Expanded erosion of barrier island and sand dunes along the gulf and eastern seaboard will eliminate thousands of square miles of existing shoreline, destroying some of the most valuable property in the country.
Why is that land valuable? Oh, yeah! Because it's on the shoreline!
I would imagine that the new land on the shoreline will become just as valuable as the old land on the shoreline.
As a result it is not able to easily flow over and around a cell's DNA but rather slams into it at several hundred thousand times a second.
Not to mention that it is traveling at 670,616,629 miles per hour and we all know how dangerous it is to travel that fast. It wouldn't be as big a deal if it were traveling more slowly.
There should be a law against having digital signals traveling that fast.
Well, the corporations told me that if I wear long sleeved clothes, a hat, and slather sunscreen on my exposed skin, I'll be safe from that big yellow ball in the sky.
Well, you can argue the privacy implications. And you might lose that argument.
On the other hand, "OMFG! GIANT CORPORATION IS KILLING YOUR KIDS!" makes people sit up and take notice. Dangerous RF has been used plenty of times to keep those pesky cell phone towers out of neighborhoods.
These days, are HDD slots really necessary? Most users don't upgrade their hard drives.
Well, they may replace them when they inevitably fail. Of course, they take their computer into the Apple Store and say, "It broke. Make it better," rather than actually consider replacing the hard drive themselves. Especially when, if they looked, they'd see that Apple is charging them up the yang for a hard drive. But that's another story.
This is always an interesting question, though, and tough to gauge. One of the things about Apple is that you have no choice.
Consider Dell for a moment. Dell has come out with some pretty clever computers. But they didn't sell very well. I would posit that one reason they didn't sell very well was competition from other Dell machines. You can have a cool laptop that folds into a tablet for $999. But right next to it is a laptop that doesn't do that but has a bunch of USB ports and a memory card reader and a bigger screen and it's $699. And guess what they choose? Yup--the $699.
Apple doesn't do this. You get a gorgeous iMac with a stunning 27" screen, a sleek keyboard and touchpad. It looks like something from a Sci-Fi movie. But you don't have the choice to say, "Yeah, it's gorgeous, but go ahead and take all that stuff and stick it in a cheap-ass plastic PC box and charge me $300 less." When you have no choice, you start having to justify yourself. "It's not a big deal if I can't replace the hard drive. I can always get an external one. Sure it will cost a bit more and it may not be as fast, but that's the price I pay for having this gorgeous computer."
And this is where you run into the difference, I think, between Consumer and Pro lines. You're right--my Mom will never upgrade her hard drive. When her MacBook's hard drive goes south--as it eventually will--she will take it into the store and someone else will take her machine apart and replace her hard drive for her, hopefully rescuing her data in the process. The car analogy is apropos--when my car breaks down, I take it to the mechanic. He takes off the various "covers" that keep me from tinkering with my car and fixes the problem.
Pros, on the other hand, want to be able to upgrade their machines. They worry about things like battery life and having replaceable batteries. They want to be able to fix their machines themselves rather than finding an Apple Store or Authorized Repair Shop and dropping the computer off for two days. If I'm a photographer and my MacBook Pro's hard drive fails while I'm shooting a safari in Kenya, finding an Apple Store may be a bit tricky. But I can probably find a hard drive somewhere.
I would love to visit New Zealand--I hear it's beautiful. But I'm not sure I'd want to just fly over the country at 30,000 feet and then come home.
Similar thing here. Traveling 500,000 miles or so to visit our nearest space neighbor and then not landing would be frustrating. Imagine how Jim Lovell must have felt about traveling to the Moon twice--but never landing there.
Unless, ya know, you count what actually matters... profit?
Now, you see, I wonder about this. Do you really care about how much a company profits?
I agree with you that "total market share" becomes somewhat of a dick-measuring contest. But as a consumer, I don't really care how profitable the company is. Whether or not they sell a good product at a good price is my main concern. Since people like the toaster analogy to phones, I could not tell you about the profitability of Waring, Black & Decker, Hamilton-Beach, or Chefman. It doesn't figure into my analysis when I'm buying a toaster. Does it do what I want it to do at a price that I'm willing to pay? Will it look good in my kitchen? Those are the concerns I have when buying a toaster.
