Actually, Microsoft may not be losing all that much money... I did a bit of digging into the sales rankings at Amazon, and what I found is interesting. The Zune is indeed listed as #1 in the category "Portable Digital Media Players". Microsoft has done it: they beat Apple at their own game, they've got a certified hit on their hands... right? OK. Go to "electronics" and sort by sales ranking. The top sellers are now:
1. Kindle. (ok, Amazon, I admit it. I'm impressed.)
2. Canon Powershot A57OIS
3. Apple 4 GB iPod nano silver
4. Garmin nüvi GPS navigator
5. Canon PowerShot A560
6. Apple 8 GB iPod nano black
and so on... iPod classic pops up again at #11, iPod Touch at #18 and 21... Zune comes in at #24. WTF? Likewise, if you head over to bestsellers in the "MP3 player" category, you'll see Apple in the #1,2,3, and the 5,6,7,8,10 spots. #4? SanDisk. #9? #9 is the much-vaunted, reduced-price Zune... What's up? I think that Microsoft is playing one of the oldest tricks in the book, using the "in it's class" qualifier. For instance, you are told that the 2008 Chevrolet Pendejo is the cheapest, best-performing, and bestselling SUV "in it's class." What the ad does not tell you is that the class they're talking about is narrowly defined as the class of SUVs which get 5 miles per gallon, which can't exceed 45mph when going uphill, and which tend to spontaneously combust when making left turns. Tack on enough qualifiers, and ANY piece of crap is the best in it's class. Microsoft has it's Zune classed as a "portable digital media player". Apparently, iPods aren't Portable Digital Media Players, they're MP3 players, and there's some sort of really important difference, so the Zune wins the top slot... in it's class. Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but from what I can tell, this is some sort of scam cooked up by the guys in Microsoft's marketing division. Wow... I mean, I feel I should be pissed at Microsoft, but it's just kind of, well... pathetic.
We finally won't have to deal with malware anymore! The guy has been arrested!
When a farmer wants to get rid of the coyotes, he doesn't shoot them all. He shoots one. Just one. And then leaves it there to rot in his field. Coyotes are pretty smart- they see the dead coyote, realize going on his farm isn't a safe thing to do, and he's often good for the rest of the year.
Yeah, I'm gonna get these guys who say that video games teach people violence. I'm gonna kick a turtle shell at them and then jump on their heads. That'll show 'em.
The summary sounds more like an April Fool's article
Or a troll. About the only way I could see it being more inflammatory is to have the article say, "The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill (H.R. 1955) last month, by a vote of 404 to 6, that says the Internet is a terrorist tool... and so is your mom."
I just don't get it. Damages of $750 dollars for downloading a song? Let's be reasonable. I mean, I hate Celine Dion as much as anyone but I don't think the RIAA should be forced to pay more than $500 for every time I download one of her MP3s.
Speaking as a scientist, and as a sailor with a couple decades worth of experience on the North Pacific, go to hell.
Yeah, science is pretty far from perfect. We scientists can be arrogant, quick to trust our theories and to disregard experience, and we make mistakes. We are, in other words, human. But scientists have also given us vastly improved navigational technology. Radar lets you see where the land is, through darkness, rain, and fog, to avoid hitting coasts and other ships. Loran, and now GPS, gave ships the ability to see precisely where they are. Ship-to-ship radio communication made it possible for ships to radio for help when they were in distress. EPIRBs (emergency position indicating radio beacon) allow ships to send distress calls over a satellite network to the Coast Guard and send precise information on their location.
The end result? Being on the water isn't safe, it never has been, and it never will be. The ocean is an unpredictable and dangerous thing. But thanks to these scientific advances, it's much, much safer today than it was just twenty or thirty years ago.
I can't say for the other countries, but here in Russia most people do not appreciate Kasparov as a politician. That might have something in common with Putin's high approval rating.
How do you know his real approval rating? If he had a low approval rating, would your news be allowed to publicize this?
Zune has occupied the top spot for quite some time. Is this a failure?
That may have more to do with the diversification of Apple's product line than anything. They have the iPod touch, iPod Classic, iPod Nano, iPod Shuffle, the iPhone, etc. Microsoft may sell more of one particular model, but I'm gonna take a wild guess that Apple is still moving a lot more iPods. Out of the top 5 slots, Apple has the next 4. Out of the top 20 media players, 13 are made by Apple.
