It is easier to "sell" (as in commercial, or even simply convincing) some treatment against a silent potential killer in your gene, than asking you to change your habit (stop smoking, drink less,...) for an actual killer in your lifestyle. Same thing happen for about anything: people are scared of terrorists, but do not driving or even go boozing in high criminality area.
People do not give a shit when they are in charge, so in practice, short of making lifestyle change mandatory by law, you can only really work on the genetic defect. (smoking has 30% to kill you in the next 10 years - does not give a shit. A gene in your DNA give you 10% higher probability to have a heart attack before you are 70 - oh my god, I'm doomed - what can I do doctor)
The Eurozone is in quite a deep crisis right now, even if ACTA is bad, a lot of countries are facing worse right now. It is possible that the countries will no want to undermine the union right now when the rating agencies are looking at any excuse to downgrade another country.
It is also possible, especially in countries close to election, that politicians will want to show some backbone against Brussel on such an easy to hate agreement.
Time will tell, as a European, I don't hold my breath. Those agreements take an awful lot of effort to be rejected - look at what it took for the SOPA thing in the US - and they come back slightly changed over and over again. They will pass, it is just a matter of time, unfortunately.
I will just say that retrospect offers amazingly clear vision.
Let's be realistic a minute here. The US, and its local allie, Israel have the best intelligence service in existence. If they were really scared of Saddam, the failure of intelligence services was of such a magnitude that something major would have had to be done about it. Even more so, considering that happened a few years after the same intelligence services failed to prevent one the biggest terrorist plot in its home country.
So yeah, in restrospect, either the US had a hidden agenda or the US government is a composed of a bunch of paranoid psychos with nukes. I the latest case, I would then suggest that you exercise your second amendement right : shoot that drunk across the street with joker outfit before he gets us all nuked.
Why not hire some American, Canadian, or European workers to produce electronics? It would eat into profits and drive up prices?
You know, in a free(-ish) market, this is not a choice. You must use the cheapest, most profitable method that is available. The reason is that if you don't, somebody else will, and they will eventually drive you out of business.
The real question is not why Apple do not hire American, it why people do not want to buy american. If the consumer does not care about what/who made his gadget, the condition, moral, social impact,... then they will get the cheapest possible standard for all those criteria. Consumers drive the show.
Actually, the fact that Apple is even looking at the problem, means that there is pressure coming from the consumer. This is a good thing. Save your energy bashing Apple and use it instead to inform the consumer.
Too bad the judges are not so discerning with the small people. Oracle needs to come with a convincing methodology. Does the RIAA have one ? Also, since regardless who win, the end-user will not be affected whatsoever - I think that would be better for Oracle to win to highlight in a bit more spectacular fashion the idiocy of the current patent system. (well, hopefully there is still some fun to be had on the mobile market - hopefully they don't settle and cross-license )
You are splitting hairs here - you take an insurance with the only goal to have somebody else pay for your problems covered by the insurance. Your reasoning that "whether or not somebody else pays depends on how much money you have paid" applies to everything that is free except for charity. Free sample at walmart: if you buy the product that wasn't really free. Free journal, if you buy something from the advertiser, that's not really free either. Free police assistance, if you use it once in your life, you have overpaid that in taxes...
Well, you see people running around listening to their iPod for 10 hours a day - listening to music is the biggest and most important activity in their life. People are addicted to music, not to potato grower, not even to that level to alcohol. That is what give them superpower and that is what gives their overlord the balls to sue a government. The logical step for a broke government would be to tax the thing to death for some easy cash. Why music is immune is a mystery.
The majority of people just wanted a device to surf the web and do basic stuff. Before they needed to buy a desktop, now they have the choice. Desktop will never die maybe correct (as in, sure you will probably find desktop for sale in 50+ years, just as you can buy a brand new horse carriage today), they just become more and more irrelevant for the mainstream consumer. Soon, they will be a professional tool only, later, a specialist tool and after that they will peacefully become a legacy tool.
No need for global conspiracy. You don't control what code is used to build your Android handset. The handset maker just tell you what base version they used and you need to trust them. Even on a vanilla Galaxy Nexus that would be trivial to slip a backdoor.
And then, you have to build it yourself (preferably with a compiler you have built yourself too).
Really Android is open source, sure. But the Android handset run custom proprietary drivers and a layer on top of it and then, even for the open source part, you cannot really tell what was used to build them. So unless you install your own build at home Android version (including drivers), it is not better than any other system (from that point of view).
Apple just say fuck you straight in the face of their customer. They don't flag something as 'beta' as some sort of customer relationship management tool. You cannot say if SIRI will work or not on other device when its out of beta. No need to bash Apple either way - nobody without a NDA knows on what the fuck will run Siri - it is not even excluded that Apple decides to abandon it on the 4S until they "get it right" at some point in the future.
