Microsoft tried to say that Apple was a competitor and, of course, used various statistics that showed how high Apple's market share was in certain markets (e.g., education, graphic arts). The court, though, decided that Apple was not a competitor because Apple did not use Intel chips and the government was saying that Microsoft had a monopoly on operating systems sold for personal computers running Intel x86 CPUs. Thus, Apple was not a competitor to Microsoft.
Again, though, there are some differences here. In the typical wholesale/retail model, I buy n units and receive an appropriate discount--say x%. If I buy more, I may receive a bigger discount. If I buy less, I may receive a smaller discount. But however much I pay, those units are now mine and I can sell them for whatever I see fit. My dealings with the manufacturer are done.
In Apple's "agency" model, Apple owns the hardware until it is sold. The retailer is merely an "agent" of Apple. Apple gives the agent a certain percentage of each sale and may pay for space in the agent's warehouse to store those computers. But Apple will decide what hardware the agent gets and how much it is sold for because the gear belongs to Apple.
You are confusing what Apple sells its devices to resellers for, and what the resellers then sell the devices for. Apple has every right to determine the first, but has no right to determine the second.
Depends on how it's being sold.
Way back in the days of CompUSA, I remember that Apple "owned" all of the machines that CompUSA sold and CompUSA basically got a commission for each Apple machine sold. But since they were Apple's machines, Apple set the prices and not CompUSA. So when Apple released a new machine, you would occasionally come in and find the new machine and the machine it replaced to be the same price because Apple hadn't set a clearance price for the older machines. This is somewhat akin to the "agency" model that Apple trumpets for digital sales.
I have TWC, Verizon FIOS, and AT&T U-Verse where I live. TWC is the cable monopoly and Verizon is the telephone monopoly. Of course, TWC provides phone service and Verizon provides television service. AT&T is available, but it runs via Verizon's copper-wire DSL service.
Actually, California's debt load is $132 billion, about a quarter of your $400 billion. Still too high and it will take some time to pay down. But at least it's going down.
As I understand it, Audi did this a couple of years with the original TT. California changed their emission standards and the TT did not pass. Audi was in the process of designing the next generation TT and didn't want to pull people off of that to fix the older TT. So they just didn't sell TTs in California. I think it was in 2005-2006, but I could be wrong.
My roomate has an iPad 1. It runs iOS 5-something. She uses it for web surfing. Works great for that. It won't stop working great for that just because of this policy. She has an app on there that has a piano keyboard. That app works great and it will continue to work great. So no worries there.
Eventually, you will no longer be able to buy apps in the App Store. Just like you may have a hard time buying apps for your computer running Windows 98 or Mac OS X 10.5. But if what you have works fine, where's the problem?
The transmissions used were line of site, VHF, the transmissions to the moon were followed by replies from the moon.
Why not use a laser to communicate? Pretty tough to listen in on. They certainly had lasers back then, as everybody likes to point out that they set up laser reflectors on the Moon. I'm sure there's some way to scramble the audio as well.
Also, you assume the Soviets didn't believe that we were sending people to the Moon and would be checking every scrap of communication to verify it. It could be that the ruse worked.
Again, I'm going to reiterate that I believe we landed on the Moon. There's plenty of evidence that we did, we had the capability, etc. I'm just saying that (a) the communication isn't really a problem and (b) it's fun to think about how you could fake it.
For example, when someone points out they put laser reflectors at the Apollo landing sites, I like to ask whether anybody pointed a laser at those sites before we landed to verify that there was nothing reflecting lasers beforehand. Also, I'm pretty sure that with 1960s technology, we could land a laser reflector on the Moon.
I always begin these by saying that, yes, I believe the moon landings are real.
That said, I would imagine the radio signals from the Moon would be the easiest part. Land a receiver and transmitter that just takes what it receives on one channel and broadcasts it back to Earth. If you take the live feed from NASA and send it to the astronauts who reply immediately, it will take the appropriate amount of time for NASA to receive the signal from the Moon and no one at NASA would be wiser (except for the conspirator who was making sure the live signal went to the astronauts).
