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What about us poor shmucks who live in the Seattle area?

I know you say wind, but a wind farm near Goldendale, in Klickitat County transmits electricity to almost 10,000 customers in central California. Such waste, that energy can be used in Washington. Then there are probably NIMBYs in Seattle like the ones in Cape Cod, like Ted Kennedy, who oppose wind farms in Puget Sound. Right across the state line Oregon is good for solar power.

Falcon

Let's look at the record of Barry Diller companies.

• Home Shopping Network. Infomercial channel. Did OK.
• Ticketmaster Bought up competitors. Achieved near-monopoly. Raised prices. Did very well.
• Expedia Travel agency. Leader in field.
• Lending Tree Mortgage loans. Sold off after losses.
• Interval International Time-share condos. Sold off from IAC in 2008.
• Ask.com Search engine. Market share near zero.
• Rushmoredrive.com Niche search engine for black people. Ceased operations a few weeks ago.

So you can see where Diller is coming from. His ad-based businesses have been disasters, while his transaction-charge businesses have done well. (Lending Tree had some bad years because they speculated in mortgages, instead of just brokering them.)

According to this article here, iPS cells can now be created from blood, does that mean that men are now obsolete?

Crunchpad, crunchpad, crunchpad!

Personally, I love how I can spend all day streaming radio over the iPhone, and that's fine. But the moment I buy an album, I have to find a wi-fi hotspot to actually download it.

Whoever was running AT&T simply had no idea how much bandwidth "unlimited bandwidth" can really suck up. They clearly lacked vision as to what a tiny internet-enabled programmable device that wasn't terrible could become. I'm guessing they based their bandwidth predictions around the LG 3G phones that they offered at the time, with their terrible, limited video and music services.

And they're still in the wrong business. Metered audio, metered texting, and unlimited digital bits as an afterthought? They're selling the wrong thing.

It's a good thing these guys can't do any more damage.

http://www.bizjournals.com/twincities/stories/2009/02/16/daily23.html 4th or 5th result when I searched for 'FirePond'

"For me, Microsoft is so last century. They are not the problem," Varney said at a June 19 panel discussion sponsored by the American Antitrust Institute. The U.S. economy will "continually see a problem -- potentially with Google" because it already "has acquired a monopoly in Internet online advertising," she said. link

So, a 90% market share is a non-issue while 76% market share is a big problem. Clicking on another website is a shedload easier than installing a different operating system (especially when most retailers will make you pay for Windows even if you don't want it). Not to mention the contrast of how each company has dealt with competitors since reaching a commanding share of their respective domains.

Google does need to be watched, but saying that Microsoft is a non-issue is unacceptable in my book. They will "f'ing kill Google" (or any other tech company) if they get the chance, and getting an opponent into antitrust issues while they run free is exactly the opportunity they would want.

And Monsanto sold the swine business in 2007. http://stlouis.bizjournals.com/stlouis/stories/2007/09/24/daily40.html

The 40 billion Yuan cost is not for one reactor; it is for two of the same kind.

OK, looks like I got that wrong, at least for this press release. But those costs do not seem to be in line with what U.S. nuclear plant developers expect to pay.

For example, this Wall Street Journal article (follow first link for full text) indicates that FPL Groups expects new AP1000's at its Turkey Point plant in Florida to cost $6-$9 billion each, and Georgia Power Co. expects a 45.7% stake in two similar reactors (i.e., 90% of one reactor) to cost $6.4 billion. (The first two reactors at Georgia Power's plant cost nearly $4.5 billion each 20 years ago, over 10 times the $330 million per plant originally estimated.)

So I'd be pretty skeptical of anyone who claims they can deliver nuclear power for less than $0.06-$0.10 per kWh. On the other hand, lots of wind power is being delivered at those costs or lower.