Using the same reasoning, if you use BitTorrent, you should be safe from the RIAA since you only exchange small chunk of music/video that are less than 30sec and therefore protected by fair use. And you could get away with murder claiming the bullet not you killed the guy.
Then again, why not, money is free speech after all...
Since the low hanging fruits of fundamental science have basically been found already, it just require more time to get the knowledge required to find some new place to dig. Statistically, you will also fail more often the more advanced the subject with less chance of bonus side effects, requiring again more time on average to produce something significant.
Just imagine the amount of knowledge and experience required just to be a simple peon on the LHC, and that only where it starts nowadays. Until we have the technology to imprint knowledge in the brain, invent some revolutionary knowledge processing technology (like an AI that could provide human with the same knowledge processing power as computer did for computation processing power), there is not workaround to the limitation of the brain. You need more experience, even if, by the time you have it, you are not longer at your brainpower peak.
If you manage a US based large company and do not make a million$ based salary - you are doing it very very wrong. Also if you think that dining with an ex-classmate, going to a trade conference and reading a professional magazine is working, you should know that your company probably consider that slacking when one of your employee does it.
If you are in a small company, put think into perspective, you probably manage less people / less money than an average project manager in a large company. So not the kind of people/. complains about (nobility-like cast so detached from their employees at the bottom or their clients there is no more any correlation between their decisions and their company performance), just the kind of people that made the US great.
If you measure people performance using a metric like number of cases closed, then the guy that maximizes the metric by any legal mean is doing is job better that the "good" guy that tries to solve the case. If you are paid to close the case, you are not paid to solve them. There is no evilness involved here.
A company that uses metric to measure performance of its employee deserve to die. Professional employees trying to do their job the old way (solving case, fixing bugs,...) are just keeping that company alive and making a huge disservice to society.
So insurance companies make money on the promise that your house will burn down, and that includes saying that houses are flammable?
Well yes - insurance companies tell you all the time that houses are flammable. They even list everything that you will lose if your "so flammable, it could be considered burning already" house do actually burn in their advertisement. They also tell you that you will lose your phone, have your car stolen, crashed and destroyed. They also tell you have a good chance to die unexpectedly and leave your family in misery if you don't get their life insurance policy.
That could be a bad move for MS to create a online only console when its primary market is pushing for more and more broadband cap. They would also need to fight the Gigabyte budget with all the new Netflix-like content provider. Most likely, you will have the choice, as on PC, between buying the physical media, or the downloading it if you want it now.
Based on your broken English (too many examples to point out) and use of the dollar sign as a trailing currency sign, this indicates you're most likely an Indian sand nigger.
There is a flaw in your reasoning though, broken English and trailing currency sign is not enough to narrow it down - so I could even be... black (regular black nigger you call them I suppose), hispano (hispanic nigger), eastern asian (yellow nigger) or plain european (white trash nigger).
As the first foreigner you meet, let me welcome you to The Internet, the amazing place full of people you can hate.
There may be more to it than that. China and India also prepare to be the first victims of global warming and they know it. They have all interest of getting all the power and money they can - they will not cripple their economy now. Also there is no hope that any type of climate treaty will be followed if it put any country at a disadvantage (see what happen in Europe with the EUR crisis: nations behaves between themselves like middle managers in a large organisation: blame shifting, petty strategies to look good, let the other fails to look better yourself, don't help John because his wife had the same dress as yours at the Christmas Party,... and complete disconnect with either their people or the world around them)
My company charges 2000$ per developer per day for enhancements, analysis,... (bug fixes are free though, some client pay more, some *much* less). So you can pay up to 500.000$ per year per dev.
Our client have so little staff that they hire us (at that rate) to analyse their requirements on their systems. Recently they hired 5 people for half a day for basic data entry (skill level = updating status in facebook) They are literally bleeding money anytime their business is not working entirely automatically. Some client have literally outsourced their whole business knowledge to us - they don't have a single person anymore that has experience with what the system is supposed to do and how it interacts with other system in their organisation. The best/worst part ? They pay that rate even if the developer actually doing the work is a cheapo one from our indian office.
But... we sell that rate because we do our job and that means that generally after a while the system settles. Some of our client have basically no interaction with us for years. So the problem is not as easy as it seems: sure they overpay massively for a short period of time (a few years), but hiring would commit them with long term employees.
That is Microsoft we are talking about. The majority of software you can buy for Windows are not yet using DotNet - the 10 years old technology that was supposed to replace all the others (Win32, COM, COM+,...). They could not even convince their own team to develop in it. I would not be too worried about metro. Desktop OS will be irrelevant for joe user before a significant percent of apps use Metro.
