That's why I put "DRM" in quotes.Did you not notice this? Their DRM comes part and parcel with the platform for better and for worse.
The point here is that Steam is providing value to it's customers while taking away something they don't care about. If I give you something worth $2 dollars, and take away something worth $1, do you want that deal? How about if I take something worth $1, and give you nothing? Would you want that deal? If you can understand the difference in these two propositions you can understand why Steam is popular, and other publisher's DRM draws so much ire. Otherwise, like I said, you're being intentionally obtuse. If you don't like Steam's DRM, factor that into valuation of the purchase. If the cost outweighs the benefit, you know what to do.
This is ostensibly the model for the accounting industry. The best opportunities in accounting start in public accounting where they have 60 hour minimums, but it is rare to work the minimum, most work more than 60, ranging past 100 hours a week.
But these jobs provide guaranteed, rapid advancement relative to private accounting which has uncertain, and potentially slower advancement. Thus the industry has had a stable stream of fodder, allowing these companies to survive for literally centuries.
Not having Steam's "DRM" is a negative point for me when I look at a game. Thankfully Steam allows me to add non-steam games into the library for my tracking, but I still can't delete, install, and re-patch them through Steam's "DRM". They also don't come with the Steam overlay. To be clear, I/want/ all of my games to have Steam's "DRM".
If you don't understand why people like "DRM" that is providing clear benefits to them, but hate "DRM" that does nothing but provide clear detriment to them, you're just being intentionally obtuse. If you care about the risk of losing old games 10-15 years from now when Valve could theoretically lose both it's tremendous profits and the mountain of capital it has built up, and suddenly go out of business in a short period of time before releasing a rescue patch, that's fine. I don't pretend that risk doesn't exist, I've fully considered it, and I've decided I don't care about it. Steam has reduced game prices in the market so dramatically so that my purchasing concerns have more to do with time than with price. I can't play all the new games I want to play, I'm really not worried about being able to play the games I've already played.
You earn it by withholding it from the people who do the work.
By far the biggest misconception about the economy is that it is a zero sum game, and therefore if someone gets rich, it must be because others are getting poorer. The real world doesn't work like that. Most people that get rich do so by creating opportunities that pull lots of other people up with them. Microsoft made Bill Gates a billionaire, but also created more than 2,000 millionaires and good salaries for tens of thousands more.
If your theory was right, third world countries, with very few billionaires keeping them down, would all be wealthy.
The GP post indicts the rich by claiming their riches were acquired at the detriment of the wider public.
"Causes of deadweight loss can include monopoly pricing (in the case of artificial scarcity), externalities, taxes or subsidies, and binding price ceilings or floors (including minimum wages). The term deadweight loss may also be referred to as the "excess burden" of monopoly or taxation."
I don't dispute that the economy is not a zero sum game. I'm just saying that Microsoft is a poor way to exemplify this since this rise had been due to anticompetitive practices which effectively give to the rich, and take from the poor, showing qualities of a zero sum game. Particularly since prior to the rise of Microsoft, there had been a wealth of competition in these markets, and these anticompetitive practices may have significantly slowed technological progress on a global scale through the ill-gotten network effects accrued to their monopoly.
A simpler example would be a successful small business owner, who saw a gap to be filled in his local market, started a business, and grew both his own wealth and added job opportunities within his company and satellite franchises.
To continue from my previous post, Specifically, it's stuff like this thatscares me about the future:
"According to the 2012 report published by the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI), the average savings by age group are as follows:
Workers younger than 35 have an average of $6,000 in savings
Individuals between 35 and 44 have about $22,500
Workers between the ages of 45 and 54 have slightly less than $44,000
Those aged 55 and 64 (the baby boomers), have saved around $65,000
People over the age of 65 have about $56,000"
Someone please tell me that these statistics are exaggerating the problem and that I don't have the proper context for this issue.
I'm lucky to be able to save enough to fund a comfortable retirement in my old age. But I really do wonder what life will look like when I hit retirement age. Successful retirement depends a lot on compound interest and consistent contribution over very long periods of time.
With so much of the country today living paycheck-to-paycheck, or with hardly any savings, time is running out for them to save for their retirement, and the longer they wait the harder it gets. What happens to the savers when the majority of the population hasn't saved?
I don't want to be unnecessarily alarmist, but wouldn't that future require either: 1) millions and millions of homeless retirees dying on the streets of American or 2) a catastrophically large expansion of welfare far above current levels to cover an unfunded generation?
