Let me guess... this move, by the second-largest US carrier (and largest GSM carrier in the US) is supposed to "improve" competition, just like their last attempt?
You got suckered by Sprint's explanation that they were only concerned about "competition" and that's why they opposed the T-Mobile buyout by AT&T. The real reason Sprint opposed it is that having a weak T-Mobile around allows them to tell their investors "We're number three! We're number three! Keep believing in our flatlined stock because at least we're still not the smallest player in the market!" Sprint cares nothing about competition. They just feared becoming the weakest and smallest major wireless carrier in the USA once T-Mobile vanished.
Better idea don't tax companies, tax people. I don't know who thought taxing companies was a good idea, I haven't heard a single reason why we should be doing it and all it does is worsen an already terrifying labor region issue.
Let me guess. Another Libertarian nut case.
This is why companies should be taxed. If I have learned anything in life, I have learned that rich people are really really good at protecting their money. This is why CEOs continue to be paid exorbitant fees to run companies and why sometimes even grossly incompetent ones get paid rather well to leave jobs they screwed up. If companies stopped being taxed, then rich people and their accountants and lawyers would figure out some way that right now nobody has ever considered that could shift all of their income to the company and thus be tax free while they enjoy the benefits of having 100% control of the money with none of the tax issues. If you don't believe that would happen, then you are clearly not paying attention to the current state of things.
Why would anyone ever release a bullshit FUD report?
If they release it someone could criticize it, if not they can keep making claims you can't refute.
I can actually answer this. I am not going to go into details, but I have some inside knowledge. Sometimes these kinds of things are done simply to suck up to Microsoft and try to get more business from them. Of course you are asking why would Microsoft release such a report, which is a different question.
Why on earth would they sell that off? Makes absolutely no sense. This type of reporting is totally and utterly a pile of crap. Must be a slow news day and this guy has an article quota to keep.
Keep in mind that IT writers make bold predictions. It writers have been predicting "the end of the PC" for more than 10 years now. Back when the first abysmal failure tablets came out in the very early 2000s that writers were saying that the PC was dead and tablets were the future. They missed on that. It took Apple to make the devices successful as nobody before them had a clue on how to do it, including Microsoft. Yes, it eventually did happen, but not when the writers all said it would.
Anyway, whether the blogger is correct or not remains to be seen. But here's his line of reasoning.
1) Microsoft bet the company on Win 8. It lost that bet. The financial implications of this will be disastrous to Microsoft.
2) Microsoft only knows how to make money on Windows and Office, so it will conclude that it needs to keep those going to make money, even though that will be proven to be a losing strategy in hindsight.
3) At least 50% of the company will be laid off in the upcoming years as a cost savings measure.
4) Anything losing money is getting closed down.
5) The entertainment division will be sold as it will be viewed as a distraction to the goal of item #2 above.
6) As business shifts to the cloud, Microsoft will suffer and its inability to build compelling cloud solutions will cause it to drop even further.
It's just a guess, and that's what IT writers do. They try to guess the future. If he is right, well, it looks like he'll be able to be the first one to say "I told you so". I tend to be more skeptical about trends that IT writers see as unstoppable, so I think that Microsoft may well be able to survive Win 8 being a failure.
Although I didnt see it first hand, the health care is legendary.
One of the reasons for this is that Cuba has for years told everybody how "great" their health care is. It's just human nature that if you keep telling everyone who will listen over and over again that you are really good at something, they will eventually believe it. I'm sure that Cuban doctors do get good quality training, but I don't read about them being in the forefront of any new techniques and I do know that the US embargo has a big impact on their medical supplies. I think they do have competent doctors who make the best of the situation they're in, but I've also read about how various doctors have started driving taxis because they could make more money that way. Cuba treats their doctors just the same as the old Soviet Union did - they are respected members of their society, but they don't have a particularly good standard of living.
Whose laws? When a country has multiple groups claiming to be the government which set do you follow?
What about when the government is obviously not legitimate?
Orange basically goes where nobody else wants to go or where no sane company would ever operate to get money. They haven't really been able to compete very well with bigger, established players in more developed countries (with some exceptions) so they look for what you might call "garbage revenue streams" by going where there's little to no competition. Given that, they're likely to listen to anybody in charge and not ask questions if they think that doing so will preserve their revenue streams. This leads to a bit of a balancing act where they can't completely turn their backs on the people in charge and get kicked out of the country, but they also can't be completely irresponsible to their customer base either for fear of losing customers. But if they think that turning off the network today will enable them to get paid tomorrow, they'll do it.
