That's what I do and go for contracts that are much shorter term than is typical with a subsidised phone because it gives me far more flexibility and much lower per-monthly costs as I'm just paying for my contract without any phone costs bundled in.
But not everyone has the cash upfront to buy a £600 smartphone outright yet are happy to pay for one over the period of say 24 months instead and then still be able to use it even if they want to change carrier afterwards.
In fact, without subsidies the smartphone market would be tiny compared to the size it is now as the vast majority of the general public would not be willing to pay for a phone if they saw the full cost of the device upfront and had to pay it in one big chunk.
They're really essential for the health of the smartphone industry as much as I'm not a fan of them.
If it's anything like the UK it'll do nothing to subsidies as you're still contracted to 12 to 24 months or whatever, the difference is that when that time is up (or even before hand if you fancy paying for a contract you no longer use or have the option to buy out) you can now go to another carrier without needing a new phone for their network.
This is how it works in the UK. We still have contracts that subsidise handsets that you can be tied into, the carrier just can't prevent you using your device on another network afterwards or even at the same time if you're so inclined.
To be fair I don't think militarisation of space is as scary as it used to be. During the cold war the danger was it turning into an arms race as the USSR and USA try to leapfrog each other, but really at this point we all know the US has won in terms of militarisation, when the USSR collapsed they kept spending and their military tech is a good generation or two ahead of that in Russia or China.
At this point I don't think Russia or China could care too much about trying to compete with something like this when they're still so desperately playing catch up in terms of boats, planes, and tanks.
Russia isn't going to get into another bankrupting arms race and China whilst building it's forces knows it couldn't compete either because even as the world's second largest economy it's still a long way behind and the only economic force that could compete with the US would be a combined-EU arms race but there's not much taste in the EU for an EU-wide military force, nor any reason to try and compete with the US given they're on the same side for the most part.
The game has moved on somewhat now, as we're seeing with Syria, and as we're seeing with China's economic policy the great game is being played in the battlefields of the UN debating chambers, and the world economy. Russia is trying to prevent the US acting internationally by weakening it's position politically, and China is more interested in growing itself, but if it can do so at the expense of the US by creating unfair trade terms that the US can do little to counteract having made itself dependant on Chinese manufacturing then it sees that as a bonus to it's growth.
So for the time being I think America's militarisation of space will be a kind of small side show. I don't think it'll trigger any kind of race by other countries to do the same other than the odd relatively trivial showcase (like China showing off the ability to accurately fling shit at other things in orbit). I think everyone else is playing a different game now and given Putin's recent political coup in completely outflanking Obama over Syria I'm not even sure the US realises that it's less about technical military superiority and more about politics, trade, and economics at this point.
Basically the game has like 3 or 4 difficulty levels, and to level up a character all the way to the highest level (60) you have to play through each difficulty level. That means to get a single character to level 60 you have to play through the game about 4 times anyway.
So it's not unusual for people to play the game many times, just levelling up two different character classes to the top to unlock all their skills and abilities means 6 or 8 playthroughs or whatever.
But he's right, you can do this and not get any kind of legendary drop. He played through so many times not looking for a legendary drop, but to level his characters up.
It's silly to suggest removing the AH will magically make things fair.
It's always been the case that games where you have to farm for goods are dominated by the unemployed or people with few commitments like housewives or students.
The reason Blizzard made the auction house in the first place was to allow those who work to be able to use that fact to compete against those who do not.
So you'll never achieve fairness by removing it. It just sways things back towards society's non-contributors and spongers unless Blizzard has basically made rare drops no longer rare such that someone who can only fit in 4 hours a week can get all the uber gear they need to compete with someone who can fit in 100 hours a week.
Agreed, this is exactly Apple's problem and I've pointed it out all along. They've built themselves a niche that's relatively limited in size and to expand out beyond that they have to alienate that original but profitable niche. This is why I always knew they'd hit saturation point and a plateau of profitability because they were always going to risk saturating that original market and any attempt to grow beyond that would be at the expense of that market.
P.S. The downmods make me lol. It's as if Apple fanboys think by downmodding people that'll somehow change Apple's predicament. I've had it for years now regarding Apple and the great thing is I've been right all along from their anti-trust suit loss to their plateau in profitability, to their unsustainably high market cap last year, and they've been consistently wrong. It shows no matter how much you try and influence the conversation you still can't change reality. Bless them and their fragile little minds.
"Apple has shown time and again that, as far as the public is concerned, they know what they're doing."
Ah. The mysitcal "public". Apple knows what they want. That's why their marketshare is roughly only around 15% and declining?
If Apple's target demographic was the general public and they knew what they wanted they'd have a far higher marketshare than 15%.
But your mistake is in assuming Apple even case what the "public" thinks, the public, presumably the general public, or the majority of the public aren't Apple's target demographic. Apple's target demographic is more profitable than the average Joe, but the problem is it's also a small demographic, which is why they're now trying to reach out beyond that with the 5C.
It's a lie though to pretend Apple is popular with the "public" though, it's not. The absolute vast majority of the "public" don't buy Apple.
"If you read the Macalope column over at MacWorld"
This is called confirmation bias. Your whole argument can basically be summed up as:
"If you ignore the whole of the mainstream press and fringe press alike who come from all walks of life and ranger from having vested interests in talking down Apple to being completely objective about Apple and instead go for an extremely biased pro-Apple source run by fanboys then you get a very pro-Apple picture"
No shit Sherlock. It's just like how I can go and read The Daily Mail if I want to pretend global warming isn't a real thing. It doesn't change the fact that every scientist worth their salt numbering in the 10s of thousands believe it is real though. Just because you can find a publication that happens to confirm your bias doesn't mean you or that publication are anywhere near correct though.
