I agree with this completely.

Yeah - good points, both of them. I think one difference here is it isn't for example, Walmart vs. the little guys. It's several giants competing with each-other as well, we've got the biggest players in the industry with strong interest in this market. I don't think Google is thinking Amazon and MS will be "forced out of business" and then later they can "ultimately recoup its losses through higher prices", or anything like that.. but it is good to pay closer attention to the nuance in these cases than I perhaps indicated in my post.

I think you're describing the problems with big government regulation squeezing regular people. You're saying that if I make arrangements with someone to allow them to stay in a spare room and they give me $30 a night, I need to adhere to all regulations a full fledged hotel would have to. I say that, while what I'm doing may be illegal in the strictest sense, it shouldn't be - and adhering to the same regulations as a hotel in such a case is beyond ridiculous. I say that the scenario above SHOULD be a *private arrangement*, and the fact that you think it isn't is part of the problem.

It's similar to Uber's situation with individuals providing rides in their own vehicles to people who want rides. Do you think that a private arrangement between two individuals to allow someone to stay in a room or apartment or whatever belonging to another in exchange for some cash means that the room/apartment or whatever needs to abide by the same heavy regulations as a hotel? The government has 2 pressures and incentives here: hotel/lodging lobbyists, not getting their tax revenue. If you really think they're doing this from a perspective of public safety, I think we'd just have to disagree.

This is the type of thing that destroys innovative businesses like AirBNB. Nobody will want to play host if government starts targeting and fucking over the 'bad actors' who may just be regular people using a service. AirBnB has all the interest in the world to play the situation down as much as possible..it'll be interesting to see what really happens here.

I'd love to see Murdoch go down in flames, but this wont be the cause.

However, he's ancient, he'll be dead soon anyways. He looks like a turtle that has crawled out of its shell, tick tock Murdoch, TICK....TOCK.

What do you consider fair competition, bigger players keeping prices high (like Dropbox, way overpriced limited offerings.) so they DON'T capture more market share? Is that considered fair competition? It sounds more like no competition, more like price-fixing agreements between similar service offerings, no?

When companies compete, prices often drop - in this case drop significantly.. a company is willing to operate at a loss in order to own more of the market share and other companies simply can't compete, is that unfair? Or simply winning the competition? If you manufacture something in the US for $5 and sell it for $10, and I manufacture the same in China for $1 and sell it for $5, you may complain that you can't compete because to match my price you'd have to operate at a loss....well, sorry to say, but sad day for you. Sad day for dropbox. Improve the offerings and make the prices more reasonable or suffer the consequences that most every company has to deal with in their given industry.

Medical advice in China is extremely cheap. Like a few RMB (less than a dollar).. the problem is, it's often wrong, and it's often intended to get you to buy medicines which is where their profit is. :D

with the story about 'doctor visits' over Skype, and how many posters were railing against how they were afraid of eavesdropping/decrypting of their Skype conversations. Where are they now! :D

Apple *should* sue Xiaomi in any country Xiaomi is selling, except China..where they would waste a ton of money on a lawsuit that is pretty much guaranteed to fail, for reasons other than the company's HQ being in Beijing city proper's CBD with close gov't support. Xiaomi's entire concept, at the beginning, was to duplicate an iPhone at a far lower price point..wait, not just an iPhone, but *all* of the products Apple puts out there, look at their line-up. They have copied presentations, commercials, even Jobs himself, so UI similarities are to be expected.

I am curious whether Apple even cares. Xiaomi competes in the 'shanzhai' level of pricing, very low priced devices aren't really in the same park as Apple's premium priced devices, even though the Xiaomi's actually have reasonably valued hardware for what you're paying....so, while Apple *should* be suing them from a principal standpoint, maybe Xiaomi just isn't competing for the same customers in a significant enough way yet or something?

I've eaten this fish quite frequently in China, and it's actually quite tasty. I didn't realize it was so highly invasive, but some other fish (like Lionfish) seem to really f' up huge populations/ecosystems when they start to flourish where they don't belong, and I definitely agree that *eating them* is by far a better method than some other fish invasion control methods, like poisoning bodies of water and all adjacent bodies of water to kill everything.

These m'f'rs can actually wriggle over land for a few days out of water to expand their territory. That's badass.

Hey quick! Look over there! (Governing 101: utilize distraction/fear-mongering.)

Um?

You clearly don't know much about the country. There are only several providers of internet services, how do you think people's personal information gets from one place to another? Magic? Or through China Telecom?

They're storing mainland customer data on mainland servers. I don't see the problem with this - if the Chinese gov't wants data, they have SO many means at their disposal to capture it regardless of whether it's stored on a domestic server, or external. This is a good move, imo, as storing data in any country other than China would mean heavy latency passing through the GFW and having it likely captured elsewhere anyways.

I don't think you understood the comment. I had the same question...

The point is, people are driving these cars an average of almost 5k miles a month in order to get out of warranty? That's a LOT of driving.