90% is a small number, right?
TFA talked about a company in South East Asia and I do have business dealings with companies from that region - and I can tell you that many companies from that region are indeed dysfunctional
They kinda adopt the Western approach of management, but then they add in their own cultural flavor, mainly based on race / religion / language background and when all those things got mixed up, what TFA mentioned wasn't even enough to scratch the surface of the true dysfunctional nature of the beasts down there
Working for others may get you a decent living, but if you really, and I mean, REALLY want to earn a lot of money, working for others won't make you rich
I started by working for high tech companies, some decades ago. Yes, I did earn really decent wages, much better than most of my peers at that time. But I didn't stop there
When I was working, I noticed niche markets that were not being fulfilled. I got out and started my own companies (plural) to do just that
Some of the companies I sold to others, some I kept. A lot of people are working with me right now, but I gotta tell you, no matter how much I pay them (and yes, I do pay my co-workers very handsomely) they still do not earn as much as I
The moral is very simple --- if you really want to be wealthy, stop being a worker, and start being an entrepreneur
The truth is, the price / performance ratio of any of the three phones listed was actually ***INFERIOR*** to the entry level smartphones that are on sale in China
For example, in China, consumers are now able to buy a smartphone equipped with a 5-inch display, a 13-megapixel camera and a MediaTek 8-core CPU for US$100. Compare that to the Dream UNO Mi-498, the Android One smartphone from Spice, India, which has a 4.5-inch display, MediaTek 1.3GHz quad-core CPU, 5-megapixel camera, with a price tag of INR7,000, or US$115
If the Chinese smartphone makers can outdo Google in the game, what is the point of Google continuing pushing its Android One phones?
We're having coming up with a definition that means "It's fine when we do it, but an act of war if we want it to be when someone does it to us" that passes the laugh test
Remember it's NSA we are talking about
They do not need to speak the truth, and in fact, they have lied to the congress and nobody could do anything to them
In other words, they can declare "An Act of War" any time they want, even if nobody did nothing, because right now, as we speak, NSA is an entity that no one have any right to inspect - not the congress, not the court, and surely, not the White House
"We're still trying to work our way through distinguishing the difference between criminal hacking and an act of war," said Rogers
NSA supposed to be a government agency filled with very intelligent folks, and they are telling us that they can't differentiate between common hacking (whether it be criminal or otherwise) and an _Act of War_ ?
I dunno about you, but I find it very hard to believe!
I'm not sure there's even really a market for science fiction
There is always a market for good scientific fiction, inspiring stories that will bring the readers towards a universe which they never experience before
What was that last Star Trek movie? I can't even remember the name of it now. It wasn't science fiction. It was an action flick with more explosions than ideas. It just happened to be set on a spaceship
I am totally with you on that flick --- the flick is a perfect example of how severely the lacking of the ability to imagine, on current crop of writers, has become!
I suspect that the current definition of "sci-fi" is no longer similar to what we are accustomed to. Nowadays the thinking is that if something happens on board of a space-ship it automatically qualifies as "sci-fi". Gone are the days that sci-fi offered the readers a glimpse of what could-be, thus inspiring the readers (many of them young) to strive to make the world that they read in sci-fi comes alive
Used to. No more.
Sci-fi writers of yesteryears used to ask pertinent questions, something like - Can robot dreams?
Nowadays we have the so-called 'sci-fi-writer-wannabes' who produce crappy stories, crappy plots, crappy concepts, craps such as 'twenty-mile-high-buildings"
The current crop of sci-fi-writer-wannabes just ain't got the imagination to inspire
Let me Xerox off a few examples of when similar Noun/Verb phrases lost their trademark in the past
Before Xerox came out with the photocopy machine which uses plain-paper for duplicating purposes, were there any such machine on the market?
No?
Before Google was online, was there any online search engine?
Yes!
Yahoo, Astavista,
Coke gets to retain its trademark precisely because Coke wasn't the first mass-marketed bottled soft drink either
The one big problem with Yahoo is it cluttered up its interface - even from the start we users already complained about their interface, but they just won't listen, and when Google came out with its back-to-basic minimalist interface users flocked to Google (including me) and since then the only time I go to yahoo is when I need to log on to my yahoomail account
A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. -- Thomas Jefferson