Even the BBC which has had a historic bias towards Apple both in priority of development targets for things like iPlayer and BBC News apps through to it's reporting is talking about Apple's problems rather than pretending they don't exist.
Declining market share, declining profits, declining investor confidence. All these things are real and can be measured objectively.
"On the comment that the public has stated that they want bigger. Is this really true or have you been watching too many Samsung adverts? I see more iPhones around than large screen Android phones, and more small screen Android phones than either."
Personal anecdotes and Samsung adverts are irrelevant.
The fact is the large screen Android phones have been outselling the smaller iPhones. Combined sales of the Galaxy S2, S3, HTC One, Galaxy Note and so forth as well as the offerings from other Android manufacturers far outstrip the sale of Apple devices.
That alone is all the objective evidence you need to be aware that the large screen devices are more popular than something of Apple's form factor or smaller.
The GP wasn't stating opinion, he was stating fact.
FWIW I don't actually like the size of the larger phones, I personally prefer iPhone sized devices (though I prefer Android to iOS) so I'm with you if your opinion is that those devices are too big, but the fact is we're still in a minority given the sales stats of what people actually buy.
1) Having your fingerprint replicated to be used elsewhere against your will.
2) Having your biometrics used to track and trace you
You're right there's probably no threat here of 1) happening because the fingerprint itself is apparently not stored, but the danger is 2). For 2) you don't need the full fingerprint, all you need is a hash that can be calculated from it. This means that if say that hash is leaked onto the web and associated with something you post there for example, then if the government also has your fingerprint and can also hence generate the same hash they can link you with a strong degree of certainty to that thing online.
I'm not saying the hash does, or even can be leaked but if, and that's a big if, if it can be leaked or does get leaked from the device then this allows for ever more intrusive tracking. If websites were able to access it then you'd get a whole extra degree of tracking well beyond what you see now which relies on much more flakey identifiers like cookies and IP addresses.
"Being myself a German, I sometimes worry about German "alarmism"."
Trust me, given your history I'd argue it's better to have German alarmism over issues like privacy than British complacency. Your country learnt the lessons of it's past. Unfortunately we didn't learn the lessons of your past despite the impact it had on us, hence why we're becoming an ever more xenophobic insular state with an unhealthy amount of nationalism and surveillance.
Better to have alarmism that tends towards personal freedom and liberty, than the type of alarmism we have that goes against personal freedom and liberty such as comments like "Allowing gay marriage will destroy people's existing marriages!" from the Church, a number of politicians, and even whole parties like UKIP.
There's a reason why your country is so strong economically, and so respected politically and as frustrating as some things may seem sometimes you should be cautious not to wish away the things that make your country great.
I think this is probably the biggest concern. Right now you have a certain degree of anonymity on the internet. If you get hauled through the courts over something that's been posted online for political reasons you can deny you ever posted it because it's impossible to prove it was you that used a particular system even if they trace back to a specific system via cookies, IP address etc.
If you start authenticating via biometrics like fingerprints then you'll have a lot tougher time arguing it wasn't your doing.
Effectively as I see it the real risk here is the erosion of anonymity, there's a danger given the points you make that it will be much easier to suggest in court someone was tied to some specific thing on the internet.
If someone is aware of corruption by some official, but doesn't have any solid proof even though they know it's true but feels it's important to whistleblow then they can do that right now and that person can attack them with libel cases and so forth but it'll be hard to tie that individual to it and win such a case. If somehow a fingerprint hash is getting tied back to that whistleblowing then you've lost all hope of getting away with it in court and being silenced by that sort of legal assault even if what you did was morally the right thing to do.
Depending on what you do, sometimes more secure authentication and security can be detrimental to your goals. If you're a political activist highlighting real issues in the face of oppression then you're probably better off having no login on your PC and unsecured wireless because you have all the plausible deniability you need at that point.
It's not just that, the issue I take with this is why the fuck are City of London police being given free reign across the UK?
Let's be clear, these guys aren't the Met. they're a tiny little police force responsible for nothing more than London's financial square mile.
I simply don't understand what's going on here, it's not their job to be going after anyone in Birmingham, that's not The City of London, that's Birmingham and it should be left to the police force responsible there as to whether that's a priority.
It seems rather than investigating financial crimes in The City of London which is their job they seem to have decided they'll just go police what the fuck they want where the fuck they want.
Just to put this into context, it's like a Scottish police force taking a day trip down to The City of London to arrest a bunch of bankers for financial crimes rather than dealing with crimes up in Scotland, or for the Americans here, it's like some small town Sheriff from Alabama taking a trip over to California to arrest people for smoking weed because that's a priority there, even if it's not in California.
It's made worse by the fact we've had elected police crime commissioners forced upon us with the whole argument being for them that people get a say in police priorities in their area - if another area's police force is now coming in meddling it makes a mockery of that.
But it is what it is, so I'm going to play the game their way, the way Osborne and Cameron want it to be played. I'm going to lobby, (and I would suggest everyone else here from the UK do the same) my police crime commissioner to commit a couple of police officers to The City of London to investigate financial crimes in the banking industry and at headquarters of media industry firms with headquarters there. I even have the justification that crimes committed there cause harm here and that the City of London police apparently are more interested in fucking around with things outside their jurisdiction.