Texas passed a law in 1999 requiring 2 GW of wind power by 2009, but they keep exceeding their goal. By 2007 they had around 2.7 GW of wind capacity. Then they added another 1.6 GW in 2007, and another 2.7 GW in 2008, bringing the total to around 7 GW. This is driven hardly at all by the Texas requirements, a little bit by the federal tax incentives (around $0.01/kWh), and mostly by the fact that Texas has great wind sites and wind power is now competitive with other sources of electricity.

The industry has been growing by 30-40% per year worldwide, and that kind of growth has a way of sneaking up on you.

Bubbles burst.

I have been wondering idly if we will look back on "computing in the cloud"- Web 2.0 - and all the other buzz words you can think of - simply as relics of the recession.

That means the employees are still with AIG.
Except they're not. At least some of them. link

"11 of those who received "retention" bonuses, which topped $1 million each, no longer work at AIG. One such person received a $4.6 million bonus."

I am not sure that your 'facts' are really facts!!!

> On top of my point, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may have been encouraged to lend to lower credit families, but the crisis would have happened even if they didn't exist because the other unregulated institutions went about it with much more gusto.

This is a big IF. It is not a fact! The fact is that F/F lowered their credit requirement so much that enables others to pursue the aggressive lending practice.

> Fannie and Freddie's subprime loans were shown to be on the more respectable end as opposed to the other banks who pushed their mortgage brokers to get loans no matter what the risk.

This is another myth but not fact.

> The only thing Fannie and Freddie really shows is that the government endorsed the practice, but the fat cats of Wall Street made Fannie and Freddie's bad loans look likes child's play.

Please update your information. Stop being brainwashed by media. The bailout for F/F will be 400b. It is a big mess larger than all the money to C, BAC, AIG, ... combined. http://sanantonio.bizjournals.com/sanantonio/stories/2009/02/16/daily26.html

Maybe you haven't been paying attention. For the past four months, all the CEOs of all the banks have been singing the praises of communism. They were so convincing, in fact, that the government handed them $350 billion with no strings attached (which they promptly spent on themselves, bonuses for their lackeys, and on buying distressed companies).

Not every CEO has been whining to the Feds:

While government leaders were well-intentioned in setting up the Troubled Asset Relief Program, it's a "lousy program," U.S. Bancorp CEO Richard Davis said at a business leaders forum Tuesday.

U.S. Bank was told, not asked, to participate in the program, which is a Darwinian attempt to "synthesize" weaker banks into stronger banks through consolidation, Davis said at the forum, held at Thrivent Financial for Lutherans in Minneapolis.

Intel announced today that it was investing $7bln to build new manufacturing facilities in the US to manufacture these chips.

The new facilities will be built at existing manufacturing plants in New Mexico, Oregon, and Arizona. Intel is estimating 7,000 new jobs will be created. BizJournals.com

I found this through a quick google search. It seems Nexicon is the company behind YouTube's video identification software, and that it used to be known as Cyco.net, an online seller of cigarettes. After acquiring two small IT companies it had a change of heart, and decided to change its business model from selling tobacco online to providing the content industry with copyright infringement solutions. It makes perfect sense.

Article about the renaming to Nexicon
Article about their work with Youtube

It seems that no company has been mismanaged or made bad decisions in the past year - any lack of performance is instantly blamed on the "credit freeze"

Problem is, there is no credit freeze.

or perhaps the economic situation isn't hitting everyone equally

Exactly. Gun sales are up. Walmart is doing well. There are industries and business that are thriving. We're just going through a natural cut-the-fat period.

To me, unemployment and inflation are the better indicators of the economic environment. Notice how gas skyrocketed, and that affected the prices of, well, everything. But now that gas is $1.50 a gallon again, the reporting has turned the the auto-industry bailouts because that's where the doom-and-gloom still is. Recessions are as much public perception as they are fact. Just look at the 2001/2002 downturn.

Idle won't go away, and it won't become less important. The owners of Slashdot are "aggressively pursuing [their] plans" for the site, and a few dissatisfied comments won't override that; all that will matter are page views and ad dollars.

