I'll give the parents who fall for this crap a little leeway. Being personally effected by something like this is emotionally rough on people and they want to find answers to why it happened, a possible cure to make it better, or even just some kind of better understanding.
People like Wakefield (and the other snake oil peddlers like faith healers, psychic surgeons, etc.) take advantage and prey on those emotions in order to prevent people from thinking rationally. Being able to look past your emotions and realize that even though something might make you feel better, doesn't mean that it actually helps you at all takes character in its own right.
Perhaps you've gone your whole life without being wrong and then getting pigheaded about it because you were emotionally invested in an answer, but I doubt it. Those that tend to believe that they have are usually the ones who are horribly wrong about something, but absolutely refuse to admit it and will just bury their heads in the sand even deeper no matter how much evidence you show them.
They're called Auto rickshaws and they're actually pretty damned handy. India has something more like traffic loose guidelines more than they have traffic laws, and these make it work. They're a lot more simple in terms of design so it wouldn't be too difficult to build an electric motor and replace the existing one. They're fun as well and far more economical as a short range taxi than European or American cabs. I wouldn't mind seeing them adopted in more American cities where it makes sense, especially in the parts of California where it's typically pleasant.
The big problem is that India's grid is already over stressed and has problems keeping up as is, and this is in a country where a lot of people live in poverty and don't have any access to power. Putting all of the countries vehicles on that grid isn't going to work without a massive overhaul of the infrastructure. Maybe this plan or goal is the impetus to make that happen as well, but as things currently stand it's utterly impossible even if they could make the electric vehicles inexpensively.
It's that low because the company hasn't been profitable in years. Their patent portfolio is likely worth more on its own, but the rest of AMD that bleeds money that's attached to that patent portfolio isn't worth anything at the moment. Maybe that changes and they can be competitive again with their new CPU architecture, but they're about $2 billion in debt right now so they've got a lot of work to do in order to get back into a good place.
Maybe you should take a look at their financials. This is a company that hasn't had positive net income since 2011. Zen needs to be at least somewhat competitive with Intel's offerings (or they need their GPU business to take a chunk out of NV) or AMD will eventually go bankrupt.
Their stock price is so low right now that the entire company could be bought for a little over $2 billion if someone were so inclined. Intel makes more quarterly profit than AMD is worth as a company. From a certain perspective they're likely worth more if they closed shop entirely and just collected Intel's licensing fees, but Intel clearly doesn't want it to come to that.
AMD might have a bit of an upswing once their new Zen CPUs come out next year, but they'll need to have made some serious strides because they can't afford another Bulldozer.
My guess is that Intel is hedging and looking for a way to keep AMD around in order to avoid becoming a de facto monopoly in the x86 space, which they'd rather avoid. Give AMD enough cash to keep them upright while Intel continues to rake in big profits.
I know Linus has called people idiots and said all kinds of harsh things, but is there an open source project where someone got so pissed at another contributor they called them a faggot and started sending death threats?
People naturally tend to disassociate themselves with idiots like that. You'd have to be an incredibly skilled coder for people to put up with dickish behavior like that, which makes me think it isn't happening.
The people pushing these conduct codes aren't adding any technical contributions to the projects. It's just cargo cult social justice by idiot narcissists who have deluded themselves into believing that they're doing good, but are really just alienating people without making any actual progress towards a more equal world. A few days ago someone pointed out that Rust was perhaps one of the most rabid communities in terms of their CoC policies and "progressive" attitudes, but almost all of the contributors were still white males. They might bang on about diversity, but it doesn't result in actual diversity. The charlatans pushing this crap might praise them for it, but they're not actually contributors to the technical aspects of the project. I imagine that a lot of developers who fall into some minority category don't want to be a sacred cow for someone else's ego trip and avoid those places like that plague.
Linus might be a brash person, but if he calls you a fucking idiot, it's because he thinks your a fucking idiot. Doesn't matter if you're male, female, black, white, disabled, or pronounce GIF as though it had a 'J' in it. He's an equal opportunity shit-flinger. If everyone's walking on egg shells around a person because of some physical attribute that has nothing to do with the quality of their code, they're still treating that person differently.
