Price equilibrium is the hallmark of capitalism. The thing that people often miss, because of how much government interferes with pricing models is that Supply will meet Demand at a price point that makes sense for the economics to work. People like the author have almost no experience looking at Econ 101 style supply demand graphs, so they have no idea how economics really works.

Eventually, Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar will all be priced about the same, for the same kind of ride. Sidecar is interesting, because it is demand side (Customers) driven, and Lyft and Uber are supply side driven. Eventually, these two sides will end up being about the same price.

The real problem I see, are the people crying for "Regulation" simply because they don't like the new models. My answer is, you have a regulated industry (Cabs), use them and stop complaining about the others. If the others can't compete, then there is a problem with their economic model that depends upon Government regulation to keep prices artificially high.

The problem with macro evolution is the inherent issues with the "in between" stages that are mostly useless, being neither good for one thing they are coming from or good for the thing they are changing into.

The example I use is Butterflies, which change from a crawling creature to one that flies, mid life. Incredible "random" feat if you ask me.

Heretic!

I dunno, people kill for governments all the time, yet we don't call those people deranged. I know plenty of people who are atheists that are deranged, the fact that they don't have a unifying cause behind them is only temporary.

IRA was as much about Nationalism as it was about religion, making it hard not to conflate the two. The fact that England is protestant and Ireland is Catholic makes it hard to distinguish between the motivations.

Before Sony got hacked, they hadn't had a big breach. Past performance means little. The scale of Sony Breach is largely unprecedented. I reject your assessment on the grounds that "best indicator" is a meaningless phrase, and probably completely untrue. Best indicator are the perpetual steps being taken by IT staff to secure the data. I can assure you, from the little I know about the breach ( which is very little) I can assure you that the data was not secured properly.

In mature markets, growth slows. This is normal. It is unreasonable to have unreasonable expectations of fast growth in markets that are mature. And companies chasing after unreasonable growth tend end up failing.

I'm in IT, but not in a CIO type level. However, I take the view that our data is NOT secure, even after I have made painstaking effort to assure that it is actually secure. Why? Because invariably, I am wrong whenever I assume that I am secure.

The result is that I am always securing, making more secure, ensuring existing policies and procedures are up to industry best. I also realize that is never good enough. The weakest link in all of the security I employ is always the people. Always.

It depends. We hope they are more secure, but we have no idea if they actually are. Lack of data breaches doesn't indicate future performance.

DIN is a physical format standard. This does nothing for the octopus connector, which is not a standard.

And unlike DIN, current in dash SYNC style displays do not have a standard. And now that Sync is no longer going to be supported, in 5 years, all those nifty consoles may just be worthless. They are barely cute toys today, and compared to the Android / iDevice options that are currently out there they suck.

And then they will eventually go bankrupt anyways because instead of making good cars, with options people actually want, the spend stupid amounts of money on installing services (like OnStar) into every vehicle "standard", which most people don't want to pay $17.95 - 70.00 month. Hey, guess what, OnStar is now mostly useless for all but emergency cases (automatic activation upon accident) because we have these things called smartphones.

And for all the profitability of OnStar, it didn't help GM from being bailed out by the USA government.

Yup, and yet they still failed. Good Job guys! How about going back to building cars and not trying to monetize the after purchase experience to death.

The cost of the Cloud is cheap. And for IT, we just say "not as secure, but if you're okay with that, go ahead" and when the Cloud services fail, or get breached or whatever, the CIO can simply say "not my fault, that was your choice". The real cost is hidden.

I can imagine the defense.

"I didn't sell anything on Silk Road 2. I built a website others used to sell those things. Would you arrest the CEO of Ebay if one of its customers sold something that was illegal?"

Perhaps not yet. But since you can print anything, the value isn't what you can pick up at Walmart, but rather printing the thing you can't pick up there. Printing the 3D plastic clip you just broke on some older thing you own, and having it that day, instead of throwing the old broken thing away is worth something, even to you. I can't tell you how many plastic clips I've broken and tossed the old broken thing away, that I now can fix and have it remain useful.

Not to mention, the creative types who are prototyping new and interesting inventions that weren't cost effective if sent to milling houses.

The correct formula is a cost / opportunity cost model. Of course, you'll never know what opportunity costs are, because you miss them. IF you can get to a point where you can MEASURE a break even point, there is usually unforeseen opportunities you'll also capture that will get you beyond break even.

Back in the day, when I sold $3000 computers, I used this model all the time. Could you justify, breaking even, on a $3000 computer (25 years ago), verses not having a computer at all. Most people understood that if you could reasonably figure out break even value, the opportunities to gain on competitors was huge unknown, but also something that should be fit into the equation.

At some point, the price drops, and the opportunities disappear because they are captured by more people in the market. Early adopters often reap huge rewards if they can find the right niche. And when new markets are emerging, niche is very profitable.