You know, I actually agree with you -- both about how silly the policy in general is and how ridiculous the article's reasoning for keeping it was.

But the idea that there are people who call forcing you to turn your iPad off for 15 minutes an "abusive government ban" is precisely what he's talking about. We've gone 'round the bend from any kind of well-adjusted relationship with our electronics. It has become downright obsessive.

It doesn't justify the ban itself, but his point is not completely without merit.

Yeah, I definitely think the best course of action is to refuse to help somebody who is going to pass laws of importance to you, all but guaranteeing a suboptimal-at-best law. "YOU'RE NOT PERFECT, STOP TRYING TO BE BETTER!" is a fantastic rallying cry.

Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Maybe, but it's certainly not clear.

Serenity, for example, did not even break even based on worldwide box office receipts. (It was very, very close -- but still under.) It went into the black with the DVD sales, but that is still a lackluster performance.

Assuming that the TV series performed similarly--hovering around the break even mark--it's a pretty easy decision to cancel it. Ordinarily I am fine with things breaking even: For a business, as an example, breaking even means you paid all your vendors, all your employees and all your expenses; it's dangerous territory in that there is no room for expansion or regression, but a lot of good can be done by "only" breaking even.

But it's not quite the same with a TV show, because it's not just about the show itself. Rather, one has to factor in the opportunity cost of taking up the extremely finite set of (valuable) time slots that the show takes. Making $10MM on a show sounds good unless you're told you could be making $30MM by airing some other show instead.

Would it have done better? Yes. Would it have done better enough to avoid cancellation? It's an open question, certainly not "pretty obvious" one way or another. $39MM at the box office is a poor showing.

Before anybody has a fit, I actually liked Firefly and Serenity, I simply realize that my liking something doesn't mean large numbers of other people like it. In my fact liking a show typically serves as a death knell. (Sorry folks.)

500,000 subscribers would also rank them #8 in the country among print newspapers. #7, actually, if you remove the print edition of the NYT. That's not insignificant. If you add them together I believe they end up #2 or #3.

they know they will die if they don't get more subscription readers

Well, yes. When you have employees who enjoy getting a paycheck, equipment costs, hosting fees, delivery fees, printing costs, advertising costs, processing costs and more -- yeah, from time to time you need to actually bring in money. If you consistently fail to bring in more than you spend, your company will die. That you seem somehow smug or surprised by this is quite simply baffling.

Online advertising may or may not cover it. If you paid a journalist $40,000/year (which isn't unreasonable in the grand scheme of things but is not high at all), assumed no extra costs or support staff whatsoever and that he wrote 365 articles a year he would still need to make just shy of $110/article in ad revenue just to break even. Multiply that out by all the writers (and then throw in those pesky editors on top) and I think you can see where the potential problem comes from.

"Herp derp I like free stuff" is well and good; I like free stuff too. Assuming that the bills magically get paid that way is unrealistic. Maybe they're delaying the inevitable; I guess we'll find out. But I don't think them trying to find a way to survive is worthy of derision. Journalists serve an important societal function and we will all be worse off without them.

He won't. That's the beauty of his "ballsy" statement.

He's starting a brand new business. I'm sure he's incorporating it, both because he has to incorporate it in some format and because of the legal insulation it provides. He'll pick the state that is most unfriendly to the concept of piercing the corporate veil (since courts are required to use the laws of the state the business incorporates in). He doesn't care one whit about the business or its would-be customers; he's starting it just as a slight at Microsoft and an attempt to get himself sued. He's guaranteed to capitalize it only as much as absolutely necessary to avoid accusations that he deliberately under-capitalized it.

So if he gets his wish and 1024 lawyers come pounding on the door, he goes to court. He probably loses, at which point he folds the business he never cared about and goes "oh well!"

It's not a non-zero risk, but it's about as close as one can get. He'll lose the seed money, but he's probably made the capitalization money back in free publicity from the articles anyway.

I think it's a combination of "I don't care why they changed it, it's different and I HATE different"

Yes, people are adverse to change. That doesn't mean change is bad, but neither does it mean it is good. Rather, it puts the onus on the person suggesting the change to show why the disruption and re-learning that will need to take place is worthwhile.

If, as you say, it is a "nice UI that really isn't very different than the old UI" then why is it necessary to force people to spend any time re-learning the interface? Why take up more real estate to do so and then tell users "well if you want it back, just minimize our annoying new UI?" This isn't somebody's pet project; it's an enterprise-class software suite used by literally millions and millions of people around the world. Change for the sake of change is not helpful; it is actively counter-productive in the most literal sense of the term.