As for whether the Zune is a failure or not, it's all relative. If the Zune had been made by a small startup, it would be hailed as a potential iPod killer. But it's made by Microsoft, the 500-pound gorilla of the digital world, a company with a lot of bright people and billions of dollars at their disposal. When one of the world's most successful corporations enters a market with all those resources behind them, anything less than runaway success is going to be seen as something of a failure. Even if they do manage to grab a large chunk of the market, the question really becomes, how much money are they spending to do it, and how much profit are they making on each Zune?
God damn scientists, always threatening our existence with their curiosity! First they had to be all clever and go and invent the atomic bomb, and now they're threatening the entire universe. There's only one way to save ourselves. Quick, everyone grab your torches and sharpen your pitch forks! Everyone will meet in the local town or city center at sunset to form a mob, and then proceed to the local observatory!
I played Half-Life 1 and 2 pretty much back-to-back. Half-Life 1 had the best storytelling I've ever seen in a game, but I found Half-Life 2 to be a bit of a disappointment after the first.
I liked the schmuck-in-a-suit aspect of the first one. He's just a nerd with a cool suit and a crowbar, trying to survive. In the second your character takes on all this heroic importance, just like any other game, and the crowbar takes a backseat to more exotic devices like a gravity gun (an awesome weapon from a gaming standpoint, it just didn't work at a dramatic level as well as the crowbar). I also thought the Xen aliens were way cooler than the Combine. They and their world were eery, strange, and oddly beautiful just like you'd expect from interdimensional beings, the Gonarch was thoroughly disgusting, and the Nihilanth evoked a weird mix of fear and pity. The Combine are just like some big multinational (or more accurately, multidimensional) corporation, and Dr. Breen comes across as a sort of malevolent Dr. Phil... equal parts self-help advice and world conquest... the Combine are sort of mundane, rather than really frightening. Yeah, I know they use headcrabs as biological weapons and turn people into stalker-zombies, but somehow I felt that Microsoft at the apex of their power were more terrifying than the Combine. I still enjoy my encounters with the G-man, though. He's a great character- where is he from, who the hell is he, for that matter, *what* is he, and what the hell is his agenda? He's sinister, even Satanic.
My biggest issue is the storytelling. Half-Life 1 didn't tell you what was going on at the beginning, but they fed you the occasional nugget of information that allowed you to slowly piece together what was going on, until you knew the entire story at the end. Half-Life 2 took this too far. All the sudden there's no Xen aliens, the Combine dudes are there instead, and the game was so stingy with information that I found it was impossible, from the gameplay alone, to figure out what the hell had happened. You kind of figured that Gordon would have said, "Uh, hey, WTF?" and asked for an explanation. The graphics are awesome, even beautiful, though.
That might be the funniest piece of BS I've read in a long time. A war was inadvertently started against the consumers, just like Hitler inadvertently started WWII.
You're seriously comparing the Third Reich to the RIAA? I think you're being a little harsh on the Germans there.
However, since our choices are limited to list A of sycophants or list B of sycophants, I'm thinking the college kids have over-valued the vote. We can't elect anyone worth much to the general population, we can't get them impeached when they break the laws, violate the constitution, torture, engage in warmaking, arrest without probable cause, hold people incommunicado without hearings for extended periods of time, make a huge industry out of imprisoning the population for personal choices about what intoxicants they prefer...
I remember a few years back I was talking over a beer with a city council member about politics, and she said something that really struck me: "cynicism is the easy way out".
Changing things for the better is hard. It's so much easier to say the system is broken, to feel sorry for yourself, and bitch and moan about how you don't get what you want, than to actually do anything. By saying we can't change anything, we relieve ourselves of all responsibility for making the world better. Well, life is a series of tough choices and disagreeable options... and then we die. Tough shit. Suck it up and deal.
This cynicism, apathy and fatalism is part of the reason the country is so screwed up today. It's this "it doesn't matter who we vote for, they're all evil" attitude that caused so many people to sit back and not give a shit when Bush ran for office the first time. I think the Bush Administration proves that it very much *does* matter who we vote for. Cynicism is the easy way out. It's so much easier to give up on your ideals than to try to live up to them in the real world.
