If this was true we would have reached stagnation thousands of years ago.
Which part of "in a market" was displayed in chinese on your screen? It's not true of every market, and for 99% of human history, transportation and communication where the primary limiting factors of trade. Some competition even a hundred miles away rarely mattered.
A developer maintaining his company's "half-assed LAMP / WordPress stack pipeline for web and web application development" is considering something more scalable that could eventually be migrated into the cloud
How about replacing it by a less-assed LAMP stack? You know, the answer to a broken wheel is not to sit down and reinvent the wheel. Generally, it is faster, cheaper and smarter to simply get a proper wheel.
I've refactored projects, both successfully and with failure. This is one area where the old estimate rule-of-thumb (take your best guess, double it, then increase the order of magnitude by one, i.e. replace hours by days, days by weeks, weeks by months, etc.) is so absolutely true. If you have a working pipeline, no matter how bad it works, you will dramatically underestimate the effort it takes to rebuild that pipeline on a different technology.
Sometimes it is worth the effort. Typically, not. Replacing wordpress with something non-broken is probably ten times faster and easier than reinventing the whole thing.
Why should that be the responsibility of Netflix, or a cost burden carried by its customers?
Yeah, why should companies have any responsibilities? If I want to produce a car that throws out so much pollution you can't see for a mile around it, shouldn't I be allowed to? And if my children toys sometimes kill a kid, parents can just stop buying them, right? Why should the government interfere with my business and tell me I can't use poisonous paint? It's a free country! And while we're at it, if I want to sell kiddie porn on the street to school children, why can't I? There's demand, there's supply, let the magical invisible hand of the market sort it out! Socialists! They won't allow me to do as I want!
---
Part of living in a society is that there are rules that the society makes that not everyone in it might like. You know, making murder illegal. Generally a good idea, even if sometimes you just really want to kill someone and it's so damn inconvenient you're not allowed to.
Well, guess what, there are rules about doing business. Some are for reasons of safety. Some are for reasons of ethics (disallowing some scammy business methods). And some are for reasons of culture, like this one. You can like it or not, just like murder being illegal, but that is how it is and if you want to be part of this society (i.e. do business in this country), then you follow these rules, period.
Don't like it? Nothing is stopping Netflix from staying out of Europe and leaving the market to local competitors. Of course they won't do it. Never in a thousand years. Europe is a much bigger market with much more people than the USA.
This bullshit comes up every stupid time that US companies are told that actually, you know, Europe is not a state within the USA, and it actually - unbelievable! - has its own laws. How dare they?
Pull out of Europe. PLEASE. Pretty please.
Guess why they don't? Not even if the EU puts a billion Euro (omg, they have their own currency, too!) fine on them for some of the shit they did?
Because if a multinational corporation had to choose between doing business in the USA or Europe, but not both, each and every one of them would rather pull out of the USA. Europe is bigger both in population and market size. Europe has more and better business connections to the rest of the world, especially the fast growing zones. Europe is a more challenging market, but pulling out of it is suicide. If any of the large Internet companies did that, it would be out of business very fast. Google, Facebook, doesn't matter. If there were no Facebook, say, in Europe, how long do you think it would take the 740 million people inside to either bring up a competitor, or move to non-western competitors like VK (from Russia) or Renren (from China)? How long do you think Facebook could compete with a global competitor with more than a billion users, if it had decided to pull out of the European market? If american users had a choice to stay on Facebook, but be isolated from their European friends, or move over to something else and connect with the world?
Please, pretty please, let's have one major international corporation do this stupid suicide move and pull out of Europe, so that we finally don't have to see this asine comment on every fucking story about Europe all the time. And you wonder why the rest of the world thinks that half of America is mentally retarded. Because of stupid comments like that, that's why.
Let's see how fast and to what degree of stability could the EU sustain its own content network without major US backing.
Instantly. We already have local alternatives to many US services. You just never heard of them. Just one example: Here in Germany, Linkedin is known mostly for the stupid spam they send to you all the time, the primary business social network is Xing. And no, it's not a copy of Linkedin, it is even slightly older (by a few months, or if you count when Linkedin became available in german, by 6 years).