I honestly can't decide if communication is Microsoft's great failure or if they really don't have a coherent reason for the things they do. It's happening again with Windows 8. Is the UI change just the stupidest possible idea in the world, or is it the greatest thing since sliced bread and they have just been utterly failing at actually communicating why? Don't get me wrong, I see how it's beneficial to THEM to essentially be able to focus on one UI across devices, but I don't see why I should want a touch-driven UI for my computer with mouse support tacked on top instead of an operating system built for that usage--and more importantly, one I have been largely familiar with for what, 15 years?

So yeah, I'm not adverse to change but somebody needs to show me why the learning curve and lost productivity is ultimately worthwhile. I don't care if that learning curve is five seconds or five years. If they can't do that, they deserve the derision. It's not like they don't have the budget for it, so I have to assume it's because they don't have the rationale.

Why is it that geeks always need something to be flawless before they find it worth consideration?

If the worst this system produces is people using gas cans, it's a victory. There will be people who will find the inconvenience enough incentive to get their insurance which is exactly the goal. Since the technology is largely already there, the database check shouldn't be a significant additional cost. (Who knows with government mandates though.)

If there is a reason to oppose this it would be the fears of Big Brother and the ability of government to know almost exactly where you are every moment you are in country. Still, with due respect to our British friends, it seems like that ship sailed a while ago. If they're (going to be) doing it, it won't require this program.

Well I think you've hit the problem. $60 for a good game isn't unreasonable; I'm something like 75 hours in with MW3 and more like 120 hours in with Skyrim. Less than a dollar an hour--some significantly less--is definitely a good value.

But that hinges on it being a good game, and there's little way to tell short of your, errr, previews. Dragon Age, for example: Fantastic game; easily worth the money and more. So naturally I was ecstatic when Dragon Age 2 came out -- but then horribly, horribly disappointed in it. It's similar with the Final Fantasy games; the early ones are great, 7 is of course one of the better games ever, I enjoyed 8-10. Twelve was good-not-great, 13 (14? I get them mixed up with the MMOs mixed in) I haven't even played through one time. I'm not even far enough in to say if it's good or bad; it's just so linear that it never captured my attention. (I really need to give it a fair shake -- I'll add it to the old to do list.)

In other words, even using a successful product as a gauge for the next product in the line is unreliable.

Likewise, sometimes there are good games that still have questionable value. Syndicate (the new one), for example, was what, maybe a six hour storyline? $60/6 = $10/hr in terms of value. Even factoring in the ability to replay it later if one wishes, that's extremely borderline. I'm actually not sure I would classify it in the "good" category either, but even if it was the value wouldn't be there.

Then there's the games where there is nothing particularly wrong, and there's lots of hours to be spent with it, but it just isn't worth it. Sports games often fall into this category. The actual improvements from version to version tend to be minuscule; people who pay for them every season are paying $60 primarily for a roster update. One may play it 120 hours and look at it and go "well, $0.50/hr right?" but the value over the previous game they already had isn't nearly as great.

The problem isn't $60 for a game; the problem is $60 over and over trying to find a game worth $60. In my opinion there are far more in the "no" column than the "yes," so that's a lot of money down the tubes even factoring in surplus value from the yeses.

In my case, it makes my purchases significantly more cautious. I've said this in several discussions before, but Steam is a good example: I impulse buy games around $10; I probably have a half dozen such games that I have never even opened. $20 requires some thought but probably happens (especially if it's down to $20 from $60). $30 is where I start wondering if I really think I'm going to get value back. $60 means I need to have a lot of information in advance, usually in-depth experience with previous games in the series, and a fuck-up like DA2 kills that goodwill outright. Publishers, as a whole, would probably make more money on me by lowering their prices. Most of them are simply too happy to hope that their game will be one of the $60 payouts and gamble a more likely income at a lower price point.

So what you're saying is that your friend is a vandal -- and too stupid to avoid admitting it to any random person who asks in a store much less avoid getting caught to begin with?

I'm not a big fan of red light cameras for a number of reasons, but damaging other peoples' property is not the right answer.

It sometimes confirms something, but only if the person (or agency in this case) accidentally confirming it isn't particularly clever.