As a developer, I'm not all that interested in Apple's "profit share," other than the standard "will they be around in 5 years?" I am interested in market share, but not necessarily over-all market share. If I'm developing educational software for pre-school children, I'd be interested in Apple's market share in those homes. If I'm developing accounting software suitable for medium-sized businesses (eg between 100 and 500 employees), I'd be interested in Apple's market share in that environment. To use that last example, Apple's market share isn't that big in that environment, so I probably wouldn't have much for sales.
As an Apple Investor, hell, yeah, I'm interested in Apple's profit share. If I'm deciding whether or not to invest some of my money into Apple or HTC, I'd probably pick Apple. But all profit share means is that Apple makes more money than anyone else. I used to work for the #1 accounting software company--by revenue. That didn't mean we had the best product. It just meant we charged more than everybody else. Arguably, if Apple is making so much more money than everybody else, I'd have to wonder whether or not Apple's stuff is overpriced. A wise man once told me that, "Unless you're buying an Armani suit, never buy from a salesman wearing one." It means they make way too much money.
App developers have also in large part found that iOS users vastly outspend their Android counterparts.
The same has been true with Macs for quite some time--Mac users buy more software than PC users. Of course, 10% of 25,000,000 is still less than 2% of 250,000,000. I remember reading somewhere that 75% of Adobe's revenue comes from Windows users and 25% from Mac users. But, as a percentage, more Mac users paid Adobe for their applications than Windows users.
This is part of the reason lots of Android software is ad-supported. I'm not sure I've ever seen a study of Ad-Supported versus Charging, though, which would be interesting. If I sell my game for 99 cents, how long would it take me to make 99 cents in advertising...
Way back in the NeXTCube days, NeXT built their own factory in Fremont, CA and invested quite a bit of time and effort into automated assembly. Perhaps Google is taking a similar tack.
$199 for Nexus 7 (8GB) + $299 for Nexus Q = $498. $399 for iPad 2 (16GB) + $99 for AppleTV = $498.
So you get more storage in an iPad 2 but the display isn't as good as the Nexus (1024 x 768 @ 132 ppi vs. 1280 x 800 @ 216 ppi), the CPU isn't as good (dual-core A5 vs Quad core Tegra). Arguably, also, since you're in your living room, you have convenient cloud access so the storage isn't that important.
Even if they did use drones I bet Fed EX would use the encrypted channel and they would rely on navigation aid other than GPS as verification.
Would they? I rashly assume that the military would not appreciate civilian companies having access to their encrypted channels.
This is not a big deal--at the moment--but it is definitely something to keep in mind. With more Drone-like aircraft being used for police and civilian purposes, most of which do not have the same military-grade encryption, and as we put more and more trust into ground-based automated equipment (self-driving cars and the like), the question of "What happens when someone maliciously jams signals?" comes into play.
Not as long as there's somebody sitting in the cockpit going, "Hey, it looks like we're going to crash into that building. I think I'll pull up," we should be okay.
Ah, but is it popular because of the bundling? After all, I get TCM "for free" with my movie bundle (5 "Encore" channels, TCM, AMC, FX Movie Channel, IFC, Sundance, Flix, and I think one or two more). Would I pay an extra $2 a month for it? Probably not.
And what happens when A La Carte is an extra $2 but I can get all 12 of those for $10. Will you then complain that it's unfair that you pay $2 and I only pay $0.83 for the same channel?
So there are people we SUSPECT are Al Qaeda... but we're not going to arrest them when they try to leave the country.
I'm not entirely sure where you're going with this. Are you saying that the TSA should arrest people just because they suspect someone is involved in a terrorist organization? I suppose they should then beat this person until he tells them what they want to hear.
I dunno. Conceptually, I like this. After all, why should I pay for a "tier" when I'm only interested in one or two channels?
That said...
One reason I don't like this is that I tend to surf channels. I'll get home from work and flip through the few hundred channels I have for something that catches my eye while I eat dinner. This week, I watched a program about old cars, a program about the formation of the Earth, and Futurama. Now I probably wouldn't consider paying a monthly fee for just Velocity and Science channels. I don't know that I'd pay for Comedy Central, either.
The second complaint is that you can take this further: "Why should I have to pay for Comedy Central when all I care about is Futurama?" "Why should I have to pay for the entire program when I only watched half of it?"
