washingtonpost.com · Domains

AOL has a more fundamental problem - churn by Animats · 2002-08-05 04:50 · Score: 2 · on Pop-Up Ads Begin To Face Serious Opposition

AOL's problem is that only new users sign up for AOL, and in time, they leave for better providers. With the market saturated, the supply of new suckers, er, users, is small. AOL thus can't grow. And their whole culture, especially their earnings estimates, was built on growth.

Pop-up ads seem to have been part of AOL's desperate, and possibly criminal, attempt to inflate earnings. AOL ran into an "ad inventory problem" - there wasn't enough space for banner ads on the main pages. Pop-ups allowed them to inflate their ad space.

lost the link? by Deven · 2002-08-05 03:34 · Score: 2 · on Borrowing ROMs

Mr. Olman was speaking in favor of the Sonny Bono Public Domain Pillage Act (also known as the "Copyright Term Extension Act"). He bewailed the loss of revenues such Communists and anarchists as the Boy Scouts cost the poor, abused Content Cartel every year. (Blatant plug: The Post published my reply. Like a schlub, I've lost the actual WashPost link.)

I guess you didn't try hard to find it... the WashPost link was right there on the page you did link to!

Re:well... by Frobnicator · 2002-08-02 07:48 · Score: 3, Insightful · on Do You Know Where You Live?

This is GOVERNMENT. It won't happen.

Almost every time political boundaries need to be altered (for representatives), these people don't move the border around a few houses, they rewrite the entire map to best suit their own agenda. Legislative Redistricting causes this problem (known as Gerrymandering) in elections again and again and again ALL OVER THE USA.

You are right about no rational people wanting it. There are many rational people who have offered ways to restructure boundaries that offer the biggest human benefit and lowest government cost. These ideal solutions segment the groups by physical boundaries and population density. But government is not a rational entity.

There are countless smart was to divide it up. Clusters of people should rationally be served by the same set of government. People between clusters should be separated by distance to the clusters and other boundaries (hills, rivers, roads). In dense population areas, map the location of a current road, or a side of the road, as the boundary -- not the line between where two rivers meet and where another river enters a lake bed.

And of course after two counties or states go to court fighting it out -- costing millions of taxpayer dollers -- They will put out big press releases saying either "We saved tax money by moving these buildings outside of our county!" or "We increased tax revenue without increasing taxes!", overlooking the fact that they wasted millions in the process.

frob.

It's Mugabe's fault.... by Yunzil · 2002-08-02 04:23 · Score: 2 · on Starving Nation Turns Down Bioengineered Corn

In addition the the article the Post also has an editorial today which explains how President Mugabe has run the country into the ground, including the agricultural industry.

Re:Slashdot misses the point by electroniceric · 2002-08-01 14:12 · Score: 2 · on Starving Nation Turns Down Bioengineered Corn

Excellent post, way to put it in perspective.

However,

I take issue with this point:

The United States is the one making a very large donation to a poor company for almost no (if any) self-benifit, yet it is painted as the bad guy for not agreeing to mill the corn as well!

Let's look at the actual cost of this corn.
The article quotes a ship arrive each day for 2 days with 10000 metric tons of corn, each costing $95. Let's say the US does this for a full year (which seems like the outside limit to me). This would cost $347 million, a trivial sum of money for this country.

I won't bother with the usual comparison to the US gov't national budget. Instead, let's compare that to the amount of money a private investment corporation, JP Morgan, was willing to put into Enron as of November last year: $1 billion. See this article. This after Enron revealed that it was in very poor financial shape as a result of extensive book-cooking for years. From this point of view, $350m is bargain basement.

What we gain:
We will have fed 12 million starving people at a time when many peple in the world thinks the US is full of greedy bastards.
Furthermore, we will have shown Europe, and other large trading partners that we are willing to go against the demands of our corporations sometimes, also at a time when many people inside and outside the US have doubts about the trustworthiness of those corporations.

As for your point that the Europeans are also involved here because they are placing restrictions on imported foodstuffs, that's a fair point. For African countries, the burden of meeting US and European food importation standard is a very heavy one. Europe is full of double-talk on this issue - if they wanted to help, they could indeed make some concessions here.

Of course we could do an end run around all of this by formally granting Zimbabwe permanent indemnity from IP claims by Monsanto (or at least until the average standard of living is something comparable to the 1st world). Hell, if Monsanto was really good faith about all this, it could grant the indemnity itself. Talk about a publicity steal for Monsanto - for the price of a tiny bit money they'd be hard pressed to collect anyway, they get to claim that their GE seeds "helped save 12 million Zimbabweans from starving".