As an individual, when I buy things, I directly fund companies, therefore keeping them and their employees in business. I also pay sales tax on these good, and payroll tax is just as much a tax on me as it is on my employer, since it affects a contract between us. I generate revenue for my employer, who pays taxes. I generate revenue for retailers of my employer's products and other businesses that work with my employer, who both also pay tax. I rent a home which provides an income for my homeowner, who in turn purchases goods and pays tax. I pay insurance for medical care (part of my contract with my employer), which funds an industry that pays tax. By having children and keeping in touch with my family and friends, I provide not only for the future of the country, I also directly improve their quality of life.

I hope this is a good argument to stop paying income tax. If not, I'll just move to another country. I'll pay a lot less tax, but it'll be in the Cayman Islands.

On a more serious note, Apple benefits from infrastructure and regulation provided by the federal and state governments, be they in education, in transport, in public safety, in healthcare, in environmental protection or pretty much anything else that these governments are involved in. If Apple could move their research, their product design, their product development, and as much back-office work as they can to China, they'd do it in a heartbeat. The problem is that's not possible. Apple wants the best engineers, the best designers, the best R&D teams... And those kind of people don't just want a big paycheck, they also want to live in a nice environment, where they are provided with sufficient opportunities for their spouses and children's development, where they won't fear for their life, where transport if sufficiently easy and reliable, and so forth. Apple want to become a Cayman Islands company? They'll still keep their corporate operations in the USA, because they know it's too hard to even attempt to move a dozen thousand of the best paid engineers and designers and their families off-shore.

Apple want the benefits from the infrastructure and the regulation that the USA provides, but doesn't want to fund the cost of maintaining and improving them. That's a free rider problem, and being a knowing free rider, that's hating the driver.

Thirty thousand years ago mankind had yet to discover agriculture and animal husbandry. One thousand years ago mankind used wood as the primary source of energy. Two centuries ago mankind had yet to understand the causes of common diseases and infections. Within the last century, mankind has begun to harness the power of the atom, so far only by fission, but perhaps soon also by fusion. Only 51 years ago did Man first venture beyond Earth's atmosphere. During the past half-century, mankind has started to explore the nature of the gene and DNA. Today, mankind is growing ever more able to harness the power of wind, wave and sunlight. Soon, perhaps, hydroponic meat will no longer be a prohibitively expensive experimental technique, but will be the cornerstone of a nutritional revolution unheard of since the discovery of agriculture. As we venture deeper into the nature of the universe, we will discover even greater sources of power, and in turn devise manners to harness them to our advantage. Growth is desireable, and the limits we believe it might have today are nothing more than the limits of our knowledge.

The reason is quite simple : Say in a town there are four shops selling kitchen goods. Two (A & B) are next to each other, whilst the other two (C & D) are in other districts. If you believe all four stores have the same probability (p) of having the type of crockery you wish to purchase, and that their prices will not be significantly different, then where will you go? To the place where A & B are, because you have a 1-(1-p)^2 probability of finding the goods, which is greater than the probability for either C or D. This means that A + B will actually have more potential customers than C + D. Increased potential customers means either prices can be slightly higher (more profitable) or more sales can be made (more volume). Thus, when E considers opening a store for kitchen goods, chances are he'll decide to establish close to A & B. Thus he will organically benefit from the customers who know A & B, rather than relying on advertising/etc. to get potential customers in front of his wares. Eventually, customers will know that the chances of finding a "better deal" at C or D than at A+B+E are so small that there's no real point in going there unless A+B+E don't have the desired good (in which case chances are C and D don't either). Ergo, C & D have lower margins & lower sales volumes, and most likely aren't profitable, which forces them to close.

