to the average person, but I think most people will change their mind when it comes down to typing in their credit card number.
How is AI a weapon? To reverse the phrase, people don't kill people, guns do - as long as an AI is not attached to any sort of movable actuator, it shouldn't be able to destroy anything. We already have the power to launch 100 nukes at all the major capital cities with the press of a few buttons, so I don't think a malicious AI *can* be any more of a weapon than a malicious human with the same physical abilities. If we have managed to keep malicious humans away from weapons, we better be able to do the same with AIs.
Wow, 150,000 submissions for 10 million dollars? The value of the time devoted to applying for that money must have been close to the prize money itself. How inefficient.
There are two things I can think of. First, Blizzard can clearly make a lot of profit from Starcraft II, probably with a better profit margin than the industry average. If they can't afford the man-power, they can can afford to hire more people and still make an above-average profit.
Second, the value of the brand will begin decreasing at some point, at least in the US. Starcraft came out ten years ago, and many of its original fans are now in their 30s and won't have time for new games. Blizzard may be losing more and more of these customers every year; now Blizzard needs to convince the next generation of 15 year olds to start playing Starcraft. Problem is, these kids won't regard the Starcraft brand as highly as the previous generation did.
So the difference is that neither one of them really innovates? I don't see the difference. Sure, Apple is good at repackaging things to be pretty and easy-to-use, but that doesn't matter when it comes to chips. In this case, they will *have* to innovate to turn their investments into something useful.
I think this move has more to do with Apple's obsession with controlling everything - they'd like to be a vertical company. It's a risky move, because hardware is a costly industry to enter. Will their recent purchases be worth it? Very possibly, it's an interesting gamble.
While a good start, no good investor depends solely on those numbers. For one thing, those numbers are way too high-level to get an understanding of what's going on inside the company.
For example, if you believe in the next year book sales will go down, kindle sales will go up, movie sales sales will go up, and miscellaneous item sales will go up, you can estimate there sales over the next year if you know details about their costs and relative sales of each category. On the other hand, if you depend on financial statements, you'll have to wait a year, by which time other investors know what you do.
No way that's true, at least in retrospect. The Titanic ended up grossing $1.85 BILLION dollars worldwide on a 200 million dollar budget. My guess is that $1.03 figure either assumes you had an unfavorable investment agreement, or is based on old/incorrect information.
Sure, the Fully Monty has a ridiculous profit:budget ratio (around 75), but that's not the norm. The Titanic's ratio of 9 is still well above average, and its investors almost certainly profited handsomely.
Every time there is a Slashdot article about a tear down with estimate hardware costs, tons of people point out that x% is an appropriate cost, etc. No one is saying otherwise; we can safely assume that Amazon understands the supply/demand curves, has researched the market, and plans on recouping its costs plus some profit - in other words, has priced the Kindle as optimally as it can. But this doesn't mean the tear-down exercise was pointless.
In my opinion, there is plenty of interesting information encoded in what the hardware costs. For one thing, it makes estimating marginal cost much easier, which is useful from a business perspective (if you can estimate manufacturing costs and sales, you can get a good idea of Amazon's revenue and costs - this is important if you are interested in investing in AMZN. Another interesting aspect is the relative cost of individual components. The high relative cost of the screen makes it clear that Amazon greatly values that aspect of the Kindle. We can expect to see further innovation in e-book screens, as competition will pay attention to this. Consumers should also be interested in information about Amazon's costs. If/when competition ramps up, I would expect prices to fall because of their healthy profit margin. And personally, as an electronics geek, I'm fascinated in how these types of devices are put together.
Sweden has 10 million peoeple - 3000 isn't that many. This is like saying "Alaska's secessionist party has 150 more people because Palin lost!" To play a real part in politics they'll need at least 10x as many people.
More importantly, this case is giving the issue a lot of renewed attention. I'm happy about that.
That's what I call a "politician's idea": it sounds good on paper, but would be a failure. Here are the problems: * Electrical cars cost a lot. Someone will pay for them, potentially the cab drivers themselves because NYC fixes cab prices. * Batteries have a limited number of charge cycles, and after a few 100 charges the capacity will be noticeably less. In hybrids this is OK because the gas engine will just work a bit more, but in cabs this will require more frequent charges, and ultimately costly replacements (a new Tesla battery is estimated to be between 10-15,000 dollars). Battery replacements will have an environmental impact. * A battery charge takes several hours (in the best case scenario: there is a charging station that can provide at least 75 watts throughput). If a cab driver exceeds the electrical range early (let's say 200 miles of hauling passengers), he's done for the day. * Batteries take up a lot of trunk space because they have a significantly lower energy density than gasoline. Cabs that go to the airport won't be able to fit much luggage.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see how antitrust is necessary in this case. In the dense suburban area I grew up in, there was only one newspaper my family ever considered - the large, liberal, city newspaper. Our neighbors also only considered one newspaper - the local, conservative newspaper. There were only two newspapers that served out region, and everyone knew which they wanted. There was no true competition.
