[...] having Apple and Amazon competing will drive the prices down as they compete for market share.
What part of "Agency Model" don't you understand?
Apple does not set the price--except for saying it must end in ".99" for some unknown reason. The publishers do. So Apple and Amazon will not be fighting for market share because they can't do anything about the prices because they don't set them.
If you look at the original Macintosh keyboard, you will see no "Open Apple". Apple wanted to use the same keyboards for the Apple IIgs as they used for Macintoshes and since the IIgs had no command key, they put both labels on the keys.
So if you call it the "Open Apple" key, you're obviously not an original Macintosh user. GTFO.
(That said, my theory as to why Apple left the symbol long after the Apple II series was discontinued is that it's easier to tell someone on the phone, "Look for the key with the little Apple logo on it." than "Look for the key with the cloverleaf/european 'place-of-interest' symbol." Of course, if you needed that explained to you, GTFO.):^D
Actually, I just tried alteredqualia.com on my iPhone and it works. Of course, when I tried it with Safari running on an Xserve, I got around 50 fps whereas on the iPhone I get about 4.7fps.
I didn't try akihabara.
I tried apirocks. It looks like it works, but it assumes you have a keyboard because you have to press the right-arrow key and my iPhone doesn't have a right-arrow key...
True. You can use AdMob to receive ads and display them. However, you cannot send any information about the user, which makes it worthless to any advertising company trying to do targeted ads.
Of course, this isn't true with iAds. How convenient...
please explain how Apple is responsible for the progression [...] from parallel ports to USB ports.
To put it simply, Apple said "We're not going to make a really great computer and we're not going to put parallel ports on it."
The PC business is cut-throat. Profit margins are thin and nobody is all that interested in taking a risk which may cut sales--they make their living on volume. Which means they have to be all things to all people. Which means if somebody wants a parallel port on their computer then the PC maker is not going to lose a sale because they don't have one.
Printer makers are in a similar boat. As long as there are parallel ports out there, why provide anything more than token USB support. If somebody has a problem with USB, well, just use parallel.
Apple came out with the iMac which eschewed so called 'legacy' ports and firmly embraced USB. So if you wanted to sell a printer to those people, you'd better have a USB printer. And the iMac was very successful--at least for an Apple product. It showed the PC makers that, hey, maybe it was safe to do this after all--that they wouldn't lose sales.
Because of Apple's higher margins (and, arguably, fanatical fan base that will agree with whatever Apple says), they have an opportunity to take risks and try to push their agenda in ways that many PC companies can't afford to do.
Being able to send data to and from the Moon was achieved in the early 1960s. So I postulate this:
NASA transmitted to the Moon. The transmission was also sent to the astronauts working on the faked moon set in "real time." The astronauts' responses were sent to the Moon which echoed them back to Earth based upon who was doing the talking (ie, when the CSM pilot spoke, it came from the CSM, when the moon-based astronauts spoke, it was sent to the LEM).
At least the speech would appear to come from the Moon. Telemetry from instruments aboard the spacecraft would be received by NASA and sent to the appropriate instruments on the Earth-bound fake (or received directly--as you say, anybody could receive them) so that any conversations about what is being seen would be accurate.
The idea would be that you have to fake out NASA as well. In this scenario, you basically have to have somebody "tap" the voice transmissions from NASA to the astronauts and telemetry data received by NASA at the source and resend it to the fake moon set. You wouldn't need high-ranking NASA people, just somebody to install the tap and make sure it kept working.
The best argument for the moon landing, in my opinion, is that we brought back lots of interesting stuff.
I believe you're right. However, we have a few thousand people trapped here in LA. Unfortunately, neither European rail nor Amtrak have yet built that tunnel under the Atlantic Ocean.
Of course, if we build that bridge across the Bering Strait...
Doing some quick googling, I get guesstimates of yearly total netbook sales between 22M and 30M. And since 40k units a day is around 15M a year, iPad is selling within a 2x factor of ALL netbooks sales.