You also get into the subsidy angle. I'm not a big fan of the Fishing Channel, but it lives in my "sports tier" alongside NFL Network. I'm sure there are people out there who love the Fishing Channel and couldn't care less about NFL Network. But by having both of them in the "sports tier," you end up with more diverse programming which pleases more people. It's quite possible that the Fishing Channel wouldn't survive if it wasn't subsidized by all these cable companies sticking it on their "sports tier."
In your example above, what if TCM went away because there just weren't enough people willing to pay $1-2 a month? Ultimately, you end up with a bunch of channels all showing the same "most popular" stuff. Syfy is a good example--there's a reason that they show WWE Smackdown and that is that it makes them money.
There's also the whole "Tyranny of Choice" angle. My local cable company offers over 300 distinct channels of programming. That's a lot to choose from.
No word on which candidate is most fit to defend America against shambling hordes of undead seeking to destroy civilization in the zombie apocalypse (perhaps that will be brought out in the debates).
I want to buy hours of video to keep my kids quiet on a road trip.
Have you considered drugs? They work pretty well, also.
While I agree with you regarding the external storage, I've found that animated kids shows tend to compress nicely. And it's not like most kids animation requires a high color gamut and 30 fps.
Just out of curiosity, the Nexus 7 has a USB port. Could you use this to attach a USB card reader? Would Android be able to deal with that?
Watch Cinemax at night, when they have soft-core porn. And, yes, it's closed-captioned.
What makes me laugh is the captions--while arguably accurate--don't really capture the tone of voice used. So you will see the large-busted woman gyrating in the throes of passion and the caption at the bottom of the screen will read:
Slashdot Mirror
Expanded erosion of barrier island and sand dunes along the gulf and eastern seaboard will eliminate thousands of square miles of existing shoreline, destroying some of the most valuable property in the country.
Why is that land valuable? Oh, yeah! Because it's on the shoreline!
I would imagine that the new land on the shoreline will become just as valuable as the old land on the shoreline.
...but I bet she still won't be impressed.
As a result it is not able to easily flow over and around a cell's DNA but rather slams into it at several hundred thousand times a second.
Not to mention that it is traveling at 670,616,629 miles per hour and we all know how dangerous it is to travel that fast. It wouldn't be as big a deal if it were traveling more slowly.
There should be a law against having digital signals traveling that fast.
Well, the corporations told me that if I wear long sleeved clothes, a hat, and slather sunscreen on my exposed skin, I'll be safe from that big yellow ball in the sky.
Well, you can argue the privacy implications. And you might lose that argument.
On the other hand, "OMFG! GIANT CORPORATION IS KILLING YOUR KIDS!" makes people sit up and take notice. Dangerous RF has been used plenty of times to keep those pesky cell phone towers out of neighborhoods.
Maybe it'll work here...
Consider this when you hear that non-smokers exposed to second-hand smoke are 20% more likely to get lung cancer.
Oh, wait! That's only for studies we don't like!
Pay per read word...
They have software that can tell what your eye is looking at and it charges you per word.
Solution: Just read the ending. Spoiler: The Butler did it. He always does it.
Well, they may replace them when they inevitably fail. Of course, they take their computer into the Apple Store and say, "It broke. Make it better," rather than actually consider replacing the hard drive themselves. Especially when, if they looked, they'd see that Apple is charging them up the yang for a hard drive. But that's another story.
This is always an interesting question, though, and tough to gauge. One of the things about Apple is that you have no choice.
Consider Dell for a moment. Dell has come out with some pretty clever computers. But they didn't sell very well. I would posit that one reason they didn't sell very well was competition from other Dell machines. You can have a cool laptop that folds into a tablet for $999. But right next to it is a laptop that doesn't do that but has a bunch of USB ports and a memory card reader and a bigger screen and it's $699. And guess what they choose? Yup--the $699.
Apple doesn't do this. You get a gorgeous iMac with a stunning 27" screen, a sleek keyboard and touchpad. It looks like something from a Sci-Fi movie. But you don't have the choice to say, "Yeah, it's gorgeous, but go ahead and take all that stuff and stick it in a cheap-ass plastic PC box and charge me $300 less." When you have no choice, you start having to justify yourself. "It's not a big deal if I can't replace the hard drive. I can always get an external one. Sure it will cost a bit more and it may not be as fast, but that's the price I pay for having this gorgeous computer."