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It is easier to "sell" (as in commercial, or even simply convincing) some treatment against a silent potential killer in your gene, than asking you to change your habit (stop smoking, drink less, ...) for an actual killer in your lifestyle. Same thing happen for about anything: people are scared of terrorists, but do not driving or even go boozing in high criminality area.
People do not give a shit when they are in charge, so in practice, short of making lifestyle change mandatory by law, you can only really work on the genetic defect. (smoking has 30% to kill you in the next 10 years - does not give a shit. A gene in your DNA give you 10% higher probability to have a heart attack before you are 70 - oh my god, I'm doomed - what can I do doctor)
It is also possible, especially in countries close to election, that politicians will want to show some backbone against Brussel on such an easy to hate agreement.
Time will tell, as a European, I don't hold my breath. Those agreements take an awful lot of effort to be rejected - look at what it took for the SOPA thing in the US - and they come back slightly changed over and over again. They will pass, it is just a matter of time, unfortunately.
I will just say that retrospect offers amazingly clear vision.
Let's be realistic a minute here. The US, and its local allie, Israel have the best intelligence service in existence. If they were really scared of Saddam, the failure of intelligence services was of such a magnitude that something major would have had to be done about it. Even more so, considering that happened a few years after the same intelligence services failed to prevent one the biggest terrorist plot in its home country.
So yeah, in restrospect, either the US had a hidden agenda or the US government is a composed of a bunch of paranoid psychos with nukes. I the latest case, I would then suggest that you exercise your second amendement right : shoot that drunk across the street with joker outfit before he gets us all nuked.
Why not hire some American, Canadian, or European workers to produce electronics? It would eat into profits and drive up prices?
You know, in a free(-ish) market, this is not a choice. You must use the cheapest, most profitable method that is available. The reason is that if you don't, somebody else will, and they will eventually drive you out of business.
The real question is not why Apple do not hire American, it why people do not want to buy american. If the consumer does not care about what/who made his gadget, the condition, moral, social impact, ... then they will get the cheapest possible standard for all those criteria. Consumers drive the show.
Actually, the fact that Apple is even looking at the problem, means that there is pressure coming from the consumer. This is a good thing. Save your energy bashing Apple and use it instead to inform the consumer.
Too bad the judges are not so discerning with the small people. Oracle needs to come with a convincing methodology. Does the RIAA have one ? Also, since regardless who win, the end-user will not be affected whatsoever - I think that would be better for Oracle to win to highlight in a bit more spectacular fashion the idiocy of the current patent system. (well, hopefully there is still some fun to be had on the mobile market - hopefully they don't settle and cross-license )
You are splitting hairs here - you take an insurance with the only goal to have somebody else pay for your problems covered by the insurance. Your reasoning that "whether or not somebody else pays depends on how much money you have paid" applies to everything that is free except for charity. Free sample at walmart: if you buy the product that wasn't really free. Free journal, if you buy something from the advertiser, that's not really free either. Free police assistance, if you use it once in your life, you have overpaid that in taxes ...
That would just push lobbyism to another level: see you either vote for this law or we will rip you apart in a court of law.
Well, you see people running around listening to their iPod for 10 hours a day - listening to music is the biggest and most important activity in their life. People are addicted to music, not to potato grower, not even to that level to alcohol. That is what give them superpower and that is what gives their overlord the balls to sue a government. The logical step for a broke government would be to tax the thing to death for some easy cash. Why music is immune is a mystery.
The majority of people just wanted a device to surf the web and do basic stuff. Before they needed to buy a desktop, now they have the choice. Desktop will never die maybe correct (as in, sure you will probably find desktop for sale in 50+ years, just as you can buy a brand new horse carriage today), they just become more and more irrelevant for the mainstream consumer. Soon, they will be a professional tool only, later, a specialist tool and after that they will peacefully become a legacy tool.
No need for global conspiracy. You don't control what code is used to build your Android handset. The handset maker just tell you what base version they used and you need to trust them. Even on a vanilla Galaxy Nexus that would be trivial to slip a backdoor.
Really Android is open source, sure. But the Android handset run custom proprietary drivers and a layer on top of it and then, even for the open source part, you cannot really tell what was used to build them. So unless you install your own build at home Android version (including drivers), it is not better than any other system (from that point of view).
Apple just say fuck you straight in the face of their customer. They don't flag something as 'beta' as some sort of customer relationship management tool. You cannot say if SIRI will work or not on other device when its out of beta. No need to bash Apple either way - nobody without a NDA knows on what the fuck will run Siri - it is not even excluded that Apple decides to abandon it on the 4S until they "get it right" at some point in the future.
oops - undo bad moderation sorry
Or just use Skype, Spotify and or legal streaming sites.