There are no hard and fast rules about consistency for Non-GAAP presentation. However, a company cannot play games claiming that a loss they're backing out is non-recurring, when in fact, it is recurring. In such a case, that Non-GAAP presentation is not clarifying results for the investor, but is actively misleading the investor, and the SEC will nail that company to the wall for it when they see the same "non-recurring" items getting backed out repeatedly.
Changing the presentation or formula isn't forbidden, but the whole purpose of Regulation G was to allow companies to publish Non-GAAP figures in a way that gives the investor more insight, more useful information from the perspective of management. For Non-GAAP figures, the company is required to show a comparison to the closest available GAAP figure, and show a reconciliation between them to highlight the differences. It's up to the investor to decide if that Non-GAAP presentation is what they want to use to make their buy/sell decisions.
Announcing Non-GAAP numbers isn't unusual. It's important to note that this isn't their 10-Q quarterly filing, but simply an 8-K earnings release. Just a communication with the public rather than an official report, and the role of the auditor with respect to these earnings releases is to simply ensure that management can show how the figures shown can be traced back to the records from which they produce the quarterly filing. However it should be noted that quarterly reports are only/reviewed/ by auditors, and not audited by auditors. There is a dramatic difference in the level of work that auditors perform on quarterly results, and that is why quarterly reports are required to include the auditor's letter which includes this disclaim and explanation of the difference between a review and an audit.
With that said, non-GAAP numbers are part of management's communication with investors. Companies usually have some idea of the key factors that investors are looking for in their company. Management use earnings releases to highlight the numbers that investors care about. Some just want steady flows of dividends, some want large R&D outflows for future growth, some want strong cash flow, etc. Non-GAAP numbers help present their financials in the form that investors want to read them. Normally, investors will just take GAAP numbers and then just recalculate the Non-GAAP numbers anyway. For example, a GAAP net loss due to large and clearly one-time losses doesn't tell you much about the performance of the company's "normal" operations during that quarter, so financial firms will just read the report, and then back those one-time losses out to arrive at a non-GAAP net income/loss. Thus, management reports non-GAAP figures to save their investors the trouble of doing this so that they have something to look at when they conduct their earnings call. Management should always provide an explanation of how these figures were derived so that they can be reconciled back to GAAP figures or else they have no meaning.
I have had an HTC incredible for about 2 years now, I'm out of contract. Worked perfectly up until the last over-the-air update from Verizon a few months ago managed to screw over the Camera so that it sometimes reboots after taking a picture. I'm not certain of who's to blame for that update, but I'm thinking Verizon.
Otherwise, I like my phone, I'd buy HTC again. In the meantime I'm still going to use this phone for a few more years.
You two are discussing things from different perspectives. You would put a battery in your pocket and a cord to your glasses. Such a device has already existed for years, for power nerds like us who would be willing to wear such a horrible thing.
The AC is talking about the mass-market which would fiercely resent glasses corded to a phone. Whether or not you think that's consistent with the temporary use of earbuds for music/conversation is irrelevant, the mass-market will not accept glasses corded to phones right now.
I personally wish tablets were fully functioning phones (not just the cobbled-together VOIP solutions). I want to just use a bluetooth headset to interact with the call functionality, and only take the tablet out of my bag when I want to interact with the screen. It's more practical to interact with a tablet-size screen than a tiny smartphone screen. But clearly my opinion doesn't make for a market, and thus there's no product catering to me(mostly because most men don't carry shoulder bags everywhere they go a.k.a man purses).
The $1,500 is the price for developers. It's a high price because they don't want casual parties to be purchasing this limited run, they want committed developers to make apps. They are aware that there's no app market for these (because this is the first in it's market).
You can touch the outside rim of the glasses to manipulate menus. I imagine this is limited to just directional scrolling.
IIRC, it requires a phone with a data connection for most of it's features. I'm guessing that a lot of work is just going to be offloaded to the phone entirely. A lot of people are imagining some crazy always-on life-changing gadget, but given that these are just glasses, and that battery capacity hasn't improved dramatically in the last couple of years, I'm going to guess that these imagined features aren't going to happen.
Similarly, the always-on surveillance distopia that people are freaking out about is also not going to happen for the same reason. There just isn't enough battery power to just record everything, all the time. Especially if you want to do anything else with them in the meantime.
