Why do you approve of the significantly stricter controls and higher development that Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony place on their Wii, XBox, and PS developers, but hold Apple to a different standard for their consumer electronics device?
Where did the GP say that.
You're projecting again. For the record I deride Apple, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft, for their restrictive policies. However as a PC gamer the inadequacies of consoles are not my concern.
I dare you to go to any foreign country and walk around without your passport.
Wow, that's the stupidest bit of travel advice I've ever heard.
Never walk around with your passport when you don't have to. Leave it locked in the hotel safe, take a photocopy if you need it.
Now I've been able to walk around unharrased without my passport in every nation I've been to, including but not limited to:
- Thailand
- Malaysia
- Philippines
- Singapore
- New Zealand
- Cambodia
- Vietnam
- China
- Indonesia
Funny, I just switched to a budget where I do the exact opposite. Fixed cash pools are, hands down, the best way to control discretionary spending. Many would be very wise to put away the plastic and go back to an all-cash budget.
In Australia this cuts down on bank fees. Unless you owe the bank a lot of money you'll be "nickled and dimed" to death, as you Americans would say as we pay per transaction, $25 at the store by EFTPOS costs me $0.5 or more in some cases, ATM withdrawal is free if I use my own banks ATM's.
The best way to control discretionary spending is to put money where you have to jump thorough hoops to access it. I have two bank accounts that are linked to each other, one is an everyday savings account and the other is a high interest savings account. The high interest savings account does not have card access, I have to log on to my internet banking site and transfer money. The incentive I have against this is that I'd lose the 3.25% it's earning just by sitting there.
If you have $5K spare a term deposit is your best friend at the moment.
On par, if not slightly cheaper then trying to increase the security the cotton-linen blend that the US uses. The biggest cost is in replacing printing machines, seeing as the technology has been around for a while this cost will be lower then that of Australia.
While notes in Australia might only last six months, in the US the replacement rate is more like 2 years. If plastic notes are, for example, 3X more expensive to produce, then that is kind of false economy.
I don't see how.
In the case of Vietnam, increasing security of paper notes would have cost more and not have resulted in the same security as a polymer note. The economic benefits come in less counterfeit notes which decreases insurance costs for banks and federal reserves. With the case of New Zealand, switching to Polymer bank notes cost them twice as much as paper notes but resulted in a note that lasted four times as long, over the lifetime of the note costs were essentially halved. If the US has a 2 year replacement cycle then there would be clear benefits to using polymer notes compared to the fragile cotton-linen notes (When I handled USD, compared to the polymer AUD, SGD and MYR the US notes were extremely fragile and often frayed or torn, I felt like I needed kid gloves to handle them).
Polymer notes are also recycled. After being shredded into a fine pulp by the RBA (Reserve Bank of Australia) the notes are melted down, mixed with other polymers or impurities and re-cast into other plastic items. This is more environmentally friendly then what we did with our old Paper currencies, which was burn them.
How much harder are they to counterfeit?
As I said with the case of Vietnam, these notes are significantly harder to counterfeit. The most expensive paper note protection hasn't been able to match cheaper polymer note protection.
Right now a counterfeit bill might only stay in circulation a few years. With plastic money, it might be harder to counterfeit, but if it stays in circulation, the damage in increased through repeated circulation.
This depends on how much more difficult it is to produce a fake note that can avoid detection. America's biggest problem is not counterfeit notes in the US, it's counterfeit notes outside the US where security detection is not as good. This has lead many international banks to flatly refuse to accept certain batches of notes and notes beyond a certain age (a serious inconvenience for US travellers, a lamentation I hear often when abroad from Americans). Polymer bank notes increase the cost, time and skill required to produce copies and increases the ability of banks to detect counterfeits, six out of every million AUD notes are found to be counterfeit.
Counterfeit notes are only good if they are not detected, a bank is the most likely place to detect a counterfeit and it is quite hard to prevent a note from reaching a bank. So the calculation you have is: (ability + cost required to make fake notes)=number of fake notes/banks ability to detect fake notes. If you increase the ability to detect notes you decrease circulation, if you increase the cost and skill to make fake notes you decrease introduction. Polymer notes attack both the supply and longevity of counterfeit notes.
This PDF is informative, showing the ratio of production to circulation and comparing the counterfeit rates to the EUR, GBP and CAD.