Well, let's take your reference to heart.
A recent study from Strategy Analytics shows that in 2009, vendors sold 30.2 million netbooks.
That's just less than 83K per day. So it's just shy of half the netbooks sold in a day. In other words, it still does not match the number of netbooks sold in a day, which was my point.
Of if that measure doesn't work, how about total monetary sales values?
Why does that matter?
As a customer, I really don't care how much Apple makes on the iPad. If they sell a product I want to buy at a price I'm willing to pay, that's what important to me. As a developer trying to decide upon which platform I should develop my killer app, how much money Apple makes from their iPad isn't all that important to me.
The only people who really care about that are investors.
Strawman alert! So which is it- 40k a day or 1k a day? Up above, you deride the drop from 70k/day to 40k/day. Now it's suddenly 1k/day (before people could even try it out, mind you).
Depends on which numbers you like to use.
According to Apple, they sold 300,000 iPads over the first weekend, which is two days, and sold 500,000 iPads in the first week.
Apple sold 300,000 iPads on the first weekend sounds amazing--and it is. But the fact is that the iPad was available for pre-order for one month. So what happened is that Apple actually fulfilled a month's worth of pre-existing orders. So saying that Apple "sold" 300,000 units in the first weekend isn't entirely accurate.
That said, I messed up, thinking the iPad was available for pre-order in early March. In fact, it was March 12th, which is less than a month before they were available. So my 1,000 units per day was not only inaccurate because of that, it was inaccurate because I can't move decimal places. 300,000 units in 30 days is 10,000, not 1,000.
So if we look at the first "weekend" again--March 12 through April 4--we come up with 24 days. 300,000 units in 24 days is 12,500 units per day.
I fail to see how you convert pre-sales volume into foward sales volume.
Hey, I'm not the one who's doing that. It's Apple and their fanbois who are doing that. They're the ones who are saying Apple sold 300,000 in two days. But the fact is that people had been ordering it for a month. They didn't separate out how many of those were fulfilling orders from March 15th and how many of those were new people because Apple didn't. They just said "opening weekend sales."
What we run into here is the difference between accounting and sales volume--sales over time. Apple books the revenue from all those pre-sales when they are shipped, which was probably considered part of that "opening weekend." So from an accounting standpoint, Apple sold 300,000 devices in one weekend.
From a projection of sales, however, it's not accurate. Let's use this example: Suppose I take pre-orders for my product on January 1st. I have one person a day who buys it. I ship one year later. That means the first day, I ship 365 units. Would you expect that I will sell 365 units per day? Probably not. Since I had one buyer per day, it's likely that I'll continue to sell one unit per day.
Especially when the full 3G version isn't out for sale AND sales are US only.
As for the fact that it's US only and that the 3G versions aren't available, I agree. We'll see how well sales do when those are available. But at least as far as the 3G version goes, I'd be careful on that. From what I understand (and I wish I had a reference), the more expensive iPads aren't selling as well as the $499 model. This is to be expected, I suppose.
If you keep saying it over and over and over, it'll become true.
iPad sold 500,000 units after one week. That's a little more than 70,000 units a day. And if you consider that in the five days after the weekend, Apple sold 200,000 units. That's 40,000 a day. Not quite so impressive. I'd bet that all the Netbooks combined sell at least 40,000 units per day.
Name one cell phone, computer, or similar device that sold 300,000 times over on the first day that was considered a failure.
The interesting thing is that Apple sold 300,000 units in it's first weekend--this is after the device had been available for pre-order for one month. So it took Apple one month to sell 300,000 units--about 1,000 units a day.
So name one cell phone, computer, or similar device that sold 300,000 units in one month that was considered a success.
But that's okay. Just sit in your corner, hug your iPad, and keep repeating: "The iPad is successful! The iPad is successful!" It'll make you feel better.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: "To the Moon, Alice!"