The Metro startmenu isn't a toggle-able feature within the OS, you need to download the windows 7 start menu from third-party sources(just google: "windows 7 start menu windows 8" and pick any of the links there). The regular windows look like windows 7, and you can turn off the transparency "glass" stuff introduced in Vista, but to get the exact look of XP or earlier, you might need to patch that in as well. In terms of functionality, Windows 8 works exactly like Windows 7 aside from the start menu.
There ARE other differences between Windows 7 and Windows 8, and though they're all improvements, none of them are noteworthy and certainly don't merit upgrading for. (Faster boot, automatic optimization for SSD drives, picture lockscreens, a lot of under-the-hood optimization and security fixes, etc. insignificant improvements).
That's their point. Why link to fox news when you could link to a credible news source? Might as well just link to your crazy uncle's tumblr blog, he could use the hits.
"Sure, there would be some firing that could not be stopped, but we'd be able to inactivate most of the artillery within hours."
That right there is the problem. During those hours of free-firing artilery on densely populated urban areas, innocent people are going to die in droves. Families will be cut to pieces or wiped out entirely. Nobody is disputing that the loss rate will be ridiculously lopsided in our favor, or that the war would be over incredibly quickly.
But the reality is that there will still be a tremendous loss of life. American lives have value, South Korean lives have value, and even North Korean lives have value. War is fucking terrible and we should never forget that. If it's possible to find a way to avoid bloodshed, we should do so.
The more convincing argument would be whether a war is a greater threat to lives than Kim Jong-Un starving his people to death. If fewer people would die in the long-term from having a war to out this dictator, I'd support it.
"How about this, the US has had nuclear weapons longer than any other nation and has not used them in warfare in 60 years?"
Jeezus, that just raises the question of, "what was the only situation in which nuclear weapons were used in warfare ever?"...doesn't help your point any.
What you should be pointing out instead, is that the US has led all nuclear disarmament talks, and has achieved a dramatic decrease in nuclear arms worldwide, and shown interest in continuing this trend.
The only change is to the start menu, the rest of the interface is the same. Install the windows 7 start menu if you like, or XP if you prefer.
I stopped using the start menu back in XP anyway so I left the default on. In fact, the "run" menu has improved slightly in windows 8. Instead of hitting Win+R to type out the exact program I want to launch, I just hit Win and then type out the first few letters of the program and it'll search out matching programs. Slightly faster.
Basically the main fault with windows 8 is only for people really attached to the start menu. But it's replaceable. Don't upgrade if you're on windows 7 already, but don't downgrade if you've got windows 8 for free.
for anyone wondering about the answer to this theoretical scenario:
There is potentially a net gain in this nonmonetary exchange of goods. It falls under barter exchange rules and is reportable on a 1040 form (since the dessert cups don't qualify for section 1031 like-kind treatment, it doesn't get tax-deferred treatment).
Do you know WHY these kids are taxed? There's a good reason. 1) The kids don't owe taxes if their personal exemption is greater than their income, and in virtually all cases, kids don't make enough money to owe tax. Because this exemption covers so much, we go about our lives not worrying about if our kids pay taxes. It's practical that way. HOWEVER, kids are still subject to tax laws to avoid people abusing a "Kid" loophole. See 2.
2) The reason WHY they have to pay tax is so that parents can't operate their business through their kid. If kids aren't taxable, then parents just put their kid's name on everything and then never pay any taxes. Maybe have another kid when the first one gets old enough to be taxable. Not taxing kids leads to screwed up incentive structures like this one. There are knock-on effects to consider in how tax laws get formed and that's part of why they get so ridiculously complex.
If Google successfully defends this case, then perhaps I can offer free lunch to my employees and reduce their pay. That way I'll be giving them a form of compensation that they won't have to pay income taxes on. I already provide life insurance coverage up to $50k tax free, and health insurance coverage as a means of compensating them without them having to pay taxes on the compensation.
Dollar for dollar I can compensate employees more efficiently with these other benefits $1 worth of health insurance coverage provides $1 worth of health insurance coverage compensation but $1 of salary may only buy $0.80 of salary compensation after-tax. The government wants me to provide these benefits to employees anyway, that's why they don't tax these forms of benefits.
If free lunch is found to be explicitly non-taxable compensation, companies are going to provide lower salaries and free lunch. Likely not a full reduction by the cost of the food because you'd have to adjust for the cost of having reduced choice, but a reduction all the same.