As I understand it, most of the US is like this. I don't know the history of the industry, and I'm sure there was competition at some point, but I can't think of any cities that are served by multiple large newspapers (and no, I don't count the New York Post!). Perhaps the industry already colluded at a regional level, and now they need to do something similar at a national or international level.
Frankly, I think it's a bit dangerous. I come from a city that has a terrible large newspaper (San Diego Tribune), and it sucks that we don't have more choice. If this happened at a national level, the entire print industry would die in one fell swoop. This "paywall" also sounds dangerous. I already get most of my news for free, and I know the demand for paid news has fallen. Perhaps this last ditch effort indicates the industry is already dead.
Yeah, in the business world that is referred to as "strategy", not "business".
Nothing about what CBS did was a good idea, and I will emphasize here that I am highly critical of them over this fiasco. But your assertion that smart people don't use last.fm is completely wrong and IMO leaning on flamebait - last.fm is made for music lovers, and is arguably the best way to find new music in the world. Collaborative filtering is a powerful thing.
People on Slashdot who were never the target audience of last.fm have no right to tell those of us who are that we shouldn't use it.
I use the service, and will continue to. I, like most other users, publicly let anyone see what I listen to. In fact, that's the main functionality of the service as far as I am concerned (that and the recommendations). I find Last.fm very useful, and hey, it's free. Also, this information was supposedly leaked by people in Last.fm themselves - if so, I get the feeling they feel empowered against CBS from all this; they probably won't let CBS break contracts like this again. CBS has egg on their face.
While I'm uncomfortable with my IP address given out, I don't consider it the biggest breach of confidentiality; IP addresses should not be considered a secret. I visit 100s of sites, and they all know my IP. I use bit torrent, where 100s of other people know my IP. Anyway, the RIAA cannot use my IP to incriminate me, because the tags my scrobbler send to them are not proof that I listened to that music because plenty of music is mistagged.
I realize people here may not care for my disregard for my privacy online, but I'd counter that you are insane if you think you actually have privacy on free online sites.
It seems to me like this is one of those situations where someone's feelings got hurt, and they are trying to use the internet to punish the other side. I hate when people do this; if you think you were wronged, act like an adult. From the twitter posts, it seems like Palm's Ambassador is a normal guy who was a bit stressed, and felt he was being pestered. The Pre Dev Camp people should have remained consistent:
"During the planning phases of the event we agreed that the community would live and thrive with or without Palm, Inc.'s support or participation. To that end, we assumed we'd get no support from Palm"
I don't see the problem here. It really would be plagiarism to copy paste one of those plots into your paper and claim you generated it yourself.
I think we would need a lawyer for any further analysis, but I never really did think I could just gather a bunch of PDFs from Alpha (e.g. pages of common probability distributions) and claim the compiled book as my own.
Craigslist has the support of the people. Why wouldn't they? It's free, has no ads, and always works as promised. There are no ulterior motives, Craig isn't looking to get wealthy. The government shutting down or censoring Craigslist would be the fast path to a miniature revolt. I don't see any elected official actually doing anything to it.
Besides, it's not like Craigs list has given up its first amendment rights. If they ever wanted to, they could use them in a court of law. My guess is they just wanted to avoid court because it would cut into their already-small profits.
"The article's name is 'Top 10 most disappointing technologies'. Maybe the marketshare of Ubuntu has somewhat lagged behind what people hoped for"
Seems consistent to me...
I wouldn't call Ubuntu a failure (I have it running on my laptop), but it's disappointing that the market share (especially among netbooks) isn't higher.
Yeah, I don't see why they are referring to this as a "server", it's bad PR. No ISP technically lets you run a server, so why would a provider let you run one through their cell towers?
Instead, they should call it a personal data syncing app or something.
You should consider (gently) replying to negative reviews on Amazon with your side of the story, and with a link to the errata. The errata really does make it look like the errors are benign and won't technically mislead the reader. Oh, and make your errata page more professional, moving GIFs are so 1999.
Knowing that a book is still "supported" by the author would really put me at ease that I'm not throwing away 50 dollars.
Why haven't ad providers tried to go to war with adblock? The rules in the main ABP filterset are generally pretty simple, like ad1.* ad2.* etc.
Why not acquire random domains and dynamically create links to the ads on these servers? I could see ABP blocking the first japi1fas6df.com/273849.gif, but not the 1000th. Is there a technical reason why this would be infeasible?
Am I the only one who assumed they are targeting business travelers? 13 dollars is nothing to them, literally - their company pays for it.
Internet on the plane is an awesome concept to the average person, but I think most people will change their mind when it comes down to typing in their credit card number.
