For comparison purposes, the Sumatra tsunami of 2004 was estimated to release around 20MT of energy at the surface, and produced as much as 30m surges hundreds of miles away from the epicenter.
Okay. So that's 20 times the 1MT we're talking about. So that would be 1.5m surge.
If the poster is anonymous and makes claims without backing them up, then a person would have to be an idiot to ascribe any weight to them.
Agreed. However...
You're considering hiring someone. Your web search of their name turns up some anonymous coward talking about what a horrible employee they are, how they tried to steal from the company, etc.
Now obviously this is anonymous hearsay. What would you do? Contact the person? Well, they're obviously going to say that it wasn't them. Now what?
You have another candidate that's almost as qualified. Do you want to go through the hassle of having the person checked out more thoroughly? Or is it easier to just go with candidate #2? After all, you'd like this job filled ASAP and you don't want to spend a week dealing with investigators.
The cable companies argue that, because they pay subscriber fees (25-90 cents per home per channel), they should be able to control who does, and does not, have access to online TV shows.
I'm not sure that you'll see this sort of "exclusive" licensing, where you won't be able to see Monk anywhere except on Comcast's website. That would be really silly for the producers of Monk. I'm sure they'd be more than willing to license it to any website that wants to pay what they the producers are asking.
The issue, of course, is that Comcast already pays USA Network 25-90 cents for each home that gets USA Network. So if Comcast offers this to their customers, they shouldn't have to pay any more money than they are paying now--it's the same program. Of course, USA Network doesn't see it the same way. They want x cents per household for TV viewing, y cents for On Demand, and z cents for Internet viewing.
I tell the police that I killed someone and hand them the murder weapon. When I have my day in court, I can't come back and say, "The police can't tell the jury I said and did that because it would be against my fifth amendment rights."
When I was in Riyadh years ago, one part that made me laugh were the traffic lights. They were only green in one direction at a time. So, for example, the light for going north would be green, but the lights for going south, east, and west would be red. Then the light for going south would be green but the lights for going north, east, and west would be red. Then the light for east would be green, etc.
Of course, you would see people drive up the right hand side and then attempt to turn left at the light, so I think they did it just to make some of the crazy behavior a little safer.
Openness adds a good third party market in some ways, but it also adds a lot of junk. Apple's filtering benefits the consumer that doesn't want to have a lot of crap in their eco-system.
Agreed. I, for one, am glad that there aren't bunches of tip calculators, fart apps, useless promotional gimmicks, fads, and web pages-turned-into-applications on Apple's App Store.
"Apple is open! Look at all the applications!" "No, you can't develop this and this and this." "Well, yes, you're right, but it's Apple's platform and they can do what they want."
Then they're not open, okay?
I'm not going to argue whether Apple's approach is better or worse. I'm a long-time Mac developer and user (as I say, my first 'Mac' was a Macintosh) and I love the iPhone. However, I'm not able to develop my kind of application for it because Apple won't let me (or, more precisely, Apple won't let me distribute it).
If you want to argue that this creates a better environment for your typical user who just wants a phone that works, I might agree with you. But don't try to say that Apple is "open" to third-party developers when they clearly are not.
Not all commuters have iPhones or any smartphones at all. Many are still quite content with ones that can just make calls and text.
You're 100% correct. And I'm sure that will stay the same for the next 100 years.
Set the time machine ahead, say, 3 or 4 years:
"What? Verizon wants to give me a free Motorola FAZR which will play music via the Internet if I sign up for a two year plan? No thank you! I want a phone that just makes calls and lets me send text messages!"
So basically you're trading one subscription based service for another and just changing the way you listen to it.
Yes. And no.
I don't give a rat's patootie about Howard Stern, Oprah, or MLB. On the other had, I do like football--principally, the New England Patriots. So I might actually pay the New England Patriots organization in order to receive their games.
It isn't all that expensive to stream stuff over the Internet. The Patriots organization could set it up in house, sell it themselves, and keep all the money.
Personally, I think "the consolidators"--essentially the middle-men who consolidate all these programs--are the ones who are not long for this world.
You don't consider the time listening to an ad to be lost?
Depends on what else I could be doing.
Consider TV viewing. I could watch an hour show in 40-something minutes if I didn't have to watch the advertisements. That would give me more time to do something.