We have this really big Near-Earth Object only 238,857 miles away with ice, uranium, iron, titanium, and various other ores. You have gravity, which means that you don't have to come up with exotic methods of extracting iron from iron ore. Also, when building things, one dropped screw doesn't float off into space forever (and become a hazard to other craft). You can use nuclear propulsion all you want without concerns about radiation, etc.
Why bother setting these things up in orbit? Why bother running around trying to mine small asteroids? We've got this nice big stable platform called the Moon just sitting there.
Apps running using native platform tools do fairly well, cross-platform apps suck a lot of the time.
Agreed. That said...
I've used a lot of dopey "utility" applications written in Java. The interfaces are horrible. But they do their job. Would I rather have a nice, native, easy to use application? Undoubtedly. But I'd rather be able to do the task than not do the task, because if it wasn't for the Java application, I'd be out of luck.
Carbon is basically a depreciated legacy API that exists in OSX to make it easier to allow developers to port OS9 applications to OSX, but Adobe didn't want to rewrite their applications so they kept using the depreciated API.
And this is also an interesting point, regarding Apple.
Way back in 1997, Apple told everyone that the future was "Rhapsody" and we were all going to rewrite our applications in Objective-C and everything would be wonderful. Developers, by and large, said, "So we're going to take decades of work and rewrite it in a 'weird' language just so we can work on your new operating system? Thanks, but if we're going to rewrite decades of work, we'll do it for Windows. Nice working with you."
So back in 1998, Apple told everyone that future was Mac OS X and that they'd meet us half-way or so. Drag your code up to at least System 7 standards and we'll do the rest. That was Carbon. Of course, developers rightly said, "Oh, but you're not going to be supporting Carbon beyond that." "No, no!" said Apple. "We understand your investment and we're going to keep supporting Carbon! That's why the Finder is in Carbon and will remain so! Trust us--Carbon applications will always be on equal footing with Cocoa applications!"
Yeah, right.
For example, Apple insisted that the future for Carbon apps doing UI was HIViews. "Use HIViews and we'll continue to support you!" They exclaimed. So Adobe rewrote all their stuff to use HIViews. And what happens? "Oh, HIViews aren't 64-bit compatible and they never will be. You have to rewrite all your UI code in Cocoa." So much for continuing to support you, huh?
This is one thing I don't really get--the video camera.
Let's say you've got the video camera. How are you going to position it so the camera sees you. And how are you going to maintain that position for, say, a 5 minute chat?
Put the iPad on your lap with the camera facing up and you end up with lots of light coming in. So you can't really see the face of the person you're talking to very well. Holding it out at arms length might be better, but could be tiring.
But, hey, you can always spend an extra $29-$39 for something that will hold it up.
While the idea of a video chat while on the go sounds cool, I'm not all that convinced it's going to work.
Re:CmdrTaco drags big brass ones along the ground
on
iPad Review
·
· Score: 1
I gotta admit, that struck me, too. This looks like it might be a nice portable thin-client.
Imagine having hundreds of hubble-class telescopes actively scanning for mining targets worth $20,000B ea. requiring little to no propellant to harvest.
I have a feeling you're being a bit optimistic.
First, I assume you're talking about a target worth $20 trillion (that's $20,000,000,000,000. That's a lot of zeroes). What substance exists that would have that value?
But let's say you find it. We'll use gold as an example. The current price for gold is $36,120.81 per kilogram. So, to get $20 trillion dollars, we'd need an asteroid with a mass of 553,697,440 kilograms. Let's say you go ahead and drag in all these as yet undiscovered golden asteroids. What's that going to do the price of gold on Earth? I'll tell you what--it'll drop to next to nothing. Everybody will have more than enough gold and the price will drop. Frankly, because of speculation, just announcing that you're bringing this much gold to market will cause the price to drop before you even show up with your first gram.
Platinum? It's about 1.5x the value of gold, so you'd need less of it. But you still have figure that when you show up with a whole bunch of Platinum, you're going to drive the price down--that's basic supply-and-demand economics.
