Average person -> Views stock market as a fairly risky thing. They don't know about portfolio, indexing, straddles, and such.
They only know "buy it if you think it's going to go up, sell it if you think it's going to go down".
And you are 100% right about them probably not having the finances to do this many times. RobinHood and fractional shares were an attempt to solve that problem but I'm not sure if it's in the mindset of the average bear.

I'm really talking about the people in the lower socio-economic tier -- the ones who buy a lottery ticket every week/day.
They could, with a phone app, easily place a bet on a prediction market that they FEEL they have a chance to win because the bets revolve around concepts that they are more comfortable with (Team X beats team Y, politician X wins, etc).

Ask a "normie" if they have a better chance at winning (and lower cost to participate in) each of these bets:
- Buy/sell a stock (low chance of being right, might forget to close their position, expensive to participate)
- Buy a lottery ticket (almost zero chance of winning, but also almost zero cost to play)
- Prediction market (cheap and in their view, less risky than stocks and higher chance of winning (50%) than a lottery ticket)

... Which is likely another slush fund for politicians

Prediction markets are "accessible" to the general public in a way that the stock market is not, from a comfortability standpoint.
The random person on the street is gambling if they buy or short a stock. They haven't done the reasearch nor are they likely capable or motivated to.

But prediction markets offer intuitive things they can trade on comfortably (even if they don't do it wisely).

So the growth of prediction markets likely kills a golden goose in states with lotteries.

Does the hardware allow for this? Also, won't the government have public specifications that would expose this possibility?

Or maybe Microsoft wants to make Flash a Windows 7 thing only... Let it sit side-by-side with Silverlight and let developers choose which plugin to use. Either way, it takes away Apples future ability to ever have Flash, and it robs Flash from Android.

Ballmer only knows how to get marketshare by buying it, so he might be thinking that Flash developers, while enraged at the lack of support on Android, would stick with their development tools anyway.

Apple made inroads in music because they did these things:
1. They allowed you thousands of songs in your pocket. What you want, when you want it.
2. They made it easy to find those songs (iTunes).
3. They got rid of commercials, DJs, etc.
4. They augmented music with other forms of media (Podcasts, Audiobooks).
5. You could take your existing CDs and rip them, thus ditching physical media altogether.

TV is entirely different because of these things:
1. TV already has a TV guide, so it's fairly easy to find what you want (I'm talking online TV guide, not the printed version).
2. People typically don't care about carrying TV shows around in their pockets (except for travelers).
3. People are OK with TV commercials -- in fact it's an art form, like during the Superbowl.
4. People don't necessarily want to "own" TV shows -- they watch them once, except for their all-time favorites.
5. Why rip a DVD that you own? That's still a very data-dense storage medium to this day.
6. They already have on-demand TV, which is just like iTunes rentals.

So the cable subscription model doesn't seem like it's going anywhere anytime soon. For that to happen, we need to see these things:

A. Network identities need to be torn down. Who cares if a show was produced by NBC, SyFy, FOX, or BET? The content should stand on its own, period.
B. Targeted marketing needs to improve. Right now, if you hit the 7pm-10pm slot on FOX, you pretty much know your demographic. Once shows are downloaded willy-nilly, the (optional) ads will need to be targeted. This could be a big win for everyone, and we're getting there.
C. How can studios push their "New fall lineup"? This is crucial, because a show lives and dies based on how it is positioned against other shows right now.

Just some thoughts.... Many more things would need to change, but these are off the top of my head.

Instead of giving Dell cash to stay away from AMD (which is frowned upon), they will give away McAfee licenses. It's that simple.

I understand why you might think this way, but realize that the language was created by a pretty smart guy -- Dr. Brad Cox -- and he had one main goal in mind: Be a strict superset of C (not even C++ does this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibility_of_C_and_C%2B%2B#Constructs_valid_in_C_but_not_C.2B.2B)

He also wanted it to be truly object-oriented and dynamic in every sense. Your comment therefore has some innaccuracies / unfairness to it:
"The Obj-C creator basically didn't know how to code linker-loader address binding"

This is by design. It allows dynamic messaging. You can even, for example, send a message to nil and everything is fine.