Well that's nice. I presume CSIRO has given the US royalty free use of the patent. What's that? They haven't? Ahh well there you go then.
Sure, as soon as the US gives Australia some royalty free use of their patents. You cant have it both ways sunshine, especially since you back-doored the DMCA into Australian law.
the distance to Australia,
WTF does this have to do with it. You'll damn well make them locally you lazy gits. Just like Israel, Singapore, Malaysia, New Zealand and Vietnam.
All sarcasm aside, CSIRO understands that countries want to control the production of their own currency so they license the technology to do so, sometimes even the expertise to get it started as was the case with Vietnam's conversion to polymer banknotes.
Also understand that a radical change in the materials of the notes could lead to problems in compatibility with various automated systems that deal with them.
I'm yet to hear of this happening, the conversion from paper to polymer in Australia presented no significant issues. This isn't some half asred implementation here, someone has already solved these problems for you, as far back as 1992 and Australia uses the same crappy diebold ATM's as most of the world.
So while the longer life of the notes is nice, it isn't the only concern.
It's not just the life that's nice, its the durability (suddenly I'm not worried if $100 goes through the wash) and the security.
US bank notes are scrutinised everywhere, in most countries bank notes before 1996 are automatically rejected whilst MYR, SGD and AUD aren't even looked at twice.
Apple did not engineer the A4, engineers that Apple acquired through it's PA Semi purchase did, and the A4 is an integration effort, it's core components where designed by engineers outside of Apple/PA Semi.
Acquire and integrate.
This sounds a lot like the MO of another evil tech company.
The A4 processor is an ARM chip. Please read this, the A4 uses technology license from ARM and uses the ARM instruction set. The Processor simply has a few proprietary Apple extensions.
Re:Keep hating Microsoft while Apple goes unchecke
on
Apple To Buy ARM?
·
· Score: 1
We do? There have been tons of complaints on Apple's strategy in terms of the App Store, and now lately the programming language limitations in the SDK, as well as every time they try to silence a blogger. There have been lots of voices of moving to Android Market, and so on.
Really, I've heard none of this on/. yet there's been at least one Apple praise story per day for the last three days. Every fanboy and their dog stood up to vocally bash Gizmodo despite this being an obvious marketing ploy and the Google bashing continues unabated (I'll grant that this one is countered by more level headed arguments). Go look at the "porn store comment" thread, every fanboy is viciously defending Apple's censorship policy.
So would freedom of the press. What you are suggesting is essentially state control of the media, and only a step away from a priori censorship. How much easier to control misinformation if you must submit everything but the weather forecast to the bureau for approval before publishing?
No, did you even read my post.
Priori censorship? I cannot fathom how you managed to reach that conclusion?
What I suggested is that news agencies be made responsible for what they publish. In the same way that I'm responsible for my actions. I know if I do something I know is wrong I will be punished but that does not stop me if I really want to.
We simply put in place, the same punishments and scrutiny for news agencies, meaning if they do misrepresent facts they can and will be held accountable after the fact. This is no more censorship then being punished for deliberately lying in court or lying on an advertisement.
Most news agencies are not. You can say pretty much anything you want to on your own dime.
Am I permitted to destroy your business with slander that is blatantly untrue, so long as it's on my "cent"? Am I permitted to advertise a price that is false? This is the proverbial "fire in a crowded theatre". Currently, in my country if I were to do either of these actions I will be punished, after the fact as both are wrong.
Sounds like a system that panders to the whims of the person with the most money. It's systems like this that handed so much power to people like Murdoch. They've failed and now news agencies need to be made accountable for what they publish.
It is still awe-inspiring how much power and trust the US Constitution puts into the people
It's just a piece of paper.
Putting blind faith into a document is as bad as putting blind faith into anything. As the GWB regime proved it's only as good as the people defending it, in other words, how are those free speech zones working out for you. Personally I wont be going anywhere near the US border with all these Philipines, Thailand, Cambodia and Malaysia (quite normal for an Australian to travel around SE Asia) stamps on my passport because as a single male they tend to earn extra scrutiny from an organisation that has no accountability.
By permitting news agencies to publish information that they know is deliberately misleading, you are basically saying it's OK to murder people even though you know that you are doing wrong. A news agency may still publish information they know to be misleading but they will be punished for it. This does not cut down on personal freedoms one iota, it cuts down on the ability of large organisations to manipulate people into believing false information. Putting some limits on lying in the media will, in fact increase personal liberty.