What you need to find, of course, is Unobtainium--something that doesn't exist on Earth. Of course, finding this Unobtainium is going to require a bit more than a bunch of telescopes (since you don't know what you're looking for). Also, assuming you find your Unobtainium, you need to figure out what it's useful for so that you can convince people to buy it so that they can turn it into something useful.
I am not trying to defend Toyota here, but rather their decision to ask for help.
If they had, I would agree.
Toyota is claiming that there is no way that it is a problem with the software. NHTSA is investigating to see whether that is true. However, NHTSA does not have any expertise in such areas, so they're calling in NASA.
A while back, there was a company that was editing copyrighted material and distributing their edits. I'm too lazy to look it up here on Slashdot, but you could go buy an R-rated movie from them and they would cut out the appropriate naughty bits to make it a G-rated movie which they would send to you. Needless to say, the studios shrieked to high heaven and the courts shut it down.
So, if I create a webpage and copyright it and you create something that modifies the copyrighted material and distributes it to the user, could we say that you have violated my copyright? With software to rip DVDs and such coming under fire, the courts seem to be saying that, "Yes, you can write your own tool to do it for your own personal use and we can't do anything about it. But if you try to distribute a tool which helps people violate copyright, you're in trouble."
Slashdot Mirror
[...] having Apple and Amazon competing will drive the prices down as they compete for market share.
What part of "Agency Model" don't you understand?
Apple does not set the price--except for saying it must end in ".99" for some unknown reason. The publishers do. So Apple and Amazon will not be fighting for market share because they can't do anything about the prices because they don't set them.
Bzzt! Thanks for playing!
If you look at the original Macintosh keyboard, you will see no "Open Apple". Apple wanted to use the same keyboards for the Apple IIgs as they used for Macintoshes and since the IIgs had no command key, they put both labels on the keys.
So if you call it the "Open Apple" key, you're obviously not an original Macintosh user. GTFO.
(That said, my theory as to why Apple left the symbol long after the Apple II series was discontinued is that it's easier to tell someone on the phone, "Look for the key with the little Apple logo on it." than "Look for the key with the cloverleaf/european 'place-of-interest' symbol." Of course, if you needed that explained to you, GTFO.) :^D
Actually, I just tried alteredqualia.com on my iPhone and it works. Of course, when I tried it with Safari running on an Xserve, I got around 50 fps whereas on the iPhone I get about 4.7fps.
I didn't try akihabara.
I tried apirocks. It looks like it works, but it assumes you have a keyboard because you have to press the right-arrow key and my iPhone doesn't have a right-arrow key...
EAT SHIT! 10 million flies can't be wrong!
True. You can use AdMob to receive ads and display them. However, you cannot send any information about the user, which makes it worthless to any advertising company trying to do targeted ads.
Of course, this isn't true with iAds. How convenient...
please explain how Apple is responsible for the progression [...] from parallel ports to USB ports.
To put it simply, Apple said "We're not going to make a really great computer and we're not going to put parallel ports on it."
The PC business is cut-throat. Profit margins are thin and nobody is all that interested in taking a risk which may cut sales--they make their living on volume. Which means they have to be all things to all people. Which means if somebody wants a parallel port on their computer then the PC maker is not going to lose a sale because they don't have one.
Printer makers are in a similar boat. As long as there are parallel ports out there, why provide anything more than token USB support. If somebody has a problem with USB, well, just use parallel.
Apple came out with the iMac which eschewed so called 'legacy' ports and firmly embraced USB. So if you wanted to sell a printer to those people, you'd better have a USB printer. And the iMac was very successful--at least for an Apple product. It showed the PC makers that, hey, maybe it was safe to do this after all--that they wouldn't lose sales.
Because of Apple's higher margins (and, arguably, fanatical fan base that will agree with whatever Apple says), they have an opportunity to take risks and try to push their agenda in ways that many PC companies can't afford to do.
I always enjoy this...