"He also didn't know about name mangling"

Again, only something you need in a statically linked object-inheritance style language like C++.

"method names and args are explicitly named, so you end up with arg named calling methods like [obj method:arg1 count:count]"

Again, by design. Named arguments makes Objective-C one of the best languages for code readability. You don't have to wonder what the arguments are!

"For adding properties to a class you have enter the same info in triplicate"

Good point -- this is frustrating even in ObjC-2.0. They should get rid of @synthesize and do it automatically.

"the creator didn't understand the value of name space partitioning in OOP"

Dr Cox certainly understood. He just wanted to keep things as close to "pure" C as possible, and had a different way of partitioning spaces -- use 2 letter codes. This is primitive but surprisingly effective, and why all Cocoa objects begin with NS. Think of all the typing this saves, and you never have to wonder what namespace context you're in.

"mind-numbing hyper-verbosity"

I agree that the Cocoa library objects / methods are verbose, but this is a GOOD thing. Also, other more recent languages do the same with there libraries, for example: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system(v=VS.100).aspx

"While the Xcode editor is doing heoric efforts in trying to guess what you meant "

I agree 100% with you -- Code completion in XCode needs to improve

"you still end up doing lots of cut & paste of the Cocoa names"

100% agreed -- XCode needs to have something better than their macro insertion stuff to save me a lot of typing.

I won't be popular for saying this, but here goes: Apple is actually trying to force a return to sanity. For years now, we have all been swallowing the "virtual machine" Kool-aid, watching with baited breath as very talented engineers put incredible technologies into the VMs (garbage collection, trace JITs, etc). All so that the code runs ALMOST as fast as native code* and has features that have been in other libraries/languages for years. Please don't think that I don't value the changes to the languages and libraries -- C# and Java are nice, and I'm glad that they finally got categories (which was in Objective-C 15 years ago, and before that Smalltalk). Still waiting on delegates ;-) My point is this: As a developer, I understand the frustration with having to maintain a codebase across each platform, and thus I see the value of Flash / .NET / Java (and for that matter, HTML / JavaScript). But does anyone remember when Java looked like absolute crap (AWT) on most platforms? The marketing hype was just overwhelmingly inaccurate. And I can give you examples to this day of where a Java program won't run on a certain platform -- the "write one run anywhere" promise is NOT true. And Steve is correct -- Flash crashes ALL the time on my Windows and Mac boxes. So, I think what Steve is trying to do is to say, "Look, I know this will piss of many people to the point where you won't develop for the iPhone OS 4.0 platform, but that's OK and we understand. For those of you who remain, you will have immediate access to all of the coolest new features and your stuff will run fast because its not emulated". Have any of you naysayers even looked at the APIs in Cocoa that would NOT be available if you used Flash / .NET / other? CoreAnimation, CoreAudio, CoreData, etc? Or QuartzComposer? (And yes I know about LINQ on .NET) Apple is being very smart here because they are gambling that with the market share that they have in the mobile market, developers will huff and puff but they will eventually learn Objective-C / C++ and Cocoa. If it's the APPS that make the PLATFORM, then its the API that makes the APPS. All of this being said -- and this is a critical point -- Apple had better hurry up and flesh out their development tools so that they are a viable alternative to the things you can do in Visual Studio and Adobe CS5 pro. They have a ways to go there. * All of you locality-of-reference and usage-pattern VM people, calm down: If you can show me a Java / CLR program that runs as fast as native then I will show you a poorly written native program. Flame off.

StarBlazers!!!! Come on, this would be AWESOME. I liked this show far more than RoboTech and I hear that's getting the big-scren treatment... Toby MacGuire, etc.

I am no Erlang expert, but isn't it supposed to be a language that is inherently parallel, thus allowing programs to "automatically" take advantage of multi-core systems?