You need to get off your high horse. If the USA would be swallowed by the ocean tomorrow, the rest of the world would have replaced everything run from there within a few months.
And what exactly is stopping French/German/Other EU companies from making their own national "Netflix" showing 100% local content?
The inability to compete in a market place where economies of scale are such a massive factor. You cannot compete with Amazon in the online retail space for the same reason you could not compete with Microsoft in the PC Operating System space. It didn't matter if your offer was better, or cheaper, or even both.
You cannot "vote with your wallet" if choices are limited.
There's a lot of bad to be said about Brussels bureaucracy, but this is not one of them. To demand that local content is not crowded out of the market is quite reasonable. Nobody demands that Netflix needs to meet certain sales quotas, simply that local content is available. With that, people now can vote with their wallets - or at least their clicks.
You need to give people a choice before you can talk about free market magic. The main reason Hollywood is so big is not that it's great - I think practically everyone agrees that its storytelling is atrocious, and the formulas used are becoming transparent even for people not interested in writing. All that it has going for it is production value - great special effects and actors and all the other things that you can buy when you are swimming in money. The benefits of a virtual monopoly. Imagine a typical Hollywood movie made with the budget of a typical european movie. It would be such utter crap that you would have to pay people to go and watch it.
The funny thing is that most of Hollywood is finance with european (mostly german) money. But that's another discussion.
We'll all either speak English or Mandarin a century from now
That is total nonsense.
The amount of languages in the world is staggering, and even though a few are dominant, you should take a good look at what peoples first language is. Check out just this WP page and you see that amazingly, the top one hundred native languages all have at least several million native speakers.
Something that several million people share will not disappear very fast. Languages die all the time, but those are languages spoken by a few thousand people from isolated tribes that disappear when the tribes disappear or get assimilated into larger societies.
But you really think that something like the Korean language, with over 70 million native speakers, will disappear anytime soon? That something like the Thai language, which is much older than English, will vanish "a century from now"? You live too much on the english-speaking Internet and too little in the real world.
All the "also-rans"
The dominance of English on the Internet is a historical oddity that is disappearing fast. When I started using computers, I had to learn english even before I had the first english class in school, because everything was in English. Today, in many parts of the world you can go online and use everything that is important in your native language.
should U.S.-based companies be facing "regional quotas" for the content they're offering?
Yes, you moron. You see, as long as your "US-based" company stays in the US, it can do whatever the fuck it wants. But when you do business in other regions of the world, boom, big surprise, suddenly the rules of those regions are a thing. Who could've seen that coming, right?
You mean the chemical weapons that the USA had sold him many years ago to gas the Kurds? Yes, everyone knows about those. But Bush claimed that he had many more and the ability to build as many as he wants. You forgot the nice invention of chem factories built into trucks that Cheney presented to the media as fact?
Saddam denying entry to the UN required weapons inspectors
Wrong. There was some back and forth over those, but eventually they were allowed in and completed their report.
let Saddam gas Iran like he gassed the Kurds in 88?
With the support of the USA? He had already used chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war, also with support of the USA whose primary interest was (still is) to prevent or slow Irans ascent to a regional power that counters Saudia Arabia.
So please, it's not about saving some brown people, especially not when they are unlucky enough to live in an enemy country. You don't buy that bullshit that the propaganda machine throws out, do you?
a) because that is what's written between the lines in TFA. b) nobody said it's a good thing. But isn't it funny how we can't evaluate a decision rationally and need to go to insults and humiliation instead of discussion pro and con?
The sheer ridiculousness of taking net access away from an entire country "for the children" is what's being mocked here, not the technological abilities in Iraq.
So the Internet will be down for one pre-announced day. That's a big inconvenience, granted. But why is it so ridiculous if this is the national exam day where, apparently, basically everyone takes their exam? And why does it have to be ridiculous, stupid and all those terms? Someone made a decision and decided that this is bigger than that. We may disagree (I do as well), but why humiliate and insult?
The US was trying to determine what had happened.
It wasn't clear? That is what you're saying? It wasn't absolutely crystal clear what had happened? Please, except for the question of who was pulling the strings, which is still unanswered to this day, pretty much everything was absolutely clear by the time all four planes were down.