It's a neat thing to think about--not whether they were faked but how could they have been faked. How much of a mission would you have to go through? I mean, we heard from Neil, Buzz, and Michael the whole trip out and then we heard from Buzz and Neil on the Moon. You could conceivably use a similar technique for voice communication, but the weightless part inside the capsule would be pretty tough to do on Earth. Did they do TV broadcasts from inside the capsule (like was shown on Apollo 13)? The capsule could have stayed in orbit--either Earth or lunar--but that would be tricky to sync up the movements of the fake moon-walking astronauts with the voices from the capsule.
One of the questions I have for the conspiracy nuts is what missions were faked? Only the Apollo missions? Assuming it was only the Apollo missions, then the Surveyor missions weren't faked and that shows that NASA could land equipment in the Moon. Were all the Apollo missions faked? Apollo 8 and Apollo 10 sent men around the Moon. Were those faked?
Moreover, if noise worries you, then get a pair of earplugs. And/or don't fly (the engines are almost always the noisiest thing on airplanes for me).
To me, there's an issue that I think will have to be confronted at some point regarding this.
If I'm wearing headphones/earplugs, how will I hear announcements from the cockpit? And if I'm wearing these while reading my kindle, how will I notice that the little "fasten seat belts" sign has come on? And when the plane drops 4 feet because of turbulence and I break my leg, who am I going to sue? Because it's obviously not my fault that my leg was broken.
And the cellphone user will comply once a few assholes are fined $25,000.
First, frankly, the difference between a restaurant and an airplane is that the restaurant can "ask you to leave" (I use the term loosely--they can tell you leave and can enforce it.) The airplane cannot really do that, unless they want to spend time and money. As much as we joke about throwing people out the door, they can't really do that.
I'm not sure which would be worse: sitting next to a jerk on a phone for 5 hours or being on a 7 hour flight because some jerk with a cellphone who isn't following the orders of the flight attendant is causing the flight to make an unscheduled stop in Omaha, Nebraska to dump said unruly passenger.
Second, airlines can obviously call the cops on passengers who are breaking FAA regulations once they land. But if one airline allows people to talk on the phone and the other airline doesn't and the one that doesn't asks the FAA to fine a passenger who was not breaking any law, I don't think that would really work. So if the Flight Attendent asks me to put away my phone and I don't, what are they going to do? I know that, in theory, you can get be fined for not doing what an FA tells you to do. But I don't know if that's true if what you're doing is against an "airline policy" versus an "FAA regulation."
I don't understand how you can compare someone talking in a (presumably) normal voice to someone using an artificial noisemaking instrument.
You can't. And if we could somehow guarantee this, I wouldn't complain.
I'm, unfortunately, one of those people who's voice goes up a few decibels when I'm talking on the phone. I don't know why, it just does. I've had friends who pointed this out to me and I make an effort to not talk on the phone in public spaces because I know that, even if I'm aware of it and make an effort, sometimes I will forget and start being loud.
In other words, I'm definitely the guy you don't want to be sitting next to on an airplane if I'm using the phone. Heck, you probably don't want to be within three rows of me.
Now, I can see the argument against a complete ban. Heck, not all of us live a convenient distance from an airport. If my flight is running late due to headwinds over Nebraska, it would be thoughtful of me to tell my sister who's driving for an hour to come pick me up that I'll be about 15 minutes late. I'm sure there are plenty of examples of nice short conversations that nobody would have a complaint with--even if they were done by a loudmouth.
From a safety standpoint, though, it's worthwhile to not have a noisy cabin. There are various lighted signs, placards, and crew instructions that must be obeyed. Picture a bunch of people yakking on the phone when the pilot asks everybody to fasten their seat belts. Sure the little light comes on, but you're not paying attention. Then the plane drops three feet and a bunch of people get hurt. These people promptly sue the airlines for millions of dollars because the airline didn't make enough of an effort to warn them of turbulence.
First, during the trial period, it's free. There is no comment as to how much it will cost after June 2014. Second, it's $9 per hour. So $18 to watch, say, a two hour movie. A bit pricey, methinks.
According to Apple, users buy 15,000 songs every minute. That would be 21,600,000 songs per day. Just for laughs, we'll say each song is 99 cents and that's $21,384,000 in revenue that just the music store brings in every day. Forget the movies, forget the TV shows, forget the Apps.
$21 million per day. Wow.