On one hand, it's a vehicle in public. Anyone can take a picture of it as there's no guarantee of privacy so pinning this up as some kind of government overreach is inane when there are so many better examples of the government infringing on the rights of the country's citizens.
On the other hand, why the hell is the FBI bothering with these people. Unless their slogan is the world's biggest misnomer, they're not going to be blowing anything up. The worst they'll do is be annoying and passive aggressive in public, which hardly warrants a single letter in the local paper let alone three in the form of some government agency.
Anyone stupid enough to ruin a perfectly good bumper with a sticker isn't worth wasting time or resources on. I'd be far more suspicious of the individuals with truck nuts. There's someone with enough screws loose to do something dangerous.
That troubling part is that as incompetent as they may be, they're still quite highly effective. Worse it's what we'll do to ourselves in response. The U.S. is still suffering from the security theater thrown together in the wake of the September 11 attacks which have done little to make us more safe and have only hampered our liberties.
They don't need to set off a dirty bomb. The fear and paranoia that they might is more than enough for us to destroy ourselves.
I think that the people who tend to believe in this 28% wage gap are also the type who are anti-capitalist or don't understand how markets work. The thought probably doesn't occur to people who hold the mantra of "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."
The only other explanation is that they are aware of it, but choose to ignore it in order to avoid the cognitive dissonance resulting from the disconnect in the logic.
Beyond that you're just dealing with someone who accepts it as an article of faith, in which case there's no real way to reason with them as they'll tend to reject anything that doesn't support their preconceived notion of the world no matter how plainly obvious the alternative may be or how much evidence for that alternative is staring them directly in the face.
The Freakenomics people had a different take on it than that, and suggest it may not be due to differences in bargaining ability, or at least not to a large extent, but rather what men and women chose to negotiate for:
I think there’s no doubt that [bargaining abilities] contribute to some degree. But let me tell you why I don’t think that they go the real distance. Some of the best studies that we have of the gender pay gap, following individuals longitudinally, show that when they show up right out of college, or out of law school, or after they get their M.B.A. — all the studies that we have indicate that wages are pretty similar then. So if men were better bargainers, they would have been better right then. And it doesn’t look as if they’re better bargainers to a degree that shows up as a very large number. But further down the pike in their lives, by 10-15 years out, we see very large differences in their pay. But we also see large differences in where they are, in their job titles, and a lot of that occurs a year or two after a kid is born, and it occurs for women and not for men. If anything, men tend to work somewhat harder. And I know that there are many who have done many experiments on the fact that women don’t necessarily like competition as much as men do — they value temporal flexibility, men value income growth — that there are various differences. But in terms of bargaining and competition it doesn’t look like it’s showing up that much at the very beginning.
Their interpretation of the data suggests that we see much of the remaining unexplained portion of the pay gap as a result of different preferences between the sexes. Men typically prefer to earn more money, whereas women typically prefer to have a more flexible work arrangement. Men tend to make choices that maximize the amount of money that they earn at the cost of flexibility or other amenities, whereas women tend to make choices that give them more flexibility with their time at the expense of making more money.
One can argue whether that's a characteristic largely inherent to the sexes themselves or a consequence of how men and women are raised or the cultural expectations of modern democracies, but that's really getting into understanding the cause of the cause. Probably a bit of both, but not really relevant for understanding why there is still a ~5% gap after accounting for most other factors that we are able to control for.
I think they have the opposite problem. People typically upgrade phones every few years, especially in the US where most people buy them on contract. However, with tablets, there's no contract so people tend to hold on to them longer. I've still got an iPad 3 from 4 years ago that still works perfectly fine for what I use it for so there's no compelling reason for me to get a newer model outside of general tech lust and if it does get replaced, it can get handed down to someone else who'll be able to make use of it. It's still getting software updates as well so it's not like it's missing some seriously important security patch. The only real downside is that the RAM is rather limited and the amount of web page bloat means that it can't have more a than a few open tabs before reloading pages constantly, but I expect installing ad-blocking software would go a long way towards improving the browsing performance.