Having an economist look at Eve Online is an interesting idea, but I question the practical value of studying virtual economies. I mean, does this research really tell us anything about how the prices of Tritanium, cybernetic implants, and frigate-class starships behave in the real world?
but at the same time, ask a roman general 2,000 years ago to consider the existence of jet fighters, air craft carriers, and helicopters and you would get the same level of incredulity as you have now about being in a "magical universe"
which means his problem, and your problem, is that you lack imagination. you're a dullard. you think pointing out that terraforming planets is difficult is a useful comment to make
All the example of the Roman general proves is that it's not a good idea to make predictions, especially about the future. Sure, the Roman general would probably have laughed at you if you told him about a time, two thousand years in the future, where people would travel in horseless carriages, fly through the sky, send words, voices, and moving pictures across the world, and worship a crucified Jew.
On the other hand: where IS my flying car? 50 years ago I'm sure you could find people confidently predicting that in the far-off future of 2007, people would have androids do their chores, live under the sea, and fly to work in that flying car. And of course, it'd all be run on nuclear power. You can't tell me that "lack of imagination" is the reason I don't have my flying car. Flying cars, it turns out, are pretty damn hard to build.
About all we can do is extrapolate from current trends. Ten years from now, I'll be able to buy a faster PC with more memory and hard drive space, my cell phone will be smaller, more organisms will be genetically engineered, and Michael Jackson will be even more freaky. But will AIDS be cured? If I lose my daughter in a terrible accident, can I clone her? Will we solve global warming? Will Duke Nukem Forever be released? The revolutions are hard to predict. Our ignorance makes many possible things seem impossible, and many impossible things, seem possible. Where does terraforming Venus fit in? Hard to say. My gut feeling is that if it ever happens, it will come long after the day we all have flying cars. Of course, I may be forced to eat those words. But if that time ever comes, I will do so gladly- I'll be having too much fun with my flying car to care.
I don't really expect presidential candidates to have a vast wealth of knowledge on the particulars of science, beyond the basics you'd get from a solid liberal arts education. Whether or not Hillary or Giuliani can explain Ohm's Law isn't something I care about. What I really care about is what role the candidate sees science playing in society, and what role the candidate sees the government playing in promoting science education and science research.
Federal support for basic research, in the form of the NSF (National Science Foundation), NIH (National Institutes of Health) and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has helped (along with private industry, which capitalizes on these advances) to make the United States the world leader in scientific research, and I would argue that this has been critical to the economic and military strength of the U.S. over the past fifty years. It was DARPA, a federal agency, that came up with the Internet after all.
But the Bush Administration does not appreciate the importance of science to the continued success of the nation. The current administration has cut the budgets for the NSF and NIH and pushed DARPA away from its basic research mission, even as they spend tens of billions on foolish schemes like missile defense and invading Iraq. And they refuse to listen to science when it doesn't agree with their agendas on issues like climate change or sex education. They're killing the goose that lays the golden egg, refusing to fund the basic research that helps make the country a success while wasting tens of billions of dollars on missile defense, the Iraq war, and tax cuts for people who make $200,000 a year or more. Meanwhile, China has massively expanded its spending on universities and research.
I've talked to one scientist who has expressed anything like support for the Bush administration. One. And I'm a scientist, so I talk to a lot of scientists. I think that's pretty goddamn telling. Admittedly, scientists do tend to be fairly left-wing as a whole, so they'd probably bitch even about a sane, moderate Republican, but Republican or Democrat, I think the next president has to realize that basic research is an investment in the future of our country.
Several universities host ongoing paranormal research, including Princeton University
Actually, see http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/press_release_closing.html. The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory has closed. At any rate, how does the existence of these laboratories say anything? There are places you can go to study Christianity, and Islam and Judiasm, does that mean that obviously there must be something to them?
Use lawyers to coerce people? Just shrewd business!
I think you watch too many movies, personally. The coercion part is what makes it "organized crime", not the means and methods.
Hm, why isn't agressively suing people organized crime? Gee, I don't know... maybe because it's not, you know, criminal to sue people? One might even go so far as to say that using lawyers is legal. Using the law does not necessarily make something right and moral (for instance, the RIAA), but pretty much by definition if you're working through the legitimate processes of the legal system, it's not organized crime.
The organizations that we consider true organized crime- the Sicilian mafia, the Russian mob, Colombian drug cartels, or the Yakuza, all have one thing in common. That's the use of violence and the threat of violence to coerce people. So you can be organized and be criminal- say, get a bunch of corrupt accountants together and embezzle a bunch of money- but nobody would accuse you of really being "organized crime" until your accountants start beating people over the head with their adding machines. Likewise, unless Microsoft execs starting making death threats, and literal ones, not Ballmer's "fucking kill" tirade, I wouldn't consider them organized crime.
