I keep hearing this. And not believing it.

The most important part of a job is being able to do the job.

Nothing GREAT comes from "just fitting in". If you can't handle DOING THE JOB then screw you. You suck. Live with it.

Blade Runner is a Frankensteinian tale about creation revolting against its creator, questioning the meaning of death, whereas Do Androids ... is about empathy as an essential human quality in a world where everything is artificial. Much of the novel is about Deckard's desire to buy a pet, required for spiritual fulfilment according to the religion of Mercerism. Death is as unimportant to the book as Mercerism is to the film.

That's only true if you're surrounded by arseholes.

Eh, it's not like Blade Runner was a faithful adaptation either. For one, its theme is completely different from the book. Still, it's one of the best SF movies and one of the best adaptations ever.

At this point... I would like to introduce the concept of "corruption vacuum", which I think is equal in metrics to the idea of "power vacuum".

It's an artificial scarcity used to inflate value. Generating "just enough" electricity, rather than "more than enough", when you are using a nuclear plant, is more about what you do with the heat (do you turn it into electricity, or do you shunt it to the cooling towers, because you can't throw it on the grid), rather than whether or not the heat is going to be relatively constant, unless you are in a changeout cycle.

Thankfully your ala carte cable is coming to pass (i.e. the unbundled ability to get some channels online is now there).

And by "crippling economic sanctions", you mean we stopped selling them scrap steel for them to use in pursuit of their war on China, where they were attempting to seize territory so that, among other things, they had the ability to mine to produce their own steel.

They were kind of expansionist, empire-building, belligerent asses at the time. A conflict was inevitable, even if we'd enabled them to take China, other areas in Asia, and the Philippines.

That's the great thing about smart meters ... if you are a power company.

You get to work around the PUC tariffed rates by showing that *on average* electricity price haven't actually gone up, while increasing revenue by 20% without having to go back to the PUC and make any concessions to get the tariff changed.

Well, that and you can charge differential rates from what you pay for solar power generated when no one is home during the day to use it. That's a lot harder to do, if you used an electromechanical meter that actually ran backwards when generation exceeded consumption.

I see these things (energy use / cost) as disjoint, but then I am pro nuclear power, and think that we should build as many plants as 150% of what we need for peak demand, and when it's a time where there isn't peak demand, use the extra power to desalinate water for Los Angeles so that the people who live in that fricking desert don't have to steal it from Northern California and Colorado.

I also am amazingly pissed off when the PG&E commercial comes on the radio:

PG&E: "Hello, PG&E, can I help you?"
Caller: "Yes, my electric bill is too high!"
PG&E: "Well, we can help you figure out ways to use less energy..."

My gut reaction on hearing that is:

Caller: "I didn't say I wanted to use less energy, dumbass, I said I wanted you to charge me less for the energy I *do* use!"
PG&E: "Uh..."
Caller: "Quit being a damn politician, and answer the question I asked, rather than the one you wanted me to ask!"
PG&E: "Uh..."
Caller: "What an asshole..."

How does a trademark licence agreement for the use of the "Android(tm)" trademark conflate with them being able to magically update the firmware on phones for which the Android team at Google does not even have full source code, and which the carriers would require recertification for use on their network?

Or do you really not understand how that bundling is achieved through the trademark licensing agreement?

First of all, I went to work for Apple in 2003, at which point in time I signed an NDA, and can therefore not give examples subsequent to that which are not based on public knowledge, no matter how much you bait me in your desire to have me do so.

Second of all, Apple had largely been taken over by Sun Microsystems management from 2008 onwards, as middle management was hired in to deal with the power vacuum being created by the (we all saw it) impending death of Steve Jobs. His hands were no longer firmly on the reins, and this was strongly signaled for all to see by the departure of CTO Avie Tevanian in 2006, and capped by the departure of Bertrand Serlet in 2011.

Third of all, Steve never appointed a protege. Tim Cook was COO, and one leg of a three legged stool consisting of himself, Scott Forestall, and Peter Oppenheimer (plus arguably a fourth leg, Phil Schiller). None of these persons were Steve's protege, and Steve failed to set up a clear line of succession, or, indeed, even discuss his illness outside of Apple.

Fourth, when the board named Tim as CEO, the departure of Scott was inevitable. The process prior to Steve's departure was contentious, and he very much liked it that way. As the cap on the legs of the stool, there would be incredibly rancorous arguments between the principal executives, and then after a while, Steve would tell them where the bear shit in the woods.

This is when Apple began *really* teetering, although it's possible to trace the origins as far back as Steve's preannouncement of the Intel switchover - the first preannouncement in Apple history, when he was already into the throes of his illness.

This time ousted by death, rather than a board vote, Apple has once again entered a John Sculley-like era -- the era you criticise me for referring to when I referred to Apple's public failures.

Tim Cook is an able COO - perhaps better at supply chain control than IBM's Lou Gerstner was, but he is no Steve Jobs, or he would have been able to let go of the COO operations, concentrated on being CEO, brought in someone else to argue rancorously with Scott and Peter, and then told them where the bear shit in the woods. He has not done that.