There really isn't more that a newer, more powerful tablet can do to improve on what I use a tablet for. Sure you can throw more CPU or RAM in it to speed up what I'm already doing, but watching streaming video, reading books, or some light web-browsing isn't going to be vastly improved no matter what they do and I'm not interested in doing the kinds of tasks that a newer model of tablet might enable.
Tablets are a lot more like PCs than they are phones in that consumers can hold onto them a lot longer. Also with the trend towards larger and larger phones, some people are going to skip out on getting a tablet completely.
There was always a way for them to gain access to that particular phone because it was an older model that didn't have the security features of their more recent devices to prevent those kinds of attacks. Basically some hacker found that they could hook a device up the phones innards and just try brute forcing the 4-digit PIN and that if they cut all power to the device on a failed attempt quickly enough that the system wouldn't register the failed attempt and wipe the device.
The FBI could always get into this phone, but they wanted Apple to give them the keys to get into any iPhone anytime that they wanted to. The only thing the FBI has probably done is drive Apple and other device makers to build security systems that they have no way of exploiting themselves, even if they have the ability to write a custom OS.
The government needs to stop trying to illegally invade the privacy of its citizens. All it's really doing is to hurt US businesses because foreign countries don't want anything to do with a country that's going to spy on all of their information or communications.
Money is a far better motivator than anything else. If you want people to do something, make it profitable for them to do so and that's the end of it. No need to beg, lecture, etc.
The amount of materials if most phones or other electronic components aren't worth the cost of hiring a person to extract them, so of course we're going to use a robot. Apple just talks up the greenness in order to appeal to the kind of people that buy into that stuff because it makes the feel good about themselves. If you really want to make the world a better place, solve the really tough engineering problems that make it profitable to do things that are environmentally friendly that would otherwise cost too much for most people to bother.
If there were legislation for a 20% tax rate, companies would be jumping to get on board with that plan. The U.S. corporate tax rate is up to 39% (federally), which makes it among the highest in the entire world. Even the Scandinavian countries that get bandied about as some kind of socialist paradise (they're not, but some people act like they are) have corporate tax rates in the 20-25% range.
Of course it's effectively much lower because no one wants to pay that much of their income out in taxes as it would make them noncompetitive with international companies who pay lower taxes and look like a much better investment opportunity so there's all kinds of loopholes, dodges, etc. that are implemented such that they realistically pay about as as any other global company regardless of location.
The really stupid part is even if you did manage to make U.S. corporations pay the full rate, it wouldn't solve the debt crisis as corporate income taxes are a small part of the federal government's revenue as the bulk comes form individual income and payroll taxes.
If they started out at 64 GB then they wouldn't get as many people to pay the $100 upgrade for the next tier. That's how Apple makes their money. Make the base model just unappealing enough that people want to spend the extra $100.
At the volumes they do, we're probably talking about at least a $2 billion yearly revenue loss for them if they made the base model more appealing and fewer people upgrade to the next tier.
I'm in the same boat for the most part. I have a smartphone, but 90% is for calls or the rare text message. It's nice to have the smart features in the rare event you need them (traveling and need directions, etc.) and it's worth it in that case, but otherwise I don't really care much about the apps and other features.
I don't think you get it just fine, but like me you really just don't care. It's the same thing with social networks. I understand why people like them, but personally I'd rather sit down and have a beer with someone than read their wall posts or whatever it's called these days.
If you're hiring women solely so that the male workers have someone to date, it's just asking for trouble. Anyone who's ever seen a workplace relationship turn bad knows what I'm talking about.
Also, from what I've heard about Amazon, it's not the best place to work in terms of work-life balance. I don't think Amazon is actively avoiding women so much as the only people stupid enough to sign up for something like that are young 20-something men who don't have a family yet or the experience to realize what they're signing up for.
We do have a say in the matter. We elect both the person who nominates the judge as well as the people who approve it. I don't know how much better you're expecting.
You already could get copies of movies everywhere, sometimes even prior to release. The only real change is that you don't get a lot of shaky cam releases from someone who tried to film it in a theater.
If they were really serious about anti-piracy measures, they'd give each person a custom version of the film that inserts slight, but largely unnoticeable graphical anomalies that would likely persist through any capture and re-encoding or even if someone just points a camera at their screen to side step any other forms of DRM or HDCP-like protections. Then you know exactly where the leak came from and have a pretty easy time making a case in court.