26TB == ~5,000 DVD (Single Layer, 4.7GB per) or ~36,000 CD-ROM (700MB per). Are those JPL guys trying to convert to/from metric _again_
Maybe the conversion got screwed up because of the difference between metric Libraries of Congress and Imperial Libraries of Congress? Anyway, the line that impressed me was "The images show features as small as a desk." Who'd have thought, a desk on Mars.
All I can say is, after his performance in 'Hulk', hearing about Eric Bana being cast in anything makes me cringe. Unless he's being cast in to a pit of boiling lava.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Kindle. (ok, Amazon, I admit it. I'm impressed.)
2. Canon Powershot A57OIS
3. Apple 4 GB iPod nano silver
4. Garmin nüvi GPS navigator
5. Canon PowerShot A560
6. Apple 8 GB iPod nano black
and so on... iPod classic pops up again at #11, iPod Touch at #18 and 21... Zune comes in at #24. WTF? Likewise, if you head over to bestsellers in the "MP3 player" category, you'll see Apple in the #1,2,3, and the 5,6,7,8,10 spots. #4? SanDisk. #9? #9 is the much-vaunted, reduced-price Zune... What's up? I think that Microsoft is playing one of the oldest tricks in the book, using the "in it's class" qualifier. For instance, you are told that the 2008 Chevrolet Pendejo is the cheapest, best-performing, and bestselling SUV "in it's class." What the ad does not tell you is that the class they're talking about is narrowly defined as the class of SUVs which get 5 miles per gallon, which can't exceed 45mph when going uphill, and which tend to spontaneously combust when making left turns. Tack on enough qualifiers, and ANY piece of crap is the best in it's class. Microsoft has it's Zune classed as a "portable digital media player". Apparently, iPods aren't Portable Digital Media Players, they're MP3 players, and there's some sort of really important difference, so the Zune wins the top slot... in it's class. Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but from what I can tell, this is some sort of scam cooked up by the guys in Microsoft's marketing division. Wow... I mean, I feel I should be pissed at Microsoft, but it's just kind of, well... pathetic.
References:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/electronics/16009311/ref=pd_ts_pg_1?ie=UTF8&pg=1 http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/electronics/ref=pd_ts_e_bcrm_electronics http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/electronics/172630/ref=pd_ts_e_bcrm_172630
When a farmer wants to get rid of the coyotes, he doesn't shoot them all. He shoots one. Just one. And then leaves it there to rot in his field. Coyotes are pretty smart- they see the dead coyote, realize going on his farm isn't a safe thing to do, and he's often good for the rest of the year.
Yeah, I'm gonna get these guys who say that video games teach people violence. I'm gonna kick a turtle shell at them and then jump on their heads. That'll show 'em.
Or a troll. About the only way I could see it being more inflammatory is to have the article say, "The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill (H.R. 1955) last month, by a vote of 404 to 6, that says the Internet is a terrorist tool... and so is your mom."
The present was so much cooler in the past...
I just don't get it. Damages of $750 dollars for downloading a song? Let's be reasonable. I mean, I hate Celine Dion as much as anyone but I don't think the RIAA should be forced to pay more than $500 for every time I download one of her MP3s.
Well, for example, the Silver Surfer. Offhand, I can't think of any other examples.
Yeah, science is pretty far from perfect. We scientists can be arrogant, quick to trust our theories and to disregard experience, and we make mistakes. We are, in other words, human. But scientists have also given us vastly improved navigational technology. Radar lets you see where the land is, through darkness, rain, and fog, to avoid hitting coasts and other ships. Loran, and now GPS, gave ships the ability to see precisely where they are. Ship-to-ship radio communication made it possible for ships to radio for help when they were in distress. EPIRBs (emergency position indicating radio beacon) allow ships to send distress calls over a satellite network to the Coast Guard and send precise information on their location.
The end result? Being on the water isn't safe, it never has been, and it never will be. The ocean is an unpredictable and dangerous thing. But thanks to these scientific advances, it's much, much safer today than it was just twenty or thirty years ago.
How do you know his real approval rating? If he had a low approval rating, would your news be allowed to publicize this?