The only way to counter this trend is to establish a store with a sufficiently large goods selection that the probability of finding the desired good in this store is vastly superior to any other store, whilst at the same time being able to control prices. This is of course a difficult equation, one that has been tackled with moderate success by department stores and large retailers. When F, a well-known department store that can stock more kitchen goods than A+B+E is looking to establish itself in the town, it doesn't really need to worry about establishing next to A+B+E, because not only does it stock goods other than kitchen goods, but it wants to have a "pseudo-captive" market, where people can't really just pop across the street & compare prices with another store. The longer/harder such a comparison is, the easier it is to close sales, whilst attracting people with loss-leader deals that reinforce the advertising image of unbeatable prices in all categories and types of product (which is sometimes possible given that F is a bulk buyer, unlike A+B+E).

So, this makes it quite easy to see why Jewelers or Banks work like this (department stores haven't really cracked those markets in the UK). However, this logic doesn't mean you can "create" customers by establishing a new store next to one that already exists. In the previous example, if C opens two new stores (C2 and C3, we'll call the first store C1), but doesn't increase its stock range (or improve prices), then customers will quickly learn that the probability of finding the desired in C1+C2+C3 is not better than it was in C, and is still less than A+B. So after a short spike, C1+C2+C3 will still have fewer potential customers than A+B. But now, C is spending three times as much money in rent, etc.

It's almost never a good idea to have control over several shops in a very limited district, unless the number of potential customers is so great that one store can't cope with all of them. The shops compete with each other, customers quickly understand it's not really "two shops" but "one, divided", so they're not more likely to find a product or get a better price by going to this district than to another one... And of course the business is paying more for stock (even with the most efficient centralized dispatch management system), more for employees, more for rent, more for in-store equipment... Basically, it's a very, very shitty idea. In the Parent's example, there were 5 GAME(station) stores within at most 5 minutes walk of each other. Except for the people hunting for bargain bin games, customers would know that the prices were the same in all 5 stores, the product selection was the same... Basically, it meant they had no more reason to go there than to the other side of town where there is a Virgin Megastore with a video games section. The only difference was that Virgin wasn't paying several times over for all the expenses, and was able to attract additional potential customers by selling other goods than just video games.

tl;dr GAME was stupid and it's stupid to own shops close to each other, but it's good to own a store near to similar stores.

Hmm... So you're saying the best way to observe psi effects is to give people LSD? I urgently await your paper, or more likely your shaky cellphone videos with people mumbling and saying "duuuuuuude".

They're going to need bigger boxes.

Ever since I've seen and used Wave, dealing with e-mail discussion chains have been a major pain in the ass. Even more than they were before. 5 people working on a presentation/document? If it's got any degree of complexity, you'll end up with 4 versions in about 3 days. Add to it the random manager/executive poking his nose in and changing things on an old version that was forwarded as part of a progress report... Wave was an elegant and simple solution to that problem. Not to most other use cases of e-mails, and pretty much none of the use cases of IM. Sadly, they rolled it out too slowly (when you finally got in, nobody else had Wave, so you couldn't use it, and by the time other people got in, you didn't check it anymore) and as you say put far, far too much weight on plugins, apps and some other collaboration things that didn't work well/were too far & few between.

"By its own admission, Google's approach to R&D is to run up a product or service and see who salutes. Forget intensive market studies, demand analytics, or any of the other techniques used by square, establishment corporations prior to investing in development. No, Google apparently sees itself as an exception to rules that govern ordinary organizations."

Given that Google is the 19th most profitable company in the USA, that speaks volumes about the "other techniques used by square, establishment corporations".

Thank God some people at Google can see further than next week, or at least seem to have learnt from Xerox PARC, Bell Labs, and so many other research departments' experience.

Even if you consider the service a success, it was much more a political than technological or commercial success. The PTT (now France Telecom) was still a state-owned company when Minitel started, and in order to get the Minitel service kick-started, PTT was "ordered" to fit one in each post office in France for free. That didn't really get the ball rolling though, so the PTT was ordered to "give away" about 5M units for free to businesses and end users. Given that France's population was just north of 50M at the time, I'll let you consider what that means in terms of market penetration.