Consider driving in a car listening to the radio. If I'm not listening to the ad, what else could I have been doing? What am I missing because I am being "forced" to listen to this ad?
The appeal of satellite radio on car trips is that even when I can't get cell phone service at all, I can get Satellite radio.
Agreed. The question is: How often am I doing car trips? As gas prices get higher, maybe not so much. Spending $10 a month for music might be an expense that goes.
Oh, and before you bring up truckers and traveling salesmen, I'm not convinced they are a big enough market to keep satellite in business.
But the bulk of the U.S. does not get 3G service.
Agreed. But do you think it will always be that way? I don't.
Then you'd have to deal with the issue of how you tie your smart phone into the sound system of your car.
My 2001 car has no convenient way to do this. My roomate's 2007 car has an audio jack. I'm pretty sure this is becoming standard in most car radios nowadays, so you can plug in your phone and talk hands-free.
Not to mention the man/machine interface that would support tuning stations inside an automobile without fiddling with a smart phone.
I don't believe this would be a difficult thing to overcome, but I'll go on to the next level and say, "Why would we need to tune our stations to begin with?"
Pandora, in my opinion, is something like what we'll see in the future--basically, lots of different streams "narrowcasting" to our particular tastes and interests. Rather than having a separate channel for "rock", "punk", "heavy metal", etc., you'll have a system which generates playlists based on the kind of music you like. So you'll be less likely to have to change the channel. And, if something comes up that you don't like, you'll hit the "That song sucks" button and it will go on to the next song on the playlist.
So rather than choosing between "the rock station" or "the heavy metal station", you'll probably choose between, say, Pandora or Last.fm based upon their ability to correctly guess what kind of music you like.
You might also see some intelligence put into other things, such as news and weather. If you're in your car traveling down interstate 405, you don't really need to care about the accident on interstate 210 or about the plane crash in Buffalo or that there's a nasty storm in Louisiana. Location, matched with interest, might interrupt your music to let you know that California just passed a budget or that Coldplay just won a grammy. Again, rather than a "news broadcast" full of stuff you don't care about, you may see more short blurbs (or medium or long blurbs depending on your interest in the story) which get dropped between songs.
So now I'm supposed to buy a new car stereo with a 3.5mm audio input jack for the owners of each of these vehicles. Sticking with FM radio is much cheaper than that.
Agreed. However, the times, they are a-changin'.
My 2001 car stereo had no line-in jack. My roomate's 2007 car does. More and more new cars do.
The point of this is that Sirius/XM and terrestrial radio are going to be broadcasting to fewer and fewer people as time goes by.
Thousands of truckers and commuters rely on Satellite for their source of entertainment and news.
The truckers, I can see. Sirius/XM's coverage is much better than, say, AT&T or Verizon's.
The commuter? Not so much. I know that I can listen to music via an iPhone or a T-Mobile G1 on my 30 mile drive to work with no problems. If I'm paying $30/month for a data plan, why pay an extra $10/month for Sirius/XM?
About the only advantage satellite has over the Internet is coverage.
You seriously think that launching a retail operation is necessary to put Windows 7 in front of people, when every freaking PC in the world will ship with it anyway?
In one word? Yes. In two words? "Mojave Experiment."
Remember that? Microsoft took a bunch of people who had never used Vista, but knew it was crap. They put them in front of Vista and said "How do you like it?" People liked it!
So, yes, I'd say it's important for Microsoft to have a place where they can show off their products. Where someone can explain the difference between Windows 7 Home and Windows 7 Home Premium. Where someone can suggest that you not try to run Windows 7 on your 1.5GHz Pentium IV with an antique graphics card because none of the pretty graphics will show up.
And if the stores can manage to at least break even, it's free marketing.
Apple's big problem back then was that they were going to go out of business. Everybody knew this. It wasn't a question of if, it was a question of when.
So, since everybody knew Apple was going out of business, would you buy a Macintosh from them? Would you invest in developing software for them? Would you want to offer them reasonable credit when buying components? Heck, no. I heard that even Motorola was only giving Apple 30 days to pay for chips they were buying.
So the very public investment of $150 million (plus an undisclosed sum as part of the patent sharing agreement) basically told people that Apple wasn't going to go out of business.