The amount of resources marshalled to enable interstellar travel implies mastery of forces that can obliterate human civilization in a single blow. If aliens wanted to kill us, there wouldn't be a war. They could just accelerate a big rock at us and obliterate all civilization in a single strike, regardless of how big our military is.
Generally speaking, destruction is easier than construction. It takes a lot of effort to assemble castles out of chaos, but a good thwack in the right places is all it takes to bring it all down back into chaos. It's just moving with entropy vs. moving against it.
I'm not a watch owner, and despite owning a smart phone, I want a watch.
1) As the new father of a five-month old, I've found that when out and about, typically one or both of my hands are occupied with a baby carrier, car seat, shopping bag, my son, whatever it may be. I hadn't noticed it before, but there is definitely utility to be found in being able to check the time without needing one of your hands.
2) Getting to your phone can take a few moments. It may require standing up to pull it out of a pants pocket, unslinging my shoulderbag and unzipping a pocket, undoing a wintercoat to access an inner pocket, etc. These are not onerous obstacles, but there is still opportunity for efficiency to be gained here.
3) It's an accessory, one of the few afforded to men in the traditional office environment. As silly as it might seem to you or I, there are other people who interpret the attention paid to your personal appearance as a signal for the attention you pay to your professional work. There's little to lose by dressing up a little.
4) Skeleton watches are fuckin' cool. Seeing those gears move, and thinking about the complexity and craft behind those movements tickles my inner nerd pretty fiercely. It'll be tricky finding one that looks tasteful enough to incorporate into an everyday appearance though.
But as I've mentioned, I don't own a watch. Never have. Perhaps once I do have one I'll find watches to be just as uncomfortable as you do.
But returning to the topic at hand...I'm totally uninterested in this "smartwatch". I'm just not in the target demographic. Seems to be most useful to those who constantly check their phones for updates on something.
Further to the above, I'd like to add that there is a growing population of dads in the gamer population, whose tastes in games are shifting along with the change in their lifestyle.
Some quit games entirely, while others make do with a half-hour here, or an hour there between their other responsibilities and demands for attention. A squalling baby doesn't give a damn if you only need 2 more kills for the next killstreak bonus, you're going AFK then and there, and you get to come back an hour later hoping that the team managed to carry the rest of the round to victory without you. After a while you stop bothering with multiplayer rounds you can't finish, and switch to singleplayer games that you can pause and come back to at any time.
Better yet, singleplayer games paced such that rewards and interesting events are doled out in 20-30minute increments so that the brief periods during which you can play will include some veneer of progress. I don't have the time to grind out 40 hours for a sword that makes a slightly higher number on the screen. I need to get an upgrade or make it to the next checkpoint within 30 minutes or I'll have to stop feeling unsatisfied. As the population of gamers in similar situations grows, the volume of games catering to our interests will follow.
Yes they can fire a nuclear warhead on a rocket, but only on short-range missiles that can hit SK and Japan(I think). They have bigger rockets that can't fit a nuclear warhead and pisspoor accuracy and long launch-lead times.
Their nuclear capability is thought to be quite weak, weaker than even the explosions in Japan in WW2. The small blast radius coupled with low accuracy means that the scarier threat is a massive amount of conventional artillery aimed at Seoul which can't be intercepted before they tear that highly populated city to pieces with shells at the outset of any conflict. Basically they're the hostage, and NK is pointing a gun at their head.
So while NK is assured to lose any kind of military conflict, they'll kill tens of thousands of innocent civilians in the first few hours, which makes a war with NK just as unpalatable as any other war, even though we have such a dramatic military superiority.
Giantbomb doesn't take money for video game reviews. It was founded by a guy who was fired for giving a bad review, and the fellow reviewers who left with him.
They review games they think are interesting or their community is interested in, if they aren't sent a review copy, they'll just go buy one at retail after release. They know they can't cover everything, so if a gaming company wants to "pressure them", they'll just buy their own copy to review. They know that means they won't have a review on launch day, and they're explicitly ok with that.
IIRC, it costs about $1k/yr to operate an offshore shell company, and only took about 30min on the phone to setup. My memory sucks though, so listen to the actual podcast where they report the details of their experience of setting up 2 shell companies for their report: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/07/27/157421340/how-to-set-up-an-offshore-company
Slashdot Mirror
That's why I put "DRM" in quotes.Did you not notice this? Their DRM comes part and parcel with the platform for better and for worse.