Further, he has made some incredibly obvious supply-side driven decisions -- COO, not CEO decisions -- regarding products. Personally, I do not believe Steve Jobs would have made these same decisions.

(1) The Aspect ratio change on the iPhone 5 was a mistake, driven by the display supplier Japan Display Inc. attempting to get out from under Apple's supply chain thumb. The entire Apple content catalog had to be re-transcoded, and Apps updated for the new aspect ratio to avoid letterboxing. This increased the Inktomi CDN costs associated with the cryptographic content knapsacks utilized by the iTunes stores, and while it resulted in a short term gain for the App store as people rebought, either as upgrades, or as complete rebuys, their existing Apps and video content, this was a more or less one time thing. Apple under Steve would never ha made this decision on the basis of a shortlived, one-time revenue enhancement strategy; John Sculley would have, though; that's how Mac OS got licensed to third parties, like Power Computing.

(2) The watch was a marketing driven decision; the press kept demanding a watch, and so rather than delivering a product which surprised and delighted their customers, Apple gave them what marketing said people wanted. Apple under Steve would never, ever have made a marketing driven decision:

“It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.”

But Apple under John Sculley did that frequently. Steve was like Henry Ford:

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

(3) The big-ass "phablet" iPhones are a mistake; they violate Steve's principle that an artifact must fit the human hand in order to "feel right"; that drove the pre-phablet iPhone size choices:

"Most importantly, holding it in my hand feels just right. Here at Apple, we don't care what others say. We care about getting it right."

So if it *was* right -- *now* it's *wrong*. Again, this was a marketing-driven decision on what to offer customers, rather than a decision based on Apple's historical principles of not caring about "the faster horse", and giving the customer what they know they want after they've seen it: the right product to surprise and delight them.

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As to "knew he was dying" (rather than believing he was immortal), and "put the company into a state where it would continue in a good direction" (despite never having brought in, trained, and nominated a protege, and despite not having an announced line of succession to deal with the bad press when it was finally announced that he was ill): there would have been planning. There wasn't.

Now there is a teetering 2-legged stool making products that some press pundit has decided that people want from Apple, and looking outside itself for decision validation.

Tell me again how this is not like the 1983-1996 John Scully/Michael Spindler years all over again?

I reiterate: Apple is a horrible counterexample.

That's a inappropriate comparison.

To patch that vulnerability would require the ability to update Android on existing handsets.

For this to work, the handset manufacturers would have to provide a new version of Android for the given handset.

For this to work, the Android development model of "partner, not Google, productizes Android" would have to change.

For this to work, there would have to be ongoing development on an older hardware platform.

For this to work, there would have to be carrier involvement in certification.

For this to work, the carrier revenue model of locking you into a two year contract every 18 months would have to change.

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It's in absolutely no ones financial interest to provide updates to Android in already shipped handsets, and Google is not in a position, as an OS supplier, rather than a phone vendor (which is what Apple is), to force changes in operational model into the carrier or the partner device vendor.

U.S. Carriers are *NOT* going to change their revenue model just so people can buy ala carte devices that will work with any carrier, and cost more up front for you to go with their service, rather than rolling it into the monthly payment when you go with a competitors service. Everyone would have to change at once (collusion, a violation of both the Sherman Antitrust Act and the RICO Statutes, and definitely something that would be prosecuted), or the carrier that tried to move to the European model would find itself out of business.

Likewise, the handset vendors, whose revenue model is completely built on thin margins, but selling a new handset every 18 months, instead of you buying one and keeping it for 10 years, would have to charge higher margin on their device sales in order to keep their revenue numbers up, and to pay for the R&D ongoing on the already-sold platform. And then they'd need to change their FAS accounting to match that of Apple's, or face charges under Sarbanes-Oxley, which is what Apple had to do before it could give away the WiFi updates to 802.11g/n for iPods. You'll (maybe) remember that they got a percentage of the monthly wireless fee from the carrier for iPhones, but realized their income at time of sale on iPod Touch and non-3G iPads, and so they had to charge $5 for the update.

And seriously, would you be willing to pay $5 for a bug fix for a bug you were pretty sure wasn't impacting you anyway, and was just some security "researcher" throwing a hissy fit to get their company name in the news so they got audit contracts out of it?

Technically, it should have been in the November patch set, they should have found the compatibility problem in testing (as they did), and the revised patch should have been in the December patch set. Then the clock would have run out.

So basically the *did* sit on their hands -- for two months.

I kind of think it doesn't matter; all you are really saying is that they don't learn from mistakes by watching the people on the road in front of them. They have an example of how to go from being violent to being non-violent, and they are unwilling to follow that example. That's a choice, not them lacking a working example, as Christianity did when they were stumbling around trying to find a road forward. I don't think the situation is comparable, and it's certainly not comparable on time scale, just because both of them are religions.

Let me know when there's a third coming of Steve Jobs; until then, the bean counters are in control of Apple now, and have been for several years.