We had no way of knowing that there were NOT more terrorists lined up
And no reasonable assumption to believe that a shutdown of air travel would do anything whatsoever. Grounding all flights that day - absolutely right. I would've also immediately landed all planes in the air, on the assumption that more terrorists are already in the air and will initiate their operation any moment. Grounding all air traffic for a week is a typical politician reaction - whoever decided to open air travel again, if the next day something happens, his career is over. So let's not take the risk. Let's make a thousand additional people die instead because they take the car instead (there've been studies on that).
but seeing as how nothing like that had ever happened before
Happened not, but a similar, even larger, plot was thwarted by US intelligence many years before, so the scenario was known.
But this is not the discussion about 9/11. The point is:
In retrospect, that reaction might not have been warranted
But someone at the time decided that it's the best thing to do, for whatever reason. The same is now true in Iraq.
They are religious nutjobs, grant you that. But if they're so stupid, why exactly are you guys so afraid of them enriching Uranium? At least get your lies lined up, ok?
When I went to school, you would repeat a grade if you failed, but not in the first 4 years, when you were still a small kid and wouldn't understand it. You could also change school if you fail, or are in danger of failing.
Ah, the smell of western arrogance in the morning. Of course if some brown people decide something, it must be stupid.
Or it could simply be that they decided to not engage in an arms race with students, to take no chances (seems these exams are really important to them) and to make sure.
And it's not like the USA wouldn't be known for the same kind of knee-jerk reaction. Like when all air travel was shut down for a week following 9/11. Because... uh, because of what? Anyone seriously thought there were more terrorists lined up for the next day?
Not that I support this shutdown, there's got to be a better way, but to simply assume they're stupid monkey who have not heard of this or that other, incomplete solution is just pure arrogance.
A prank is a physical situation that you cannot immediately escape. It is about your immediate reaction, and typically involves violating boundaries. That is why it is something to be done with care.
A television sketch about a politician, on the other hand, may make that politician uncomfortable, but he is not immediately on the spot and has plenty of opportunity to react rationally. In fact, making him uncomfortable may be the only way to push him into re-thinking his ways. Or a satire about some organisation or public figure may exaggerate in order to make the point and create humor, again crossing the line into discomfort or even humiliation. But again it is targeted at the audience and the victim is not in the headlights with their immediate reaction being national news.
It's a big difference if you get put in a bad place, then calm down and later on are interviewed about it, compared to being put in a bad place and whatever your instinctive first reaction is will be archived for all eternity.
If the person who is the victim of the prank can't laugh about it, then it's not a prank, it's just being an asshole at someone elses expense.
If you don't know that person, you need to be extra careful and the standard should be that pretty much anyone you can imagine would find it funny. Just4Laughs is a good example of a prank show where the people pranked are not humiliated and made to feel awful. A lot of the other prank shit on YouTube is just not funny if you're the slightest bit empathic.
46% drop in phone revenue, slightly better than the 49% drop the quarter before that
So that's a 72% loss in two years. That's not a drop, it's much faster than freefall could accomplish.
The rest of the team is said to join the Microsoft Surface team, and may be tasked with working on an upcoming Surface Phone
from the we-created-a-total-disaster-one-time-lets-try-again department ?
Look, Mickeysoft: You just can't produce phones. You've been trying for 20 long years, and produced nothing but total failures. When the market says no to you so clearly, loudly and consistently, maybe it's time to give up and do something else?
Never met one that didn't tell the world when and where they ran. They're like vegans in that regard. I doubt many of their users will care.
Here.
There are a lot of casual joggers in the world, who don't make it a religion but use an App simply to track or to remind or because they can.
Just like there are a lot of people in the world who sometimes eat a lunch that would qualify as vegan, not because they think anything about vegan food, but simply because their choice of what to eat that day turned out to be so.
I sell stuff online that sometimes gets pirated. I don't whine about it. It's a fact of life. When I find out, I send a friendly takedown notice to the site in question and forget about it. Anyway can't prevent it.
My personal counter at one time was to sell some of my stuff for the price of "what you think its worth". It was a very interesting experience and a lot of people paid well. About half chose the minimum price I had set, the other half spent more, sometimes several times more.
People, in general, aren't as greedy as they are made out to be if you stop treating them like criminals.
