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Comment Re:Insurance Companies Are Not Interested In Reduc (Score 1) 567

No, that's not true. Insurance companies are interested in Profit not Sales. So, if you pay $100/month for car insurance, but you get into an accident every year that they have to cover, they hate that.

The behavior that they want is for you to pay $90/month ("safe" driver discount) and NEVER get into an accident as a "safe" driver. Therefore, they pocket all the money.

Comment Re:Location proves nothing (Score 1) 225

by Styros (#36788634) Attached to: Police Increasingly Looking To Smartphones For Evidence

It doesn't have to prove you were at the scene. It only has to persuade the JURY beyond a reasonable doubt. It doesn't even have to eliminate all doubt. Just eliminate the reasonable ones.

Basically, if you claim you were home alone, but your phone was at the crime scene, you're in a world of hurt. Why was your phone at the crime scene? Did you lend it to someone? Did you lose your phone? When/where did you lose your phone? If you have no alibi, you're sunk.

Comment Re:Commercial Convenience (Score 1) 850

by Styros (#32130818) Attached to: Flash Is Not a Right

I'm so glad somebody made a coherent argument. You hit the nail on the head exactly.

Remember when Microsoft changed VB to VB.Net? From MSDN:

"All but the most trivial applications will take a significant amount of effort to port from VB6 to VB.NET. Backward compatibility appears not to be one of Microsoft's high-priority goals with the new .NET environment." (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa239677%28VS.60%29.aspx)

How many people on Slashdot complained? Where was the outrage? Where was the boycott of MS due to its "closed" system?

Or as a better comparison, remember when the PS3 came out, and every game company had to scrap their PS2 codebase? Where was the outrage?

Technology changes every 3-5 years. Adapt or die. If people haven't learned that by now, they should not be in this industry.
Piracy

App Store Piracy Losses Estimated At $459 Million 202

Posted by Soulskill from the arrr-me-hearties dept.
An anonymous reader passes along this quote from a report at 24/7 Wall St.: "There have been over 3 billion downloads since the inception of the App Store. Assuming the proportion of those that are paid apps falls in the middle of the Bernstein estimate, 17% or 510 million of these were paid applications. Based on our review of current information, paid applications have a piracy rate of around 75%. That supports the figure that for every paid download, there have been 3 pirated downloads. That puts the number of pirate downloads at 1.53 billion. If the average price of a paid application is $3, that is $4.59 billion dollars in losses split between Apple and the application developers. That is, of course, assuming that all of those pirates would have made purchases had the application not been available to them for free. This is almost certainly not the case. A fair estimate of the proportion of people who would have used the App Store if they did not use pirated applications is about 10%. This estimate yields about $459 million in lost revenue for Apple and application developers." A response posted at Mashable takes issue with some of the figures, particularly the 75% piracy rate. While such rates have been seen with game apps, it's unclear whether non-game apps suffer the same fate.
Space

Supersonic Skydiving 58

Posted by Soulskill from the man-or-meteorite dept.
Almost six years ago, we talked about the story of Michel Fournier, a retired French army officer who planned to skydive from a height of 25 miles. That plan and a subsequent attempt one year later both failed due to "technical and weather-related problems." Now, at the age of 64, Fournier is set to try again. If everything goes right, his speed will approach 1,000 miles per hour during the early stages of his 15-minute descent. Quoting the NYTimes: "Fournier faces plenty of perils. Above 40,000 feet, there is not enough oxygen to breathe in the frigid air. He could experience a fatal embolism. And 12 miles up, should his protective systems fail, his blood could begin to boil because of the air pressure, said Henri Marotte, a professor of physiology at the University of Paris and a member of Fournier's team. 'If the human body were exposed at very high altitude, the loss of consciousness is very fast, in five seconds,' Marotte said. 'Brain damage, in three or four minutes.'"

Comment Re:RTFA (Score 1) 552

by Styros (#19256467) Attached to: Senator Warns of Email Tax This Fall

I just skimmed the bill linked in the summary... is it just me, or does this 1) not appear to apply to email whatsoever (it's not mentioned anywhere in the bill, though VOIP is) and 2) only applies to business doing $5 million USD or more in business a year.

No, no, no. This is slashdot. You're not suppose to point out the facts! You're suppose to fuel our rampant speculation and knee-jerking.

This is what you're suppose to say:

I knew it!! This is a secret SCO conspiracy, backed by Microsoft, to FUD Linux in a desperate attempt to kill net neutrality. Damn you, RIAA! Damn you!!!

See?

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