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User: steelfood

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  1. Re:Really want this to suceed on An Exploration of BlackBerry 10's Programming API · · Score: 1

    Of course, they have low market share and strong competitors - but then again, so did Apple when they launched the iPhone, and Google when they launched Android.

    Apple and Google both succeeded for different reasons. Apple succeeded because they introduced a revolutionary device. When everybody else was moving to full QWERTY keyboards and sliding form factors, Apple went with a single, simple, touch screen. They effectively created a completely new segment of the phone market for themselves. That, coupled with Jobs' reality distortion field, launched the iPhone into history.

    Google saw Apple's stragglehold of this new market, and decided they wanted a piece of that market. But instead of competing directly by putting out their own phone, they wrote the software and gave it away to Apple's existing competitors. They figured the cream would rise to the top, which it has. They basically pulled a Microsoft on Apple.

    Blackberry is not doing either. They are not pioneering a new cell phone market segment. They are not jumping onto a competition-less, one-man bandwagon. They are trying to wedge themselves into an existing, mostly-saturated market, using their existing customer base as leverage. That will be difficult. Microsoft couldn't do it with their Windows Phone, though they made some very, very poor decisions early on which cost them dearly, and they lost more of their user base than BB has before their attempt at a reboot. That's the one thing they have going for them: They're still holding onto a fair amount of the enterprise market that neither Apple nor Google initially targeted.

    I don't know if Blackberry will be able to do what Microsoft couldn't. I'm rooting for them though. The smartphone landscape could use a third player.

  2. Re:No moral high ground on Belgian Media Group Demanding Copyright Levy for Internet Access · · Score: 3, Informative

    I don't think anyone except the trolls are going to reply with "screw you"-type comments. I think most people here respect the fact that you're trying to make a living doing what you like to do, and would root for your continued success.

    Now, if your continued success was contingent on you trampling over the mostly-dead body of civil rights, then things might turn hostile. But unless you're working for one of these groups, and in fact, you're an executive in one of them, I don't see how that could possibly be.

    As they say, you're welcome to make a living doing what you want to do, but you don't have the right to do so. And that applies to engineers, scientists, academia, and artists alike.

  3. Re:Personal experience on BlackBerry CEO: Tablet Market Is Dying · · Score: 1

    I have an Asus Transformer TF700T tablet with a detachable keyboard.

    ...

    The thing in my house that's collecting dust? My old dell laptop.

    You just replaced your (Windows) laptop with an (Android) laptop. The "tablet" form factor is only relevant with the keyboard detached. With it attached, it is a laptop just with a different OS.

    You can say that the ASUS Transformer provides the best of both worlds, allowing you to switch between tablet and laptop form factors on one machine as you see fit. But in your case, you cannot say that the tablet has replaced the laptop.

    There are other use cases where the tablet has superseded the laptop, in particular, use cases dealing with content consumption and more specifically, connected content consumption. And it is because what most people want is effectively a glorified portable television that there is such a large market for tablets.

  4. Re: Hahahaha! on BlackBerry CEO: Tablet Market Is Dying · · Score: 1

    Nothing says f-you [...] like a BlackBerry Playbook.

    Yeah there is: Surface RT.

  5. Re:So basically on Cracked Game Released To Get Back At Pirates · · Score: 1

    let your brain run wild.

    I do not think that means what you think it means, for some people.

  6. Re:Shame the patent application isn't linked... on Lawyer Loses It In Letter To Patent Office · · Score: 3, Insightful

    For starters, he mentioned taxpayers in the letter.

    The patent office, like the postal service, is self-funded. Taxpayers don't pay a dime to these people. In fact, a part of the money the patent office brought in used to go back into the bigger federal budget to fund other things.

    I'm highly suspicious that this is an actual patent lawyer.

  7. Re: Wow, this is stupid. on Why We'll Never Meet Aliens · · Score: 1

    Apparently, we still have tons of energon deposits though.

  8. Re:Why is this here? on Why We'll Never Meet Aliens · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The premise of the summary is fatally flawed in and of itself. It starts by equating the accessibility and breadth of knowledge to intelligence, and special* intelligence at that. In making the assumption, it posits that a species with greater intelligence would not be interested in the same things that species with lower intelligence would.