Slashdot is owned by SourceForge, Inc (formerly VA Linux), an Internet media company that owns several sites like Linux.com, Freshmeat, and Thinkgeek. It's a publicly traded company with a CEO, SEC filings, and NASDAQ ticker symbol. SourceForge doesn't seem like a heartless corporation to me, they've done a lot of great things for the open source community and have generally stuck to their values, but as a public company they need to satisfy their investors (as seen in a recent management change).

1. Company builds an interesting product.
2. The investors do everything they can to protect their IP.
3. Things start to go horribly wrong.
4. The firms assets are sold.
5. The backups of the original software get recycled. Welcome to silicon heaven!

But isn't this just a contrived "media" event?

This reminds me of the College Basketball Tournement that is supposed to bring corporations to their knees as the final four basket ball games are being played - it never happens, yet every year broadcasters announce the impending Billion Dollar plus hit to our economy due to the college basketball season championship.

Stories from 2003 and 2007

What a load of rubbish...

But isn't this just a contrived "media" event?

This reminds me of the College Basketball Tournement that is supposed to bring corporations to their knees as the final four basket ball games are being played - it never happens, yet every year broadcasters announce the impending Billion Dollar plus hit to our economy due to the college basketball season championship.

Stories from 2003 and 2007

What a load of rubbish...

If the government bails out the music industry I'll be pissed.

Pissed doesn't even begin to describe how bad things will be in America if the music industry was 'bailed out'.

More than 2/3 of voters in many polls are not in favor of helping out part of the transportation infrastructure. Here's and example of common trends in results.

That's transportation, plus related and support business.

The music industry is Entertainment. there is no way anyone can rationalize to me why I 'NEED' the entertainment industry.

Cars, even shitty American ones, with the 3+ million workforce potential loss, I can at least understand. I'm not in favor of bailing them out though.

Entertainment? It was the first thing stricken from my budget when Wall street got caught with their pants around their ankles in Sep08.

OOPS I meant to say RELATED news :)

I'll add a little background here: In NZ, we are burdened by a regressive monopoly structure which has severely hampered our connectivity, both in country and internationally.

Telecom NZ was formerly a subsidiary of NZ Post and thereby wholly owned and controlled by the government. The New Zealand economy went into a tailspin beginning in the 1970s, hit with the oil shock and the diminution of trade with its largest overseas market, the UK, who had just entered the European Common Market. In response, during the 1980s and 90s the governments, first Labour and then National, went on a privatization binge (see Rogernomics) and sold off infrastructure right and left in an effort to encourage capital investment. Power generation and transmission, rail lines and rolling stock, and the telephone network were peeled off and their new corporate structures were remarkably free of constraints or oversight from the former owners.

As a result of this monopoly position, Telecom has had two decades in which to milk the cash cow of assets it was more or less gifted from the public domain, and has been loath to increase capacity any more than absolutely necessary. The latest government, after reviewing the pathetic state of everything from landline and mobile pricing to broadband uptake and service levels, finally reinstituted regulation of Telecom and forced a split of the company into wholesale, retail and services divisions. In addition, it has mandated local loop unbundling for competitive DSL providers. Much of this is too little, too late, however, and the elephant in the room has been unacknowledged.

New Zealand has only one transoceanic fiber link to the rest of the world, and its operator, the Southern Cross Cable Network, is 50 percent owned by Telecom. The rates for international traffic on the SCCN reflect its monopoly status and appear to be governed by the doctrine of artificial scarcity. As a result, NZ ISPs have to be ultra stingy with bandwidth, forcing onerous data caps on business and retail customers and enforcing a two-tier pricing model on local and international traffic. Of course, in a nation with a land mass and population similar to the state of Colorado and an urgent need to be connected to global markets, this is criminally insane. But until competition enters the picture or the government grows some balls, we're stuffed.