It's one thing having a local area police force bought off by industry (this isn't news, The City of London police have long been easily bent by bribery from everything from the banks to Scientology, they've just never stepped outside their remit like this before), it's one thing that being possible in our country, but if it's going to be possible they should have no right to step outside their area of influence.
I'll also contact my MP and ask him to raise this in parliament and suggest disbanding The City of London police because it's now way too corrupt and just hand it over to the met. Again, I recommend others do the same.
"what gives the USA the right to judge them when the USA has one of the largest arsenals of chemical"
America doesn't have chemical weapons, it destroyed them all after it signed up to the convention on chemical weapons just like about 197 out of 203 other nations in the world. Those that haven't include the likes of Syria, North Korea and so forth.
Don't muddle nuclear in, it's a separate thing because Assad doesn't have nuclear weapons and the US isn't preaching to him about them. Disarmament of nuclear weapons has to be done as a staged stand down with the likes of Russia, if you don't understand why then simply Google the history of nuclear weapons and the various disarmament treaties that have been pursued and learn about the principle of MAD.
I agree there are important issues that haven't be dealt with here, but that doesn't mean that the chemical weapons issue isn't important and shouldn't be dealt with. It's still a priority problem as well.
Actually there's a danger of the conspiracy theory that's been floating around about that last attack coming true in the other direction.
Can we really be sure Assad wont retain a secret stockpile for use after "disarmament" and use them blaming the rebels with the excuse "I gave all mine up, it must be the rebels!"?
I think the only view Russia has is "For a supposedly smart president, it wasn't hard to completely and utterly outplay Obama on the international stage and make a mockery of him" because that's exactly what they've done.
Strike or not, there's little question that Russia has completely outplayed the US on this and gotten exactly what they wanted making a joke of current US government competence on the international stage. Putin was always annoyed that Obama went behind his back to re-negotiate the nuclear arms treaty with Medvedev. I suspect this, coupled with the fact Medvedev has now fallen from grace and is being "investigated" in Russia is Putin's long game revenge for all that as much as anything else.
The problem with the terrorists amongst the rebels now is they feel shafted by everyone and an Assad win isn't magically going to make Al Nusra vanish into thin air no matter what munitions or atrocities he commits. I suspect in the next few decades we'll see Al Nusra's name attached to various terrorist attacks in both the West and Russia.
Effectively a game where Russia wanted to retain their Mediterranean port under Assad and America wanted Assad out to cripple Hezbollah and help Israel has turned into a complete mess and make no mistake, we're all going to feel that.
Do I know what a better solution would've been? Not really. I do wonder if perhaps Obama should've tied stronger conditions to his strike threat - e.g. we'll keep out of Syria if Iran, Hezbollah and resupplies of Russian arms also keep out, alongside the chemical weapons disarmament but that would've required Obama to actually be able to grow a pair of balls and be capable of negotiation on the international stage. I'd agree this would be at least something good if we could somehow guarantee we were actually going to get all Assad's weapons but it's like getting the US/Russia to disarm completely - if they have 3000 warheads each and get rid of 2000 of them do they care? they still have enough to destroy the world over and even if they claim to get rid of the last 1000 in a multi-lateral agreement could we really be sure both of them would? It's the same with Assad, even if the bulk of his chemical weapons go it doesn't matter as he was never going to use 90% anyway, there just aren't enough targets for that, but the remaining 10% he may stow away is going to be just as much of a problem then as it is now. Similarly we don't even know how much the rebels have captured and they've already said they wont be part of this. So in theory it's a nice idea, but in practice I'm not convinced it'll make any tangible difference.
Either way with the current situation no one wins, but one thing we can say is that this outcome is only going to make the war on terror look ever more like the war on drugs due to the fact that it's now destined to continue in response to major terrorist attacks for at least another few decades. All because the current decisions that have been made not only do nothing to deal with the core issues in Syria, but actually only inflame radicalisation. I'd wager it wont now be long until even the moderate elements of the FSA fold in line with al Nusra due to being shafted by everyone, swelling their numbers ever more.
Yes, you're right but the post started by the GP are missing the actual problem with chemical weapons, none of this is the real reason chemical weapons are so bad. Especially the likes of Sarin.
You use different chemical weapons with different aims, quite rightly as you say VX is persistent so you use it if you want to deny access to an area whilst others like Sarin and Mustard gas aren't.
The reason Sarin for example is particularly bad is because it kills en-masse very quickly and leaves infrastructure intact. It reduces the cost of war, particularly this sort of civil war and it makes ethnic cleansing a dangerously cheap thing to do. Thus far the war has been expensive for Assad - he's had to literally destroy his most economically productive cities literally into nothing but rubble, and that's expensive. It means even if he wins there'll still have been a massive cost to his actions which act as a deterrent for further action, and for other dictators to do the same when they realise he may have won the war, but his country is now 3rd world which means even he personally will be poorer with no national wealth to sponge from.
Sarin does indeed degrade to be pretty harmless relatively quickly, which is why there were pictures of people stood by the delivery rockets of this particular attack only a short time afterwards, and why there were concerns that Assad's 5 day delay in letting the chemical weapons inspectors there could cause the loss of much evidence. The problem with a weapon like this that can kill a thousand people and leave nothing but a bunch of dead bodies and a small crater in the ground is that it leaves all the infrastructure intact. It makes war and ethnic cleansing relatively free of penalty for someone who does it.
Decided you don't like those of a particular religious sect sat in that corner of your city? Use Sarin! Within a day they'll all be dead and all you have to do is burn the bodies then your preferred religious sect can move in in their place and that section of the city remains productive because everything works like it did a day before the entire population was wiped out.