But I doubt it will even come to this point as the studios aren't going to want this any more than the movie theaters. No matter how much they charge, the argument will be that someone will start their own unauthorized theater by charging $5 or something like that which will hurt the current business model.
It doesn't make any sense to compare the cost of living in the US with the average income in China. When taking into account purchasing power parity, China has a larger economy than the United States and is barely behind the entire EU.
If you use Switzerland's poverty line figures (about $25000 for a single person) to make your comparison then even more of China (an a large number of Americans for that matter) would be considered impoverished.
It's not just a matter of clones that are functionally as good as the original and therefor driving down prices, but cheap shitty knockoffs that are barely functional and are mostly designed to dupe unsuspecting customers. If I were Apple I'd be more concerned about how much damage that does to their brand and how it harms consumer confidence in their app store. I think they should take Google's route and put functionality in place to allow for refunds within a short window of time, or basically just don't actually count the purchase until a few hours later if the app is still installed.
I'd rather have an app store that is by invite only where the limited app selection contains fewer choices, but isn't full of ad-infested crap or other apps that make their money violating my privacy. Apple obviously won't allow anything to compete with them, but I think Google or one of the handset manufacturers has an opportunity to give their customers better value by filtering out all the crap.
I think that the bigger problem is that even when you do have a good idea, it's difficult to market it in a world where most everything has to be free upfront and ad supported to generate its revenue in order to draw a crowd or you're pretty much limited to trying to build a massive user base and sell yourself to Facebook, Google, etc. so that the venture capitalists can get their payday.
The only other real opportunity seems to be making a cheap game app that sells well at $.99 for a week or two before the market gets inundated with clones or you splash some fancy graphics on a virtual Skinner box and bleed people through micro-transactions until they move on to something else.
The mobile app ecosystem is in this weird phase where it sucks for both the customers and the developers but neither side is really willing to change. It's as though both sides were constantly choosing to defect in a prisoner's dilemma type game.
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I do something similar, except I just cut the soda pop with whisky so I'm not getting as much of it, but a 60% mix seems a bit high.
I'll give the parents who fall for this crap a little leeway. Being personally effected by something like this is emotionally rough on people and they want to find answers to why it happened, a possible cure to make it better, or even just some kind of better understanding.
People like Wakefield (and the other snake oil peddlers like faith healers, psychic surgeons, etc.) take advantage and prey on those emotions in order to prevent people from thinking rationally. Being able to look past your emotions and realize that even though something might make you feel better, doesn't mean that it actually helps you at all takes character in its own right.
Perhaps you've gone your whole life without being wrong and then getting pigheaded about it because you were emotionally invested in an answer, but I doubt it. Those that tend to believe that they have are usually the ones who are horribly wrong about something, but absolutely refuse to admit it and will just bury their heads in the sand even deeper no matter how much evidence you show them.
They're called Auto rickshaws and they're actually pretty damned handy. India has something more like traffic loose guidelines more than they have traffic laws, and these make it work. They're a lot more simple in terms of design so it wouldn't be too difficult to build an electric motor and replace the existing one. They're fun as well and far more economical as a short range taxi than European or American cabs. I wouldn't mind seeing them adopted in more American cities where it makes sense, especially in the parts of California where it's typically pleasant.
The big problem is that India's grid is already over stressed and has problems keeping up as is, and this is in a country where a lot of people live in poverty and don't have any access to power. Putting all of the countries vehicles on that grid isn't going to work without a massive overhaul of the infrastructure. Maybe this plan or goal is the impetus to make that happen as well, but as things currently stand it's utterly impossible even if they could make the electric vehicles inexpensively.
It's that low because the company hasn't been profitable in years. Their patent portfolio is likely worth more on its own, but the rest of AMD that bleeds money that's attached to that patent portfolio isn't worth anything at the moment. Maybe that changes and they can be competitive again with their new CPU architecture, but they're about $2 billion in debt right now so they've got a lot of work to do in order to get back into a good place.
Maybe you should take a look at their financials. This is a company that hasn't had positive net income since 2011. Zen needs to be at least somewhat competitive with Intel's offerings (or they need their GPU business to take a chunk out of NV) or AMD will eventually go bankrupt.
