g. cloud services

For all the paranoia about cloud services eating your privacy, the one place where they're a no-brainer is as paid services targeting corporations. The cloud itself, in this case, could be hosted by the corporation - but in any case, it wouldn't be ad-funded, and there's no reason to think that a hosting organization would snoop on content they're paid not to snoop on.

But in this case step 3 ("is not perceived as useful...") has some entrenched interests helping to muddy the waters. Turns out there's a lot of software that's been written for the traditional desktop. Much of that is tied to a back-end database, and would be much easier to deploy and support if it were rewritten to live in the cloud. But many of these systems are extremely complex, and those rewrites are expensive. Until a viable competitor comes out with a cloud-based alternative, vendors try to justify their client-server wares based on their robust features - playing down their mediocre performance and abysmal supportability. In the face of the new-found popularity of cloud app architecture, some have tried to pass off Citrix server farms as 'the cloud'. Good luck with that...

And it's the reason they bailed on it that's relevant here. Whether Silverlight was or was not great software doesn't matter. It's not cross-platform, so nobody wanted it. Microsoft sees that, and they're smart enough to not make that mistake again. And the marketplace isn't giving them many more chances to make that mistake again - so Metro's mostly a no-show too. That leaves servers and cloud services. Good move, Microsoft, but for you, not necessarily for us...

Mostly right. The thing is, the Windows desktop isn't going anywhere. It'll continue to be a cash cow for at least another generation - if only because of all the proprietary 3rd party stuff that's Windows only. Office document compatibility is only the tip of that iceberg - and one of the easiest to replace.

But for sure, the windows desktop is no longer a growth opportunity for the company. And in Capitalism, 21st century style, growth is all that matters. Most of the computer growth these days is in mobile - and Microsoft would love to be there. But they know they've mostly missed that boat. They still have a chance to the extent that the residual monopoly effect will translate continuing Win8 desktop sales into a healty app store for Metro apps - but that's gonna take time. So for now, they're concentrating on the cloud - where you don't have to win offer millions of customers, and if you provide nice dev tools, you can win over the audience that matters. And that happens to be an audience they were on the verge of losing outright.

So the new regime over there is smart, and it's a new game. Past behavior (and the lingering desktop monopoly) tell me I still don't want them to win it.

Except that the politics of climate change denial have a definite scientific/technological angle. So do the potential solutions to the problem. It's not as if Slashdot were covering abortion politics - or gun politics. This is about science folks - much as those who want to deny the problem don't want it to be...

For what it's worth, there's a lot of math/science in economics too. The much vaunted Laffer curve, for example, explicitly postulates that when taxes are too low, lowering them further just reduces revenue. Yet the right-wing think tanks that promoted the supply-side 'ideas' behind that curve only ever talk about the paradoxical part of the curve where raising taxes theoretically reduces revenue. What they don't say is that experience has shown that that part of the curve occurs with marginal rates north of the 70% range they were in when Reagan lowered taxes. Seems those tax cuts didn't pay for themselves - yet Republican pols almost unanimously assert that lowering taxes from today's much lower rates would pay for themselves - or create jobs - or make Jesus happy. There's a trade off between evidence-based policy and ideology-based politics, and that subject is perfectly appropriate for a science/tech site.

A fossil fuel tax (assuming it worked as advertised to bring consumption down) would have the added benefit of keeping oil prices down. When you spike consumption in response to lower prices, the prices just go back up. A well-designed ff tax would hold the prices steady at a level high enough to encourage conservation, but hopefully low enough to not be onerous. And the difference between the target price and the actual price is money that could be put to good use - or even simply returned to the public in the form of a rebate if politics dictate that's the only way. The point is to use less fossil fuels, not necessarily to make driving expensive.

There is a tradeoff in this society between the rights of individuals to speak their minds and the right of the electorate to expect that their votes are weighted equally.

Given that democracy is this country's big innovation, you'd think that those two rights would be given at least equal consideration in terms of regulation of the mechanics of democracy. You and your friends have rights to campaign for something, but it's a stretch to consider the corporation that you, you're friends and 100K strangers all 'own together' as 'pooling money to buy an ad to campaing for something' - especially on the basis of the legalistic fiction that the corporation is a person - same as you or me. But even if we were to agree that a corporation is analogous to, say, a labor union (it's not, but let's just assume it is), there's nothing that says it's not legit to require the ads it buys to identify who's paying.

Money in politics is speech. Money in politics is also bribery. (Selective) absolutism about money as speech is just stupidity - or politics masquerading as concern for the constitution.