The drastically more indiscriminate nature is certainly a problem also as others have pointed out, the fact that even people hidden in basements and so forth will die to it. In the attack being discussed at the moment it seems around 200 people at minimum died from one single munition using even the low end figures (the high end would probably suggest maybe as many as 750 - 800 from a single munition). Judging from where the munition landed from pictures, even if it was built up rush hour I'd take a guess that at most an equivalently sized conventional purely explosive rocket would've only killed 50 at most.
The issue is that we still don't really know what impact HFT has on the markets. Has it prolonged the financial crisis? Has it led to bigger booms and hence bigger busts? That's the problem.
A lot of countries have talked of the underlying feel of the economy feeling healthier than the markets and so forth suggest. Is this because HFT is artificially deflating the markets because of the economy as a whole when in a non-HFT world the markets would've picked up much better in those countries and possibly across the globe?
The potential for flash crashes that can't be predicted is bad enough, and yes we can mitigate them to some degree but as well as the threat of those there's also the broader, more subtle impacts it's having on the markets that can have real actual negative effects.
Post dot com we were told that HFT would help prevent that sort of thing in the future and you may be right that this was it being sold as something it couldn't possibly actually do and so unfair, but do we really know HFT wasn't in part responsible for the depth and duration of the current financial crisis? Some would argue yes, others no, but in reality we don't know. If future busts are similarly prolonged to the unprecedented degree this one was in duration then is it worth then consideration that maybe the subtle effects of HFT are at least in part to blame?
As I say the flash crashes are one thing, but how do we measure the less prominently obvious effects? That's a very hard thing to do and there's still a massive amount of research being poured into it. It may be that the impact will be negligible, but at the other end of the scale it's quite possible it's taking us down paths that are far from optimal than a non-HFT or delayed/per-transaction taxed HFT world would give us.
What if it is responsible for prolonged depression of the markets which in turn lowers investment, slows growth, and creates unemployment which can lead to people being homeless or even committing suicide. Would you agree that on the off chance a causal link (I'm not saying I suspect this is the case, but if, and I'm talking hypothetically here), that it has been in part responsible for this sort of real actual harm, then would you then agree that maybe it wasn't such a good idea after all at that point?
I'm intrigued. What if she agreed with Microsoft, Apple, Google, to all ignore the NSA's requests and release said documents. Would the government really dare destroy one of the most important pillars of it's economy, the tech industry?
Doing so would be in the interests of shareholders too as the current setup costs these companies heavily in money and reputation.
Possibly, but not to any recognisable degree given that the same period in which they were getting tougher action against dog owners the service deteriorated greatly despite no such laws existing for the last few hundred years and the service being better during that period. In other words, even if it does help the benefit is negligible. Ultimately I don't know why staff don't just refuse to deliver to houses with dangerous dogs, they'd be perfectly allowed to do so hence why I don't see it as a big issue.
It strikes me as the classic union tactic of trying to justify their existence going after things that aren't a big deal but making a big issue with them all the while ignoring the more fundamental problems that are going on all around them. This is how the Union I used to be a member of and did some work for once worked so I wouldn't be surprised to hear it extends to all public sector unions, certainly the signs are there.
I don't buy that, the downfall of Royal Mail has been in the last 18 months but private courier companies have been cherry picking for decades.
Further, the Royal Mail has a legally granted monopoly on the last mile for daily deliveries of standard post so the private companies can't even cherry pick there.
But as important in anything else is that due to the rise of online shopping the market for parcels has expanded so drastically that there's far more profit to be made even if the market was split equally 20 ways that it'd be still more profitable now then 10 - 20 years ago.
The problem is that private companies DO provide better service. DPD for example sends me a text the day before delivering giving me the name of the drive, the hour timeslot between which he'll deliver and they turn up without failure, even when it's snowing and all part of their standard service. You're lucky if Royal Mail even turn up on the right day, let alone the perks of giving you a timeslot during which it'll arrive.
"You can't even prove it is a chaotic system at all."
As I said, you obviously have not the slightest bit of a clue about this subject, go educate yourself before you make yourself look even more of a fool making such stupid statements.
But I'm going to turn around the argument on you seeing as you seem to know it all. Please provide me the paper you have written that demonstrably proves that HFT is not in the slightest bit responsible for any artificial deflation of stock markets, or any artificial booms that wouldn't otherwise have happened without it.
The fact is, it's a chaotic system, and we have no idea it's impact on these sorts of issues. It's quite possible that it's been responsible for increasing the scale of booms leading to greater busts, and that it's been responsible for prolonging economic downturn unnecessarily.
Again, you're making an argument without having even a basic grasp of the topic, and it's not my fault you do not understand the topic. That's entirely your problem, but your lack of understanding does not, as much as you'd like to believe otherwise, make me wrong.
There are many thousands of papers and other writings and musings on on chaos and HFT because it's a major area of research. A quick Google will trivially confirm this for you so again, go educate yourself before talking any further utter nonsense.
I should probably have quantified as it seems you've missed the point I intended - I'll quantify that as serious harm. I don't pretend anything that may cause the slightest bit of harm should be outlawed, but that anything with potential to cause serious harm should be treated with some degree of caution and confirmation before "going live" with it.
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That's what I do and go for contracts that are much shorter term than is typical with a subsidised phone because it gives me far more flexibility and much lower per-monthly costs as I'm just paying for my contract without any phone costs bundled in.