You see, way back when, there were studios and there were broadcast networks. Broadcast networks weren't allowed to own studios. So they would buy the rights to air the program (and they would have some say over content and the like), but the studio owned the program. So when a network cancelled a program, the studio would make the money on syndication and, later, on DVD sales. The studios would make more money on syndication and DVD sales than they made from the networks for the original airings.
So, back then, all NBC did was show Star Trek on their network. Desilu (and later, Paramount) owned the actual rights to the show.
Of course, they got rid of that rule about networks owning studios (which is how the Fox network, etc. came about). Studios bought up networks (Disney bought ABC, NBC is part of Universal, and CBS is part of Viacom, which includes Paramount). This works nicely for the studios because they are no longer dependent on some outside source to make shows popular--they control everything.
I think we all have heard the same stories about various other foreign countries. And, honestly, if a company would pay me my American salary and let me live in and work from, say, Vietnam, I'd do it in a heartbeat!
The problem is that's not what's being offered. They want to pay you the prevailing wage in whatever country you're moving to.
So if you were making $100,000 here in the US and you move to China, you might only be making $10,000 a year. You might be able to live just as well in China on $10,000 a year as you could in the US for $100,000 a year, so "in theory" your standard of living wouldn't be changing.
However, the problem would be that if you save your money while working over there and then return to the US, you'll find your savings is worth significantly less.
I would do something like this if I was young and single--it'd be quite the adventure! But if I was older, with a wife and kids and a house and all that? Not a chance.
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Perhaps the government will provide one as part of it's next Economic Stimulus bill. Write your congressman today!
For comparison purposes, the Sumatra tsunami of 2004 was estimated to release around 20MT of energy at the surface, and produced as much as 30m surges hundreds of miles away from the epicenter.
Okay. So that's 20 times the 1MT we're talking about. So that would be 1.5m surge.
I think New York is safe.
If the poster is anonymous and makes claims without backing them up, then a person would have to be an idiot to ascribe any weight to them.
Agreed. However...
You're considering hiring someone. Your web search of their name turns up some anonymous coward talking about what a horrible employee they are, how they tried to steal from the company, etc.
Now obviously this is anonymous hearsay. What would you do? Contact the person? Well, they're obviously going to say that it wasn't them. Now what?
You have another candidate that's almost as qualified. Do you want to go through the hassle of having the person checked out more thoroughly? Or is it easier to just go with candidate #2? After all, you'd like this job filled ASAP and you don't want to spend a week dealing with investigators.
The cable companies argue that, because they pay subscriber fees (25-90 cents per home per channel), they should be able to control who does, and does not, have access to online TV shows.
I'm not sure that you'll see this sort of "exclusive" licensing, where you won't be able to see Monk anywhere except on Comcast's website. That would be really silly for the producers of Monk. I'm sure they'd be more than willing to license it to any website that wants to pay what they the producers are asking.
The issue, of course, is that Comcast already pays USA Network 25-90 cents for each home that gets USA Network. So if Comcast offers this to their customers, they shouldn't have to pay any more money than they are paying now--it's the same program. Of course, USA Network doesn't see it the same way. They want x cents per household for TV viewing, y cents for On Demand, and z cents for Internet viewing.
Well, not entirely.
I tell the police that I killed someone and hand them the murder weapon. When I have my day in court, I can't come back and say, "The police can't tell the jury I said and did that because it would be against my fifth amendment rights."
Well, since I patented "something cool" I get to decide what is cool and what isn't in regards to technology.
And I've decided that "something cool you can do with technology" is anything that makes you enough money that I can take with my patent.
When I was in Riyadh years ago, one part that made me laugh were the traffic lights. They were only green in one direction at a time. So, for example, the light for going north would be green, but the lights for going south, east, and west would be red. Then the light for going south would be green but the lights for going north, east, and west would be red. Then the light for east would be green, etc.
Of course, you would see people drive up the right hand side and then attempt to turn left at the light, so I think they did it just to make some of the crazy behavior a little safer.
That means we have to start pumping CO2 into the atmosphere post haste!
I guess I'll go buy that SUV now...
Openness adds a good third party market in some ways, but it also adds a lot of junk. Apple's filtering benefits the consumer that doesn't want to have a lot of crap in their eco-system.