How about the waiting list for maternity wards? Last I checked it was over 9 months...

That's a great headline, but in reality, it was in one city during a population explosion due to booming economy.

I've had 2 kids in the last couple years in Vancouver, we had no issue whatsoever getting access to a delivery room nor pre or post care in either case. The overloaded maternity wards was a temporary and localized problem due to a rash of babies being born at once, that could have just as easily happened in the states, and it has.

Indeed...

"The UC Davis Medical Center declared an internal state of emergency Wednesday morning and began turning away all but the most seriously ill and injured patients from the trauma center and emergency room because the hospital is completely full.

Elective surgeries are being postponed to free up operating rooms for patients with life-threatening conditions.

UC Davis -- and other local hospitals -- have been operating close to capacity for much of the year. The rapidly growing population in the Sacramento region, a growing number of uninsured patients who crowd emergency rooms because they cannot get care anywhere else, and a critical shortage of nursing staff are causing the strain. "

http://sacramento.bizjournals.com/sacramento/stories/2003/03/17/daily25.html

Sacramento? Where is that again? Oh... right.

These headline grabbing anecdotes however aren't representative of either system.

I've never seen anyone die in the street because he didn't get his surgery. Get real.

Probably, because "didn't get his surgery" can't be listed as a cause of death on a coroners report.

But this comes pretty close:

"A paraplegic man wearing a soiled hospital gown and a broken colostomy bag was found crawling in a gutter in skid row in Los Angeles on Thursday after allegedly being dumped in the street by a Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center van, police said."

http://blogs.usatoday.com/ondeadline/2007/02/la_hospital_all.html

Or this:

In Baltimore, Maryland, on July 27, 1998, a 70-year-old man accompanied his daughter to the hospital with a sick child. When they arrived, the man told his daughter he didn't feel well and would wait outside the hospital. Passersby noticed something was wrong and called security. The security officer's log stated: "911 notified intoxicated male ... ER notified (refused)" An emergency medical technician with a private ambulance leaving the hospital initiated CPR while the officer contacted the emergency department for assistance. The emergency department again refused assistance. Another ambulance arrived and transported the man to the ER. About one-half hour after the man was first seen lying in the grass, he was pronounced dead of cardiac arrhythmia.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/nov2001/dump-n07.shtml

or this:

"In Chicago, Illinois, a 19-year-old patient came to the ER of Provident Hospital of Cook County with symptoms of threatened miscarriage. The hospital sought HMO approval, which was denied. The young woman was not given an exam or treatment. Because of the delay, she began to deliver a nonviable fetus as she waited for a taxi to take her to another hospital."

again from:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/nov2001/dump-n07.shtml

or:

"In 2006, criminal charges were filed against Kaiser Permanente after one of its hospitals was caught on tape dumping a 63 year old women on the street, wearing nothing but a hospital gown, and still very ill."

http://ezinearticles.com/?Crack-Down-on-Patient-Dumping&id=100321

"While we can be quick to claim hot topics as 'DRM' or 'Poor Economy' for the cause, it's more likely the simple fact that the difference between BluRay and DVD is negligible. "

You are wrong, and I say that with no qualifiers.

DVD sales have been down for what, 3 years running (including year to date)? DVD sales are decreasing faster than BD sales are increasing. Video games surpassed the lucky-to-be-flat DVD sales. Home video overall is still down. These are all "simple facts".

BD costing significantly more than DVDs, which are losing ground overall, and you want to blame something that is for the most part, irrelevant? Lest we forget, during the same period after the release of DVD, people were saying the same thing wrt. DVD vs. VHS. The difference in content and visual/audio quality between VHS and DVD is quite large, though not all true at first. Yet we saw the same pattern of lackluster DVD vs. VHS sales. If that much of a clear difference in quality - even w/o spending more on TVs and receivers to "get the most out of it" - saw the same pattern, then how the hell is an alleged "minor" bump in quality going to be the main cause or even a significant one? BD is more expensive than DVD, just as DVD was more expensive than VHS. Players were not cheap, and the movies were significantly higher priced.