And this is where you run into the difference, I think, between Consumer and Pro lines. You're right--my Mom will never upgrade her hard drive. When her MacBook's hard drive goes south--as it eventually will--she will take it into the store and someone else will take her machine apart and replace her hard drive for her, hopefully rescuing her data in the process. The car analogy is apropos--when my car breaks down, I take it to the mechanic. He takes off the various "covers" that keep me from tinkering with my car and fixes the problem.
Pros, on the other hand, want to be able to upgrade their machines. They worry about things like battery life and having replaceable batteries. They want to be able to fix their machines themselves rather than finding an Apple Store or Authorized Repair Shop and dropping the computer off for two days. If I'm a photographer and my MacBook Pro's hard drive fails while I'm shooting a safari in Kenya, finding an Apple Store may be a bit tricky. But I can probably find a hard drive somewhere.
Perhaps that's what the Salyut is for?
Actually, I sort of agree with the GP.
I would love to visit New Zealand--I hear it's beautiful. But I'm not sure I'd want to just fly over the country at 30,000 feet and then come home.
Similar thing here. Traveling 500,000 miles or so to visit our nearest space neighbor and then not landing would be frustrating. Imagine how Jim Lovell must have felt about traveling to the Moon twice--but never landing there.
Unless, ya know, you count what actually matters... profit?
Now, you see, I wonder about this. Do you really care about how much a company profits?
I agree with you that "total market share" becomes somewhat of a dick-measuring contest. But as a consumer, I don't really care how profitable the company is. Whether or not they sell a good product at a good price is my main concern. Since people like the toaster analogy to phones, I could not tell you about the profitability of Waring, Black & Decker, Hamilton-Beach, or Chefman. It doesn't figure into my analysis when I'm buying a toaster. Does it do what I want it to do at a price that I'm willing to pay? Will it look good in my kitchen? Those are the concerns I have when buying a toaster.
As a developer, I'm not all that interested in Apple's "profit share," other than the standard "will they be around in 5 years?" I am interested in market share, but not necessarily over-all market share. If I'm developing educational software for pre-school children, I'd be interested in Apple's market share in those homes. If I'm developing accounting software suitable for medium-sized businesses (eg between 100 and 500 employees), I'd be interested in Apple's market share in that environment. To use that last example, Apple's market share isn't that big in that environment, so I probably wouldn't have much for sales.
As an Apple Investor, hell, yeah, I'm interested in Apple's profit share. If I'm deciding whether or not to invest some of my money into Apple or HTC, I'd probably pick Apple. But all profit share means is that Apple makes more money than anyone else. I used to work for the #1 accounting software company--by revenue. That didn't mean we had the best product. It just meant we charged more than everybody else. Arguably, if Apple is making so much more money than everybody else, I'd have to wonder whether or not Apple's stuff is overpriced. A wise man once told me that, "Unless you're buying an Armani suit, never buy from a salesman wearing one." It means they make way too much money.
App developers have also in large part found that iOS users vastly outspend their Android counterparts.
The same has been true with Macs for quite some time--Mac users buy more software than PC users. Of course, 10% of 25,000,000 is still less than 2% of 250,000,000. I remember reading somewhere that 75% of Adobe's revenue comes from Windows users and 25% from Mac users. But, as a percentage, more Mac users paid Adobe for their applications than Windows users.
This is part of the reason lots of Android software is ad-supported. I'm not sure I've ever seen a study of Ad-Supported versus Charging, though, which would be interesting. If I sell my game for 99 cents, how long would it take me to make 99 cents in advertising...
FTFY.
Another possibility is robotics.
Way back in the NeXTCube days, NeXT built their own factory in Fremont, CA and invested quite a bit of time and effort into automated assembly. Perhaps Google is taking a similar tack.
Well, let's see...
$199 for Nexus 7 (8GB) + $299 for Nexus Q = $498.
$399 for iPad 2 (16GB) + $99 for AppleTV = $498.
So you get more storage in an iPad 2 but the display isn't as good as the Nexus (1024 x 768 @ 132 ppi vs. 1280 x 800 @ 216 ppi), the CPU isn't as good (dual-core A5 vs Quad core Tegra). Arguably, also, since you're in your living room, you have convenient cloud access so the storage isn't that important.