Now we have some accounting to do. Yes, the music companies get about 2/3rds of that. But when does Apple transfer that 2/3rds? I doubt it's every day. Every week? Every month? Apple can make pretty good interest on $21 million dollars a day, I would imagine. If they give the money to the music companies every month, that gives Apple 30 days to play with that revenue. I'm sure they can get some pretty good rates on that.
Yes, Apple claims that they end up making about 1 cent of profit from an iTunes sale. But do they count the interest that they accumulate from holding onto that money in their 1 cent of profit?
But spying for a political race? There aren't really any defenses you can latch onto to rationalize it.
Well, first off, I'm not sure that matters. There are plenty of politically-minded people at the NSA, much like keeping up with boardroom intrigue affects a company's morale. So this spying that I'm doing is good for the agency. And what's good for the agency is good for the country, right?
Another obvious point: In an election, there's plenty of money involved. Offer some NSA guy $50 million to feed the Republican/Democratic candidate's call info to their competitors. I dunno about you, but I could probably live pretty well for the rest of my life in some foreign country on $50 million. As soon as my services aren't needed, I'm resigning and on the first plane out of the country. You don't need a grandiose conspiracy from the sounds of it. Snowden was just one person.
I'd love to have satellite! For me, I have to send my TCP/IP packets via a carrier pigeon and have to pay to feed those pigeons and clean up after them!
In the abstract, that's true. However, start including other road users and you can find a hill that is problematic.
Yes, I can go into first gear and climb the hill at 4 MPH. But if I'm sharing a lane with cars, I'm not sure that they'll really appreciate it. Being able to bip up the hill at 15 or 20 MPH will probably make them happier.
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That's actually some entertaining trivia.
Microsoft tried to say that Apple was a competitor and, of course, used various statistics that showed how high Apple's market share was in certain markets (e.g., education, graphic arts). The court, though, decided that Apple was not a competitor because Apple did not use Intel chips and the government was saying that Microsoft had a monopoly on operating systems sold for personal computers running Intel x86 CPUs. Thus, Apple was not a competitor to Microsoft.
Again, though, there are some differences here. In the typical wholesale/retail model, I buy n units and receive an appropriate discount--say x%. If I buy more, I may receive a bigger discount. If I buy less, I may receive a smaller discount. But however much I pay, those units are now mine and I can sell them for whatever I see fit. My dealings with the manufacturer are done.
In Apple's "agency" model, Apple owns the hardware until it is sold. The retailer is merely an "agent" of Apple. Apple gives the agent a certain percentage of each sale and may pay for space in the agent's warehouse to store those computers. But Apple will decide what hardware the agent gets and how much it is sold for because the gear belongs to Apple.
You are confusing what Apple sells its devices to resellers for, and what the resellers then sell the devices for. Apple has every right to determine the first, but has no right to determine the second.
Depends on how it's being sold.
Way back in the days of CompUSA, I remember that Apple "owned" all of the machines that CompUSA sold and CompUSA basically got a commission for each Apple machine sold. But since they were Apple's machines, Apple set the prices and not CompUSA. So when Apple released a new machine, you would occasionally come in and find the new machine and the machine it replaced to be the same price because Apple hadn't set a clearance price for the older machines. This is somewhat akin to the "agency" model that Apple trumpets for digital sales.
Accurate, but not entirely true.
I have TWC, Verizon FIOS, and AT&T U-Verse where I live. TWC is the cable monopoly and Verizon is the telephone monopoly. Of course, TWC provides phone service and Verizon provides television service. AT&T is available, but it runs via Verizon's copper-wire DSL service.
Actually, California's debt load is $132 billion, about a quarter of your $400 billion. Still too high and it will take some time to pay down. But at least it's going down.
CA is broke.
California has a $2.4 billion surplus, about same as Texas.
As I understand it, Audi did this a couple of years with the original TT. California changed their emission standards and the TT did not pass. Audi was in the process of designing the next generation TT and didn't want to pull people off of that to fix the older TT. So they just didn't sell TTs in California. I think it was in 2005-2006, but I could be wrong.
This isn't really intended for the home-owner. You're right there--I probably have more space on my roof than the square footage of my windows.
This is for the tall office building in a city. Those tend to have more square-footage in windows than the space available on the roof.
That said, I'd be curious about other buildings blocking the sun in a crowded area.
Is she happy with it?