The point here is that Steam is providing value to it's customers while taking away something they don't care about. If I give you something worth $2 dollars, and take away something worth $1, do you want that deal? How about if I take something worth $1, and give you nothing? Would you want that deal? If you can understand the difference in these two propositions you can understand why Steam is popular, and other publisher's DRM draws so much ire. Otherwise, like I said, you're being intentionally obtuse. If you don't like Steam's DRM, factor that into valuation of the purchase. If the cost outweighs the benefit, you know what to do.
This is ostensibly the model for the accounting industry. The best opportunities in accounting start in public accounting where they have 60 hour minimums, but it is rare to work the minimum, most work more than 60, ranging past 100 hours a week.
But these jobs provide guaranteed, rapid advancement relative to private accounting which has uncertain, and potentially slower advancement. Thus the industry has had a stable stream of fodder, allowing these companies to survive for literally centuries.
OP is correct.
Not having Steam's "DRM" is a negative point for me when I look at a game. Thankfully Steam allows me to add non-steam games into the library for my tracking, but I still can't delete, install, and re-patch them through Steam's "DRM". They also don't come with the Steam overlay. To be clear, I /want/ all of my games to have Steam's "DRM".
If you don't understand why people like "DRM" that is providing clear benefits to them, but hate "DRM" that does nothing but provide clear detriment to them, you're just being intentionally obtuse. If you care about the risk of losing old games 10-15 years from now when Valve could theoretically lose both it's tremendous profits and the mountain of capital it has built up, and suddenly go out of business in a short period of time before releasing a rescue patch, that's fine. I don't pretend that risk doesn't exist, I've fully considered it, and I've decided I don't care about it. Steam has reduced game prices in the market so dramatically so that my purchasing concerns have more to do with time than with price. I can't play all the new games I want to play, I'm really not worried about being able to play the games I've already played.
You earn it by withholding it from the people who do the work.
By far the biggest misconception about the economy is that it is a zero sum game, and therefore if someone gets rich, it must be because others are getting poorer. The real world doesn't work like that. Most people that get rich do so by creating opportunities that pull lots of other people up with them. Microsoft made Bill Gates a billionaire, but also created more than 2,000 millionaires and good salaries for tens of thousands more.
If your theory was right, third world countries, with very few billionaires keeping them down, would all be wealthy.
The GP post indicts the rich by claiming their riches were acquired at the detriment of the wider public.
You replied to the GP by citing those who had been convicted of anti-competitive practices, i.e generating Deadweight Loss: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss
"Causes of deadweight loss can include monopoly pricing (in the case of artificial scarcity), externalities, taxes or subsidies, and binding price ceilings or floors (including minimum wages). The term deadweight loss may also be referred to as the "excess burden" of monopoly or taxation."
I don't dispute that the economy is not a zero sum game. I'm just saying that Microsoft is a poor way to exemplify this since this rise had been due to anticompetitive practices which effectively give to the rich, and take from the poor, showing qualities of a zero sum game. Particularly since prior to the rise of Microsoft, there had been a wealth of competition in these markets, and these anticompetitive practices may have significantly slowed technological progress on a global scale through the ill-gotten network effects accrued to their monopoly.
A simpler example would be a successful small business owner, who saw a gap to be filled in his local market, started a business, and grew both his own wealth and added job opportunities within his company and satellite franchises.
To continue from my previous post, Specifically, it's stuff like this thatscares me about the future:
"According to the 2012 report published by the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI), the average savings by age group are as follows:
Workers younger than 35 have an average of $6,000 in savings
Individuals between 35 and 44 have about $22,500
Workers between the ages of 45 and 54 have slightly less than $44,000
Those aged 55 and 64 (the baby boomers), have saved around $65,000
People over the age of 65 have about $56,000"
Someone please tell me that these statistics are exaggerating the problem and that I don't have the proper context for this issue.
I'm lucky to be able to save enough to fund a comfortable retirement in my old age. But I really do wonder what life will look like when I hit retirement age. Successful retirement depends a lot on compound interest and consistent contribution over very long periods of time.
With so much of the country today living paycheck-to-paycheck, or with hardly any savings, time is running out for them to save for their retirement, and the longer they wait the harder it gets. What happens to the savers when the majority of the population hasn't saved?
I don't want to be unnecessarily alarmist, but wouldn't that future require either: 1) millions and millions of homeless retirees dying on the streets of American or 2) a catastrophically large expansion of welfare far above current levels to cover an unfunded generation?