At what rate does VDSL2 degrade. With ADSL 2+ it degrades beyond a point of usefulness at 4-6 KM, Once you get past 2 KM the curve increases lowering speed significantly.
I live 3.3 Kilometres from my telephone Exchange and can barely get 3 Mbit/s. For the most part I get 1-1.3 Mbit/s. Can VDSL help extend the useful range of DSL?
If the site owners need to make sure that everyone that reads the site also gets the ads, then they simply have to figure something else out.
The Escapist tried forcing everyone to watch ad's before Zero Punctuation. If you didn't view the ad, ZP wouldn't load but they made the mistake of serving the ad's from someone else so it took me 5 minutes to figure out if I disabled adblock when I pressed play and immediately re-enabled it the ad would stop loading and Zero Punctuation would begin.
Eventually The Escapist figured it out and I no longer had to jump through this hoop. I have no issue with ad's in general, I have an issue with ads being pushed above the content. The ad's that get past ad-block are generally not invasive or annoying so I let them live.
The reason the USSR was a heavy-handed communist government run by power hungry elitists is because that is the only way communism can ever be applied to an entire nation. As soon as you allow one person to say "No, I don't want to" the whole system begins to crumble.
This is true of all extremist forms of government, not just communism (Authoritarian, Socialist). When Pol Pot tried to implement agrarianism (Anarchistic, Socialist) in Cambodia he ended up wiping out a quarter of the countries population (2.2 million Khmer). Hitler and Fascism (Authoritarian, Capitalist) and the same would be true for Libertarianism (Anarchistic, Capitalist).
Pol Pot and Stalin failed to implement a non-violent or authoritarian regime because their philosophies could not handle people who thought differently, this is true of all extremist forms of government which is why we need to vote for people who are closer to the centre of the political compass. A little bit of socialism is a good thing because it happily co-exists with a bit of capitalism where as a lot of capitalism is a bad thing as it cannot co-exist with another state.
Regardless of the working conditions, these people are there because they have needs and desires the same as the rest of us. They work there because there is no other work available, or the work that is available is even worse. That's the state that the majority of the world is in, and it won't be changed by any number of idealistic fools opining about the immorality of large corporations.
Consider the source, this is the Daily Mail, the UK's version of Fox News. They are just publishing deliberately inflammatory stories to drum um readership.
But I agree, having travelled to third world nations I see that they often have the same basic desires, a comfortable home, plentiful food, family, friends. This is true the world over, even in those "evil" nations they rabbit on about.
Apple has a good handle on their vertical, from hardware to content. Google is just beginning its jump into the hardware portion. I imagine this is just another rung in the ladder from the bottom to the top, control all the way.
You seem a bit confused.
Apple designed the vertical integration from the word go, Google designed an open platform from the word go. What you state is the antithesis of an open platform
If Google is entering the consumer hardware business which is pure speculation at this point, but not without merit, the Nexus Two will be the Motorola Shadow but who is to say what the Nexus Three will be. If Google is entering the consumer hardware market they will be doing it as an Android competitor, not an Android controller. The introduction of the Google Nexus One had not impact on the introduction of the HTC Desire, which uses the same hardware as the N1 but with HTC's "Sense" interface.
Google has no interest in becoming a vertical monopoly.
Because that's the kind of business Apple is, they don't innovate, they litigate. It's been this way for a while, the look and feel lawsuit is a great historical example.
Up until now I've been saying this Google-Apple war is very one sided with Apple doing a lot if ineffectual attacking with Google (removing the word "google" from the Iphone, various comments including the two "porn store" comments). But this changes that.
Google I would say have just pulled off their own Doolittle raid, whilst completely ineffectual from a business standpoint it does send an important message to Apple, don't forget we can strike anywhere, even in the very heart of your business.
On the plus side, Google diversifies and gets insight and input into ARM development.
Really? REALLY?! You're trying to tell me that flash is innovation on the web
Flash is where most of the content is on the web. Like it or not, you have to deal with that. Apple is not going to force all the existing content into HTML 5 so kindly stop with the incoherent fanboy ranting. Content is far more important then innovation, I can list a dozen innovations that went nowhere because they were too incompatible.
and clean the froth off your keyboard.