DVDs had very distinct advantages in that it was going to get pull out and stuck in your player, permanently ruined - an advantage anyone who had VHS could easily appreciate and understand. Yet it took several years for DVD to "take off".

It is certainly true that there was, and is a lot of hype around "the new format", and that it is exceedingly rare that the reality lives up to the hype. But if you look at what people in the know have been saying, you'll see that this year is in line with what reasonable people have been expecting, At current rates, the BD sales will top over 1.3 billion dollars this year. [sarcasm] Year, that's a loss for a more expensive purchase, sure. [/sarcasm] By the end of the year BD sales will approach 50 million discs this year. Do DVD sales outshine that? Hell yes. DVD is established and has been around for many years.

We also have the hype of "the end of the war" with the death of HD-DVD. People with no knowledge claimed it would be a huge win for BD, and eventually it will be. But anyone with sense and reason knew it wouldn't be right away. That said, on big "recent" titles, BD sales account for 1 little more than 1 in 20, and in some cases even one in ten sales of that movie. On essentially re-releases to BD, the sales share for BD has reached 2 out of 3. Overall almost one in ten movie disc purchases are BD. The format wars didn't end until this year. That means in less than one year after the "end of HD-DVD vs BD", BD has hit almost one in 10 (8%) of video disc sales. Note these are dollar amounts, for both DVD vs. VHS and BD vs. DVD.

Consider these:
http://sanjose.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2002/01/07/daily34.html and http://www.ce.org/Press/CEA_Pubs/929.asp

Note that public availability of movies on DVD began in 1997 (1996 in Japan), and this was after the digital disc format wars ended. It took almost 5 years for DVD sales to surpass VHS sales. And that was considered "a meteoric rise" at the time. At the current growth rates, BD will outsell DVD in less time than it took DVD to overtake VHS. And VHS is still available, more than 10 years after the release of DVD video. After 2 years of public availability of DVD-Video, it was predicted by market analysts that it would be 5 more years before DVD overtook VHS. It took "only" 3 more years. Today the analysts are predicting 4 years for BD to outsell DVD. So the analysts are more optimistic this time around.

I should also note that DVD rentals lagged behind sales, only overtaking VHS rentals in late 2003 - six years into DVD-Video.

In most cases, its a LACK of stronger regulation that is the problem! Many cities would love 2 cable companies and probably give them incentives!

Really? Like this case, where Verizon wanted to provide FiOS, but the city wouldn't let them? What an incentive!!

I don't think you understand the concept of an ISP franchise. In a nutshell, it's when a city says "Company X is giving us $XX million, in exchange for being the sole ISP in the city, provided they sell at least Y mbit/s with at least a certain level of availability." Yes, most governments are really that stupid.

How can you even get more strict than that?

The error I often see is that some think government is a form of corporation; it can not have any monopoly because it represents all citizens

Sigh. The error I see is that some don't know WTF they're talking about. From the dictionary:

Main Entry: monopoly
Pronunciation: \m-nä-p(-)l\
Function: noun
1 : exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action
2 : exclusive possession or control
3 : a commodity controlled by one party
4 : one that has a monopoly

Any entity with exclusive control over something has a monopoly on that something. It doesn't matter if it's a government, private citizen, or giant mega-corporation. It has nothing to do with representation.

In my area the local governments created a NGO with a board appointed by the cities it serves and it manages the public lands in regard to communications use by private orgs. This board isn't great; however, it is generally the best thing we can do in our area. Problem is the cable and phone companies are too powerful for our 10 cities and nobody will MOVE IN to compete without massive government welfare (which the existing monopolies initially HAD.) Every legal fight is a loss for us and even if the 10 cities directly used their relatively "vast" funds it quite likely would still loose in the end (they just lobby the state when at risk.)