But not everyone has the cash upfront to buy a £600 smartphone outright yet are happy to pay for one over the period of say 24 months instead and then still be able to use it even if they want to change carrier afterwards.
In fact, without subsidies the smartphone market would be tiny compared to the size it is now as the vast majority of the general public would not be willing to pay for a phone if they saw the full cost of the device upfront and had to pay it in one big chunk.
They're really essential for the health of the smartphone industry as much as I'm not a fan of them.
If it's anything like the UK it'll do nothing to subsidies as you're still contracted to 12 to 24 months or whatever, the difference is that when that time is up (or even before hand if you fancy paying for a contract you no longer use or have the option to buy out) you can now go to another carrier without needing a new phone for their network.
This is how it works in the UK. We still have contracts that subsidise handsets that you can be tied into, the carrier just can't prevent you using your device on another network afterwards or even at the same time if you're so inclined.
To be fair I don't think militarisation of space is as scary as it used to be. During the cold war the danger was it turning into an arms race as the USSR and USA try to leapfrog each other, but really at this point we all know the US has won in terms of militarisation, when the USSR collapsed they kept spending and their military tech is a good generation or two ahead of that in Russia or China.
At this point I don't think Russia or China could care too much about trying to compete with something like this when they're still so desperately playing catch up in terms of boats, planes, and tanks.
Russia isn't going to get into another bankrupting arms race and China whilst building it's forces knows it couldn't compete either because even as the world's second largest economy it's still a long way behind and the only economic force that could compete with the US would be a combined-EU arms race but there's not much taste in the EU for an EU-wide military force, nor any reason to try and compete with the US given they're on the same side for the most part.
The game has moved on somewhat now, as we're seeing with Syria, and as we're seeing with China's economic policy the great game is being played in the battlefields of the UN debating chambers, and the world economy. Russia is trying to prevent the US acting internationally by weakening it's position politically, and China is more interested in growing itself, but if it can do so at the expense of the US by creating unfair trade terms that the US can do little to counteract having made itself dependant on Chinese manufacturing then it sees that as a bonus to it's growth.
So for the time being I think America's militarisation of space will be a kind of small side show. I don't think it'll trigger any kind of race by other countries to do the same other than the odd relatively trivial showcase (like China showing off the ability to accurately fling shit at other things in orbit). I think everyone else is playing a different game now and given Putin's recent political coup in completely outflanking Obama over Syria I'm not even sure the US realises that it's less about technical military superiority and more about politics, trade, and economics at this point.
Basically the game has like 3 or 4 difficulty levels, and to level up a character all the way to the highest level (60) you have to play through each difficulty level. That means to get a single character to level 60 you have to play through the game about 4 times anyway.
So it's not unusual for people to play the game many times, just levelling up two different character classes to the top to unlock all their skills and abilities means 6 or 8 playthroughs or whatever.
But he's right, you can do this and not get any kind of legendary drop. He played through so many times not looking for a legendary drop, but to level his characters up.
It's silly to suggest removing the AH will magically make things fair.
It's always been the case that games where you have to farm for goods are dominated by the unemployed or people with few commitments like housewives or students.
The reason Blizzard made the auction house in the first place was to allow those who work to be able to use that fact to compete against those who do not.
So you'll never achieve fairness by removing it. It just sways things back towards society's non-contributors and spongers unless Blizzard has basically made rare drops no longer rare such that someone who can only fit in 4 hours a week can get all the uber gear they need to compete with someone who can fit in 100 hours a week.
Agreed, this is exactly Apple's problem and I've pointed it out all along. They've built themselves a niche that's relatively limited in size and to expand out beyond that they have to alienate that original but profitable niche. This is why I always knew they'd hit saturation point and a plateau of profitability because they were always going to risk saturating that original market and any attempt to grow beyond that would be at the expense of that market.
P.S. The downmods make me lol. It's as if Apple fanboys think by downmodding people that'll somehow change Apple's predicament. I've had it for years now regarding Apple and the great thing is I've been right all along from their anti-trust suit loss to their plateau in profitability, to their unsustainably high market cap last year, and they've been consistently wrong. It shows no matter how much you try and influence the conversation you still can't change reality. Bless them and their fragile little minds.
"Apple has shown time and again that, as far as the public is concerned, they know what they're doing."
Ah. The mysitcal "public". Apple knows what they want. That's why their marketshare is roughly only around 15% and declining?
If Apple's target demographic was the general public and they knew what they wanted they'd have a far higher marketshare than 15%.
But your mistake is in assuming Apple even case what the "public" thinks, the public, presumably the general public, or the majority of the public aren't Apple's target demographic. Apple's target demographic is more profitable than the average Joe, but the problem is it's also a small demographic, which is why they're now trying to reach out beyond that with the 5C.
It's a lie though to pretend Apple is popular with the "public" though, it's not. The absolute vast majority of the "public" don't buy Apple.
"If you read the Macalope column over at MacWorld"
This is called confirmation bias. Your whole argument can basically be summed up as:
"If you ignore the whole of the mainstream press and fringe press alike who come from all walks of life and ranger from having vested interests in talking down Apple to being completely objective about Apple and instead go for an extremely biased pro-Apple source run by fanboys then you get a very pro-Apple picture"
No shit Sherlock. It's just like how I can go and read The Daily Mail if I want to pretend global warming isn't a real thing. It doesn't change the fact that every scientist worth their salt numbering in the 10s of thousands believe it is real though. Just because you can find a publication that happens to confirm your bias doesn't mean you or that publication are anywhere near correct though.
