sudomal

They also own IMDb... a slight annoyance for me because it's integrated with Amazon's streaming service rather than being a neutral platform for movies.

It'll be a similar reason for Spotify's [former?] monthly limits.

Then why is Luxembourg such a magnet? It's not just Amazon, companies that exclusively cater for the UK market moved their base there.

Different retailers target different sectors of the market and those sectors have varying levels of profit and growth. To me, Amazon seems to be aiming at the lower end, i.e. they focus on price rather than ethics, so they experience high growth in sales and relatively low profits.

I don't think everyone should copy them. It's like telling Apple to copy Acer or Samsung.

I'm sure I saw a documentary a few years back where an aeroplane engine manufacturer had a control centre. The sole purpose of this place was to track minute engine attributes in real time, and alert their clients of future maintenance. Is that just on the latest planes?

I'm imagining a future where most cameras have Street View style blurring in their hardware. Where vintage digital cameras are sought after and illicit manufacturers produce unauthorised copies with the feature disabled.

The player does not need to pay, but at the same time is subjected to game theory driven psychological trickery that's been developed over decades. Think of it like gambling, but more subtle, yet gambling is heavily regulated.

It sounds like an ideal CyanogenMOD candidate. A phone from an iconic manufacturer that's already running Android and needs to be opened up a bit.

I suspect that legalisation of weed is going to be a blip in history and they'll heavily tax it to phase it out. It just doesn't make sense to encourage people to breathe in smoke.

One thing that stuck me about Google Music is its lack of built-in support for last.fm. Was kind of hoping this had it.

Yep. The disadvantage of consolidation in that industry is these big providers have a conflict of interest. In an ideal world, platform providers would be broken up and prevented from selling their own content. That goes for Google too.

I can fully appreciate this. Abstraction takes the fun (or spark) out of programming, all we really do these days as developers is glue framework components together.

Agreed. As you get older too, you start to appreciate how much time is burned by working. It's good to work, just it shouldn't dominate your waking life.

One benefit of this is Nokia could potentially acquire the successful ventures - once Microsoft is out of the picture and they're allowed to return to the smartphone business.