The GP is 100% right, as soon as flash is available on Android handsets people will use Flash for mobile gaming, watching video's and what not. Google doesnt care about this as they dont want (or care if) their customers are beholden to Itunes. Apple on the other hand wants its customers to be beholden to their revenue stream.
From where I sit, html5 is the innovation and the future of the web here
A future without a past is not a future. With flash and HTML5 I have the past, present and future of the web, not a limited subset of it.
Apple actually acknowledged that Android exists! I thought that was a big no-no
First they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you. ------ we are here.
Then you win.
Victory for Android in 2011, according to the Gandhi scale.
Disclosure: Linux fan, I doubt that puts me in the minority here.
I have to disagree. I'm far from a Microsoft fan, but they've never prevented me from running software on their products because they disagreed with the content or subject matter.
MS doesn't give a crap what you do so long as you give them their yearly cheque. I'm currently managing IT in a small business and MS has said, they don't care that I'm using VLK's for the terminal server (we dont get VLK's in MAPS but do in Empower) so long as I'm only using my allotted 15 office licenses. MS has even been some help in marketing the business as they want to push MS in the BI (Business Intelligence) world.
MS understands their customer, the business and they understand keeping their customer happy is paramount. Pay the yearly fee, keep track of licenses and MS will leave you the hell alone (the official line is if your 2% out you're fine).
Slashdot Mirror
6 CRT monitors: $300.
Cheap Shelving from Ikea: $120
Chiropractor for back problems: $12,000
Watching the whole thing collapse under it's own weight because you cheaped out and went to Ikea: priceless.
Where did the GP say that.
You're projecting again. For the record I deride Apple, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft, for their restrictive policies. However as a PC gamer the inadequacies of consoles are not my concern.
A cop is meant to have accountability, no... wait.
How is that any different from being a gangster?
Wow, that's the stupidest bit of travel advice I've ever heard.
Never walk around with your passport when you don't have to. Leave it locked in the hotel safe, take a photocopy if you need it.
Now I've been able to walk around unharrased without my passport in every nation I've been to, including but not limited to:
- Thailand
- Malaysia
- Philippines
- Singapore
- New Zealand
- Cambodia
- Vietnam
- China
- Indonesia
BTW, I'm an Australian.
In Australia this cuts down on bank fees. Unless you owe the bank a lot of money you'll be "nickled and dimed" to death, as you Americans would say as we pay per transaction, $25 at the store by EFTPOS costs me $0.5 or more in some cases, ATM withdrawal is free if I use my own banks ATM's.
The best way to control discretionary spending is to put money where you have to jump thorough hoops to access it. I have two bank accounts that are linked to each other, one is an everyday savings account and the other is a high interest savings account. The high interest savings account does not have card access, I have to log on to my internet banking site and transfer money. The incentive I have against this is that I'd lose the 3.25% it's earning just by sitting there.
If you have $5K spare a term deposit is your best friend at the moment.
On par, if not slightly cheaper then trying to increase the security the cotton-linen blend that the US uses. The biggest cost is in replacing printing machines, seeing as the technology has been around for a while this cost will be lower then that of Australia.
I don't see how.
In the case of Vietnam, increasing security of paper notes would have cost more and not have resulted in the same security as a polymer note. The economic benefits come in less counterfeit notes which decreases insurance costs for banks and federal reserves. With the case of New Zealand, switching to Polymer bank notes cost them twice as much as paper notes but resulted in a note that lasted four times as long, over the lifetime of the note costs were essentially halved. If the US has a 2 year replacement cycle then there would be clear benefits to using polymer notes compared to the fragile cotton-linen notes (When I handled USD, compared to the polymer AUD, SGD and MYR the US notes were extremely fragile and often frayed or torn, I felt like I needed kid gloves to handle them).
Polymer notes are also recycled. After being shredded into a fine pulp by the RBA (Reserve Bank of Australia) the notes are melted down, mixed with other polymers or impurities and re-cast into other plastic items. This is more environmentally friendly then what we did with our old Paper currencies, which was burn them.
As I said with the case of Vietnam, these notes are significantly harder to counterfeit. The most expensive paper note protection hasn't been able to match cheaper polymer note protection.