Non-GAAP disclosure fall under Regulation G: http://www.sec.gov/rules/final/33-8176.htm
There are no hard and fast rules about consistency for Non-GAAP presentation. However, a company cannot play games claiming that a loss they're backing out is non-recurring, when in fact, it is recurring. In such a case, that Non-GAAP presentation is not clarifying results for the investor, but is actively misleading the investor, and the SEC will nail that company to the wall for it when they see the same "non-recurring" items getting backed out repeatedly.
Changing the presentation or formula isn't forbidden, but the whole purpose of Regulation G was to allow companies to publish Non-GAAP figures in a way that gives the investor more insight, more useful information from the perspective of management. For Non-GAAP figures, the company is required to show a comparison to the closest available GAAP figure, and show a reconciliation between them to highlight the differences. It's up to the investor to decide if that Non-GAAP presentation is what they want to use to make their buy/sell decisions.
IAACPA.
Announcing Non-GAAP numbers isn't unusual. It's important to note that this isn't their 10-Q quarterly filing, but simply an 8-K earnings release. Just a communication with the public rather than an official report, and the role of the auditor with respect to these earnings releases is to simply ensure that management can show how the figures shown can be traced back to the records from which they produce the quarterly filing. However it should be noted that quarterly reports are only /reviewed/ by auditors, and not audited by auditors. There is a dramatic difference in the level of work that auditors perform on quarterly results, and that is why quarterly reports are required to include the auditor's letter which includes this disclaim and explanation of the difference between a review and an audit.
With that said, non-GAAP numbers are part of management's communication with investors. Companies usually have some idea of the key factors that investors are looking for in their company. Management use earnings releases to highlight the numbers that investors care about. Some just want steady flows of dividends, some want large R&D outflows for future growth, some want strong cash flow, etc. Non-GAAP numbers help present their financials in the form that investors want to read them. Normally, investors will just take GAAP numbers and then just recalculate the Non-GAAP numbers anyway. For example, a GAAP net loss due to large and clearly one-time losses doesn't tell you much about the performance of the company's "normal" operations during that quarter, so financial firms will just read the report, and then back those one-time losses out to arrive at a non-GAAP net income/loss. Thus, management reports non-GAAP figures to save their investors the trouble of doing this so that they have something to look at when they conduct their earnings call. Management should always provide an explanation of how these figures were derived so that they can be reconciled back to GAAP figures or else they have no meaning.
I have had an HTC incredible for about 2 years now, I'm out of contract. Worked perfectly up until the last over-the-air update from Verizon a few months ago managed to screw over the Camera so that it sometimes reboots after taking a picture. I'm not certain of who's to blame for that update, but I'm thinking Verizon.
Otherwise, I like my phone, I'd buy HTC again. In the meantime I'm still going to use this phone for a few more years.
There is a touch interface on the rim of the glasses:
http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/22/4013406/i-used-google-glass-its-the-future-with-monthly-updates
You two are discussing things from different perspectives. You would put a battery in your pocket and a cord to your glasses. Such a device has already existed for years, for power nerds like us who would be willing to wear such a horrible thing.
The AC is talking about the mass-market which would fiercely resent glasses corded to a phone. Whether or not you think that's consistent with the temporary use of earbuds for music/conversation is irrelevant, the mass-market will not accept glasses corded to phones right now.
I personally wish tablets were fully functioning phones (not just the cobbled-together VOIP solutions). I want to just use a bluetooth headset to interact with the call functionality, and only take the tablet out of my bag when I want to interact with the screen. It's more practical to interact with a tablet-size screen than a tiny smartphone screen. But clearly my opinion doesn't make for a market, and thus there's no product catering to me(mostly because most men don't carry shoulder bags everywhere they go a.k.a man purses).
I read the Verge article on Glass:
http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/22/4013406/i-used-google-glass-its-the-future-with-monthly-updates
The $1,500 is the price for developers. It's a high price because they don't want casual parties to be purchasing this limited run, they want committed developers to make apps. They are aware that there's no app market for these (because this is the first in it's market).
You can touch the outside rim of the glasses to manipulate menus. I imagine this is limited to just directional scrolling.
IIRC, it requires a phone with a data connection for most of it's features. I'm guessing that a lot of work is just going to be offloaded to the phone entirely. A lot of people are imagining some crazy always-on life-changing gadget, but given that these are just glasses, and that battery capacity hasn't improved dramatically in the last couple of years, I'm going to guess that these imagined features aren't going to happen.