That may have more to do with the diversification of Apple's product line than anything. They have the iPod touch, iPod Classic, iPod Nano, iPod Shuffle, the iPhone, etc. Microsoft may sell more of one particular model, but I'm gonna take a wild guess that Apple is still moving a lot more iPods. Out of the top 5 slots, Apple has the next 4. Out of the top 20 media players, 13 are made by Apple.
As for whether the Zune is a failure or not, it's all relative. If the Zune had been made by a small startup, it would be hailed as a potential iPod killer. But it's made by Microsoft, the 500-pound gorilla of the digital world, a company with a lot of bright people and billions of dollars at their disposal. When one of the world's most successful corporations enters a market with all those resources behind them, anything less than runaway success is going to be seen as something of a failure. Even if they do manage to grab a large chunk of the market, the question really becomes, how much money are they spending to do it, and how much profit are they making on each Zune?
God damn scientists, always threatening our existence with their curiosity! First they had to be all clever and go and invent the atomic bomb, and now they're threatening the entire universe. There's only one way to save ourselves. Quick, everyone grab your torches and sharpen your pitch forks! Everyone will meet in the local town or city center at sunset to form a mob, and then proceed to the local observatory!
I liked the schmuck-in-a-suit aspect of the first one. He's just a nerd with a cool suit and a crowbar, trying to survive. In the second your character takes on all this heroic importance, just like any other game, and the crowbar takes a backseat to more exotic devices like a gravity gun (an awesome weapon from a gaming standpoint, it just didn't work at a dramatic level as well as the crowbar). I also thought the Xen aliens were way cooler than the Combine. They and their world were eery, strange, and oddly beautiful just like you'd expect from interdimensional beings, the Gonarch was thoroughly disgusting, and the Nihilanth evoked a weird mix of fear and pity. The Combine are just like some big multinational (or more accurately, multidimensional) corporation, and Dr. Breen comes across as a sort of malevolent Dr. Phil... equal parts self-help advice and world conquest... the Combine are sort of mundane, rather than really frightening. Yeah, I know they use headcrabs as biological weapons and turn people into stalker-zombies, but somehow I felt that Microsoft at the apex of their power were more terrifying than the Combine. I still enjoy my encounters with the G-man, though. He's a great character- where is he from, who the hell is he, for that matter, *what* is he, and what the hell is his agenda? He's sinister, even Satanic.
My biggest issue is the storytelling. Half-Life 1 didn't tell you what was going on at the beginning, but they fed you the occasional nugget of information that allowed you to slowly piece together what was going on, until you knew the entire story at the end. Half-Life 2 took this too far. All the sudden there's no Xen aliens, the Combine dudes are there instead, and the game was so stingy with information that I found it was impossible, from the gameplay alone, to figure out what the hell had happened. You kind of figured that Gordon would have said, "Uh, hey, WTF?" and asked for an explanation. The graphics are awesome, even beautiful, though.
You're seriously comparing the Third Reich to the RIAA? I think you're being a little harsh on the Germans there.
I remember a few years back I was talking over a beer with a city council member about politics, and she said something that really struck me: "cynicism is the easy way out".
Changing things for the better is hard. It's so much easier to say the system is broken, to feel sorry for yourself, and bitch and moan about how you don't get what you want, than to actually do anything. By saying we can't change anything, we relieve ourselves of all responsibility for making the world better. Well, life is a series of tough choices and disagreeable options... and then we die. Tough shit. Suck it up and deal.
This cynicism, apathy and fatalism is part of the reason the country is so screwed up today. It's this "it doesn't matter who we vote for, they're all evil" attitude that caused so many people to sit back and not give a shit when Bush ran for office the first time. I think the Bush Administration proves that it very much *does* matter who we vote for. Cynicism is the easy way out. It's so much easier to give up on your ideals than to try to live up to them in the real world.
Having an economist look at Eve Online is an interesting idea, but I question the practical value of studying virtual economies. I mean, does this research really tell us anything about how the prices of Tritanium, cybernetic implants, and frigate-class starships behave in the real world?
All the example of the Roman general proves is that it's not a good idea to make predictions, especially about the future. Sure, the Roman general would probably have laughed at you if you told him about a time, two thousand years in the future, where people would travel in horseless carriages, fly through the sky, send words, voices, and moving pictures across the world, and worship a crucified Jew.
