Posts by ratfox

@Test Man: Welcome to planet Earth

If Microsoft US ultimately loses its appeal, and faces the prospect of heavy fines for not somehow turning over the data, they will order Microsoft Ireland to turn it over. Microsoft Ireland might well be technically an independent company, but it still has to do whatever Microsoft US tells it to do.

Re: Am I the only one...

I'm not that into social networks in the first place, but I doubt it will be scrapped completely. The forced integration seems to be going away, but a lot of features are useful and can be recycled.

Re: @ratfox

When I said income, I meant profit. Microsoft has a market cap slightly below Google, and a price to earnings ratio about half.

Re: BoringGreen Destroyed @Matt Bryant

I suspect he means, legally irrelevant. FinFisher is not in legal trouble because of this leak. It can go on selling its software to many a government except Russia.

Re: can't resist

Meh. Spain and Ireland are catholic countries, yet they are not particularly known for their corruption. On the other hand, China, India or Egypt have the reputation of being so corrupt it becomes a way of life, without being catholic.

I'd say if you discount Italy, it looks like corruption is more dependent on development than anything else.

Re: no exact number?

More likely, they are allowed to specify in which range by 250… like 0-249, 250-499, 500-749, etc.

That's how Google has always reported these types of requests.

Re: Why the hell is Google buying things like this?

There is not even a casual link between an innovative company like Lift Labs and an Internet advertising company like Google

Google has already bought many robotics companies. Why not this one too?

Re: But what about the big boy who started the little and often update fad?

I assume they refuse to have anything to do with that.

Thieves… Nasty little thieves, they stole our precious!

Re: I don't geddit.

It's not abuse. They do whatever they want with their website. They make the rules, and can change them whenever they want. There is no way to force a website to host something it does not want. Again, the only way to have a website exactly the way you want is to do it yourself.

Re: What's to criticize with Apple forbidding to sell that information?

What guarantees do you have they won't do it all the same?

Re: why Microsoft thought it would make sense on a desktop

Microsoft had zero developers for its mobile phones. No developers means no apps, means no users, means no developers, etc. Putting TIFKAM on desktop was a way to bootstrap development on mobile, by getting the countless developers for desktop Windows interested.

Re: Breakthroughs

No innovation on original iPhone.

I also had a smartphone before the iPhone (a Palm). And let me tell you, the UI of the iPhone was heads and shoulders above it. It's easy to forget now that all phones are like that, but there really was nothing comparable at the time.

In particular, I don't think any other phone had swiping and pinch to zoom, which were a game changer for surfing the web using a small screen.

Re: Driving test?

The reason tests for computers are more strict is that computers cannot be expected to have common sense.

E.g if the whole road has disappeared due to a landslide, the human is expected to stop; no need to test the situation. But you need to check what the computer will do.