    To begin with, knowledge and intelligence are two very different domains. Having greater knowledge is not equivalent to possessing greater intellectual ability, and it is an even further stretch to equate it with special intelligence. Yes, greater intelligence implies greater breadth of knowledge, but this is true only individually. And the relationship between the two is an implication, not an equivalence.

    Secondly, there is nothing indicative in our historical (we know our history, right?) record to even remotely indicate that we as a species has grown more intelligent over time. In fact, I would argue that the distribution of intelligence among the popuplation today is the same as (or even skewed in the negative direction) 500 years ago, 1000 years ago, 5000 years ago, and 10,000 years ago. The local maxima and minima with respect to time are also unchanged. What's changed in the past 500 years that resulted in the exponential progress of our society is a sudden stability in our record-keeping ability, which has lead to us collectively retain more knowledge, and disseminate this knowledge more easily. Essentially, we as a species are not reinventing the wheel all the time, and thus we can spend our time progressing other aspects of our lives.

    Thus as the premise itself is false with regards to the human species, the remainder does not follow. Now, to extrapolate this to supposedly alien beings would be an incredible stretch either way. In fact, I would go as far as to say that attempting to do so would be entering the realm of theology, i.e. unsubstantiated, even ignorant speculation. You might as well say that we will never make contact with aliens because the FSM is keeping them away, and be just about as accurate.

    * read, speci-al, or pertaining to the species.

  9. Re:Florian Mueller is like a Microsoft PR guy on Was Google's Motorola Mobility Acquisition a Mistake? · · Score: 1

    Google's purchases tend to be investments. Youtube, Android, Doubleclick, etc. all took years to develop into a viable product and bring in real returns. There's no reason to expect Motorola's going to be any different. If I were a betting person, I'd put money on something coming out of this purchase in two or so years.

    Microsoft made several such smart purchases in the past as well. Not so much recently though.

  10. Re:Hamburger Analogy on Elon Musk Hates 405 Freeway Traffic, Pays Money To Speed Construction · · Score: 1

    The price of driving is supposed to come out of the taxes placed on gasoline. One solution is to tax gasoline so high that most people cannot afford to drive, or at least, are forced to carpool.

  11. Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem on Elon Musk Hates 405 Freeway Traffic, Pays Money To Speed Construction · · Score: 1

    You can't rev your fancy new electric car to 120 MPH if every other person on the highway is only going 2.5.

    And there is serious business incentive for him to cut the traffic down. The bad PR from electric cars dying in the middle of the road would be sufficient (in the same situation, the gas-powered cars probably would too, but that's wouldn't produce as sensationalist headlines as electric cars doing the same).

  12. Re:$50k enough? on Elon Musk Hates 405 Freeway Traffic, Pays Money To Speed Construction · · Score: 1

    That's the half of the population who grew up playing Sim City.

  13. Re:Let's not kid ourselves here on Netflix: 'Arrested Development' Won't Crash Our Service · · Score: 1

    Nah, Fox royally fucked up Firefly. Arrested Development had three seasons to do it right. Fox didn't even finish airing Firefly's first season.

  14. Re:How did he encrypt it? on Federal Magistrate Rules That Fifth Amendment Applies To Encryption Keys · · Score: 1

    Probably Truecrypt on Linux.

    That having been said, if your encrypted information was deemed important enough, your HDD contents would just be copied over to the NSA's data processing facility, and it'd be broken in a few months or so.

    Your only real protection is your lack of importance.

  15. Re:Mountain out of a molehill on Federal Magistrate Rules That Fifth Amendment Applies To Encryption Keys · · Score: 1

    Bloomberg's an idiot.

    The bill of rights will still be relevant for the next twenty or thirty years. This coming generation of kids who grew up in the shadow of 9/11 might not regard the constitution so highly, but we have at least until they take power.

  16. Re:Last Sentence on Federal Magistrate Rules That Fifth Amendment Applies To Encryption Keys · · Score: 2

    No, I think some of the other people got it right. What all this means is that the 5th amendment applies if law enforcement does not know a priori that some important piece of evidence is encrypted.

