But it also seems like they're missing the point. OK, so actual photographers need better optics than you find in the typical phone. So why don't they just make a phone designed for photographers, which includes a camera with better optics and a more professional photography UI?

Or to put it a different way, this interesting product is conspicuously missing the ability to make cellular voice calls for no apparent reason.

I believe the point is that an OpenCL transcoding algorithm running on a typical GPU will make doing it on a CPU look silly and pointless, so who cares how fast the CPU can do it when you're going to do it on the GPU anyway?

That seems even less coherent. All you're saying is that you can have a patent system that allows anything to be patented. It has nothing to do with the makeup of the economy. If the economy is manufacturing-oriented then you could just as easily have patents on manufacturing methods, manufactured products, etc. And if the patent office granted patents of the same breadth and quality as they do software patents then you would have people with patents on "method of affixing one material to another" running around suing the pants off of anyone who dares to manufacture a product using nails, adhesives, zip ties or rubber bands.

Now you're just playing the sleight of hand where you classify everything that isn't physical as "intellectual property." Copyrights and patents don't play a dominant role in the jobs of an insurance adjuster or a nurse etc., notwithstanding that their work product isn't always "tangible."

That seems very "Hydrogen Economy." You can get energy from Hydrogen, but only if you "somehow" already have Hydrogen. Where do we get a continuing supply of entangled particles without expending energy?

Not exactly. For one thing you're assuming high barriers to entry. It doesn't do any good to bury your existing competitors if new competitors spring up the second you raise prices back out of the loss-making range.

In addition to that, it's more about power asymmetries than smart and stupid. Suppose there are two identical sellers. If one of them starts selling below cost, you say they're the smart one because they'll drive the other one out of the market and then have a monopoly. But if the other one is "smart" too then they'll be doing the same thing, and all you'll end up with is both sellers playing chicken until one of them stops being so "smart" and in the meantime they both make losses indefinitely.

The only way that strategy works for one of the sellers is if that seller has more resources than all the others and can hold out until after every other competitor has long since sold off their facilities and fired all their employees. Even then you can't really raise prices that much once you have a monopoly unless there are high barriers to entry (like in telecommunications), because the second you do there are new entrants who want a piece of the action.

This is why Walmart is so successful: The model isn't "sell below your own cost to drive out the competition," it's "sell near your own costs forever but have sufficient economies of scale that your sale price is near or below your competitor's cost," which allows Walmart to capture almost the whole market and make up for the low margins with high volumes.

I'm not sure how you come to that conclusion. For example, suppose there are a hundred million files, a million are pirated and have on average a million downloads each, whereas 99 million are legitimate and have on average a hundred thousand downloads each. 1M * 1M = 1B. 99M * 100K = 9.9B. So in this example, only 1% of the files and ~9% of the downloads are pirated, but using this study's methodology the false conclusion would be that 100% of them are pirated because the pirated ones comprise the entire top 1000.

And this is in the nature of what actually happens, because Hollywood films are popular -- you can pretty well expect that The Dark Knight is going to get a hundred million downloads, but that tells you nothing about the potentially quite large number of legal downloads available which are still getting 100K or even 10M downloads but not enough to make it on the list of "most popular" files.

That's what debunking is. You show that the conclusion doesn't follow from the premise. If you want a different, actually valid conclusion then you have to run the study again with better assumptions.

What you're doing is assuming the conclusion without proving it and then, when someone points out that you haven't proven it, retorting that they haven't proven the contrary. You're the one asserting that 99% of BitTorrent is piracy, so where is your proof? We've already established that the nonsense study is not it.

I guess you missed the link in your own article that debunks the study? Cliffs notes version: They only looked at the files with the most seeds, which already skews the results, and pirated stuff has a huge list of fake seeds to screw up lazy anti-piracy enforcers, which means that choosing the torrents with the most seeds invalidates the entire study because the ones with the most (fake) seeds are the pirated ones.

I would also add that relying on 'this one public BitTorrent tracker we found somewhere' is not statistically valid, because it's just one tracker. You have to get a statistically valid sample of all the trackers or you can't conclude anything. For example, if they included these these trackers instead, I would expect different results -- and by failing to consider them, they naturally get totally invalid numbers.

Basically every review of the device on a respectable site points out that the hardware is slow, the OS makes terrible use of screen real estate and it doesn't run anywhere near the same number of apps as Android and iOS. These are not characteristics of "the best smartphone ever." Moreover, the only way you get from one to the other is by feeding the WA algorithm a bunch of additional spam reviews paid for by Microsoft marketing money.

You must be joking, right? The only reason the phone even gets reviewed at all is that Microsoft is schlepping it all over the place trying to get people to pay attention to it. For example, compare the number of reviews of the Lumina to the number of reviews of the N900. Yeah, that's what I thought.

I'm not sure how much of a "win" a site that claims "Firefox 5" to be the best browser can really be considered.

This is one of the situations where Apple really ought to be taking a page from Google. The problem in this case is that Siri is returning a nonsense answer as a result of Microsoft's astroturfing and marketing attempts to try to make Nokia not feel as lonely at the bottom of the market share charts.

The "right" way to fix that is to make your search algorithm less susceptible to slashvertizements and spam reviews. The stupid way is to change the single result someone pointed out to you and let the device continue telling people that snake oil cures cancer and plants crave Brawndo.

That's because you misjudge what people mean by "design" -- Apple's goal is to make products that make you say "wow" rather than (necessarily) products that stay with in spec and achieve six nines of uptime, keep working after you accidentally sit on them, or never break or spontaneously combust in normal usage. And it's pretty much always been that way. The failure rate of the power supplies in "mirror door" PowerMac G4s was something preposterous like 50%, but they sure were pretty.

It's way more important to Apple that people think it's cool than that it actually works; if something doesn't work, you fix that in the next generation (and then have entirely different problems).

Lies. This is from Groklaw's coverage of his testimony:

In other words, a Google engineer, working at Google, wrote a function and contributed it to Java (for free). Now Oracle is trying to sue over it because of that copyright assignment, and claiming that the freely contributed code is hugely valuable and that the contributor therefore owes them big money for using it. Even if this is technically legal for them to sue over, Oracle really deserves to DIAF over this.

I understand that. What I'm saying is that Facebook is in a precarious position right now. They don't have a lot of growth potential, but they have a lot of risk e.g. if Google+ takes off, or Apple starts a social network, or some startup comes along and eats their lunch. They're in a market where fortunes change overnight. And with that level of risk, you would expect to at least have a high level of growth...but they're already big. So you end up with a stock which is high risk without high growth.

Of course, if you believe the efficient market hypothesis then it doesn't matter, because the market will value the shares consistent with their risk adjusted return. But the efficient market hypothesis only works if people disregard it... and more to the point, the amount of hype behind the Facebook IPO is epic, making it more likely that the company will be overvalued.

Sort of... the trouble is that Google is fairly diversified (search, maps, docs/drive, gmail, YouTube, Android, Google+, etc.), so anything that seriously hurts them is likely to be a general industry-wide phenomenon that would hurt Facebook just as much if not more.

All that said, I'm not saying that Facebook is guaranteed to die off in short order. If they end up worth a few times as much in five years as they are now, I wouldn't be particularly surprised -- but if they're worth less than Myspace in five years, I wouldn't be particularly surprised either. The point is that there is a lot of risk, and not necessarily a lot of upside -- if they grow significantly it will have to be by entering new markets, and they haven't proven that they can execute on that.