Their stock price is so low right now that the entire company could be bought for a little over $2 billion if someone were so inclined. Intel makes more quarterly profit than AMD is worth as a company. From a certain perspective they're likely worth more if they closed shop entirely and just collected Intel's licensing fees, but Intel clearly doesn't want it to come to that.
AMD might have a bit of an upswing once their new Zen CPUs come out next year, but they'll need to have made some serious strides because they can't afford another Bulldozer.
My guess is that Intel is hedging and looking for a way to keep AMD around in order to avoid becoming a de facto monopoly in the x86 space, which they'd rather avoid. Give AMD enough cash to keep them upright while Intel continues to rake in big profits.
I know Linus has called people idiots and said all kinds of harsh things, but is there an open source project where someone got so pissed at another contributor they called them a faggot and started sending death threats?
People naturally tend to disassociate themselves with idiots like that. You'd have to be an incredibly skilled coder for people to put up with dickish behavior like that, which makes me think it isn't happening.
The people pushing these conduct codes aren't adding any technical contributions to the projects. It's just cargo cult social justice by idiot narcissists who have deluded themselves into believing that they're doing good, but are really just alienating people without making any actual progress towards a more equal world. A few days ago someone pointed out that Rust was perhaps one of the most rabid communities in terms of their CoC policies and "progressive" attitudes, but almost all of the contributors were still white males. They might bang on about diversity, but it doesn't result in actual diversity. The charlatans pushing this crap might praise them for it, but they're not actually contributors to the technical aspects of the project. I imagine that a lot of developers who fall into some minority category don't want to be a sacred cow for someone else's ego trip and avoid those places like that plague.
Linus might be a brash person, but if he calls you a fucking idiot, it's because he thinks your a fucking idiot. Doesn't matter if you're male, female, black, white, disabled, or pronounce GIF as though it had a 'J' in it. He's an equal opportunity shit-flinger. If everyone's walking on egg shells around a person because of some physical attribute that has nothing to do with the quality of their code, they're still treating that person differently.
On one hand, it's a vehicle in public. Anyone can take a picture of it as there's no guarantee of privacy so pinning this up as some kind of government overreach is inane when there are so many better examples of the government infringing on the rights of the country's citizens.
On the other hand, why the hell is the FBI bothering with these people. Unless their slogan is the world's biggest misnomer, they're not going to be blowing anything up. The worst they'll do is be annoying and passive aggressive in public, which hardly warrants a single letter in the local paper let alone three in the form of some government agency.
Anyone stupid enough to ruin a perfectly good bumper with a sticker isn't worth wasting time or resources on. I'd be far more suspicious of the individuals with truck nuts. There's someone with enough screws loose to do something dangerous.
That troubling part is that as incompetent as they may be, they're still quite highly effective. Worse it's what we'll do to ourselves in response. The U.S. is still suffering from the security theater thrown together in the wake of the September 11 attacks which have done little to make us more safe and have only hampered our liberties.
They don't need to set off a dirty bomb. The fear and paranoia that they might is more than enough for us to destroy ourselves.
I think that the people who tend to believe in this 28% wage gap are also the type who are anti-capitalist or don't understand how markets work. The thought probably doesn't occur to people who hold the mantra of "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."
The only other explanation is that they are aware of it, but choose to ignore it in order to avoid the cognitive dissonance resulting from the disconnect in the logic.
Beyond that you're just dealing with someone who accepts it as an article of faith, in which case there's no real way to reason with them as they'll tend to reject anything that doesn't support their preconceived notion of the world no matter how plainly obvious the alternative may be or how much evidence for that alternative is staring them directly in the face.
