Doh ... Senor, not senior.

Yo soy el stupido. :-P

but THE Isaac Asimov !!!

El Senior Isaac Asimov. :-P

Intellectual property ... market share ... product offerings ... future company direction.

Maybe they weren't the fools you think they were?

Ah, but if you buy it, you can phase out the brand, and have one less competitor.

There is one less major company making a phone which isn't Windows now.

Do you think that was an accident, or a strategy?

Embrace, extend, and then extinguish.

Nokia used to write good software, it just didn't happen to be Microsoft.

Resistance is futile, especially when the CEO gets parachuted in to make decisions which aren't good for Nokia.

It's hard not to think that the Nokia shareholders didn't essentially get robbed in order to benefit Microsoft.

Bah, why do you think all crypto discussions are about exchanges between Alice and Bob? :-P

And you all thought that the Star Trek writers were just spouting nonsense...

In fairness, they were ... and they knew it.

Throw out enough techno-babble, and sooner or later you might be right just by accident. :-P

Sadly, it doesn't work that way.

In their view, they're allowed to break any law they need to to do their job. But if anybody else breaks any law, they can and will use that to achieve their goal.

So, when Schwartz does it, they can trump up the charge to make something stick. When the DEA does it, it's business as usual.

In other words, the law as applied to us little people is not the same as applied to law enforcement. Because they, in their minds, are above the law.

Welcome to the dystopian future, where laws exist only at the whim of those who enforce it, and only apply to those who don't.

Law enforcement is above the law. That they'll abuse it all they want is kind of inevitable.

Which means you should assume that all forms of law enforcement will become completely corrupt and out of control -- like happens in every other banana republic in which the police decide what is legal.

Ad revenue.

SlashDice isn't about supporting anything which doesn't generate revenue for Dice.

And, can you talk to people who have Skype with them?

Or are you thinking everyone you know is going to start using some open source product to talk to you because you say so?

If they're not compatible with Skype, then they're not replacements for it.

Open Source isn't always the solution, especially when they're not compatible with the things they're supposed to replace.

The people that go to them don't expect much and hence are rarely disappointed

Actually, prior to X-Men, we were regularly disappointed. Because everyone who tried to make a comic-based movie did a terrible job prior to that. There's almost not a single comic-based movie before this which treated the material well and didn't devolve into some corny parody,

Are they escapism and popcorn cinema? Absolutely they are.

But, what you can't argue with is the bottom line -- they make money. Lots and lots of money. When X-Men came out on DVD, the sales of the DVD were higher than the highest grossing films in the box office. That was the first time sales of a DVD had done that, and suddenly people stood up and took notice.

Disney bought Marvel for something like $4 billion dollars. I believe the Iron man films alone have brought in something like $4 billion dollars, and that's possibly before we hit the merchandising.

So, you may not like them (and nobody says you have to), but there's really no denying that the Marvel properties which have been turned into film since X-Men have generated huge amounts of money, have been seen by tons of people, and have even more films (and money) in the pipeline.

DC is hoping they can cash in on the action, but they may not have as many properties as people relate to, and if they don't have a "big vision" kind of deal where someone who knows the material keeps it such that the fans still watch it.

If they carve it up, do a bunch of things which don't go according to canon, or generally do a half job and expect to just roll in the money, they could be seriously disappointed.

Marvel has been smart, they know the rules and stories of their characters, and have entrusted it in the hands of people who actually know the material. Which means the people who want to see them don't find themselves halfway through a film going "no, that's not right".

Contrast this with the Spider Man series, which is a Marvel property but has been in the hands of Sony. They're on their second reboot of the damned thing. We don't want yet another Peter Parker origin story because you don't want to pay the actor. If that's all you have, just stop.

So, "pre sold to comic fans" isn't a gimme. If DC just acts all cynical and "give me the money", they might find they've made crappy films that nobody has any interest in seeing. Think Dare Devil and Electra.

The proof is in the pudding, and in the revenues. Just jumping on the comic book movie isn't a guarantee of anything.

Yeah, that's kind of my point. If you're releasing a major version a month or so before you launch new products, you'd hope you have the OS for those products squared away.

This sounds like they pushed out iOS 8, ran into problems and released iOS 8.0.1, and apparently 8.0.2, and then 8.0.3.

And now they're rolling out 8.1.

That is a lot of churn in a relatively short period of time. Which tells me I'm still going to wait a while, because I expect 8.1.1 or 8.2 to appear within a month or so.

Wow, so it wasn't much more than a month ago they rolled out iOS 8, and then bug fixes for it, and now iOS 8.1.

That kind of thing doesn't instill a lot of confidence.

I'm curious to know how many people have been holding off on upgrading to iOS 8 to begin with. I know I looked at it for my ipod touch and sorta decided to wait a little while and let it sort itself out. I think I'm glad I did.

No, the concern of Piketty, at least the main one is that our current system causes the return on capital investment to be proportionally greater than the growth of the economy

Of course it is.

When large corporations offshore, they have the net effect of shrinking the economy, keeping more as profits, and then paying the executives handsome bonuses.

The amount your wealth goes up is proportional to how much you're removing from the economy for your own ends.

And corporations don't give a sweet damn about the economy at large. Just their share of it.

If corporations cause the economy to grow, it's purely a side effect.

Capitalism is a big giant ponzi scheme. And the people in charge have successfully been moving more and more of the stuff into their control, while taking more and more away from the rest of us.

No, that's the problem of the companies who own these apps. But it's not my problem.

But making the overall internet less secure to account for the people who own these apps? Like I said, dumb.

Make the default click-to-play. If people or corporations want to override that, then they can assume the risk.

Making it insecure by default to accommodate corporations is stupid. There's already settings on my work IE that I can't change myself, so this is a solved problem. Corporations already manage those settings.

Of course, this doesn't fix the fact that Java and Flash are still security holes waiting to happen. Flash has been dangerous to run for over a decade. And since Flash isn't click to play by default, for Adobe to be saying this is a bit of a joke.

And Java? I honestly haven't seen any site outside of corporate apps which have used that in a very long time. I'm sure some still exist, but embedded Java in web pages seems to have almost gone away.

It's time to stop treating browsers as things we trust to just say "oh, sure, you've got some code for me to run? Awesome, I'll get on that!". Since everybody uses them, someone is always going to try to exploit them -- and so far Flash and Java seem to be pretty rich targets.