That's not true. However, the movie industry is still focussed on box office numbers and blockbuster record breaking numbers to report to the press. Music has recovered from the Napster days in large part thanks to iTunes and its likes, which make buying music online (or directly on your smartphone) so convenient and cheap that there's simply no reason to search for a torrent anymore.
I used to buy a lot of CDs. Then I downloaded a lot of.mp3 and now I'm back to buying a lot of music.
Convenience, immediate availability, a reasonably good search and interface and no DRM. That's how you sell digital content online.
It should be that a person was left in the situation where they could not reach out to other people for help, but instead did this.
You have a thousand people who follow you live and nobody to reach out to? Seriously? If you can kill yourself you can't say "guys, here is something fucked up and I don't know how to handle it, if anyone knows, post me a comment, please" ?
Now, I accept that people in crisis do not (can not) act rationally, but it does make me question the purpose of the whole attention whoring thing that people do with the Internet, if it doesn't give you anything when you need other people most.
The Olympic Games have been political tools since 1956 (a bunch of western countries stayed away from Melbourne, Australia to prosted against Russia) or 1976 (african nations protested against New Zealand by not going to Montreal, Canada) or, of course, the famous 1980 boycott of the Moscow games where most western nations stayed away after pressure from the US government.
The mess is that we, the "good guys" in the west abused the games to make political statements instead of seing them in the spirit they are intended to be, as an opportunity to bridge gaps and meet your enemy in peace, if not friendship.
Sochi is debatable, though you are naive if you think there's no corruption around the games in western countries. However, for thousands of people it was the first time they travelled to Russia, and a wonderful opportunity to peek at least a little bit behind the curtain of propaganda that even our free press creates.
Really, is it so far removed? I'm quite sure that 99% of Amazons revenue is not from diamond rings and yachts. Maybe not from necessities like water, but the exaggeration merely illuminates the point.
Do we want to live in a society where everything depends on money? Are we homo sapiens, or homo economicus?
Slashdot Mirror
If this was true we would have reached stagnation thousands of years ago.
Which part of "in a market" was displayed in chinese on your screen? It's not true of every market, and for 99% of human history, transportation and communication where the primary limiting factors of trade. Some competition even a hundred miles away rarely mattered.
A developer maintaining his company's "half-assed LAMP / WordPress stack pipeline for web and web application development" is considering something more scalable that could eventually be migrated into the cloud
How about replacing it by a less-assed LAMP stack? You know, the answer to a broken wheel is not to sit down and reinvent the wheel. Generally, it is faster, cheaper and smarter to simply get a proper wheel.
I've refactored projects, both successfully and with failure. This is one area where the old estimate rule-of-thumb (take your best guess, double it, then increase the order of magnitude by one, i.e. replace hours by days, days by weeks, weeks by months, etc.) is so absolutely true. If you have a working pipeline, no matter how bad it works, you will dramatically underestimate the effort it takes to rebuild that pipeline on a different technology.
Sometimes it is worth the effort. Typically, not. Replacing wordpress with something non-broken is probably ten times faster and easier than reinventing the whole thing.
Why should that be the responsibility of Netflix, or a cost burden carried by its customers?
Yeah, why should companies have any responsibilities? If I want to produce a car that throws out so much pollution you can't see for a mile around it, shouldn't I be allowed to? And if my children toys sometimes kill a kid, parents can just stop buying them, right? Why should the government interfere with my business and tell me I can't use poisonous paint? It's a free country! And while we're at it, if I want to sell kiddie porn on the street to school children, why can't I? There's demand, there's supply, let the magical invisible hand of the market sort it out! Socialists! They won't allow me to do as I want!
---
Part of living in a society is that there are rules that the society makes that not everyone in it might like. You know, making murder illegal. Generally a good idea, even if sometimes you just really want to kill someone and it's so damn inconvenient you're not allowed to.
Well, guess what, there are rules about doing business. Some are for reasons of safety. Some are for reasons of ethics (disallowing some scammy business methods). And some are for reasons of culture, like this one. You can like it or not, just like murder being illegal, but that is how it is and if you want to be part of this society (i.e. do business in this country), then you follow these rules, period.