This depends on how much more difficult it is to produce a fake note that can avoid detection. America's biggest problem is not counterfeit notes in the US, it's counterfeit notes outside the US where security detection is not as good. This has lead many international banks to flatly refuse to accept certain batches of notes and notes beyond a certain age (a serious inconvenience for US travellers, a lamentation I hear often when abroad from Americans). Polymer bank notes increase the cost, time and skill required to produce copies and increases the ability of banks to detect counterfeits, six out of every million AUD notes are found to be counterfeit.
Counterfeit notes are only good if they are not detected, a bank is the most likely place to detect a counterfeit and it is quite hard to prevent a note from reaching a bank. So the calculation you have is: (ability + cost required to make fake notes)=number of fake notes/banks ability to detect fake notes. If you increase the ability to detect notes you decrease circulation, if you increase the cost and skill to make fake notes you decrease introduction. Polymer notes attack both the supply and longevity of counterfeit notes. This PDF is informative, showing the ratio of production to circulation and comparing the counterfeit rates to the EUR, GBP and CAD.
They already do.
CSIRO license almost everything they develop.
Sure, as soon as the US gives Australia some royalty free use of their patents. You cant have it both ways sunshine, especially since you back-doored the DMCA into Australian law.
WTF does this have to do with it. You'll damn well make them locally you lazy gits. Just like Israel, Singapore, Malaysia, New Zealand and Vietnam.
All sarcasm aside, CSIRO understands that countries want to control the production of their own currency so they license the technology to do so, sometimes even the expertise to get it started as was the case with Vietnam's conversion to polymer banknotes.
I'm yet to hear of this happening, the conversion from paper to polymer in Australia presented no significant issues. This isn't some half asred implementation here, someone has already solved these problems for you, as far back as 1992 and Australia uses the same crappy diebold ATM's as most of the world.
It's not just the life that's nice, its the durability (suddenly I'm not worried if $100 goes through the wash) and the security.
US bank notes are scrutinised everywhere, in most countries bank notes before 1996 are automatically rejected whilst MYR, SGD and AUD aren't even looked at twice.
Acquire and integrate.
This sounds a lot like the MO of another evil tech company.
The A4 processor is an ARM chip. Please read this, the A4 uses technology license from ARM and uses the ARM instruction set. The Processor simply has a few proprietary Apple extensions.
Really, I've heard none of this on /. yet there's been at least one Apple praise story per day for the last three days. Every fanboy and their dog stood up to vocally bash Gizmodo despite this being an obvious marketing ploy and the Google bashing continues unabated (I'll grant that this one is countered by more level headed arguments). Go look at the "porn store comment" thread, every fanboy is viciously defending Apple's censorship policy.
The same way MS stops Dell from installing Linux.
There are any number of tricks, domain squatting redirecting to Google, strong arming suppliers into favouring Google, manipulating search rankings.
The fact that Google does not do these things, so an investigation is not something to be feared.
I thought the bible was already public information.
Or do you mean to tell me they have some credible data to go on?
No, did you even read my post.
Priori censorship? I cannot fathom how you managed to reach that conclusion?
What I suggested is that news agencies be made responsible for what they publish. In the same way that I'm responsible for my actions. I know if I do something I know is wrong I will be punished but that does not stop me if I really want to.
We simply put in place, the same punishments and scrutiny for news agencies, meaning if they do misrepresent facts they can and will be held accountable after the fact. This is no more censorship then being punished for deliberately lying in court or lying on an advertisement.
Am I permitted to destroy your business with slander that is blatantly untrue, so long as it's on my "cent"? Am I permitted to advertise a price that is false? This is the proverbial "fire in a crowded theatre". Currently, in my country if I were to do either of these actions I will be punished, after the fact as both are wrong.
Sounds like a system that panders to the whims of the person with the most money. It's systems like this that handed so much power to people like Murdoch. They've failed and now news agencies need to be made accountable for what they publish.
It's just a piece of paper.
Putting blind faith into a document is as bad as putting blind faith into anything. As the GWB regime proved it's only as good as the people defending it, in other words, how are those free speech zones working out for you. Personally I wont be going anywhere near the US border with all these Philipines, Thailand, Cambodia and Malaysia (quite normal for an Australian to travel around SE Asia) stamps on my passport because as a single male they tend to earn extra scrutiny from an organisation that has no accountability.