Similarly, the always-on surveillance distopia that people are freaking out about is also not going to happen for the same reason. There just isn't enough battery power to just record everything, all the time. Especially if you want to do anything else with them in the meantime.
The Metro startmenu isn't a toggle-able feature within the OS, you need to download the windows 7 start menu from third-party sources(just google: "windows 7 start menu windows 8" and pick any of the links there). The regular windows look like windows 7, and you can turn off the transparency "glass" stuff introduced in Vista, but to get the exact look of XP or earlier, you might need to patch that in as well. In terms of functionality, Windows 8 works exactly like Windows 7 aside from the start menu.
There ARE other differences between Windows 7 and Windows 8, and though they're all improvements, none of them are noteworthy and certainly don't merit upgrading for. (Faster boot, automatic optimization for SSD drives, picture lockscreens, a lot of under-the-hood optimization and security fixes, etc. insignificant improvements).
That's their point. Why link to fox news when you could link to a credible news source? Might as well just link to your crazy uncle's tumblr blog, he could use the hits.
"Sure, there would be some firing that could not be stopped, but we'd be able to inactivate most of the artillery within hours."
That right there is the problem. During those hours of free-firing artilery on densely populated urban areas, innocent people are going to die in droves. Families will be cut to pieces or wiped out entirely. Nobody is disputing that the loss rate will be ridiculously lopsided in our favor, or that the war would be over incredibly quickly.
But the reality is that there will still be a tremendous loss of life. American lives have value, South Korean lives have value, and even North Korean lives have value. War is fucking terrible and we should never forget that. If it's possible to find a way to avoid bloodshed, we should do so.
The more convincing argument would be whether a war is a greater threat to lives than Kim Jong-Un starving his people to death. If fewer people would die in the long-term from having a war to out this dictator, I'd support it.
This is a TERRIBLE reply.
"How about this, the US has had nuclear weapons longer than any other nation and has not used them in warfare in 60 years?"
Jeezus, that just raises the question of, "what was the only situation in which nuclear weapons were used in warfare ever?"...doesn't help your point any.
What you should be pointing out instead, is that the US has led all nuclear disarmament talks, and has achieved a dramatic decrease in nuclear arms worldwide, and shown interest in continuing this trend.
The only change is to the start menu, the rest of the interface is the same. Install the windows 7 start menu if you like, or XP if you prefer.
I stopped using the start menu back in XP anyway so I left the default on. In fact, the "run" menu has improved slightly in windows 8. Instead of hitting Win+R to type out the exact program I want to launch, I just hit Win and then type out the first few letters of the program and it'll search out matching programs. Slightly faster.
Basically the main fault with windows 8 is only for people really attached to the start menu. But it's replaceable. Don't upgrade if you're on windows 7 already, but don't downgrade if you've got windows 8 for free.
for anyone wondering about the answer to this theoretical scenario:
There is potentially a net gain in this nonmonetary exchange of goods. It falls under barter exchange rules and is reportable on a 1040 form (since the dessert cups don't qualify for section 1031 like-kind treatment, it doesn't get tax-deferred treatment).
Do you know WHY these kids are taxed? There's a good reason.
1) The kids don't owe taxes if their personal exemption is greater than their income, and in virtually all cases, kids don't make enough money to owe tax. Because this exemption covers so much, we go about our lives not worrying about if our kids pay taxes. It's practical that way. HOWEVER, kids are still subject to tax laws to avoid people abusing a "Kid" loophole. See 2.
2) The reason WHY they have to pay tax is so that parents can't operate their business through their kid. If kids aren't taxable, then parents just put their kid's name on everything and then never pay any taxes. Maybe have another kid when the first one gets old enough to be taxable. Not taxing kids leads to screwed up incentive structures like this one. There are knock-on effects to consider in how tax laws get formed and that's part of why they get so ridiculously complex.
If Google successfully defends this case, then perhaps I can offer free lunch to my employees and reduce their pay. That way I'll be giving them a form of compensation that they won't have to pay income taxes on. I already provide life insurance coverage up to $50k tax free, and health insurance coverage as a means of compensating them without them having to pay taxes on the compensation.
Dollar for dollar I can compensate employees more efficiently with these other benefits $1 worth of health insurance coverage provides $1 worth of health insurance coverage compensation but $1 of salary may only buy $0.80 of salary compensation after-tax. The government wants me to provide these benefits to employees anyway, that's why they don't tax these forms of benefits.