Even the BBC which has had a historic bias towards Apple both in priority of development targets for things like iPlayer and BBC News apps through to it's reporting is talking about Apple's problems rather than pretending they don't exist.
Declining market share, declining profits, declining investor confidence. All these things are real and can be measured objectively.
"On the comment that the public has stated that they want bigger. Is this really true or have you been watching too many Samsung adverts? I see more iPhones around than large screen Android phones, and more small screen Android phones than either."
Personal anecdotes and Samsung adverts are irrelevant.
The fact is the large screen Android phones have been outselling the smaller iPhones. Combined sales of the Galaxy S2, S3, HTC One, Galaxy Note and so forth as well as the offerings from other Android manufacturers far outstrip the sale of Apple devices.
That alone is all the objective evidence you need to be aware that the large screen devices are more popular than something of Apple's form factor or smaller.
The GP wasn't stating opinion, he was stating fact.
FWIW I don't actually like the size of the larger phones, I personally prefer iPhone sized devices (though I prefer Android to iOS) so I'm with you if your opinion is that those devices are too big, but the fact is we're still in a minority given the sales stats of what people actually buy.
Other comments seem to suggest this depends on the quality of the fingerprint scanner in question.
There's two issues:
1) Having your fingerprint replicated to be used elsewhere against your will.
2) Having your biometrics used to track and trace you
You're right there's probably no threat here of 1) happening because the fingerprint itself is apparently not stored, but the danger is 2). For 2) you don't need the full fingerprint, all you need is a hash that can be calculated from it. This means that if say that hash is leaked onto the web and associated with something you post there for example, then if the government also has your fingerprint and can also hence generate the same hash they can link you with a strong degree of certainty to that thing online.
I'm not saying the hash does, or even can be leaked but if, and that's a big if, if it can be leaked or does get leaked from the device then this allows for ever more intrusive tracking. If websites were able to access it then you'd get a whole extra degree of tracking well beyond what you see now which relies on much more flakey identifiers like cookies and IP addresses.
That's the privacy issue.
"Being myself a German, I sometimes worry about German "alarmism"."
Trust me, given your history I'd argue it's better to have German alarmism over issues like privacy than British complacency. Your country learnt the lessons of it's past. Unfortunately we didn't learn the lessons of your past despite the impact it had on us, hence why we're becoming an ever more xenophobic insular state with an unhealthy amount of nationalism and surveillance.
Better to have alarmism that tends towards personal freedom and liberty, than the type of alarmism we have that goes against personal freedom and liberty such as comments like "Allowing gay marriage will destroy people's existing marriages!" from the Church, a number of politicians, and even whole parties like UKIP.
There's a reason why your country is so strong economically, and so respected politically and as frustrating as some things may seem sometimes you should be cautious not to wish away the things that make your country great.
I think this is probably the biggest concern. Right now you have a certain degree of anonymity on the internet. If you get hauled through the courts over something that's been posted online for political reasons you can deny you ever posted it because it's impossible to prove it was you that used a particular system even if they trace back to a specific system via cookies, IP address etc.
If you start authenticating via biometrics like fingerprints then you'll have a lot tougher time arguing it wasn't your doing.
Effectively as I see it the real risk here is the erosion of anonymity, there's a danger given the points you make that it will be much easier to suggest in court someone was tied to some specific thing on the internet.
If someone is aware of corruption by some official, but doesn't have any solid proof even though they know it's true but feels it's important to whistleblow then they can do that right now and that person can attack them with libel cases and so forth but it'll be hard to tie that individual to it and win such a case. If somehow a fingerprint hash is getting tied back to that whistleblowing then you've lost all hope of getting away with it in court and being silenced by that sort of legal assault even if what you did was morally the right thing to do.
Depending on what you do, sometimes more secure authentication and security can be detrimental to your goals. If you're a political activist highlighting real issues in the face of oppression then you're probably better off having no login on your PC and unsecured wireless because you have all the plausible deniability you need at that point.
I was under the impression it had already completed destruction of it's chemical weapons? How many remain and where?
It's not just that, the issue I take with this is why the fuck are City of London police being given free reign across the UK?
Let's be clear, these guys aren't the Met. they're a tiny little police force responsible for nothing more than London's financial square mile.
I simply don't understand what's going on here, it's not their job to be going after anyone in Birmingham, that's not The City of London, that's Birmingham and it should be left to the police force responsible there as to whether that's a priority.
It seems rather than investigating financial crimes in The City of London which is their job they seem to have decided they'll just go police what the fuck they want where the fuck they want.
Just to put this into context, it's like a Scottish police force taking a day trip down to The City of London to arrest a bunch of bankers for financial crimes rather than dealing with crimes up in Scotland, or for the Americans here, it's like some small town Sheriff from Alabama taking a trip over to California to arrest people for smoking weed because that's a priority there, even if it's not in California.
It's made worse by the fact we've had elected police crime commissioners forced upon us with the whole argument being for them that people get a say in police priorities in their area - if another area's police force is now coming in meddling it makes a mockery of that.
But it is what it is, so I'm going to play the game their way, the way Osborne and Cameron want it to be played. I'm going to lobby, (and I would suggest everyone else here from the UK do the same) my police crime commissioner to commit a couple of police officers to The City of London to investigate financial crimes in the banking industry and at headquarters of media industry firms with headquarters there. I even have the justification that crimes committed there cause harm here and that the City of London police apparently are more interested in fucking around with things outside their jurisdiction.