By permitting news agencies to publish information that they know is deliberately misleading, you are basically saying it's OK to murder people even though you know that you are doing wrong. A news agency may still publish information they know to be misleading but they will be punished for it. This does not cut down on personal freedoms one iota, it cuts down on the ability of large organisations to manipulate people into believing false information. Putting some limits on lying in the media will, in fact increase personal liberty.
At what rate does VDSL2 degrade. With ADSL 2+ it degrades beyond a point of usefulness at 4-6 KM, Once you get past 2 KM the curve increases lowering speed significantly.
I live 3.3 Kilometres from my telephone Exchange and can barely get 3 Mbit/s. For the most part I get 1-1.3 Mbit/s. Can VDSL help extend the useful range of DSL?
This is true of all extremist forms of government, not just communism (Authoritarian, Socialist). When Pol Pot tried to implement agrarianism (Anarchistic, Socialist) in Cambodia he ended up wiping out a quarter of the countries population (2.2 million Khmer). Hitler and Fascism (Authoritarian, Capitalist) and the same would be true for Libertarianism (Anarchistic, Capitalist).
Pol Pot and Stalin failed to implement a non-violent or authoritarian regime because their philosophies could not handle people who thought differently, this is true of all extremist forms of government which is why we need to vote for people who are closer to the centre of the political compass. A little bit of socialism is a good thing because it happily co-exists with a bit of capitalism where as a lot of capitalism is a bad thing as it cannot co-exist with another state.
Consider the source, this is the Daily Mail, the UK's version of Fox News. They are just publishing deliberately inflammatory stories to drum um readership.
But I agree, having travelled to third world nations I see that they often have the same basic desires, a comfortable home, plentiful food, family, friends. This is true the world over, even in those "evil" nations they rabbit on about.
I've got some other revelations for you.
That thing about the birds and the bees, not true. Also the tooth fairy...
You seem a bit confused.
Apple designed the vertical integration from the word go, Google designed an open platform from the word go. What you state is the antithesis of an open platform
If Google is entering the consumer hardware business which is pure speculation at this point, but not without merit, the Nexus Two will be the Motorola Shadow but who is to say what the Nexus Three will be. If Google is entering the consumer hardware market they will be doing it as an Android competitor, not an Android controller. The introduction of the Google Nexus One had not impact on the introduction of the HTC Desire, which uses the same hardware as the N1 but with HTC's "Sense" interface.
Google has no interest in becoming a vertical monopoly.
Because that's the kind of business Apple is, they don't innovate, they litigate. It's been this way for a while, the look and feel lawsuit is a great historical example.
Up until now I've been saying this Google-Apple war is very one sided with Apple doing a lot if ineffectual attacking with Google (removing the word "google" from the Iphone, various comments including the two "porn store" comments). But this changes that.
Google I would say have just pulled off their own Doolittle raid, whilst completely ineffectual from a business standpoint it does send an important message to Apple, don't forget we can strike anywhere, even in the very heart of your business.
On the plus side, Google diversifies and gets insight and input into ARM development.
Flash is where most of the content is on the web. Like it or not, you have to deal with that. Apple is not going to force all the existing content into HTML 5 so kindly stop with the incoherent fanboy ranting. Content is far more important then innovation, I can list a dozen innovations that went nowhere because they were too incompatible.
and clean the froth off your keyboard.
The GP is 100% right, as soon as flash is available on Android handsets people will use Flash for mobile gaming, watching video's and what not. Google doesnt care about this as they dont want (or care if) their customers are beholden to Itunes. Apple on the other hand wants its customers to be beholden to their revenue stream.
A future without a past is not a future. With flash and HTML5 I have the past, present and future of the web, not a limited subset of it.
First they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you. ------ we are here.
Then you win.
Victory for Android in 2011, according to the Gandhi scale.
MS doesn't give a crap what you do so long as you give them their yearly cheque. I'm currently managing IT in a small business and MS has said, they don't care that I'm using VLK's for the terminal server (we dont get VLK's in MAPS but do in Empower) so long as I'm only using my allotted 15 office licenses. MS has even been some help in marketing the business as they want to push MS in the BI (Business Intelligence) world.
MS understands their customer, the business and they understand keeping their customer happy is paramount. Pay the yearly fee, keep track of licenses and MS will leave you the hell alone (the official line is if your 2% out you're fine).