If free lunch is found to be explicitly non-taxable compensation, companies are going to provide lower salaries and free lunch. Likely not a full reduction by the cost of the food because you'd have to adjust for the cost of having reduced choice, but a reduction all the same.
The amount of resources marshalled to enable interstellar travel implies mastery of forces that can obliterate human civilization in a single blow. If aliens wanted to kill us, there wouldn't be a war. They could just accelerate a big rock at us and obliterate all civilization in a single strike, regardless of how big our military is.
Generally speaking, destruction is easier than construction. It takes a lot of effort to assemble castles out of chaos, but a good thwack in the right places is all it takes to bring it all down back into chaos. It's just moving with entropy vs. moving against it.
I'm not a watch owner, and despite owning a smart phone, I want a watch.
1) As the new father of a five-month old, I've found that when out and about, typically one or both of my hands are occupied with a baby carrier, car seat, shopping bag, my son, whatever it may be. I hadn't noticed it before, but there is definitely utility to be found in being able to check the time without needing one of your hands.
2) Getting to your phone can take a few moments. It may require standing up to pull it out of a pants pocket, unslinging my shoulderbag and unzipping a pocket, undoing a wintercoat to access an inner pocket, etc. These are not onerous obstacles, but there is still opportunity for efficiency to be gained here.
3) It's an accessory, one of the few afforded to men in the traditional office environment. As silly as it might seem to you or I, there are other people who interpret the attention paid to your personal appearance as a signal for the attention you pay to your professional work. There's little to lose by dressing up a little.
4) Skeleton watches are fuckin' cool. Seeing those gears move, and thinking about the complexity and craft behind those movements tickles my inner nerd pretty fiercely. It'll be tricky finding one that looks tasteful enough to incorporate into an everyday appearance though.
But as I've mentioned, I don't own a watch. Never have. Perhaps once I do have one I'll find watches to be just as uncomfortable as you do.
But returning to the topic at hand...I'm totally uninterested in this "smartwatch". I'm just not in the target demographic. Seems to be most useful to those who constantly check their phones for updates on something.
Further to the above, I'd like to add that there is a growing population of dads in the gamer population, whose tastes in games are shifting along with the change in their lifestyle.
Some quit games entirely, while others make do with a half-hour here, or an hour there between their other responsibilities and demands for attention. A squalling baby doesn't give a damn if you only need 2 more kills for the next killstreak bonus, you're going AFK then and there, and you get to come back an hour later hoping that the team managed to carry the rest of the round to victory without you. After a while you stop bothering with multiplayer rounds you can't finish, and switch to singleplayer games that you can pause and come back to at any time.
Better yet, singleplayer games paced such that rewards and interesting events are doled out in 20-30minute increments so that the brief periods during which you can play will include some veneer of progress. I don't have the time to grind out 40 hours for a sword that makes a slightly higher number on the screen. I need to get an upgrade or make it to the next checkpoint within 30 minutes or I'll have to stop feeling unsatisfied. As the population of gamers in similar situations grows, the volume of games catering to our interests will follow.
Yes they can fire a nuclear warhead on a rocket, but only on short-range missiles that can hit SK and Japan(I think). They have bigger rockets that can't fit a nuclear warhead and pisspoor accuracy and long launch-lead times.
Their nuclear capability is thought to be quite weak, weaker than even the explosions in Japan in WW2. The small blast radius coupled with low accuracy means that the scarier threat is a massive amount of conventional artillery aimed at Seoul which can't be intercepted before they tear that highly populated city to pieces with shells at the outset of any conflict. Basically they're the hostage, and NK is pointing a gun at their head.
So while NK is assured to lose any kind of military conflict, they'll kill tens of thousands of innocent civilians in the first few hours, which makes a war with NK just as unpalatable as any other war, even though we have such a dramatic military superiority.
Giantbomb doesn't take money for video game reviews. It was founded by a guy who was fired for giving a bad review, and the fellow reviewers who left with him.
They review games they think are interesting or their community is interested in, if they aren't sent a review copy, they'll just go buy one at retail after release. They know they can't cover everything, so if a gaming company wants to "pressure them", they'll just buy their own copy to review. They know that means they won't have a review on launch day, and they're explicitly ok with that.
IIRC, it costs about $1k/yr to operate an offshore shell company, and only took about 30min on the phone to setup. My memory sucks though, so listen to the actual podcast where they report the details of their experience of setting up 2 shell companies for their report: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/07/27/157421340/how-to-set-up-an-offshore-company