At its "peak" in the second half of the 1990s, Minitel had around 9M end user terminals in operation, as well as those in post offices and businesses. The total revenues through the system were about $1B, of which three quarters were siphoned through to service providers and companies selling goods through Minitel. Effectively, for the PTT/France Telecom it was a $250M business, that enabled them to cut back slightly on print runs of phone directories.That sounds good, but when you consider they had to pony up the cost of 5-6M units before even starting to get revenues, that's a slight damper. With an average sales point of $150 (in 1983), even if you think they made a nice 30% mark-up, having to give away 5-6M units (+ installing them, + the network, +R&D...) comes out at over $600M. I don't know how much the PTT saved through not printing phone directories. But Minitel is not quite a clear success in the PTT/France Telecom's cap. It might have ended up turning a small profit over the lifetime of the service, and it definitely did enable new business models to be created (many, many, many of which were porn-related), however it was far too little with regards to the massive push PTT gave to get it started. The real success was a political one (with both sides of the spectrum fighting to take ownership of it) : politicians could say France was high-research, connected, yadda yadda, everybody was on the information superhighway, security, etc.

If you have to approve tags people add of you to photos, Facebook still has the personal data that you *were* tagged in that picture. If you reject the invitation, not only does it still show up, but FB still has the data you were invited. I have chat switched off (as far as I can tell, it definitely doesn't show up for me), but I still appear in the "friend shortlist" that FB serves up to my friends in the right-hand panel. I never consented to FB sending me chats by text message (I did however initially accept "messages"), that didn't stop FB sending me a chat on the basis that Chat and Messages are now merged.

I signed up for FB when it was still a novelty in my country, and it didn't have many of the features it now has. FB considers that my choice to share my information with Facebook means they can develop new features/apps and use my data without restriction (TBH, I agree with this point of view). Google had a different privacy policy for each feature/app within the company. Now Google is falling in line with FB, and saying it'll use your information from one feature in another, along as it's within the company, and not communicated to third parties. And the EU is saying Google's practice is abusive, despite FB doing this for years?

How can I get FB to not use my information in photos? Oh wait. I can't. How can I get FB to not use my information in events? Oh wait, I can't. How can I get FB to not use my information in chat? Oh wait, I can't.

Google has the same controls regarding third party access to information as FB. The only difference is that Google doesn't really rely on many third party applications, whilst FB has created a complete ecosystem in that respect.

>>If Google had thought about it a simple acceptance screen allowing people to opt in and out their information from the meta-profile would probably have addressed the privacy concerns. It would also highlight to the users what information Google has collected and what services it is providing.
Google has had Dashboard for *years* now that shows exactly what personal information Google had gathered from their various services. For each service, you can (and could well before today) go into the specifics of the privacy agreement, remove personal data, change how it would be shared etc. FB doesn't have anything like that. Google has pointed out repeatedly that it HAS Dashboard, and unlike FB, provides a tool to remove -all- your personal information.

>>Does FB collect data on you
YES. Even when you're not actively using the website. It will create "pre-profiles" based on e-mail addresses people put in the "look for friends" function, so that when you create an account it can instantly suggest "friends". If you have an account, and a friend tags you in a photo they uploaded, how is that not collecting data on *you*?

>>your searches
It's slightly unclear, but it seems that does collect data on what you put into the FB "search bar" at the top of the page as part of their "Realtime Activities" data.

>>and what you're reading outside of FB?
Facebook connect? Likes? Facebook comment sections? If the EU is arguing that Google is "misleading customers" by unifying the data users submitted through Blogger, Youtube, Google Search and Gmail, the isn't FB similarly "misleading customers" by unifying the data users submitted through websites such as Engadget, Techcrunch or the Wall Street Journal? What's the distinguishing criteria for this decision?

>> if you opened up a browser and did a search for "Toni Collette in pink panties" on Google or Bing, would FB be able to put it into a data base and link 'Escogido' with 'Toni Collette' and 'pink panties'?
Straw man. Just switch Google and FB to see that's obviously not why the EU is investigating Google.

Ignorantia juris non excusat (or for our civil law country friends : nemo censetur ignorare legem).

So the state/EU/politicians are saying that they need to protect me from wilfully giving my information in exchange for a service, on that basis that I'm "ignorant"... And at the same time they believe I'm perfectly knowledgeable of every facet of law?