Being able to send data to and from the Moon was achieved in the early 1960s. So I postulate this:
NASA transmitted to the Moon. The transmission was also sent to the astronauts working on the faked moon set in "real time." The astronauts' responses were sent to the Moon which echoed them back to Earth based upon who was doing the talking (ie, when the CSM pilot spoke, it came from the CSM, when the moon-based astronauts spoke, it was sent to the LEM).
At least the speech would appear to come from the Moon. Telemetry from instruments aboard the spacecraft would be received by NASA and sent to the appropriate instruments on the Earth-bound fake (or received directly--as you say, anybody could receive them) so that any conversations about what is being seen would be accurate.
The idea would be that you have to fake out NASA as well. In this scenario, you basically have to have somebody "tap" the voice transmissions from NASA to the astronauts and telemetry data received by NASA at the source and resend it to the fake moon set. You wouldn't need high-ranking NASA people, just somebody to install the tap and make sure it kept working.
The best argument for the moon landing, in my opinion, is that we brought back lots of interesting stuff.
Indeed. In fact, if you close your eyes and listen to him, you would swear he's channeling De Kelley. It's uncanny.
I believe you're right. However, we have a few thousand people trapped here in LA. Unfortunately, neither European rail nor Amtrak have yet built that tunnel under the Atlantic Ocean.
Of course, if we build that bridge across the Bering Strait...
Even if your example was correct, what would you do with the extra few minutes during lunch?
Smoke a cigarette.
Actually, there's a way to change that message to whatever you want. That's how Google plans to pay for this.
While your document prints, ads will show up on the display for the printer: Print Documents/At Staples/No Job is Too Big/or Too Small!
Doing some quick googling, I get guesstimates of yearly total netbook sales between 22M and 30M. And since 40k units a day is around 15M a year, iPad is selling within a 2x factor of ALL netbooks sales.
Well, let's take your reference to heart.
A recent study from Strategy Analytics shows that in 2009, vendors sold 30.2 million netbooks.
That's just less than 83K per day. So it's just shy of half the netbooks sold in a day. In other words, it still does not match the number of netbooks sold in a day, which was my point.
Of if that measure doesn't work, how about total monetary sales values?
Why does that matter?
As a customer, I really don't care how much Apple makes on the iPad. If they sell a product I want to buy at a price I'm willing to pay, that's what important to me. As a developer trying to decide upon which platform I should develop my killer app, how much money Apple makes from their iPad isn't all that important to me.
The only people who really care about that are investors.
Strawman alert! So which is it- 40k a day or 1k a day? Up above, you deride the drop from 70k/day to 40k/day. Now it's suddenly 1k/day (before people could even try it out, mind you).
Depends on which numbers you like to use.
According to Apple, they sold 300,000 iPads over the first weekend, which is two days, and sold 500,000 iPads in the first week.
Apple sold 300,000 iPads on the first weekend sounds amazing--and it is. But the fact is that the iPad was available for pre-order for one month. So what happened is that Apple actually fulfilled a month's worth of pre-existing orders. So saying that Apple "sold" 300,000 units in the first weekend isn't entirely accurate.
That said, I messed up, thinking the iPad was available for pre-order in early March. In fact, it was March 12th, which is less than a month before they were available. So my 1,000 units per day was not only inaccurate because of that, it was inaccurate because I can't move decimal places. 300,000 units in 30 days is 10,000, not 1,000.
So if we look at the first "weekend" again--March 12 through April 4--we come up with 24 days. 300,000 units in 24 days is 12,500 units per day.
I fail to see how you convert pre-sales volume into foward sales volume.
Hey, I'm not the one who's doing that. It's Apple and their fanbois who are doing that. They're the ones who are saying Apple sold 300,000 in two days. But the fact is that people had been ordering it for a month. They didn't separate out how many of those were fulfilling orders from March 15th and how many of those were new people because Apple didn't. They just said "opening weekend sales."