Don't like it? Nothing is stopping Netflix from staying out of Europe and leaving the market to local competitors. Of course they won't do it. Never in a thousand years. Europe is a much bigger market with much more people than the USA.
This bullshit comes up every stupid time that US companies are told that actually, you know, Europe is not a state within the USA, and it actually - unbelievable! - has its own laws. How dare they?
Pull out of Europe. PLEASE. Pretty please.
Guess why they don't? Not even if the EU puts a billion Euro (omg, they have their own currency, too!) fine on them for some of the shit they did?
Because if a multinational corporation had to choose between doing business in the USA or Europe, but not both, each and every one of them would rather pull out of the USA. Europe is bigger both in population and market size. Europe has more and better business connections to the rest of the world, especially the fast growing zones. Europe is a more challenging market, but pulling out of it is suicide. If any of the large Internet companies did that, it would be out of business very fast. Google, Facebook, doesn't matter. If there were no Facebook, say, in Europe, how long do you think it would take the 740 million people inside to either bring up a competitor, or move to non-western competitors like VK (from Russia) or Renren (from China)? How long do you think Facebook could compete with a global competitor with more than a billion users, if it had decided to pull out of the European market? If american users had a choice to stay on Facebook, but be isolated from their European friends, or move over to something else and connect with the world?
Please, pretty please, let's have one major international corporation do this stupid suicide move and pull out of Europe, so that we finally don't have to see this asine comment on every fucking story about Europe all the time. And you wonder why the rest of the world thinks that half of America is mentally retarded. Because of stupid comments like that, that's why.
Let's see how fast and to what degree of stability could the EU sustain its own content network without major US backing.
Instantly. We already have local alternatives to many US services. You just never heard of them. Just one example: Here in Germany, Linkedin is known mostly for the stupid spam they send to you all the time, the primary business social network is Xing. And no, it's not a copy of Linkedin, it is even slightly older (by a few months, or if you count when Linkedin became available in german, by 6 years).
You need to get off your high horse. If the USA would be swallowed by the ocean tomorrow, the rest of the world would have replaced everything run from there within a few months.
And what exactly is stopping French/German/Other EU companies from making their own national "Netflix" showing 100% local content?
The inability to compete in a market place where economies of scale are such a massive factor. You cannot compete with Amazon in the online retail space for the same reason you could not compete with Microsoft in the PC Operating System space. It didn't matter if your offer was better, or cheaper, or even both.
You cannot "vote with your wallet" if choices are limited.
There's a lot of bad to be said about Brussels bureaucracy, but this is not one of them. To demand that local content is not crowded out of the market is quite reasonable. Nobody demands that Netflix needs to meet certain sales quotas, simply that local content is available. With that, people now can vote with their wallets - or at least their clicks.
You need to give people a choice before you can talk about free market magic. The main reason Hollywood is so big is not that it's great - I think practically everyone agrees that its storytelling is atrocious, and the formulas used are becoming transparent even for people not interested in writing. All that it has going for it is production value - great special effects and actors and all the other things that you can buy when you are swimming in money. The benefits of a virtual monopoly. Imagine a typical Hollywood movie made with the budget of a typical european movie. It would be such utter crap that you would have to pay people to go and watch it.
The funny thing is that most of Hollywood is finance with european (mostly german) money. But that's another discussion.
We'll all either speak English or Mandarin a century from now
That is total nonsense.
The amount of languages in the world is staggering, and even though a few are dominant, you should take a good look at what peoples first language is. Check out just this WP page and you see that amazingly, the top one hundred native languages all have at least several million native speakers.
Something that several million people share will not disappear very fast. Languages die all the time, but those are languages spoken by a few thousand people from isolated tribes that disappear when the tribes disappear or get assimilated into larger societies.
But you really think that something like the Korean language, with over 70 million native speakers, will disappear anytime soon? That something like the Thai language, which is much older than English, will vanish "a century from now"? You live too much on the english-speaking Internet and too little in the real world.
All the "also-rans"
The dominance of English on the Internet is a historical oddity that is disappearing fast. When I started using computers, I had to learn english even before I had the first english class in school, because everything was in English. Today, in many parts of the world you can go online and use everything that is important in your native language.
should U.S.-based companies be facing "regional quotas" for the content they're offering?