My roomate has an iPad 1. It runs iOS 5-something. She uses it for web surfing. Works great for that. It won't stop working great for that just because of this policy. She has an app on there that has a piano keyboard. That app works great and it will continue to work great. So no worries there.
Eventually, you will no longer be able to buy apps in the App Store. Just like you may have a hard time buying apps for your computer running Windows 98 or Mac OS X 10.5. But if what you have works fine, where's the problem?
leading me to suspect that the cheaper android devices are first and foremost used as a pure phone with some games etc thrown in.
And this is bad...why?
The poster's experience with the Internet is probably as bad or better than what people have to live in most of the world that isn't the US or Europe.
...or South Korea or Japan or Taiwan or Iceland or Uruguay...
I would say "Yes," but it would be a lie.
Why not use a laser to communicate? Pretty tough to listen in on. They certainly had lasers back then, as everybody likes to point out that they set up laser reflectors on the Moon. I'm sure there's some way to scramble the audio as well.
Also, you assume the Soviets didn't believe that we were sending people to the Moon and would be checking every scrap of communication to verify it. It could be that the ruse worked.
Again, I'm going to reiterate that I believe we landed on the Moon. There's plenty of evidence that we did, we had the capability, etc. I'm just saying that (a) the communication isn't really a problem and (b) it's fun to think about how you could fake it.
For example, when someone points out they put laser reflectors at the Apollo landing sites, I like to ask whether anybody pointed a laser at those sites before we landed to verify that there was nothing reflecting lasers beforehand. Also, I'm pretty sure that with 1960s technology, we could land a laser reflector on the Moon.
Of course, if we in the US landed today, it would be the AT&T Sea of Tranquility.
I always begin these by saying that, yes, I believe the moon landings are real.
That said, I would imagine the radio signals from the Moon would be the easiest part. Land a receiver and transmitter that just takes what it receives on one channel and broadcasts it back to Earth. If you take the live feed from NASA and send it to the astronauts who reply immediately, it will take the appropriate amount of time for NASA to receive the signal from the Moon and no one at NASA would be wiser (except for the conspirator who was making sure the live signal went to the astronauts).
It's a neat thing to think about--not whether they were faked but how could they have been faked. How much of a mission would you have to go through? I mean, we heard from Neil, Buzz, and Michael the whole trip out and then we heard from Buzz and Neil on the Moon. You could conceivably use a similar technique for voice communication, but the weightless part inside the capsule would be pretty tough to do on Earth. Did they do TV broadcasts from inside the capsule (like was shown on Apollo 13)? The capsule could have stayed in orbit--either Earth or lunar--but that would be tricky to sync up the movements of the fake moon-walking astronauts with the voices from the capsule.
One of the questions I have for the conspiracy nuts is what missions were faked? Only the Apollo missions? Assuming it was only the Apollo missions, then the Surveyor missions weren't faked and that shows that NASA could land equipment in the Moon. Were all the Apollo missions faked? Apollo 8 and Apollo 10 sent men around the Moon. Were those faked?
Moreover, if noise worries you, then get a pair of earplugs. And/or don't fly (the engines are almost always the noisiest thing on airplanes for me).
To me, there's an issue that I think will have to be confronted at some point regarding this.
If I'm wearing headphones/earplugs, how will I hear announcements from the cockpit? And if I'm wearing these while reading my kindle, how will I notice that the little "fasten seat belts" sign has come on? And when the plane drops 4 feet because of turbulence and I break my leg, who am I going to sue? Because it's obviously not my fault that my leg was broken.
And the cellphone user will comply once a few assholes are fined $25,000.
First, frankly, the difference between a restaurant and an airplane is that the restaurant can "ask you to leave" (I use the term loosely--they can tell you leave and can enforce it.) The airplane cannot really do that, unless they want to spend time and money. As much as we joke about throwing people out the door, they can't really do that.
I'm not sure which would be worse: sitting next to a jerk on a phone for 5 hours or being on a 7 hour flight because some jerk with a cellphone who isn't following the orders of the flight attendant is causing the flight to make an unscheduled stop in Omaha, Nebraska to dump said unruly passenger.