Using the same reasoning, if you use BitTorrent, you should be safe from the RIAA since you only exchange small chunk of music/video that are less than 30sec and therefore protected by fair use. And you could get away with murder claiming the bullet not you killed the guy.
Then again, why not, money is free speech after all ...
Since the low hanging fruits of fundamental science have basically been found already, it just require more time to get the knowledge required to find some new place to dig. Statistically, you will also fail more often the more advanced the subject with less chance of bonus side effects, requiring again more time on average to produce something significant.
Just imagine the amount of knowledge and experience required just to be a simple peon on the LHC, and that only where it starts nowadays. Until we have the technology to imprint knowledge in the brain, invent some revolutionary knowledge processing technology (like an AI that could provide human with the same knowledge processing power as computer did for computation processing power), there is not workaround to the limitation of the brain. You need more experience, even if, by the time you have it, you are not longer at your brainpower peak.
If you are in a small company, put think into perspective, you probably manage less people / less money than an average project manager in a large company. So not the kind of people /. complains about (nobility-like cast so detached from their employees at the bottom or their clients there is no more any correlation between their decisions and their company performance), just the kind of people that made the US great.
If you measure people performance using a metric like number of cases closed, then the guy that maximizes the metric by any legal mean is doing is job better that the "good" guy that tries to solve the case. If you are paid to close the case, you are not paid to solve them. There is no evilness involved here.
A company that uses metric to measure performance of its employee deserve to die. Professional employees trying to do their job the old way (solving case, fixing bugs, ...) are just keeping that company alive and making a huge disservice to society.
So insurance companies make money on the promise that your house will burn down, and that includes saying that houses are flammable?
Well yes - insurance companies tell you all the time that houses are flammable. They even list everything that you will lose if your "so flammable, it could be considered burning already" house do actually burn in their advertisement. They also tell you that you will lose your phone, have your car stolen, crashed and destroyed. They also tell you have a good chance to die unexpectedly and leave your family in misery if you don't get their life insurance policy.
That could be a bad move for MS to create a online only console when its primary market is pushing for more and more broadband cap. They would also need to fight the Gigabyte budget with all the new Netflix-like content provider. Most likely, you will have the choice, as on PC, between buying the physical media, or the downloading it if you want it now.
Based on your broken English (too many examples to point out) and use of the dollar sign as a trailing currency sign, this indicates you're most likely an Indian sand nigger.
There is a flaw in your reasoning though, broken English and trailing currency sign is not enough to narrow it down - so I could even be ... black (regular black nigger you call them I suppose), hispano (hispanic nigger), eastern asian (yellow nigger) or plain european (white trash nigger).
As the first foreigner you meet, let me welcome you to The Internet, the amazing place full of people you can hate.
There may be more to it than that. China and India also prepare to be the first victims of global warming and they know it. They have all interest of getting all the power and money they can - they will not cripple their economy now. Also there is no hope that any type of climate treaty will be followed if it put any country at a disadvantage (see what happen in Europe with the EUR crisis: nations behaves between themselves like middle managers in a large organisation: blame shifting, petty strategies to look good, let the other fails to look better yourself, don't help John because his wife had the same dress as yours at the Christmas Party, ... and complete disconnect with either their people or the world around them)
My company charges 2000$ per developer per day for enhancements, analysis, ... (bug fixes are free though, some client pay more, some *much* less). So you can pay up to 500.000$ per year per dev.
Our client have so little staff that they hire us (at that rate) to analyse their requirements on their systems. Recently they hired 5 people for half a day for basic data entry (skill level = updating status in facebook) They are literally bleeding money anytime their business is not working entirely automatically. Some client have literally outsourced their whole business knowledge to us - they don't have a single person anymore that has experience with what the system is supposed to do and how it interacts with other system in their organisation. The best/worst part ? They pay that rate even if the developer actually doing the work is a cheapo one from our indian office.
But ... we sell that rate because we do our job and that means that generally after a while the system settles. Some of our client have basically no interaction with us for years. So the problem is not as easy as it seems: sure they overpay massively for a short period of time (a few years), but hiring would commit them with long term employees.
Not yet, anyway.
That is Microsoft we are talking about. The majority of software you can buy for Windows are not yet using DotNet - the 10 years old technology that was supposed to replace all the others (Win32, COM, COM+, ...). They could not even convince their own team to develop in it. I would not be too worried about metro. Desktop OS will be irrelevant for joe user before a significant percent of apps use Metro.
Or about the value of a small sd-card of mp3.