On the other hand: where IS my flying car? 50 years ago I'm sure you could find people confidently predicting that in the far-off future of 2007, people would have androids do their chores, live under the sea, and fly to work in that flying car. And of course, it'd all be run on nuclear power. You can't tell me that "lack of imagination" is the reason I don't have my flying car. Flying cars, it turns out, are pretty damn hard to build.
About all we can do is extrapolate from current trends. Ten years from now, I'll be able to buy a faster PC with more memory and hard drive space, my cell phone will be smaller, more organisms will be genetically engineered, and Michael Jackson will be even more freaky. But will AIDS be cured? If I lose my daughter in a terrible accident, can I clone her? Will we solve global warming? Will Duke Nukem Forever be released? The revolutions are hard to predict. Our ignorance makes many possible things seem impossible, and many impossible things, seem possible. Where does terraforming Venus fit in? Hard to say. My gut feeling is that if it ever happens, it will come long after the day we all have flying cars. Of course, I may be forced to eat those words. But if that time ever comes, I will do so gladly- I'll be having too much fun with my flying car to care.
Yes, cash seems like a good option, but the problem is that Seagate defines the dollar as having 93 cents.
BURNS: Why is that man in pink?!
SMITHERS: Oh, that's Homer Simpson, sir. He's one of your boobs from Sector 7-G.
BURNS: Simpson, eh? Well, judging by his outlandish attire, he's some sort of free-thinking anarchist!
SMITHERS: I'll call security, sir.
BURNS: Excellent. Yes, these color monitors have already paid for themselves...
Oh, sure, sure. Your company screws up, blame the Polish. Bunch of racists.
Federal support for basic research, in the form of the NSF (National Science Foundation), NIH (National Institutes of Health) and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has helped (along with private industry, which capitalizes on these advances) to make the United States the world leader in scientific research, and I would argue that this has been critical to the economic and military strength of the U.S. over the past fifty years. It was DARPA, a federal agency, that came up with the Internet after all.
But the Bush Administration does not appreciate the importance of science to the continued success of the nation. The current administration has cut the budgets for the NSF and NIH and pushed DARPA away from its basic research mission, even as they spend tens of billions on foolish schemes like missile defense and invading Iraq. And they refuse to listen to science when it doesn't agree with their agendas on issues like climate change or sex education. They're killing the goose that lays the golden egg, refusing to fund the basic research that helps make the country a success while wasting tens of billions of dollars on missile defense, the Iraq war, and tax cuts for people who make $200,000 a year or more. Meanwhile, China has massively expanded its spending on universities and research.
I've talked to one scientist who has expressed anything like support for the Bush administration. One. And I'm a scientist, so I talk to a lot of scientists. I think that's pretty goddamn telling. Admittedly, scientists do tend to be fairly left-wing as a whole, so they'd probably bitch even about a sane, moderate Republican, but Republican or Democrat, I think the next president has to realize that basic research is an investment in the future of our country.
Actually, see http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/press_release_closing.html. The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory has closed. At any rate, how does the existence of these laboratories say anything? There are places you can go to study Christianity, and Islam and Judiasm, does that mean that obviously there must be something to them?
Hm, why isn't agressively suing people organized crime? Gee, I don't know... maybe because it's not, you know, criminal to sue people? One might even go so far as to say that using lawyers is legal. Using the law does not necessarily make something right and moral (for instance, the RIAA), but pretty much by definition if you're working through the legitimate processes of the legal system, it's not organized crime.
The organizations that we consider true organized crime- the Sicilian mafia, the Russian mob, Colombian drug cartels, or the Yakuza, all have one thing in common. That's the use of violence and the threat of violence to coerce people. So you can be organized and be criminal- say, get a bunch of corrupt accountants together and embezzle a bunch of money- but nobody would accuse you of really being "organized crime" until your accountants start beating people over the head with their adding machines. Likewise, unless Microsoft execs starting making death threats, and literal ones, not Ballmer's "fucking kill" tirade, I wouldn't consider them organized crime.
Maybe the conversion got screwed up because of the difference between metric Libraries of Congress and Imperial Libraries of Congress? Anyway, the line that impressed me was "The images show features as small as a desk." Who'd have thought, a desk on Mars.
All I can say is, after his performance in 'Hulk', hearing about Eric Bana being cast in anything makes me cringe. Unless he's being cast in to a pit of boiling lava.