Buying a car is not like that. Yes Tesla has a fixed price but it's their price or fuck you. Conversely dealers DO compete but they bury their prices under so much manure that it's hard to know what they are until they've reeled you in. So neither side is right. But the competition law is there not to justify scummy sales tactics but to promote competition. If Tesla feels a fixed price is right for selling their cars then they should sell their vehicles to deals wholesale and subject to contractual obligations on how to present the retail price to customers.
Really? I would love to be able to shop for a car and know that no matter where I shopped I was getting the exact same price. I absolutely HATE having to negotiate on the price, and the popularity of services like truecar suggest that a huge number of people agree with me.
That would be called price fixing. If I go shopping for a washing machine and I visit a bunch of websites I should expect to see a variety of prices. All non negotiable, but all transparent and available. Imagine now you could only buy a Bosch washing machine from the Bosch website. There is no longer any competition on price at all. "Ah" someone might say "but you could price compare your Bosch machine to the price for a somewhat equivalent Zanussi on the Zanussi site!", yeah but you're not comparing like with like and it's still not remotely the same competition when I want a Bosch not a Zanussi.
Why? Tesla sees dealers for the unnecessary middle men that they are. They've already shown that they would rather not enter a market than open a franchised dealership. I don't see any reason that this would change.
Because too many states have laws that prohibit direct sales. And as I said while I think most car dealers are scum, the law is there to ensure competition, not their sales ethics. But Tesla does have the means to exert some ethics of its own and open up the sale of its vehicles at the same time. Dealers would want to be able to do after sales service like servicing, selling parts, trade ins etc. There are obvious reasons they might sign up to some franchise or programme that ensures a consistent sales experience.
If Samsung can ensure that Android apps run perfectly well on Tizen, including Google apps like maps etc, then they're 80%+ to offering a mobile OS I'd move to if the handset was one I wanted.
The problem is they can't. Look at Blackberry in this department. Blackberry probably has the most mature Android stack running over BB10 / QNX but it's no damned good for apps that want to run background services, or support in-app payments, or use the Google services which the impl doesn't support. Then you're talking about forking the code to produce a BB compatible version stripped of that stuff or rebuilt with a 3rd party library. And Blackberry has another issue - Android apps, run over some Frankandroid layer which almost certainly impacts on launch times, performance and memory footprint.
I doubt the experience by Samsung would be much different. And doubtless Samsung would want to tie apps to their own store. Just the hassle of releasing an app twice, potentially in two different build flavours is enough to put devs off doing it at all. Look how bereft the Amazon store is compared to Google's. It costs time and money to support two builds through two stores of basically the same app. Doing so adds no benefit to the user or the developer. It's just a hoop they're supposed to jump through because yet another behemoth wants all the pie to themselves.
The only reason it exists at all is because Samsung sees Google taking 30% off of app sales and services and it wants that 30% for itself. That might be a wonderful motivating factor for Samsung to push this thing. For everyone else... not so much. Consumers will just see a new platform which has doesn't have the apps they want to use. App developers will just see yet another lame duck platform that they must spend inordinate effort to support or ignore completely.
Unless Samsung money hats devs and hand out free phones like candy, they're not going to get the buy-in to their platform. And even if they do it's no guarantee - Nokia and Blackberry both went down that route trying to buy devs and it didn't pay off.
So they have a secret capability to spy on North Korea, and they tell us because Sony got hacked? So now North Korea knows about it and probably will do something about it? That sounds an incredibly stupid action to me.
Or perhaps they got the info through other means but thought they'd troll North Korea - make them disrupt their own network looking for the compromise which wasn't there to begin with.
How would the West feel about the release of a popular film in which the assassination of a living head of state is planned?
You mean like if a villain plotted to kill the queen at a baseball game with hypnotised assassins with all kinds of hilarious pratfalls along the way?
I suspect the reason it doesn't happen more often is due to legal issues, audience reception (and therefore box office) and the fear of repercussions of pissing off the people whose good graces they want to be in. It doesn't stop one book, movie and TV show after another putting fictional heads of state in perilous situations and occasionally bumping them off.
And if North Korea did some movie about whacking Obama, it's likely it might generate some media noise but I doubt it would do much else.
"I can guarantee they are wrong. It has to do with a group of hackers - I will not name them - who are civil libertarians and who hate the confinement the restrictions the music industry and the movie industry has placed on art and so they are behind it."
Oh so it was a noble cause all along. Pull the other one.
At one time I was semi considering a satellite internet system because of problems getting decent broadband where I lived but I was put off by the horrific latencies (500-1000ms) and the equally horrific costs of using the system. It all looked quite Heath Robinson with the upload being via ISDN / ADSL and the download via a satellite and some kind of kludge in the middle to reconcile the two halves. I bet anyone using satellite internet has to tweak their browsers to max out concurrent requests to reduce the lag and suffers all kinds of frustrations (e.g. no games, no public servers etc.).
Anyway 2-way satellite to 750 miles is obviously better but there would be lag there too - at least 2*750 miles for a message to go up and straight back down. Except of course it's more likely the packet goes up, gets routed to one or more satellites in the constellation (e.g. by using geo IP or some heuristic), down, across a terrestrial network and then the reverse trip. In some scenarios it might be faster than land based solutions but it could well be slower over all especially if the satellites are under heavy load.
Still, if I had really bad internet I would be seriously interested in this solution provided it was affordable. But what's affordable to me might not be affordable even for an entire village in some places in the world, so it has issues unrelated to technology to work out too.
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