Even if they did use drones I bet Fed EX would use the encrypted channel and they would rely on navigation aid other than GPS as verification.
Would they? I rashly assume that the military would not appreciate civilian companies having access to their encrypted channels.
This is not a big deal--at the moment--but it is definitely something to keep in mind. With more Drone-like aircraft being used for police and civilian purposes, most of which do not have the same military-grade encryption, and as we put more and more trust into ground-based automated equipment (self-driving cars and the like), the question of "What happens when someone maliciously jams signals?" comes into play.
Obviously, the CIA spoofed the GPS of those airplanes that hit the World Trade Center. There were no hijackers.
Not as long as there's somebody sitting in the cockpit going, "Hey, it looks like we're going to crash into that building. I think I'll pull up," we should be okay.
TCM is one of the most popular channels.
Ah, but is it popular because of the bundling? After all, I get TCM "for free" with my movie bundle (5 "Encore" channels, TCM, AMC, FX Movie Channel, IFC, Sundance, Flix, and I think one or two more). Would I pay an extra $2 a month for it? Probably not.
And what happens when A La Carte is an extra $2 but I can get all 12 of those for $10. Will you then complain that it's unfair that you pay $2 and I only pay $0.83 for the same channel?
So there are people we SUSPECT are Al Qaeda ... but we're not going to arrest them when they try to leave the country.
I'm not entirely sure where you're going with this. Are you saying that the TSA should arrest people just because they suspect someone is involved in a terrorist organization? I suppose they should then beat this person until he tells them what they want to hear.
And dependence on other nations for oil is not a concern as long as access to supply is certain [...]
And we will spend trillions of dollars of tax money to keep that access available.
I dunno. Conceptually, I like this. After all, why should I pay for a "tier" when I'm only interested in one or two channels?
That said...
One reason I don't like this is that I tend to surf channels. I'll get home from work and flip through the few hundred channels I have for something that catches my eye while I eat dinner. This week, I watched a program about old cars, a program about the formation of the Earth, and Futurama. Now I probably wouldn't consider paying a monthly fee for just Velocity and Science channels. I don't know that I'd pay for Comedy Central, either.
The second complaint is that you can take this further: "Why should I have to pay for Comedy Central when all I care about is Futurama?" "Why should I have to pay for the entire program when I only watched half of it?"
You also get into the subsidy angle. I'm not a big fan of the Fishing Channel, but it lives in my "sports tier" alongside NFL Network. I'm sure there are people out there who love the Fishing Channel and couldn't care less about NFL Network. But by having both of them in the "sports tier," you end up with more diverse programming which pleases more people. It's quite possible that the Fishing Channel wouldn't survive if it wasn't subsidized by all these cable companies sticking it on their "sports tier."
In your example above, what if TCM went away because there just weren't enough people willing to pay $1-2 a month? Ultimately, you end up with a bunch of channels all showing the same "most popular" stuff. Syfy is a good example--there's a reason that they show WWE Smackdown and that is that it makes them money.
There's also the whole "Tyranny of Choice" angle. My local cable company offers over 300 distinct channels of programming. That's a lot to choose from.
No word on which candidate is most fit to defend America against shambling hordes of undead seeking to destroy civilization in the zombie apocalypse (perhaps that will be brought out in the debates).
Obviously, Obama would be best against the Zombies. Romney would be best against the Vampires. Or maybe it's the other way around.
I want to buy hours of video to keep my kids quiet on a road trip.
Have you considered drugs? They work pretty well, also.
While I agree with you regarding the external storage, I've found that animated kids shows tend to compress nicely. And it's not like most kids animation requires a high color gamut and 30 fps.
Just out of curiosity, the Nexus 7 has a USB port. Could you use this to attach a USB card reader? Would Android be able to deal with that?
Watch Cinemax at night, when they have soft-core porn. And, yes, it's closed-captioned.
What makes me laugh is the captions--while arguably accurate--don't really capture the tone of voice used. So you will see the large-busted woman gyrating in the throes of passion and the caption at the bottom of the screen will read:
"Oh."
...and character. Why, when I was in school, I had to lug 60 pounds of books to school. Through the snow. Up hill. BOTH WAYS!
But you try to tell the young people of today that...they won't believe you.