Agreed. I, for one, am glad that there aren't bunches of tip calculators, fart apps, useless promotional gimmicks, fads, and web pages-turned-into-applications on Apple's App Store.
Oh, wait...
Here's sort of where I laugh.
"Apple is open! Look at all the applications!"
"No, you can't develop this and this and this."
"Well, yes, you're right, but it's Apple's platform and they can do what they want."
Then they're not open, okay?
I'm not going to argue whether Apple's approach is better or worse. I'm a long-time Mac developer and user (as I say, my first 'Mac' was a Macintosh) and I love the iPhone. However, I'm not able to develop my kind of application for it because Apple won't let me (or, more precisely, Apple won't let me distribute it).
If you want to argue that this creates a better environment for your typical user who just wants a phone that works, I might agree with you. But don't try to say that Apple is "open" to third-party developers when they clearly are not.
How about having to buy a Macintosh as an initial cost for iPhone development?
Consider a spongey body made of soft, runny (with chunks), powdery carbonaceous materials (including hydrocarbons) [...]
What?! There may be hydrocarbons on these things?!?
Well, why didn't you say so? We'll invade tomorrow.
So they'd have to go back to...farming?
Not all commuters have iPhones or any smartphones at all. Many are still quite content with ones that can just make calls and text.
You're 100% correct. And I'm sure that will stay the same for the next 100 years.
Set the time machine ahead, say, 3 or 4 years:
"What? Verizon wants to give me a free Motorola FAZR which will play music via the Internet if I sign up for a two year plan? No thank you! I want a phone that just makes calls and lets me send text messages!"
Yeah. Sure.
So basically you're trading one subscription based service for another and just changing the way you listen to it.
Yes. And no.
I don't give a rat's patootie about Howard Stern, Oprah, or MLB. On the other had, I do like football--principally, the New England Patriots. So I might actually pay the New England Patriots organization in order to receive their games.
It isn't all that expensive to stream stuff over the Internet. The Patriots organization could set it up in house, sell it themselves, and keep all the money.
Personally, I think "the consolidators"--essentially the middle-men who consolidate all these programs--are the ones who are not long for this world.
You don't consider the time listening to an ad to be lost?
Depends on what else I could be doing.
Consider TV viewing. I could watch an hour show in 40-something minutes if I didn't have to watch the advertisements. That would give me more time to do something.
Consider driving in a car listening to the radio. If I'm not listening to the ad, what else could I have been doing? What am I missing because I am being "forced" to listen to this ad?
The appeal of satellite radio on car trips is that even when I can't get cell phone service at all, I can get Satellite radio.
Agreed. The question is: How often am I doing car trips? As gas prices get higher, maybe not so much. Spending $10 a month for music might be an expense that goes.
Oh, and before you bring up truckers and traveling salesmen, I'm not convinced they are a big enough market to keep satellite in business.
But the bulk of the U.S. does not get 3G service.
Agreed. But do you think it will always be that way? I don't.
Then you'd have to deal with the issue of how you tie your smart phone into the sound system of your car.
My 2001 car has no convenient way to do this. My roomate's 2007 car has an audio jack. I'm pretty sure this is becoming standard in most car radios nowadays, so you can plug in your phone and talk hands-free.
Not to mention the man/machine interface that would support tuning stations inside an automobile without fiddling with a smart phone.
I don't believe this would be a difficult thing to overcome, but I'll go on to the next level and say, "Why would we need to tune our stations to begin with?"
Pandora, in my opinion, is something like what we'll see in the future--basically, lots of different streams "narrowcasting" to our particular tastes and interests. Rather than having a separate channel for "rock", "punk", "heavy metal", etc., you'll have a system which generates playlists based on the kind of music you like. So you'll be less likely to have to change the channel. And, if something comes up that you don't like, you'll hit the "That song sucks" button and it will go on to the next song on the playlist.
So rather than choosing between "the rock station" or "the heavy metal station", you'll probably choose between, say, Pandora or Last.fm based upon their ability to correctly guess what kind of music you like.