I think there’s no doubt that [bargaining abilities] contribute to some degree. But let me tell you why I don’t think that they go the real distance. Some of the best studies that we have of the gender pay gap, following individuals longitudinally, show that when they show up right out of college, or out of law school, or after they get their M.B.A. — all the studies that we have indicate that wages are pretty similar then. So if men were better bargainers, they would have been better right then. And it doesn’t look as if they’re better bargainers to a degree that shows up as a very large number. But further down the pike in their lives, by 10-15 years out, we see very large differences in their pay. But we also see large differences in where they are, in their job titles, and a lot of that occurs a year or two after a kid is born, and it occurs for women and not for men. If anything, men tend to work somewhat harder. And I know that there are many who have done many experiments on the fact that women don’t necessarily like competition as much as men do — they value temporal flexibility, men value income growth — that there are various differences. But in terms of bargaining and competition it doesn’t look like it’s showing up that much at the very beginning.
Their interpretation of the data suggests that we see much of the remaining unexplained portion of the pay gap as a result of different preferences between the sexes. Men typically prefer to earn more money, whereas women typically prefer to have a more flexible work arrangement. Men tend to make choices that maximize the amount of money that they earn at the cost of flexibility or other amenities, whereas women tend to make choices that give them more flexibility with their time at the expense of making more money.
One can argue whether that's a characteristic largely inherent to the sexes themselves or a consequence of how men and women are raised or the cultural expectations of modern democracies, but that's really getting into understanding the cause of the cause. Probably a bit of both, but not really relevant for understanding why there is still a ~5% gap after accounting for most other factors that we are able to control for.
Just use Lynx and you won't have to worry about the blocking.
I think they have the opposite problem. People typically upgrade phones every few years, especially in the US where most people buy them on contract. However, with tablets, there's no contract so people tend to hold on to them longer. I've still got an iPad 3 from 4 years ago that still works perfectly fine for what I use it for so there's no compelling reason for me to get a newer model outside of general tech lust and if it does get replaced, it can get handed down to someone else who'll be able to make use of it. It's still getting software updates as well so it's not like it's missing some seriously important security patch. The only real downside is that the RAM is rather limited and the amount of web page bloat means that it can't have more a than a few open tabs before reloading pages constantly, but I expect installing ad-blocking software would go a long way towards improving the browsing performance.
There really isn't more that a newer, more powerful tablet can do to improve on what I use a tablet for. Sure you can throw more CPU or RAM in it to speed up what I'm already doing, but watching streaming video, reading books, or some light web-browsing isn't going to be vastly improved no matter what they do and I'm not interested in doing the kinds of tasks that a newer model of tablet might enable.
Tablets are a lot more like PCs than they are phones in that consumers can hold onto them a lot longer. Also with the trend towards larger and larger phones, some people are going to skip out on getting a tablet completely.
There was always a way for them to gain access to that particular phone because it was an older model that didn't have the security features of their more recent devices to prevent those kinds of attacks. Basically some hacker found that they could hook a device up the phones innards and just try brute forcing the 4-digit PIN and that if they cut all power to the device on a failed attempt quickly enough that the system wouldn't register the failed attempt and wipe the device.
The FBI could always get into this phone, but they wanted Apple to give them the keys to get into any iPhone anytime that they wanted to. The only thing the FBI has probably done is drive Apple and other device makers to build security systems that they have no way of exploiting themselves, even if they have the ability to write a custom OS.
The government needs to stop trying to illegally invade the privacy of its citizens. All it's really doing is to hurt US businesses because foreign countries don't want anything to do with a country that's going to spy on all of their information or communications.
Money is a far better motivator than anything else. If you want people to do something, make it profitable for them to do so and that's the end of it. No need to beg, lecture, etc.
The amount of materials if most phones or other electronic components aren't worth the cost of hiring a person to extract them, so of course we're going to use a robot. Apple just talks up the greenness in order to appeal to the kind of people that buy into that stuff because it makes the feel good about themselves. If you really want to make the world a better place, solve the really tough engineering problems that make it profitable to do things that are environmentally friendly that would otherwise cost too much for most people to bother.
If there were legislation for a 20% tax rate, companies would be jumping to get on board with that plan. The U.S. corporate tax rate is up to 39% (federally), which makes it among the highest in the entire world. Even the Scandinavian countries that get bandied about as some kind of socialist paradise (they're not, but some people act like they are) have corporate tax rates in the 20-25% range.
Of course it's effectively much lower because no one wants to pay that much of their income out in taxes as it would make them noncompetitive with international companies who pay lower taxes and look like a much better investment opportunity so there's all kinds of loopholes, dodges, etc. that are implemented such that they realistically pay about as as any other global company regardless of location.