And you expect to regulate the problem away? What exactly do you plan on telling the ISPs? "Provide us internet service because our law, which doesn't apply to you because you don't do business here, says you have to?"

Instead of expecting somebody else to lose a bunch of money on the deal, why not get your group of ten cities to pay for the infrastructure and provide you with internet service?

Interest rates are no longer the lifeblood of banks. These days fees and other non-interest income account for more than 40 percent of a bank's revenue and contribute about the same percentage to the bottom line.

Source

Again, I already proposed a metric for desirability and economic well-being: housing prices.

Nobody thought you were serious because, well:

• Markets with the biggest drop since peak.
• 68% drop in 1 year in Santa Ana
• California foreclosures at 15-year peak.
• Median price in Valley dives 19% from last year.

Oh? You want to cherry pick your markets? How about these: Merced, CA down 46% from peak. Vallejo, CA down 29%. Salinas, CA down 34%. Modesto, CA down 39.5%. Stockton, CA down 40%. San Francisco down 15%.

To compare a cherry picked market: New York, average price downtown up 10% from last year. Median price in the Village up 63% from last year. Also, NYC Home Prices Outpace Rest of Country as Avg Prices Continue to Rise.

How about you compare the number of businesses leaving the various states. That might be a good idea. Then again, maybe not.

To get some internet company to oppose it, you have to pay it about as much as you have to pay to buy it out, because they know their very existance depends on NN. Are you sure? I am not at all sure that Web 2.0, venture capitalists or anyone else knows what is at risk.

They're monopolies because big companies bribed politicians into giving them monopolies.

Don't be absurd. They've been monopolies since the beginning of time because no one wants multiple sets of wires runnings through their neighborhood, or multiple sets of water pipes, or multiple sets of gas pipes, etc.

The pharmaceutical industry. Virtually no newcomers due to interlocking patent issues.

That's so absurd as to be parody. Exactly which patent stops someone from opening a lab and doing research? Here are two that I found in about five seconds of searching:

New pharma 1
New pharma 2

It is simply not possible to make a "clean room" clone of, say, Windows 2000. [snip ridiculous nonsense] It is far too complicated to make EXACTLY the same systems from scratch.

*cough*ReactOS*cough*

and if anyone who has access to the source code tries to re-implement part of Windows Microsoft will sue them and win easily.

As I pointed out to someone else in this thread, say what you want about Microsoft, but they have rarely, if ever, used lawsuits as weapons (unlike, say, Apple). The ReactOS project has been around over 10 years. I assure you that Microsoft knows about it. If they were going to try and crush the life out of them, they would've done it before now, when they have an XP-level beta release possibly coming out this year.

Also note that the WINE project has also not been crushed out of existence, despite the fact that you typically need to use real Windows DLLs to make it truly functional. See also: CodeWeavers, which makes *MS Office* run under Linux.

Of course, your own example of Samba also kills your argument. Last I checked, Microsoft hasn't sued them out of existence.

At least try and do a little research before posting rants like this.

Remember tho in the US, power companies aren't allowed to be profitable.

really? I had no idea.

Hmmmm.

This?

How about this?

Or this?

Every illegal immigrant may not commit every singly offense against the US, but a large number are committing crimes and offenses and causing problems.

And that doesn't address the various scams they run, like insurance fraud. (also here or here or here).

Man, if that's what they were doing they are screwed, from:

http://portland.bizjournals.com/portland/stories/2003/11/24/daily21.html

"T-Mobile said 20,546 workers at 13 call centers, including one in Salem, were required to perform "preparatory activities" prior to the beginning of their normal shifts. Such activities -- and any other work-related activity beyond 40 hours per week -- must be compensated under the Fair Labor Standards Act, according to an announcement."

T-Mobile lost to the tune of 4.8 Million. Can we say precedence?