You might also see some intelligence put into other things, such as news and weather. If you're in your car traveling down interstate 405, you don't really need to care about the accident on interstate 210 or about the plane crash in Buffalo or that there's a nasty storm in Louisiana. Location, matched with interest, might interrupt your music to let you know that California just passed a budget or that Coldplay just won a grammy. Again, rather than a "news broadcast" full of stuff you don't care about, you may see more short blurbs (or medium or long blurbs depending on your interest in the story) which get dropped between songs.
So now I'm supposed to buy a new car stereo with a 3.5mm audio input jack for the owners of each of these vehicles. Sticking with FM radio is much cheaper than that.
Agreed. However, the times, they are a-changin'.
My 2001 car stereo had no line-in jack. My roomate's 2007 car does. More and more new cars do.
The point of this is that Sirius/XM and terrestrial radio are going to be broadcasting to fewer and fewer people as time goes by.
Thousands of truckers and commuters rely on Satellite for their source of entertainment and news.
The truckers, I can see. Sirius/XM's coverage is much better than, say, AT&T or Verizon's.
The commuter? Not so much. I know that I can listen to music via an iPhone or a T-Mobile G1 on my 30 mile drive to work with no problems. If I'm paying $30/month for a data plan, why pay an extra $10/month for Sirius/XM?
About the only advantage satellite has over the Internet is coverage.
Uh...mine? At least when my phone is in the car.
I plug my phone in through the auxiliary jack and I have music and the added benefit of a speakerphone when somebody calls me.
You seriously think that launching a retail operation is necessary to put Windows 7 in front of people, when every freaking PC in the world will ship with it anyway?
In one word? Yes. In two words? "Mojave Experiment."
Remember that? Microsoft took a bunch of people who had never used Vista, but knew it was crap. They put them in front of Vista and said "How do you like it?" People liked it!
So, yes, I'd say it's important for Microsoft to have a place where they can show off their products. Where someone can explain the difference between Windows 7 Home and Windows 7 Home Premium. Where someone can suggest that you not try to run Windows 7 on your 1.5GHz Pentium IV with an antique graphics card because none of the pretty graphics will show up.
And if the stores can manage to at least break even, it's free marketing.
Well, it wasn't the money as the image.
Apple's big problem back then was that they were going to go out of business. Everybody knew this. It wasn't a question of if, it was a question of when.
So, since everybody knew Apple was going out of business, would you buy a Macintosh from them? Would you invest in developing software for them? Would you want to offer them reasonable credit when buying components? Heck, no. I heard that even Motorola was only giving Apple 30 days to pay for chips they were buying.
So the very public investment of $150 million (plus an undisclosed sum as part of the patent sharing agreement) basically told people that Apple wasn't going to go out of business.
It's an honest mistake for one so young...
You see, way back when, there were studios and there were broadcast networks. Broadcast networks weren't allowed to own studios. So they would buy the rights to air the program (and they would have some say over content and the like), but the studio owned the program. So when a network cancelled a program, the studio would make the money on syndication and, later, on DVD sales. The studios would make more money on syndication and DVD sales than they made from the networks for the original airings.
So, back then, all NBC did was show Star Trek on their network. Desilu (and later, Paramount) owned the actual rights to the show.
Of course, they got rid of that rule about networks owning studios (which is how the Fox network, etc. came about). Studios bought up networks (Disney bought ABC, NBC is part of Universal, and CBS is part of Viacom, which includes Paramount). This works nicely for the studios because they are no longer dependent on some outside source to make shows popular--they control everything.
Kind of like jury duty?
"Really, I'd love to go to Washington DC and represent my area, but unfortunately I have a dentist appointment that week..."
I think we all have heard the same stories about various other foreign countries. And, honestly, if a company would pay me my American salary and let me live in and work from, say, Vietnam, I'd do it in a heartbeat!
The problem is that's not what's being offered. They want to pay you the prevailing wage in whatever country you're moving to.
So if you were making $100,000 here in the US and you move to China, you might only be making $10,000 a year. You might be able to live just as well in China on $10,000 a year as you could in the US for $100,000 a year, so "in theory" your standard of living wouldn't be changing.
However, the problem would be that if you save your money while working over there and then return to the US, you'll find your savings is worth significantly less.
I would do something like this if I was young and single--it'd be quite the adventure! But if I was older, with a wife and kids and a house and all that? Not a chance.