Google's page ranking system might have been innovative enough to deserve a patent - if it was the first automated, algorithmic system of its sort. Once you've got page ranking out there, though, a new ranking algorithm is not a technical innovation at all. Sure, Disney should be allowed to create such a system - but why on earth should they be allowed to patent it? And why would they even care to patent it - other than to keep from being prevented from building it by somebody else gaming our lousy patent system to make them pay royalties on it.

It might not be (that much) better with democrats in control, but that's largely due to obstructionism and the hideous effects on our democracy of the "Money is Speech" and "Corporations are People" rulings of "originalist" idiots like Scalia and Alito - courtesy of Republican appointments. It seems to me that people that say 'both sides are equally corrupt" tend use it as a smokescreen to cover up the fact that they favor the side that's really the more corrupt one (see Brooks, David).

Rather than lament that corruption, how about joining (or starting) a movement to make votes for the restoration of democracy (campaign finance, lobbying, revolving door reforms) a litmus test for candidates. The Occupy movement got part of the equation right - they got the attention of the media. But they did absolutely nothing concrete with that attention. The 99 percent still has the power of the vote, it's just that actual voting has been marginalized by the lousy options we're offered, and by the horse-race media that wouldn't know a real issue if it bit them on the ass. I work in the TV sales industry, and in recent years election season has become for TV stations and networks what Christmas season has always been for retailers. They use that burst of ad revenue to shore up their otherwise failing businesses, so there's a big disincentive to cover the fact that political money affects what issues get discussed at all. But they wouldn't be able to do it if nobody would watch their trivializations.

...before some browsers are quite ready for it? Who says the Internet is ready for it? Seriously, why on earth should we even be thinking about routinely streaming stuff at 60fps over the internet. If net neutrality has any downside at all, this is it. It's bad enough that Netflix is eating up 30% (or whatever) of the available bandwidth. I'm not saying that ISP's should be instituting fast lanes, etc. But this is just asking for it...

And seriously, it reminds me of the push to put 4K displays on 5 inch cellphones. Really, why? Someday, the infrastructure (or battery tech on phones) will support this kind of thing without a hiccup, but that day is not today. You might say we need things that push the envelope in order to bring that someday into being - but Netflix is doing a pretty good job of that as it is.

Not quite. Microsoft has an immensely profitable business selling software to customers - but the stock price already reflects that. The perverse thing about Capitalism in America today is that being a hugely profitable business isn't enough. To satisfy the investor class, you need to generate an ever increasing stock price. And for a mature company like Microsoft, that means finding new revenue streams. So, while they could continue indefinitely with their software for cash business model, what they're trying to do is to copy other companies' models in addition. They're not particularly creative, so when they enter the search market, they do it by copying Google's business model as well as their technology - with the same incentives to mine your data. To think that they don't do that simply because they make a lot of money selling software is pretty naive. If they don't mine your data now, it's because they're not successful enough, and they're still in the loss-leader phase of trying to break into the business. But they probably mine you anyway...

It's exactly the opposite. You seem to assume Google wants to do bad things. They don't want to have as much information from everyone. Their business model isn't to be Big Brother and use this information to control us. They've built useful services that by their very nature need that information to work. Google Now would have nothing to show you if it weren't monitoring your email. Where this gets dicey is that Google has chosen to make these services 'free' by funding them with advertising. They don't want your information, they do want to place those ads. It's not evil - you're getting useful services, and the advertisers are getting ads that are theoretically more effective. But it can get creepy. That's why a non-ad supported option might be nice. Google gets their money from you, and the only thing they use your info for is to provide you with a great service that you're willing to pay for.

Certainly worth a thought experiment - and no need to derail that by indulging your paranoia.

Maybe if this works, Google could offer a version of all of their services that no longer tracks your individual activity for ad revenue.

Of course, Google insists that their tracking is only done to make their services work better - and beyond targeted ads, which would go away, there are still many aspects of Google services that wouldn't work as well without tracking you. But at least the tradeoff would be clearer - and if you paid them, but still allowed tracking for the purpose of providing more appropriate search results, maybe they could re-establish a trust relationship where it's been lost (or deliberately eroded - e.g. the "Scroogled" ad campaign).

And as passive income that billion a year is taxed at a 15% rate after all of his other deductions and loopholes. Whether or not you think a $70 mil writeoff is insignificant to a hundred billionaire, it's just this kind of insult to injury loophole (available only to the hyper rich) that makes a travesty of the notion that we're all in this together. But, of course, we're not - and apparently CrimsonAvenger is fine with that...