How is AI a weapon? To reverse the phrase, people don't kill people, guns do - as long as an AI is not attached to any sort of movable actuator, it shouldn't be able to destroy anything. We already have the power to launch 100 nukes at all the major capital cities with the press of a few buttons, so I don't think a malicious AI *can* be any more of a weapon than a malicious human with the same physical abilities. If we have managed to keep malicious humans away from weapons, we better be able to do the same with AIs.
Wow, 150,000 submissions for 10 million dollars? The value of the time devoted to applying for that money must have been close to the prize money itself. How inefficient.
There are two things I can think of. First, Blizzard can clearly make a lot of profit from Starcraft II, probably with a better profit margin than the industry average. If they can't afford the man-power, they can can afford to hire more people and still make an above-average profit.
Second, the value of the brand will begin decreasing at some point, at least in the US. Starcraft came out ten years ago, and many of its original fans are now in their 30s and won't have time for new games. Blizzard may be losing more and more of these customers every year; now Blizzard needs to convince the next generation of 15 year olds to start playing Starcraft. Problem is, these kids won't regard the Starcraft brand as highly as the previous generation did.
So the difference is that neither one of them really innovates? I don't see the difference. Sure, Apple is good at repackaging things to be pretty and easy-to-use, but that doesn't matter when it comes to chips. In this case, they will *have* to innovate to turn their investments into something useful.
I think this move has more to do with Apple's obsession with controlling everything - they'd like to be a vertical company. It's a risky move, because hardware is a costly industry to enter. Will their recent purchases be worth it? Very possibly, it's an interesting gamble.
And it's only 110 dollars!
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.5179
Or a single bad postal employee...
While a good start, no good investor depends solely on those numbers. For one thing, those numbers are way too high-level to get an understanding of what's going on inside the company.
For example, if you believe in the next year book sales will go down, kindle sales will go up, movie sales sales will go up, and miscellaneous item sales will go up, you can estimate there sales over the next year if you know details about their costs and relative sales of each category. On the other hand, if you depend on financial statements, you'll have to wait a year, by which time other investors know what you do.
No way that's true, at least in retrospect. The Titanic ended up grossing $1.85 BILLION dollars worldwide on a 200 million dollar budget. My guess is that $1.03 figure either assumes you had an unfavorable investment agreement, or is based on old/incorrect information.
Sure, the Fully Monty has a ridiculous profit:budget ratio (around 75), but that's not the norm. The Titanic's ratio of 9 is still well above average, and its investors almost certainly profited handsomely.
Every time there is a Slashdot article about a tear down with estimate hardware costs, tons of people point out that x% is an appropriate cost, etc. No one is saying otherwise; we can safely assume that Amazon understands the supply/demand curves, has researched the market, and plans on recouping its costs plus some profit - in other words, has priced the Kindle as optimally as it can. But this doesn't mean the tear-down exercise was pointless.
In my opinion, there is plenty of interesting information encoded in what the hardware costs. For one thing, it makes estimating marginal cost much easier, which is useful from a business perspective (if you can estimate manufacturing costs and sales, you can get a good idea of Amazon's revenue and costs - this is important if you are interested in investing in AMZN. Another interesting aspect is the relative cost of individual components. The high relative cost of the screen makes it clear that Amazon greatly values that aspect of the Kindle. We can expect to see further innovation in e-book screens, as competition will pay attention to this. Consumers should also be interested in information about Amazon's costs. If/when competition ramps up, I would expect prices to fall because of their healthy profit margin. And personally, as an electronics geek, I'm fascinated in how these types of devices are put together.
As others point out, you should learn how to read the summary if you want to complain.
Mods, do your job correctly.
Sweden has 10 million peoeple - 3000 isn't that many. This is like saying "Alaska's secessionist party has 150 more people because Palin lost!" To play a real part in politics they'll need at least 10x as many people.
More importantly, this case is giving the issue a lot of renewed attention. I'm happy about that.
You need to discover San Diego :)
"Make all new taxis run on 100% electric"
That's what I call a "politician's idea": it sounds good on paper, but would be a failure. Here are the problems:
* Electrical cars cost a lot. Someone will pay for them, potentially the cab drivers themselves because NYC fixes cab prices.
* Batteries have a limited number of charge cycles, and after a few 100 charges the capacity will be noticeably less. In hybrids this is OK because the gas engine will just work a bit more, but in cabs this will require more frequent charges, and ultimately costly replacements (a new Tesla battery is estimated to be between 10-15,000 dollars). Battery replacements will have an environmental impact.
* A battery charge takes several hours (in the best case scenario: there is a charging station that can provide at least 75 watts throughput). If a cab driver exceeds the electrical range early (let's say 200 miles of hauling passengers), he's done for the day.
* Batteries take up a lot of trunk space because they have a significantly lower energy density than gasoline. Cabs that go to the airport won't be able to fit much luggage.