If you win against a computer you are cheating
I thought it was more if you win playing the same moves that a computer would make you are cheating.
This presupposes that computers play chess differently to humans. My understanding with chess is that there are certain 'stock' moves, openings and such like, that players memorize and use to their advantage. What if someone has set up positions and studied a computer response to those positions or play, would repeating the learned computer moves be the equivalent of cheating? What impact does an eidetic memory have on this where a person is able recall those positions and moves exactly?
I can comment a bit at this. I used to play in chess tournaments in my state some years ago. I was at a very low level in most of them. To put it in simple terms, I was about as far away in talent from the best players in my state (not my country or the world, but just my state) as I could be. I gave up playing chess because bluntly put, computers ruined it. You are right that players memorize openings. The list of known openings and known variations of those openings is staggering. Honestly, it's more than most people can memorize. Back in the 1990s when I played, it was unusual for a known opening to go beyond maybe 7 or so moves before you "got out of book" as they put it and responses started to deviate from known ones. Keep in mind that while you could always deviate very early from known responses, the odds of such being successful were quite low as if the move was really any good, it would already be known. Now add to this the knowledge that since white moves first, he controls the game. So if I as a player think "I'm really hoping white opens with e4 as I've been dying to try out the black side of this variation of the Ruy Lopez", white may open with d4, destroying my chance to defend an e4 opening. Even if white opens with e4 as I hope, on his 2nd move he may prevent the Ruy Lopez variation that I wanted to play. So you can see that what you have to learn is quite enormous because when you play black,you have to be prepared for all kinds of openings that you may not ever play when you have the white pieces.
Computer analysis took to openings to deeper levels of known good responses. So an opening that used to be maybe 7 moves long before you got out of book was now 13-14 moves long. At some point it just becomes impossible to keep up. To be honest with you, I put a lot of time into trying to improve and I really didn't make much progress. It was already tough enough for me to keep up before computers got involved and I just gave up as I felt like I was getting left further and further behind. To be honest with you, a lot of the tournaments weren't much fun. A lot of the guys who showed up to them were really weird. It made me question whether I really wanted to spend a lot of time getting better at something that attracted defective people to it. It's not unheard of for guys to be exceptionally good at chess and be homeless because they can't keep a job. Fischer himself was a genius player but if there was ever a crazier World Champion than him, I don't know who that would be.
I don't know that someone triggering a $12.8 million bonus payout for themselves can be adequately explained by stupidity. I don't know of a lot of Mr. Bean-like millionaires that just stupidly stumbled into wealth
In general this is true, but the ones who just stupidly stumbled into wealth seem to buy professional sports teams in the USA. Each of the four major sports leagues (MLB, NFL, NBA and NHL) has owners who make you scratch your head and ask "How on earth could somebody that stupid be so rich?" In some cases it's simply that dad was a genius and rich and junior just inherited his money.
Looks like baseball player Kurt Schilling (who apparently was very good at baseball) decided to start a video game studio, who knows why.
Actually the "why" is known. Hubris. Schilling has an ego the size of Texas. Think Rush Limbaugh who happens to pitch major league baseball and you've got an idea. Schilling was very good at his sport and is on the bubble for the Hall of Fame, meaning you can make a case both for and against him going into the Hall. But you have to be really good to even be on the bubble.
Schilling's arrogance made him a great pitcher but in real life he sees everything in black and white. There are no gray areas to him. People that agree with him are smart. Everyone that disagrees with him, he thinks is an idiot. And he'll tell them to their faces. Basically he realized that a lot of money could still be made via role playing games. Since he concluded that he was a genius and there was a business opportunity in front of him, there was simply no way the combination could fail to work because him being a genius would overcome any limitations or lack of experience he personally had. Not to digress, but honestly, if you see some smart ass punk kid like Zuckerberg drop out of college and become a billionaire, I do kind of understand how a guy with a big ego might think "I can do that too!". So since he has self-confidence to a level almost bordering on delusion he found the one sucker who would give him the money he needed without any strings attached.
Factorials were someone's attempt to make math LOOK exciting.