What we run into here is the difference between accounting and sales volume--sales over time. Apple books the revenue from all those pre-sales when they are shipped, which was probably considered part of that "opening weekend." So from an accounting standpoint, Apple sold 300,000 devices in one weekend.
From a projection of sales, however, it's not accurate. Let's use this example: Suppose I take pre-orders for my product on January 1st. I have one person a day who buys it. I ship one year later. That means the first day, I ship 365 units. Would you expect that I will sell 365 units per day? Probably not. Since I had one buyer per day, it's likely that I'll continue to sell one unit per day.
Especially when the full 3G version isn't out for sale AND sales are US only.
As for the fact that it's US only and that the 3G versions aren't available, I agree. We'll see how well sales do when those are available. But at least as far as the 3G version goes, I'd be careful on that. From what I understand (and I wish I had a reference), the more expensive iPads aren't selling as well as the $499 model. This is to be expected, I suppose.
The ipad IS successful.
If you keep saying it over and over and over, it'll become true.
iPad sold 500,000 units after one week. That's a little more than 70,000 units a day. And if you consider that in the five days after the weekend, Apple sold 200,000 units. That's 40,000 a day. Not quite so impressive. I'd bet that all the Netbooks combined sell at least 40,000 units per day.
Name one cell phone, computer, or similar device that sold 300,000 times over on the first day that was considered a failure.
The interesting thing is that Apple sold 300,000 units in it's first weekend--this is after the device had been available for pre-order for one month. So it took Apple one month to sell 300,000 units--about 1,000 units a day.
So name one cell phone, computer, or similar device that sold 300,000 units in one month that was considered a success.
But that's okay. Just sit in your corner, hug your iPad, and keep repeating: "The iPad is successful! The iPad is successful!" It'll make you feel better.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: "To the Moon, Alice!"
We have this really big Near-Earth Object only 238,857 miles away with ice, uranium, iron, titanium, and various other ores. You have gravity, which means that you don't have to come up with exotic methods of extracting iron from iron ore. Also, when building things, one dropped screw doesn't float off into space forever (and become a hazard to other craft). You can use nuclear propulsion all you want without concerns about radiation, etc.
Why bother setting these things up in orbit? Why bother running around trying to mine small asteroids? We've got this nice big stable platform called the Moon just sitting there.
Apps running using native platform tools do fairly well, cross-platform apps suck a lot of the time.
Agreed. That said...
I've used a lot of dopey "utility" applications written in Java. The interfaces are horrible. But they do their job. Would I rather have a nice, native, easy to use application? Undoubtedly. But I'd rather be able to do the task than not do the task, because if it wasn't for the Java application, I'd be out of luck.
Carbon is basically a depreciated legacy API that exists in OSX to make it easier to allow developers to port OS9 applications to OSX, but Adobe didn't want to rewrite their applications so they kept using the depreciated API.
And this is also an interesting point, regarding Apple.
Way back in 1997, Apple told everyone that the future was "Rhapsody" and we were all going to rewrite our applications in Objective-C and everything would be wonderful. Developers, by and large, said, "So we're going to take decades of work and rewrite it in a 'weird' language just so we can work on your new operating system? Thanks, but if we're going to rewrite decades of work, we'll do it for Windows. Nice working with you."
So back in 1998, Apple told everyone that future was Mac OS X and that they'd meet us half-way or so. Drag your code up to at least System 7 standards and we'll do the rest. That was Carbon. Of course, developers rightly said, "Oh, but you're not going to be supporting Carbon beyond that." "No, no!" said Apple. "We understand your investment and we're going to keep supporting Carbon! That's why the Finder is in Carbon and will remain so! Trust us--Carbon applications will always be on equal footing with Cocoa applications!"
Yeah, right.
For example, Apple insisted that the future for Carbon apps doing UI was HIViews. "Use HIViews and we'll continue to support you!" They exclaimed. So Adobe rewrote all their stuff to use HIViews. And what happens? "Oh, HIViews aren't 64-bit compatible and they never will be. You have to rewrite all your UI code in Cocoa." So much for continuing to support you, huh?