Yes, you moron. You see, as long as your "US-based" company stays in the US, it can do whatever the fuck it wants. But when you do business in other regions of the world, boom, big surprise, suddenly the rules of those regions are a thing. Who could've seen that coming, right?
You mean the chemical weapons that the USA had sold him many years ago to gas the Kurds? Yes, everyone knows about those. But Bush claimed that he had many more and the ability to build as many as he wants. You forgot the nice invention of chem factories built into trucks that Cheney presented to the media as fact?
Saddam denying entry to the UN required weapons inspectors
Wrong. There was some back and forth over those, but eventually they were allowed in and completed their report.
let Saddam gas Iran like he gassed the Kurds in 88?
With the support of the USA? He had already used chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war, also with support of the USA whose primary interest was (still is) to prevent or slow Irans ascent to a regional power that counters Saudia Arabia.
So please, it's not about saving some brown people, especially not when they are unlucky enough to live in an enemy country. You don't buy that bullshit that the propaganda machine throws out, do you?
Ay, my bad. I got that mixed up. Iraq was with invisible WMDs, right.
a) because that is what's written between the lines in TFA.
b) nobody said it's a good thing. But isn't it funny how we can't evaluate a decision rationally and need to go to insults and humiliation instead of discussion pro and con?
The sheer ridiculousness of taking net access away from an entire country "for the children" is what's being mocked here, not the technological abilities in Iraq.
So the Internet will be down for one pre-announced day. That's a big inconvenience, granted. But why is it so ridiculous if this is the national exam day where, apparently, basically everyone takes their exam? And why does it have to be ridiculous, stupid and all those terms? Someone made a decision and decided that this is bigger than that. We may disagree (I do as well), but why humiliate and insult?
The US was trying to determine what had happened.
It wasn't clear? That is what you're saying? It wasn't absolutely crystal clear what had happened? Please, except for the question of who was pulling the strings, which is still unanswered to this day, pretty much everything was absolutely clear by the time all four planes were down.
We had no way of knowing that there were NOT more terrorists lined up
And no reasonable assumption to believe that a shutdown of air travel would do anything whatsoever. Grounding all flights that day - absolutely right. I would've also immediately landed all planes in the air, on the assumption that more terrorists are already in the air and will initiate their operation any moment.
Grounding all air traffic for a week is a typical politician reaction - whoever decided to open air travel again, if the next day something happens, his career is over. So let's not take the risk. Let's make a thousand additional people die instead because they take the car instead (there've been studies on that).
but seeing as how nothing like that had ever happened before
Happened not, but a similar, even larger, plot was thwarted by US intelligence many years before, so the scenario was known.
But this is not the discussion about 9/11. The point is:
In retrospect, that reaction might not have been warranted
But someone at the time decided that it's the best thing to do, for whatever reason. The same is now true in Iraq.
They are religious nutjobs, grant you that. But if they're so stupid, why exactly are you guys so afraid of them enriching Uranium? At least get your lies lined up, ok?
True, stupidity at the highest level.
When I went to school, you would repeat a grade if you failed, but not in the first 4 years, when you were still a small kid and wouldn't understand it. You could also change school if you fail, or are in danger of failing.
Ah, the smell of western arrogance in the morning. Of course if some brown people decide something, it must be stupid.
Or it could simply be that they decided to not engage in an arms race with students, to take no chances (seems these exams are really important to them) and to make sure.
And it's not like the USA wouldn't be known for the same kind of knee-jerk reaction. Like when all air travel was shut down for a week following 9/11. Because... uh, because of what? Anyone seriously thought there were more terrorists lined up for the next day?
Not that I support this shutdown, there's got to be a better way, but to simply assume they're stupid monkey who have not heard of this or that other, incomplete solution is just pure arrogance.
No, you confuse humor with prank.
A prank is a physical situation that you cannot immediately escape. It is about your immediate reaction, and typically involves violating boundaries. That is why it is something to be done with care.