It's one thing having a local area police force bought off by industry (this isn't news, The City of London police have long been easily bent by bribery from everything from the banks to Scientology, they've just never stepped outside their remit like this before), it's one thing that being possible in our country, but if it's going to be possible they should have no right to step outside their area of influence.
I'll also contact my MP and ask him to raise this in parliament and suggest disbanding The City of London police because it's now way too corrupt and just hand it over to the met. Again, I recommend others do the same.
"what gives the USA the right to judge them when the USA has one of the largest arsenals of chemical"
America doesn't have chemical weapons, it destroyed them all after it signed up to the convention on chemical weapons just like about 197 out of 203 other nations in the world. Those that haven't include the likes of Syria, North Korea and so forth.
Don't muddle nuclear in, it's a separate thing because Assad doesn't have nuclear weapons and the US isn't preaching to him about them. Disarmament of nuclear weapons has to be done as a staged stand down with the likes of Russia, if you don't understand why then simply Google the history of nuclear weapons and the various disarmament treaties that have been pursued and learn about the principle of MAD.
I agree there are important issues that haven't be dealt with here, but that doesn't mean that the chemical weapons issue isn't important and shouldn't be dealt with. It's still a priority problem as well.
Actually there's a danger of the conspiracy theory that's been floating around about that last attack coming true in the other direction.
Can we really be sure Assad wont retain a secret stockpile for use after "disarmament" and use them blaming the rebels with the excuse "I gave all mine up, it must be the rebels!"?
I think the only view Russia has is "For a supposedly smart president, it wasn't hard to completely and utterly outplay Obama on the international stage and make a mockery of him" because that's exactly what they've done.
Strike or not, there's little question that Russia has completely outplayed the US on this and gotten exactly what they wanted making a joke of current US government competence on the international stage. Putin was always annoyed that Obama went behind his back to re-negotiate the nuclear arms treaty with Medvedev. I suspect this, coupled with the fact Medvedev has now fallen from grace and is being "investigated" in Russia is Putin's long game revenge for all that as much as anything else.
The problem with the terrorists amongst the rebels now is they feel shafted by everyone and an Assad win isn't magically going to make Al Nusra vanish into thin air no matter what munitions or atrocities he commits. I suspect in the next few decades we'll see Al Nusra's name attached to various terrorist attacks in both the West and Russia.
Effectively a game where Russia wanted to retain their Mediterranean port under Assad and America wanted Assad out to cripple Hezbollah and help Israel has turned into a complete mess and make no mistake, we're all going to feel that.
Do I know what a better solution would've been? Not really. I do wonder if perhaps Obama should've tied stronger conditions to his strike threat - e.g. we'll keep out of Syria if Iran, Hezbollah and resupplies of Russian arms also keep out, alongside the chemical weapons disarmament but that would've required Obama to actually be able to grow a pair of balls and be capable of negotiation on the international stage. I'd agree this would be at least something good if we could somehow guarantee we were actually going to get all Assad's weapons but it's like getting the US/Russia to disarm completely - if they have 3000 warheads each and get rid of 2000 of them do they care? they still have enough to destroy the world over and even if they claim to get rid of the last 1000 in a multi-lateral agreement could we really be sure both of them would? It's the same with Assad, even if the bulk of his chemical weapons go it doesn't matter as he was never going to use 90% anyway, there just aren't enough targets for that, but the remaining 10% he may stow away is going to be just as much of a problem then as it is now. Similarly we don't even know how much the rebels have captured and they've already said they wont be part of this. So in theory it's a nice idea, but in practice I'm not convinced it'll make any tangible difference.
Either way with the current situation no one wins, but one thing we can say is that this outcome is only going to make the war on terror look ever more like the war on drugs due to the fact that it's now destined to continue in response to major terrorist attacks for at least another few decades. All because the current decisions that have been made not only do nothing to deal with the core issues in Syria, but actually only inflame radicalisation. I'd wager it wont now be long until even the moderate elements of the FSA fold in line with al Nusra due to being shafted by everyone, swelling their numbers ever more.
Yes, you're right but the post started by the GP are missing the actual problem with chemical weapons, none of this is the real reason chemical weapons are so bad. Especially the likes of Sarin.
You use different chemical weapons with different aims, quite rightly as you say VX is persistent so you use it if you want to deny access to an area whilst others like Sarin and Mustard gas aren't.
The reason Sarin for example is particularly bad is because it kills en-masse very quickly and leaves infrastructure intact. It reduces the cost of war, particularly this sort of civil war and it makes ethnic cleansing a dangerously cheap thing to do. Thus far the war has been expensive for Assad - he's had to literally destroy his most economically productive cities literally into nothing but rubble, and that's expensive. It means even if he wins there'll still have been a massive cost to his actions which act as a deterrent for further action, and for other dictators to do the same when they realise he may have won the war, but his country is now 3rd world which means even he personally will be poorer with no national wealth to sponge from.
Sarin does indeed degrade to be pretty harmless relatively quickly, which is why there were pictures of people stood by the delivery rockets of this particular attack only a short time afterwards, and why there were concerns that Assad's 5 day delay in letting the chemical weapons inspectors there could cause the loss of much evidence. The problem with a weapon like this that can kill a thousand people and leave nothing but a bunch of dead bodies and a small crater in the ground is that it leaves all the infrastructure intact. It makes war and ethnic cleansing relatively free of penalty for someone who does it.
Decided you don't like those of a particular religious sect sat in that corner of your city? Use Sarin! Within a day they'll all be dead and all you have to do is burn the bodies then your preferred religious sect can move in in their place and that section of the city remains productive because everything works like it did a day before the entire population was wiped out.