Second, airlines can obviously call the cops on passengers who are breaking FAA regulations once they land. But if one airline allows people to talk on the phone and the other airline doesn't and the one that doesn't asks the FAA to fine a passenger who was not breaking any law, I don't think that would really work. So if the Flight Attendent asks me to put away my phone and I don't, what are they going to do? I know that, in theory, you can get be fined for not doing what an FA tells you to do. But I don't know if that's true if what you're doing is against an "airline policy" versus an "FAA regulation."
I don't understand how you can compare someone talking in a (presumably) normal voice to someone using an artificial noisemaking instrument.
You can't. And if we could somehow guarantee this, I wouldn't complain.
I'm, unfortunately, one of those people who's voice goes up a few decibels when I'm talking on the phone. I don't know why, it just does. I've had friends who pointed this out to me and I make an effort to not talk on the phone in public spaces because I know that, even if I'm aware of it and make an effort, sometimes I will forget and start being loud.
In other words, I'm definitely the guy you don't want to be sitting next to on an airplane if I'm using the phone. Heck, you probably don't want to be within three rows of me.
Now, I can see the argument against a complete ban. Heck, not all of us live a convenient distance from an airport. If my flight is running late due to headwinds over Nebraska, it would be thoughtful of me to tell my sister who's driving for an hour to come pick me up that I'll be about 15 minutes late. I'm sure there are plenty of examples of nice short conversations that nobody would have a complaint with--even if they were done by a loudmouth.
From a safety standpoint, though, it's worthwhile to not have a noisy cabin. There are various lighted signs, placards, and crew instructions that must be obeyed. Picture a bunch of people yakking on the phone when the pilot asks everybody to fasten their seat belts. Sure the little light comes on, but you're not paying attention. Then the plane drops three feet and a bunch of people get hurt. These people promptly sue the airlines for millions of dollars because the airline didn't make enough of an effort to warn them of turbulence.
I think you misread that.
First, during the trial period, it's free. There is no comment as to how much it will cost after June 2014. Second, it's $9 per hour. So $18 to watch, say, a two hour movie. A bit pricey, methinks.
...and you can do the same thing with an Android tablet.
I first saw this on a Motorola Xoom several months before it's introduction in iOS. Definitely not an Apple first.
No. Bullshit. The profit is minimal.
Y'know, I sometimes wonder about this.
According to Apple, users buy 15,000 songs every minute. That would be 21,600,000 songs per day. Just for laughs, we'll say each song is 99 cents and that's $21,384,000 in revenue that just the music store brings in every day. Forget the movies, forget the TV shows, forget the Apps.
$21 million per day. Wow.
Now we have some accounting to do. Yes, the music companies get about 2/3rds of that. But when does Apple transfer that 2/3rds? I doubt it's every day. Every week? Every month? Apple can make pretty good interest on $21 million dollars a day, I would imagine. If they give the money to the music companies every month, that gives Apple 30 days to play with that revenue. I'm sure they can get some pretty good rates on that.
Yes, Apple claims that they end up making about 1 cent of profit from an iTunes sale. But do they count the interest that they accumulate from holding onto that money in their 1 cent of profit?
But spying for a political race? There aren't really any defenses you can latch onto to rationalize it.
Well, first off, I'm not sure that matters. There are plenty of politically-minded people at the NSA, much like keeping up with boardroom intrigue affects a company's morale. So this spying that I'm doing is good for the agency. And what's good for the agency is good for the country, right?
Another obvious point: In an election, there's plenty of money involved. Offer some NSA guy $50 million to feed the Republican/Democratic candidate's call info to their competitors. I dunno about you, but I could probably live pretty well for the rest of my life in some foreign country on $50 million. As soon as my services aren't needed, I'm resigning and on the first plane out of the country. You don't need a grandiose conspiracy from the sounds of it. Snowden was just one person.
They do on their FiOS service.
I'd love to have satellite! For me, I have to send my TCP/IP packets via a carrier pigeon and have to pay to feed those pigeons and clean up after them!
Satellite! Pfft! I dream of having satellite!
(Sorry...I was just thinking of Four Yorkshiremen.)
In the abstract, that's true. However, start including other road users and you can find a hill that is problematic.
Yes, I can go into first gear and climb the hill at 4 MPH. But if I'm sharing a lane with cars, I'm not sure that they'll really appreciate it. Being able to bip up the hill at 15 or 20 MPH will probably make them happier.
Share the road applies to everyone.