A television sketch about a politician, on the other hand, may make that politician uncomfortable, but he is not immediately on the spot and has plenty of opportunity to react rationally. In fact, making him uncomfortable may be the only way to push him into re-thinking his ways. Or a satire about some organisation or public figure may exaggerate in order to make the point and create humor, again crossing the line into discomfort or even humiliation. But again it is targeted at the audience and the victim is not in the headlights with their immediate reaction being national news.
It's a big difference if you get put in a bad place, then calm down and later on are interviewed about it, compared to being put in a bad place and whatever your instinctive first reaction is will be archived for all eternity.
This.
If the person who is the victim of the prank can't laugh about it, then it's not a prank, it's just being an asshole at someone elses expense.
If you don't know that person, you need to be extra careful and the standard should be that pretty much anyone you can imagine would find it funny. Just4Laughs is a good example of a prank show where the people pranked are not humiliated and made to feel awful. A lot of the other prank shit on YouTube is just not funny if you're the slightest bit empathic.
46% drop in phone revenue, slightly better than the 49% drop the quarter before that
So that's a 72% loss in two years. That's not a drop, it's much faster than freefall could accomplish.
The rest of the team is said to join the Microsoft Surface team, and may be tasked with working on an upcoming Surface Phone
from the we-created-a-total-disaster-one-time-lets-try-again department ?
Look, Mickeysoft: You just can't produce phones. You've been trying for 20 long years, and produced nothing but total failures. When the market says no to you so clearly, loudly and consistently, maybe it's time to give up and do something else?
Never met one that didn't tell the world when and where they ran. They're like vegans in that regard. I doubt many of their users will care.
Here.
There are a lot of casual joggers in the world, who don't make it a religion but use an App simply to track or to remind or because they can.
Just like there are a lot of people in the world who sometimes eat a lunch that would qualify as vegan, not because they think anything about vegan food, but simply because their choice of what to eat that day turned out to be so.
I sell stuff online that sometimes gets pirated. I don't whine about it. It's a fact of life. When I find out, I send a friendly takedown notice to the site in question and forget about it. Anyway can't prevent it.
My personal counter at one time was to sell some of my stuff for the price of "what you think its worth". It was a very interesting experience and a lot of people paid well. About half chose the minimum price I had set, the other half spent more, sometimes several times more.
People, in general, aren't as greedy as they are made out to be if you stop treating them like criminals.
Only rarely a movie is worth even watching.
That's not true. However, the movie industry is still focussed on box office numbers and blockbuster record breaking numbers to report to the press. Music has recovered from the Napster days in large part thanks to iTunes and its likes, which make buying music online (or directly on your smartphone) so convenient and cheap that there's simply no reason to search for a torrent anymore.
I used to buy a lot of CDs. Then I downloaded a lot of .mp3 and now I'm back to buying a lot of music.
Convenience, immediate availability, a reasonably good search and interface and no DRM. That's how you sell digital content online.
It should be that a person
was left in the situation where they could not reach out to other people for help, but instead did this.
You have a thousand people who follow you live and nobody to reach out to? Seriously? If you can kill yourself you can't say "guys, here is something fucked up and I don't know how to handle it, if anyone knows, post me a comment, please" ?
Now, I accept that people in crisis do not (can not) act rationally, but it does make me question the purpose of the whole attention whoring thing that people do with the Internet, if it doesn't give you anything when you need other people most.
The Olympic Games have been political tools since 1956 (a bunch of western countries stayed away from Melbourne, Australia to prosted against Russia) or 1976 (african nations protested against New Zealand by not going to Montreal, Canada) or, of course, the famous 1980 boycott of the Moscow games where most western nations stayed away after pressure from the US government.
The mess is that we, the "good guys" in the west abused the games to make political statements instead of seing them in the spirit they are intended to be, as an opportunity to bridge gaps and meet your enemy in peace, if not friendship.
Sochi is debatable, though you are naive if you think there's no corruption around the games in western countries. However, for thousands of people it was the first time they travelled to Russia, and a wonderful opportunity to peek at least a little bit behind the curtain of propaganda that even our free press creates.
Really, is it so far removed? I'm quite sure that 99% of Amazons revenue is not from diamond rings and yachts. Maybe not from necessities like water, but the exaggeration merely illuminates the point.
Do we want to live in a society where everything depends on money? Are we homo sapiens, or homo economicus?
uh... you can change the Siri voice?