We don't even have to debate the evilness of walled gardens

Evilness? The walled garden is the *reason* I buy Apple products. The only annoying thing is that they don't set the walls highs enough. If they would charge a few hundred dollars per app submitted, they could (1) examine apps more closely, (2) do it faster, and (3) eliminate the millions upon millions of garbage apps that clutter the app store with the expectation it might make a few bucks.

Sure, there exists the theoretical possibility that a good app might not get submitted, but the reality is that if you don't believe in your app enough to put a few hundred dollars behind it (or find anyone else to), it's unlikely to be a very good app. Almost all successful apps have a minimum of $50-100K behind them already.

Some modest barriers to entry are a *good* thing for the vast majority of consumers. And for those who really, really want the choice? They've got a jillion Android phones to choose from. No one is forced into the walled garden.

Understood. So whining *but building anyway* makes sense.

But in the end, they want to make as much money as possible. Which means if they choose not to build, it means they think they can't make back their investment, even at the unpleasantly high rates they charge!

Wouldn't they just borrow and invest in the infrastructure? Given that interest rates are incredibly low, *any* money-making opportunity that's reasonably safe should be exploited using borrowed money.

I'm certain that I've read on Slashdot that given how much the ISPs charge, providing high-speed Internet service is this *huge* cash cow that the Internet providers milk for all its worth.

But now we're finding out that it's not financially worth-while for them to even construct the cash-cow?

This doesn't bode well. Surely it can't be that building and servicing the infrastructure for high-speed Internet is simply bloody expensive compared to revenues?

That seems a pretty reasonable way of doing things, and covers most of my fears. But looking at the numbers, does it really come close to covering fees?

I've no personal experience with this, but one keeps reading that even seemingly simple defenses end up well into the 6-figures, while this seems to cover ~$10K. But again, maybe one only reads about the absurdly costly cases.

So in other words, if you win, you're great, but if you lose (and there is always some danger of losing, no matter how straightforward it seems), then not only do you lose your patent, but you also lose your house, your savings, and your pension. (Yes, here's the bill for $5 million dollars we spent suing you.)

I'd guess that simply the threat of suing would make most people collapse. After all, a company could easy spend several hundred thousand dollars in prepping for a suit that you could be on the hook for. If you wait until you find out if they have a case or not, you're already down a fortune if it turns out they do.

The variability in skill set, the varieties of skills needed to complete the project is not fully addressed.

This is a good point. But I'm looking at a lot of businesses that are essentially de-skilling their work environment in order to increase worker fungibility. Any design that cannot be meaningfully understood by 95% of the team is sent back to the drawing board. It's a bit frustrating to have to leave elegant, efficient, but complex designs on the table, but businesses that are doing so seem to be beating everyone else in their market.

(Note, this doesn't really apply to the very few companies where technology *is* their product. But for 90% of the companies/jobs out there, technology is simply the tool towards running the business. For them, reliability is far more important than being a little ahead of the game and being able to make all workers fungible is an important step towards that goal.)

Very good point. Unfortunately for men, reliability seems to end up far more important for long-term viability, which is why most businesses have been de-emphasizing the super-star approach over building lower-skill fungible teams. (And, to be honest, it seems to be working for them.)

And just to make it clear, r = 0.25 is pretty darn strong, especially for anything involving as many variables as human interaction.

I'm quite amazed it's this large, but then again, it matches my real life experience for complex team-based problems (rather than combining parallel single-person tasks, which is more common, but not nearly as tricky).

Intelligence stays with you as long as you are above ground and cannot be taken away.

You're not 50 yet, are you?

That razor sharp intelligence is only marginally less fleeting than beauty.

Ah, but did you factor in the several hundred hours involved in obtaining enough competence in minor engineering repair so that you could in fact diagnose, order and repair the appliance?

I will repair (or more often, destroy while *trying* to repair) things around the house, but I carefully avoid calculating how much time it costs me. As soon as I start calculating hours spent taking things apart, diagnosing, ordering replacements and attempting repairs, the cost/benefit equation goes out the window.

The analysis might be different if one was naturally handy (for one, the success rate might be a lot higher than my 50%). And if it could be considered mildly entertaining, then it becomes a totally different matter.

If we are going to be reduced to resorting to "facts" and "reason", we might as well throw the entire educational research establishment away completely.

Absolutely. With manufacturing costs crazy low, fixing things is a huge waste of time and effort *unless* you really enjoy having brought something back to life, in which case, good for you! From a straight economic decision, why should people want to spend time learning to be good at fixing things instead of using that time to learn other productive skills?

Someone needs to be introduced to the concept of "opportunity cost".

Ontario had vans with speed cameras in them, and I'd estimate that they knocked about 10km/h off the average speed of highway drivers, reducing speeds to about 2-5 km/h over the limit.

When a new government eliminated them, speeds went back up to the 12-15km/h over the limit over the next month or so. As expected, accident and mortality rates went up as well. Faster cars = less reaction time.

However, nobody was willing to seriously ask the real question. Is freeing up 5-10 minutes of a large number of people's day worth a few lives lost?

Their hardware is nothing particularly special. A Mac is barely different from a Dell hardware-wise and if you put Windows on the Mac you can't tell the difference. Nobody would pay a premium to Apple for a Mac with Windows on it so the difference MUST be in the software because that is all that is really different.

Actually, given the number of people I know who bought Apple laptops and run Windows almost exclusively, I disagree at least on degree of hardware equivalence (or at least on people's perception of hardware equivalence...).

However, in general I think you're right. It's the software more than the hardware.