Gore, on the other hand, has been even handed in suggesting there is no silver bullet to our energy and climate crises.

Gore is chairman for a good-sized (almost $700 million) investment fund that specialized in green technologies. His interests probably results in somewhat less bias, but he does have horses in this race.

I admit I don't know how regulation works. My understanding is that the power company would forecast demand 5+ years out and come to the PUC with a proposal for new power generation. After haggling there would be a plan, the power company would build the power stations and get a regulated profit and be reimbursed for the investment over many years. There is plenty of incentive to create enough power, and we have development of many different kinds of power.

I don't remember any blackouts from regulated power, aside from natural disasters. All the blackouts I've heard of have been after things were deregulated.

As far as other states, I know in my home state of Colorado rates are under control thanks to regulation. We have had no blackouts despite a quintupling of the population in the time I've been here. A brief search turned up problems in Pennsylvania and Maryland I guess paying double with no price stability sounds OK to you, but I don't see the point. I don't see what is so great about deregulation. It costs more than regulated markets, without a single exception. It has ruinous instability although industry and homeowners need constant access. The only positive thing that can be said about it is the opportunity to make huge profits. I guess as an investor I am in favor of it, but as a consumer and believer in the value of stability for industry I am very much against it.

I admit I don't know how regulation works. My understanding is that the power company would forecast demand 5+ years out and come to the PUC with a proposal for new power generation. After haggling there would be a plan, the power company would build the power stations and get a regulated profit and be reimbursed for the investment over many years. There is plenty of incentive to create enough power, and we have development of many different kinds of power.

I don't remember any blackouts from regulated power, aside from natural disasters. All the blackouts I've heard of have been after things were deregulated.

As far as other states, I know in my home state of Colorado rates are under control thanks to regulation. We have had no blackouts despite a quintupling of the population in the time I've been here. A brief search turned up problems in Pennsylvania and Maryland I guess paying double with no price stability sounds OK to you, but I don't see the point. I don't see what is so great about deregulation. It costs more than regulated markets, without a single exception. It has ruinous instability although industry and homeowners need constant access. The only positive thing that can be said about it is the opportunity to make huge profits. I guess as an investor I am in favor of it, but as a consumer and believer in the value of stability for industry I am very much against it.

Qwest's legal problems predate the NSA's circulating access requests to the telcos in the Fall of 2001.

The insider case that Nacchio, Qwest's CEO, claims he's being punished for, goes back to the dot-com bust when Qwest execs realized they weren't going to hit revenue projections. They started dumping stock and fraudulently shifting revenue to cover up the shortfall. Again, this all happened prior to the NSA asking for data.

The company has a history of engaging in illegal activity. In 2001, they paid an additional $350,000 fine on top of the June, 2000 $1.5 million fine they paid the FCC for slamming users. The slamming complaints started in the 90's.

Nacchio's blowing smoke by playing the role of NSA's victim.

I sure hope Activision isn't stupid enough to mess around with the way Blizzard does things.

If anything, Vivendi (Blizzard's owner) might mess around with Activision.
From a different article:

After the deal closes, Vivendi will then have a 52 percent stake in the new Activision Blizzard.

But that's all a minor point since, as a consumer of both brands, the same concern applies whichever side has ownership.

A different article about it says it is 65-80% done, so they really don't know how far long it is.

"In a statement, Amphion Innovations said it would take in $800,000 from the settlement after costs."

Source:

http://sanantonio.bizjournals.com/triangle/stories/2008/06/09/daily18.html

Just to play devil's advocate... There are plenty of countries that can do just about everything we can, for slave wages. Why not just outsource all of our jobs?

would certainly be more profitable for the wealthy

Whats the point of employing people? What is our responsibility to our communities?

Well ..., quote: "Sprint Nextel loses $505M on lower revenue" (today)

have no idea how much the lack of net neutrality could cost their business.