Yup. Apple's phone is definitely getting to the point where it's almost modern.
Now, if they can just figure out how to use Bluetooth to transfer files, they'll have a winner.
January called--they want their joke back.
And the lack of video camera for chatting
This is one thing I don't really get--the video camera.
Let's say you've got the video camera. How are you going to position it so the camera sees you. And how are you going to maintain that position for, say, a 5 minute chat?
Put the iPad on your lap with the camera facing up and you end up with lots of light coming in. So you can't really see the face of the person you're talking to very well. Holding it out at arms length might be better, but could be tiring.
But, hey, you can always spend an extra $29-$39 for something that will hold it up.
While the idea of a video chat while on the go sounds cool, I'm not all that convinced it's going to work.
I gotta admit, that struck me, too. This looks like it might be a nice portable thin-client.
I have a phone now. I'm looking at the nice and shiny android phones. But I am not quite convinced that the apps are what I might need.
An interesting question, but you may be thinking it more than most people would.
You have a phone now. It works. Why are you thinking of getting rid of it?
"Well, because my friend with an iPhone/Blackberry/Droid/Pre has one and he has various useful Apps."
Really? Like what?
"Well, there's this cool Twitter App, etc., etc."
Well there you have it. Google "Twitter app android." That will probably give you at least one or two that you can check out.
Anything else, while I'm in the neighborhood?
Imagine having hundreds of hubble-class telescopes actively scanning for mining targets worth $20,000B ea. requiring little to no propellant to harvest.
I have a feeling you're being a bit optimistic.
First, I assume you're talking about a target worth $20 trillion (that's $20,000,000,000,000. That's a lot of zeroes). What substance exists that would have that value?
But let's say you find it. We'll use gold as an example. The current price for gold is $36,120.81 per kilogram. So, to get $20 trillion dollars, we'd need an asteroid with a mass of 553,697,440 kilograms. Let's say you go ahead and drag in all these as yet undiscovered golden asteroids. What's that going to do the price of gold on Earth? I'll tell you what--it'll drop to next to nothing. Everybody will have more than enough gold and the price will drop. Frankly, because of speculation, just announcing that you're bringing this much gold to market will cause the price to drop before you even show up with your first gram.
Platinum? It's about 1.5x the value of gold, so you'd need less of it. But you still have figure that when you show up with a whole bunch of Platinum, you're going to drive the price down--that's basic supply-and-demand economics.
What you need to find, of course, is Unobtainium--something that doesn't exist on Earth. Of course, finding this Unobtainium is going to require a bit more than a bunch of telescopes (since you don't know what you're looking for). Also, assuming you find your Unobtainium, you need to figure out what it's useful for so that you can convince people to buy it so that they can turn it into something useful.
I am not trying to defend Toyota here, but rather their decision to ask for help.
If they had, I would agree.
Toyota is claiming that there is no way that it is a problem with the software. NHTSA is investigating to see whether that is true. However, NHTSA does not have any expertise in such areas, so they're calling in NASA.
Mini Cooper - the new Library of Congress for volume measurements!
Actually, the old volume measurement was "Volkswagens" (as in a Volkswagen Bug). So the Mini Cooper is the new Volkswagen Bug.
A while back, there was a company that was editing copyrighted material and distributing their edits. I'm too lazy to look it up here on Slashdot, but you could go buy an R-rated movie from them and they would cut out the appropriate naughty bits to make it a G-rated movie which they would send to you. Needless to say, the studios shrieked to high heaven and the courts shut it down.
So, if I create a webpage and copyright it and you create something that modifies the copyrighted material and distributes it to the user, could we say that you have violated my copyright? With software to rip DVDs and such coming under fire, the courts seem to be saying that, "Yes, you can write your own tool to do it for your own personal use and we can't do anything about it. But if you try to distribute a tool which helps people violate copyright, you're in trouble."