The really stupid part is even if you did manage to make U.S. corporations pay the full rate, it wouldn't solve the debt crisis as corporate income taxes are a small part of the federal government's revenue as the bulk comes form individual income and payroll taxes.
If they started out at 64 GB then they wouldn't get as many people to pay the $100 upgrade for the next tier. That's how Apple makes their money. Make the base model just unappealing enough that people want to spend the extra $100.
At the volumes they do, we're probably talking about at least a $2 billion yearly revenue loss for them if they made the base model more appealing and fewer people upgrade to the next tier.
They know exactly what they're doing.
I'm in the same boat for the most part. I have a smartphone, but 90% is for calls or the rare text message. It's nice to have the smart features in the rare event you need them (traveling and need directions, etc.) and it's worth it in that case, but otherwise I don't really care much about the apps and other features.
I don't think you get it just fine, but like me you really just don't care. It's the same thing with social networks. I understand why people like them, but personally I'd rather sit down and have a beer with someone than read their wall posts or whatever it's called these days.
If you're hiring women solely so that the male workers have someone to date, it's just asking for trouble. Anyone who's ever seen a workplace relationship turn bad knows what I'm talking about. Also, from what I've heard about Amazon, it's not the best place to work in terms of work-life balance. I don't think Amazon is actively avoiding women so much as the only people stupid enough to sign up for something like that are young 20-something men who don't have a family yet or the experience to realize what they're signing up for.
We do have a say in the matter. We elect both the person who nominates the judge as well as the people who approve it. I don't know how much better you're expecting.
You already could get copies of movies everywhere, sometimes even prior to release. The only real change is that you don't get a lot of shaky cam releases from someone who tried to film it in a theater.
If they were really serious about anti-piracy measures, they'd give each person a custom version of the film that inserts slight, but largely unnoticeable graphical anomalies that would likely persist through any capture and re-encoding or even if someone just points a camera at their screen to side step any other forms of DRM or HDCP-like protections. Then you know exactly where the leak came from and have a pretty easy time making a case in court.
But I doubt it will even come to this point as the studios aren't going to want this any more than the movie theaters. No matter how much they charge, the argument will be that someone will start their own unauthorized theater by charging $5 or something like that which will hurt the current business model.
Spot on. This is just going to turn into another case of Trump getting free publicity on all the news networks.
It doesn't make any sense to compare the cost of living in the US with the average income in China. When taking into account purchasing power parity, China has a larger economy than the United States and is barely behind the entire EU.
If you use Switzerland's poverty line figures (about $25000 for a single person) to make your comparison then even more of China (an a large number of Americans for that matter) would be considered impoverished.
It's not just a matter of clones that are functionally as good as the original and therefor driving down prices, but cheap shitty knockoffs that are barely functional and are mostly designed to dupe unsuspecting customers. If I were Apple I'd be more concerned about how much damage that does to their brand and how it harms consumer confidence in their app store. I think they should take Google's route and put functionality in place to allow for refunds within a short window of time, or basically just don't actually count the purchase until a few hours later if the app is still installed.
I'd rather have an app store that is by invite only where the limited app selection contains fewer choices, but isn't full of ad-infested crap or other apps that make their money violating my privacy. Apple obviously won't allow anything to compete with them, but I think Google or one of the handset manufacturers has an opportunity to give their customers better value by filtering out all the crap.
I think that the bigger problem is that even when you do have a good idea, it's difficult to market it in a world where most everything has to be free upfront and ad supported to generate its revenue in order to draw a crowd or you're pretty much limited to trying to build a massive user base and sell yourself to Facebook, Google, etc. so that the venture capitalists can get their payday.
The only other real opportunity seems to be making a cheap game app that sells well at $.99 for a week or two before the market gets inundated with clones or you splash some fancy graphics on a virtual Skinner box and bleed people through micro-transactions until they move on to something else.
The mobile app ecosystem is in this weird phase where it sucks for both the customers and the developers but neither side is really willing to change. It's as though both sides were constantly choosing to defect in a prisoner's dilemma type game.