Apple, Microsoft and Google don't need to grow to survive. They can continue to operate profitably at their present size. AAPL has a P/E ratio of 10. MSFT, 18. GOOG, 26. Those are all reasonable price/earnings ratios for successful mature companies. F (Ford Motor) is at 10, and IBM is at 13. Both are century-old companies, still doing well.

Now look at Facebook, P/E of 514. And that's after the stock declined 37% since "the world's most hyped IPO." Facebook just doesn't generate much profits. Facebook's traffic and revenue peaked in 2012. In revenue terms, Facebook was never that big. It's in the class with Adobe, not the big boys like Microsoft, Google, and Apple. If Facebook didn't have a two-tier stock structure that gives most of the votes to Zuckerberg, he would have been fired by now.

That's Facebook, the biggest success in "social". Everybody else is doing worse. Zynga just had a big layoff. Social looks like the first dot-com boom and crash - the players were talking about "clicks now, worry about the revenue later". Well, "later" is here.

The fundamental problem with "social" is that the revenue model is to crank up the ad density, which annoys the users. In the last year, Facebook introduced "sponsored stories" and Twitter introduced "sponsored tweets". Myspace tried that strategy. It didn't end well.

The bill is H.R. 2356, introduced by Michael Capuano (D-Mass) and Walter Jones (R-N.C.).

Find your congressman here. Send them some sort of correspondence that says you wish them to co-sponsor the bill. If you e-mail, make sure you request a response.

I remember when the name "iPad" would provoke giggles.

I agree, I have no idea what's supposed to be fun about these games either. I think they're idiotic. Then again, I think most spectator sports are a complete waste of time and not interesting at all (esp. baseball!).

Even so, suppose instead of sports games, their forte was dungeon games like I used to enjoy when I was younger and had a lot more time for such things (DnD, Ultima, etc.). No one needs to play dungeon games, even if I really like them personally, and if their only advantage over some other companys' competing dungeon games is that theirs are (let's say, I'm trying to come up with some supposed hypothetical advantage here) official Ultima spin-offs, or official TSR-endorsed games, or whatever, I'd still be a complete idiot to buy their games given the horrible reputation EA has earned over the past 10+ years for both the quality of their games and the way they treat customers.

If the U.S. Government has the signing key to Windows Update, and can mess with upstream routers, it can put spyware on any Windows machine worldwide. No "exploit" needed.

Somebody needs to start doing security analyses of everything that comes in via Windows Update. Comparing the updates that are sent to different computers is a good first step.

Well, there's always the air gap -- keep your git-hosting computer in a secret place, never connect it to any network or external hardware, and ideally never power it on either :^)

OTOH, if your software is open-source anyway, it's hard to see why anyone would feel the need to hack the server to get to it.

Increasingly the case in the U.S. as well, with various agencies encouraging everyone to spy on and report on their neighbors. Lack of manpower is no obstacle so long as people still like to gossip, or can be fearbent into gossip.

http://brownfieldagnews.com/2013/05/17/luetkemeyer-wants-hsus-irs-investigation-investigated/

There are better articles but this was the one I could find offhand.

The USAF has been working on "stealth helicopters" for years. They haven't been able to make them silent, but they can make them sound like wind noise, eliminating the distinctive "whap-whap-whap" blade sounds.

Wire based Ethernet is spec'd at MAC layer throughput. It is talking about the data rate of Ethernet frames, the 8b/10b encoding overhead is already accounted for and all that. So you discover that, particularly with Jumbo Frames, you get real near that speed in actual throughput.

Wireless Ethernet, not so much. You find that effective throughput, even under basically ideal conditions, are way less than the listed speed.

So it leads to confusion for people. Basically wireless is over advertising the speed.

DECT 6.0 phones work on the 1900MHz band and more or less act like short-range cell phones with their protocols and compression. They work quite well, have decent penetration through walls, and are outside of the range used for computers.

OK now you are dismissive AND arrogant. Good work, I am more concerned about you and your field of endeavor than I was when this started.

The fact that genomic research HAS enabled the ability to engineer organisms that can be extremely dangerous, and can potentially be dangerous to only targetted groups is intensely intertwined with all the beneficial advances in the field. You simply can't separate the two and pretend the dark side isn't there.

Genomics is simply a very dangeorus field. Its given an ethically challenged species the ability to play god and tamper with life itself. Its just a matter of time until someone will tamper with it and it wont end well.

"Yes, I singled out rednecks and skinheadsâ¦"

There wasn't even a tinge of humor in it, not sure why you are claiming there was.

You are engaging in the very kind of stereotyping and targeting of groups you've been preaching against and dismissing. And to pile on you just added a bunch more groups you hold in contempt and would probably just as soon seen wiped off the face of the earth.

Its the kind of bigotry a well educated, probably liberal, affluent person such as yourself would refuse to accept as bigotry. It doesn't really bother me that you are doing it. It bothers me you don't seem to even realize you are doing it.

So what? No one needs to play a football game, much less one with particular real-life teams hardcoded in rather than fictional teams.

If people think they absolutely need such a game that much, then they're a fool and they deserve to be separated from their money. I have zero sympathy.

Of course they care about profits, it's all they care about. However, they're not too worried about that when suckers keep buying their crap, regardless of how shitty it is. The vgcats comic is right: if you don't like the game, why did you buy it? Yes, it's hard to try games before you buy them, but MS and EA have long reputations for shittiness, so at this point if you buy anything from them, you deserve whatever you get. It's not like you're taking a chance on some new indie game studio's product; I've been reading stories about how awful EA is for well over a decade now.