    If they have a priori knowledge, they can ask for the keys and it has to be provided. But if they're only asking for the keys to find out if there's evidence, then the 5th amendment applies and it doesn't have to be provided.

    Either way, it's a good idea to not cave during the initial questioning and let the courts determine if the 5th amendment applies to your case or not. Granted, it's probably always a good idea to not cave during the initial questioning...

  17. Re:NIMBY are the sole reason on China Slows Nuclear Expansion · · Score: 1

    Totally False.

    The strict regulations put in place in the late 70's-early 80's right after the Three Mile Island incident made it practically impossible to build new nuclear power plants. The regulations dealt with more than just structural and engineering requirements. There were also societal requirements like having comprehensive evacuation plans for all nearby populated areas.

    The reason those strict regulations were put in place were because of state and local governments freaking out about having a nuclear power plant near them right after the accident. Basically, NIMBY.

    The existing ones have since only remained running with exemptions from the federal government.

    There is, in fact a huge commercial demand for cheap, clean nuclear energy. There's just no place any company could put one down.

    As for natural gas, the reason why that's so popular right now is because there are no regulations against fracking. It's stupid-cheap to produce, and so everybody's using it.

  18. Re:I'm Definitely Antimatter on LHCb Experiment Observes New Matter-Antimatter Difference · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    We need more restrictive CP laws so that it'll be harder for them to be violated in the future.

  19. Re:T-mobile no contract plan should shake things u on HTC Does What Google Wouldn't: Sell an LTE Phone That Sidesteps AT&T · · Score: 2

    Verizon is too entrenched to need to undercut T-Mobile. It's Bell South errm, I mean AT&T who might have to do this, and they don't have other revenue streams.

    Not that they need to right now. Verizon and AT&T currently offer far better coverage than T-Mobile. Verizon is still tons better than AT&T, mostly because they're on CDMA instead of GSM, so that should tell you where T-Mobile is in comparison with Verizon.

    The other thing is, FiOS is not as big of a revenue maker as you might think. The cost of rolling out the infrastructure is not being offset by the revenue from people switching over. In fact, it's gotten so bad they've stopped rolling it out completely.

  20. Re:Some other relevant stories on Crowdsourcing Failed In Boston Bombing Aftermath · · Score: 1

    There were 12 dead. Only, 9 of them were actually intergalactic tourists.

  21. Re:I always follow Scotty's law on Overconfidence: Why You Suck At Making Development Time Estimates · · Score: 1

    So you're saying that the real date of the events in Star Trek was actually the year 6795?

  22. Re:crowsourcing did NOT fail - here's why on Crowdsourcing Failed In Boston Bombing Aftermath · · Score: 1

    Even those people that saw the surviving suspect on a daily basis failed to identify him from the picture.

    The lack of objectivity is a huge problem. Nobody wants to believe it's their friend or acquaintance who did something so horrible. And the ones who can believe it wouldn't want to finger that friend or acquaintance either, in fear that they're wrong and just caused their friend a shitload of unnecessary inconvenience.

    What's particularly interesting is that it might have worked if their action was not nearly as heinous. If they had been accused of rape or just simply triple murder, there wouldn't be nearly as much of an initial disbelief. This effect only exists because of the magnitude of the initial crime.

    What's also interesting is that if these guys had not made the ruckus they had when trying to get away, it would've taken at least another week to ID them. By then, they could've been anywhere in the world, or done plenty more harm before being caught. Don't forget that they were looking for another target before revealing themselves.

  23. Re:Some other relevant stories on Crowdsourcing Failed In Boston Bombing Aftermath · · Score: 1

    Basically it works when members of the crowd are acting individually. It does not work when members of the crowd are acting like a mob.

  24. Re:And it begins on Noodle Robots Replacing Workers In Chinese Restaurants · · Score: 1

    The biggest hindrance to Latin American stability is U.S. foreign policy.

  25. Re:And it begins on Noodle Robots Replacing Workers In Chinese Restaurants · · Score: 1

    At some point we will have to realize that we have unemployable people and must do something with them.

    They can go do something that requires no skill. There's a huge demand for unskilled labor in society. But those people find such jobs beneath them. So they are taken up by immigrants, legal and illegal alike.