Monday: "Did you steal my sandwich?" "Of course not!"
Tuesday: "Did you steal my sandwich?" "Of course not!"
Wednesday: "Did you steal my sandwich?" "I can neither confirm nor deny whether or not I may have stolen your sandwich."

That doesn't work. If you want "I can't confirm or deny" to work you have to use it consistently.

In this case it's a one-time allegation about something EPIC has little or no proof even exists. Can "give me all your secret information NOW!" be responded to with anything other than "I'm not even going to tell you if I have secret information much less give any of it to you?"

Furthermore, since Slashdot itself isn't doing the moderation (with one notable exception), well written opposing viewpoints get modded up and stay there.

Sometimes, but definitely not always. I'd even hesitate to say a majority of the times.

Further, there are different kinds of "well-written opposing viewpoints" that may be accepted differently. We accept Google fanbois and anti-Google trolls; Apple fanbois and anti-Apple trolls. Microsoft fanbois get destroyed. Anti-Microsoft trolls often get modded up. I don't believe I have ever seen a pro-Sony comment. Has one really never been posted, or has it just never been moderated into my threshold (+3)?

Even when there is a alternate opinion that is respected and modded up, there's usually a chorus of drivel modded up alongside (and often in reply) to it. For example, if somebody makes a post about the attitudes of many free software developers and happens to get it modded up, you'll see five versions of "fork it" or "fix it yourself" modded up. You still lose whatever insight the original poster may have had to impart in a sea of groupthink. If you have all day to read comments, yeah, they might be modded up waiting for you. You're still wading through nonsense to get there.

In other words, Slashdot, like similar moderation schemes, still produces an echo chamber. Sometimes something gets through, especially in areas where the community itself is split, but that doesn't mean it happens often. I really don't think it's a great example of democratization of the moderation process.

Frankly what I was hoping to see in this discussion, and would love to see, is some discussion about fresh ideas on how to approach the problem. We have the old +/- system, restricted +/- (basically Slashdot), pre-moderation, post-moderation, karma systems... but they are all flawed. Is flawed the best we can do? Is there no new ideas on how to tackle the issue in the last 10 years?

That may or may not be true, but I honestly have seen nothing to suggest any deep thought or analysis went into it. It sounds a lot like he went "herp derp, 20% is greater than 5% so I'll stop doing Android." There are a lot of questions one needs to ask beyond that to understand what's going on and if it was ultimately a good decision.

The first and simplest is where is the growth? If sales for Android are growing while sales for iPhone are plateauing, he has probably made a bad decision. Relatedly, does having that extra 20% of his time allow him to make up the lost sales revenue? In other words, can he get more iPhone sales or more money out of existing iPhone sales or is he essentially saturated?

The second question I would ask myself is why. Is it just that iPhone users are more likely to buy than Android users? Is it that he has obviously been developing for iPhone longer and sales have established themselves? Is he advertising for one and not the other?

In other words, 20% of your time for 5% of your profits is only bad if you can put the time to better use (or would just rather have the free time based on the ROI). We don't have enough information to make that call and I don't know that he bothered to get enough either.

Well you are a thoroughly disagreeable fellow and I have to resist an urge to find you and punch you in the face when you use a term like pigs to refer to the police, but I actually agree.

This is fraud, plain and simple. There needs to be six ex-police officers in jail to start with. Then we need to figure out if this was some sort of conspiracy among them, and if it went at all above them. If some supervisor told them to "just write in these numbers," he can join them in prison.

Pretty unlikely. There is a lot of factors that go into a decision about whether or not to extend somebody a job offer. Even if you found some kind of quantifiable way to show you were "more qualified," they'll simply cite other factors that have no method of quantification. How are you going to convincingly argue against "we felt Joe would be a better fit in our company culture?" Especially when you're standing in a courtroom lambasting the company at the time?

Maybe you would win, but being that sure of it is simple folly. Employment cases are not easy to win.

But isn't there a saying that goes something like "Never attribute to cleverness what can more easily be explained by anything other than cleverness"?

There might be some perversion of the original, but the original was from Napoleon: "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."

In the case of the peace officer thing, I actually think the OP has it wrong. Searching without probable cause isn't just wrong, it's illegal, and as such of course he is correct that he wouldn't want people in the job who would do so. However that's not what the situation was; the situation was somebody asking for access. It's no different to the real-life equivalent of a police officer asking if he can search your car. "No" is a perfectly acceptable answer, but it doesn't necessarily mean "yes" is wrong and it doesn't mean that it's wrong to conduct the search if given explicit permission to do so.