The Baltimore Business Journal has discovered the story and does a good job of explaining the stakes for small business.

All of these services are unregulated, which means there are no demands on reliability, other than what the marketplace demands.

Small business owners have long memories, at least when it comes to Hillary Clinton and the health care reform plan she developed during her husband's administration.
The plan required all businesses to provide health insurance, but many small companies said they would not be able to afford the coverage. Clinton made few friends when she dismissed that complaint with a curt, "I can't go out and save every undercapitalized entrepreneur in America."
http://www.bizjournals.com/specials/pages/131.html

"Bit's should be free in a perfect world but in the real world it takes effort to organize those
bits and economics is a way to spread the effort around fairly."

"CEO's are a threat to capitalism"

http://sanantonio.bizjournals.com/sanantonio/stories/2008/01/07/editorial1.html

This goes well beyond copyright, piracy is simply a form of class war. Marx would have a field day with the kind of shit he predicted that's now happening in capitalist societies, many top capitalists are quite obviously unfairly and unjustly rewarded because most people don't have a clue about just how IP can be abused to tax the population and stifle innovation.

You should define "fairly", people want in on copyright because of the millions they can bilk from the public, not via skill or merit, but via POPULATION SIZE. Traditional arguments of the "hard worker deserves what he deserves" don't apply to goods that aren't scarce and have infinite scalability, real goods have limits and therefore have limits on how much a company can make, a virutal good has no such limit (witness world of warcraft). Which makes them dangerous because we all know money is a weapon of politics of social control. All economic transactions are political transactions. The more money you have the more political power you have, so any money people deny big corporations is helping at least somewhat to to resist the influence over their lives.

The problem is economic idealogy versus technology, the fact is current capitalist thinking is out-dated for technology that makes ease of replication and production negligable. If someone invented a replicator, entire industries would go bankrupt and be obsoleted overnight and most people in industry would do their damndest to stop the introduction of this technology because it threatened their "rich lifestyle", all of a sudden their skills, education mean nothing and they've been "deskilled". What's good for hte goose is good for the gander.

We've seen it countless times with other professions, and people who weren't effected simply said "tough luck" or "go get retrained", etc.

Piracy is a reaction to corporate control extortion and general criminal behaviour of businesses, the law is a joke, lets face this fact. Copyright and patents have been abused willy nilly to further cement the rich fews control over the population at large, people aren't organized like industries are to pay lobbyists on their behalf, so all they have is civil disobedience and IMHO piracy in these times is more then justified with the nonsense going on in the States, the passing of the DMCA and the illegal war in IRAQ. When the laws are unjust the citizens have every right to reevolt even if they are 'economic' in character, tryin to ban piracy is like trying to ban prohibition, it didn't work. And this time it's capitalist idealogy and thinking that will foist upon people an orwellian society, the orwellian society is coming from the business sector in an act of protectionism against a technology that enables socialism to be possible with certain products. (i.e. pirating doesn't hurt anyone, the games industry still makes billions), if you look at what people are paid, they aren't paid according to "what they are worth" they are paid according to where the money is flowing right now(tm). And the whole idea of a 'hard days work' is a shame, it's all about how much money and capital you can take in, it's not about merit or any such hogwash, if we reduce the population size, the profits would also decrease according to the # of people. The fact that people can get rich is an artifact of population size rather then 'merit'. There's this interplay that current people refuse to recognize.

The truth is IP advocates are like the horse & buggy of the 21st century, when cars were introduced they had to find another way. The same *should* ideally go for copyright, the only thing scarce in IP industr

Sometimes they do .. for example the RIMM versus a patent holding company called NTP:

http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/03/technology/rimm_ntp/

Other situations companies settle such as this one where a company claimed it owned rights to JPEG

http://www.bizjournals.com/austin/stories/2005/02/21/daily14.html

So yeah, patent trolling can be quite lucrative from a financial standpoint .. but I dunno what it does to the conscience.