There can be significant costs in acquiring/licensing art/music assets for games for a start. But perhaps even more insidious is that all of the most useful apps I can think of have some sort of cloud component--which means that someone, somewhere, has to have a server to support to the app. That means monthly bandwidth/hosting cost obligations into the foreseeable future. If your app sells, great. If not . . . you're kinda screwed. And then, of course, there's the fact that you're only allowed to develop on a Mac, so your start-up costs might not be insignificant either.

I'm pretty skeptical that people are unnecessarily going to college simply because student loans are available. A student loan, after all, is still a loan. At the current ridiculously low interest rates, I think you'd have a hard time even arguing that it it's a subsidy by way of interest owed reduction.

I have no doubt, however, that many people who go to college probably could have done just as well in their chosen career without it. Not everybody needs to go to college, and yet we have been repeatedly stating the opposite to young people on the verge of making that sort of large life decision.

Besides, education is what economists call a positive externality--even in instances where it's not a factor in your chosen career. As with any positive externality, a subsidy is one of the correct and proper ways to help correct for market undervaluation. Even if student loans did constitute a subsidy, that wouldn't be a bad thing. There are quite a few free market fanatics who seem to have cultivated a false sense of the governments role (or to their way of thinking, lack thereof) in regulating a free market. The Free Market is not a unicorn. It needs more than rainbows to function optimally.

Why not? Ebay paid 3.1 billion for Skype (was initially to be as much as 4.1 billion, based on performance goals which ultimately were not met) and they bought it "just before the recession". It was a disaster for them, by most people's accounting (even though the ridiculous amount Microsoft paid for eBay made the deal ultimately profitable for them even though they only had a 30% stake by the time MS bought it). Some people would argue that buying ebay for 1/3 of what Microsoft paid for it was the "mistake" that pretty much cost Meg Whitman her job as CEO at eBay. I really can't imagine why Microsoft would want those damaged goods so badly as to pay 3x as much and I can only conclude that we're in the midst of a second tech bubble (see Groupon's valuation and the recent LinkedIN IPO for more examples).

Microsoft dodged that bullet, and then ran full steam into Skype. Ebay was mocked for buying Skype at nearly 25% of what Microsoft paid for it just a couple of years later. Skype is not worthless, but come on-- Microsoft seriously overpaid. Probably by roughly the same margin as they would have been overpaying for Yahoo, had that deal gone through.

Flickr is a loss leader, though. Yes, it's used by many, many people--and each one of them costs Yahoo money. Somebody may be able to monetize it, but Yahoo hasn't managed it.

In fairness, I don't really think anybody could have predicted Apple's return from the brink of death into an unstoppable juggernaut. It probably exceeded the fantasies of even the most dedicated fanboy.

Yeah, Yahoo did that back when there were like 12 sites on the internet. Not such a workable proposition anymore, I'm afraid.

"Users" is a tricky metric, particularly since it gets defined by the companies themselves. If "users" means unique account logins over the course of a 90 day period, that's a very different thing than if it means "number accounts" or even "number of accounts that have received mail". Keep in mind, that unlike gmail, Yahoo Mail was around back in the per-captcha days, and spam bots could create new accounts with no real barriers to stop them. And, of course, most gmail users all still have Yahoo Mail accounts, though at best they simply forward them to another account and at worse they don't use them at all.

I'm not suggesting that Yahoo (and Hotmail, for that matter) don't still have tons of active users but I'm guessing the number is far lower, by any reasonable metric, than they choose to report. Ultimately, when you're in the business of selling ads, quality matters more than than quantity, and I'd be shocked if Google wasn't making way more money off Gmail (yes, even though way more of them use POP3/IMAP and get served no ads at all) than Yahoo makes of Yahoo Mail.

Find some pictures of the actual event, and tell me what was on the signs. Look for some interviews. People were protesting "taxes", or at least most of them seemed to think they were.

Actually, the Tea Party started out protesting non-existent tax increases. Hence the name. Telling them that nobody had proposed, suggested or even hinted any new taxes at the time did no good, as none of them really had any sort of actual political awareness or cohesion until the HMO's got them organized against the healthcare build and started busing them around the country.

I'm glad you know what it's about. I feel like there's really no coherent message or explanation for the whole movement, atm.

That metaphor breaks down here because there's no way to "see the hole" until you've stumbled through it. In this case, we're talking about changing a value somewhere in an URL or something similar, and getting access to something that isn't yours. You can look at the structure of the URL and make the intuitive leap that there might be an issue and test it out, but there's no way you can know without testing and no point in reporting if you don't know.

If the deal gets blocked, they still come out a few billion a head in in free spectrum and money that AT&T put up to demonstrate the seriousness of their bid. So, in the short term, it all works out pretty well for T-Mobile. In the long run, however, they probably end up making nice with sprint so that instead of 2 MASSIVE providers and 1 little one, we end up with 3 "pretty big" providers. That's still a slight improvement. Alternately, someone else might wish to buy them and continue operating them as a 4th provider. It's not like T-Mobile doesn't have decent prospects, it's just not performing up to expectations.

Not technically true, unless you're looking at Microsoft as a percent of the TOTAL OS market and not just Desktop OS, which would be a bit. Even years later, MS still has a tighter grip on the Desktop OS market than Google does on search. Google commands 65% of US search vs Microsoft's 79% of Desktop OS. Back when it was under scrutiny, I do believe Microsoft had well above 90%.

At any rate, as others will point out, Microsoft's problems stemmed less from having a monopoly and more with the manner in which they abused it. Google is accused of practices which they alone out of all search engines actually deny doing (human manipulation of search results). You can't really prove a negative, so it's a pretty tricky claim to defend against. If Google is lying, then I'm not sure how I feel about it. There are quite a few people who say there's nothing wrong with it, and I'm not entirely sure how to feel about that. But, as I said, they do deny it. They've stated clearly, on the record, under penalty of personal prosecution, that this is something they do explicitly do not do. I'm inclined to believe that.

What?