I guess all those millions of BMWs I see on the road must be a figment of my imagination then.

BMW has been making cars since 1916. How long has Google been making them? How hard is it for established manufacturers to get the tens of thousands of parts in a road car 100% correct at design time? Google is not infallible. If they do indeed decide to mass manufacture their own cars (which I doubt) it will take years and billions of miles to iron out all the issues. Engineering isn't software.

Say you're BMW's favourite kind of customer: you buy new, all the gimmicks, change your car for another BMW every 4-5 years and have been doing so for 20 years. Are you going to start buying Google's plastic toy car that's only been in production for 2 years instead? You might buy one to go with your BMW, especially if you live in a city, but you're still going to buy the BMW.

Presumably they'll do what Google, Apple, FB and the rest of the tech-cartels do when they want to muscle in on something: buy it in.

Actually, having said that, I very much doubt BMW will be competing with Google for car sales anyway, because I very much doubt Google will be retailing their cars. They will either operate the fleet themselves or sell them to other fleet operators or just sell the software.

The irony is that with noscript enabled you simply don't exist for 95% of sites (log crunching is SO 1999). You might think that you like it that way but it's extremely shortsighted: you can hardly expect people to develop content that appeals to you if they don't know you exist.

Yeah, but that async code has only existed for a couple of months. Until recently analytics code was the bottleneck on most sites, making it a bit rich for google to be claiming to have sped up the internet.

Ah yes, but you're forgetting that postgre is advocated by smug holier-than-thou geeks, the kind that everyone wants to punch in the face. This means that it will continue to be an obscure footnote in database history, while mysql continues to be the world's most widely used database.

For the unenlightened the Daily Mail is about as reliable and non-partisan as the National Enquirer. Stories from them should be filtered at source.

Actually, only Americans and New Zealanders have seen that (in the first world). They are the only two OECD countries that allow direct marketing of prescription drugs to consumers.

i agree with you completely

Why? Who cares if webcomic X gets its own 2 line wikipedia page? It doesn't cost anything (except a trivial amount of disk space) and no one has to look at it if they don't want to. The idea of wikipedia being a rival to Britannica et al should be left behind: while editing is open to all no one can treat it as definitive and frankly I doubt anyone does. Wikipedia is "good enough". It's 95% there, but that extra 5% will take a hell of a lot of effort and come at a cost that many would find unnacceptable. Just accept that it is what it is and enjoy it, stop striving for something unobtainable and frankly undesirable.

As someone with some experience in retail I can tell you that 50% margin would be considered extremely good for an electronic item at final retail. Normally the high street retailer will make 10-20% on these things and the internet discounters will be pushing 5%. There is just so much competition out there and people are very sensitive to price for electronics, however amazon has no competitors for the kindle, so they can pretty much charge what they want. (For comparison, clothing will normally make 50-80%, books 35%, though it depends greatly on the industry and niche)

Except of course they will never get round to paying off their debt. They will inflate their way out, like every other time they got into trouble.

So don't keep cash; only land and gold hold their value.

Damn straight; socialists did it..

I think you maybe on the wrong site. As you point out, people here like to base their discussions on the "facts" they just inserted into to wikipedia. Actual facts from actual people who work in the actual industry are right out.

But thank you anyway.

So, to continue this shocking analogy, you would prefer to have to ring round 5 gritting companies beforehand to get the best price, keeping an eye on the weather all the time just to make sure you don't forget? And there's a fair chance your neighbours will have used a different company, meaning several journeys by several trucks (which is clearly not more efficient) not forgetting that the companies will necessarily being buying in smaller quantities therefore getting a worse price. Not to mention the people who choose not to pay and get the benefit of other people paying for them, leading to a tragedy of the commons. No, sometimes competition is good, in some cases it is clearly ludicrous.

If you've learnt one thing from the events of the last 12 months in the economy it should be that there is no guiding hand; free markets are not by default the most efficient solution. Like natural selection the market goes to local maxima in the landscape rather than the best solution. Sometimes the local maxima IS the best solution, but oftimes it's not.