The drastically more indiscriminate nature is certainly a problem also as others have pointed out, the fact that even people hidden in basements and so forth will die to it. In the attack being discussed at the moment it seems around 200 people at minimum died from one single munition using even the low end figures (the high end would probably suggest maybe as many as 750 - 800 from a single munition). Judging from where the munition landed from pictures, even if it was built up rush hour I'd take a guess that at most an equivalently sized conventional purely explosive rocket would've only killed 50 at most.
Oh dear. You really do get desperate with your arguments when you're way out of your depth don't you?
The issue is that we still don't really know what impact HFT has on the markets. Has it prolonged the financial crisis? Has it led to bigger booms and hence bigger busts? That's the problem.
A lot of countries have talked of the underlying feel of the economy feeling healthier than the markets and so forth suggest. Is this because HFT is artificially deflating the markets because of the economy as a whole when in a non-HFT world the markets would've picked up much better in those countries and possibly across the globe?
The potential for flash crashes that can't be predicted is bad enough, and yes we can mitigate them to some degree but as well as the threat of those there's also the broader, more subtle impacts it's having on the markets that can have real actual negative effects.
Post dot com we were told that HFT would help prevent that sort of thing in the future and you may be right that this was it being sold as something it couldn't possibly actually do and so unfair, but do we really know HFT wasn't in part responsible for the depth and duration of the current financial crisis? Some would argue yes, others no, but in reality we don't know. If future busts are similarly prolonged to the unprecedented degree this one was in duration then is it worth then consideration that maybe the subtle effects of HFT are at least in part to blame?
As I say the flash crashes are one thing, but how do we measure the less prominently obvious effects? That's a very hard thing to do and there's still a massive amount of research being poured into it. It may be that the impact will be negligible, but at the other end of the scale it's quite possible it's taking us down paths that are far from optimal than a non-HFT or delayed/per-transaction taxed HFT world would give us.
What if it is responsible for prolonged depression of the markets which in turn lowers investment, slows growth, and creates unemployment which can lead to people being homeless or even committing suicide. Would you agree that on the off chance a causal link (I'm not saying I suspect this is the case, but if, and I'm talking hypothetically here), that it has been in part responsible for this sort of real actual harm, then would you then agree that maybe it wasn't such a good idea after all at that point?
I think someone got the ballasts hanging underneath confused with the BIG FUCK OFF BUNCH OF BRIGHTLY COLOURED BALLOONS FLOATING ABOVE.
Apparently some people are actually that retarded.
I'm intrigued. What if she agreed with Microsoft, Apple, Google, to all ignore the NSA's requests and release said documents. Would the government really dare destroy one of the most important pillars of it's economy, the tech industry?
Doing so would be in the interests of shareholders too as the current setup costs these companies heavily in money and reputation.
Possibly, but not to any recognisable degree given that the same period in which they were getting tougher action against dog owners the service deteriorated greatly despite no such laws existing for the last few hundred years and the service being better during that period. In other words, even if it does help the benefit is negligible. Ultimately I don't know why staff don't just refuse to deliver to houses with dangerous dogs, they'd be perfectly allowed to do so hence why I don't see it as a big issue.
It strikes me as the classic union tactic of trying to justify their existence going after things that aren't a big deal but making a big issue with them all the while ignoring the more fundamental problems that are going on all around them. This is how the Union I used to be a member of and did some work for once worked so I wouldn't be surprised to hear it extends to all public sector unions, certainly the signs are there.
I don't buy that, the downfall of Royal Mail has been in the last 18 months but private courier companies have been cherry picking for decades.
Further, the Royal Mail has a legally granted monopoly on the last mile for daily deliveries of standard post so the private companies can't even cherry pick there.
But as important in anything else is that due to the rise of online shopping the market for parcels has expanded so drastically that there's far more profit to be made even if the market was split equally 20 ways that it'd be still more profitable now then 10 - 20 years ago.
The problem is that private companies DO provide better service. DPD for example sends me a text the day before delivering giving me the name of the drive, the hour timeslot between which he'll deliver and they turn up without failure, even when it's snowing and all part of their standard service. You're lucky if Royal Mail even turn up on the right day, let alone the perks of giving you a timeslot during which it'll arrive.
"You can't even prove it is a chaotic system at all."
As I said, you obviously have not the slightest bit of a clue about this subject, go educate yourself before you make yourself look even more of a fool making such stupid statements.
But I'm going to turn around the argument on you seeing as you seem to know it all. Please provide me the paper you have written that demonstrably proves that HFT is not in the slightest bit responsible for any artificial deflation of stock markets, or any artificial booms that wouldn't otherwise have happened without it.
The fact is, it's a chaotic system, and we have no idea it's impact on these sorts of issues. It's quite possible that it's been responsible for increasing the scale of booms leading to greater busts, and that it's been responsible for prolonging economic downturn unnecessarily.
Again, you're making an argument without having even a basic grasp of the topic, and it's not my fault you do not understand the topic. That's entirely your problem, but your lack of understanding does not, as much as you'd like to believe otherwise, make me wrong.
There are many thousands of papers and other writings and musings on on chaos and HFT because it's a major area of research. A quick Google will trivially confirm this for you so again, go educate yourself before talking any further utter nonsense.
I should probably have quantified as it seems you've missed the point I intended - I'll quantify that as serious harm. I don't pretend anything that may cause the slightest bit of harm should be outlawed, but that anything with potential to cause serious harm should be treated with some degree of caution and confirmation before "going live" with it.