Government regulation is why most of the U.S. has a single cable company and a single phone company as their only choices for Internet service. Municipal governments have granted local cable and phone monopolies. Because of this artificial duopoly, government-enforced net neutrality is needed.
No; most of the US has a single cable and phone company because wire infrastructure is insanely expensive to install and maintain. The municipal monopoly deals say things like "if you service the center of town, you also have to service every house in the far edges". Getting rid of those monopolies would mean one or (in large cities) maybe two cable companies serving rich, densely populated regions, and zero companies servicing the rest.
Don't believe me? Surely some libertarian utopia in Texas or New Hampshire has gotten rid of cable monopolies; show me how great their cable and phone options are.
I'll start by pointing out that much of Europe has very strict government regulation on telecommunications. Government mandated monopolies where the monopolist is also mandated to sell access to their lines to other companies. As a result, people there tend to get many corporations competing for their money. A free market caused by strong and sane regulation, rather than the US's weak or nonexistent regulation.
You do realize that in the past 3 years, the percentage of failed mortgages for middle-income and upper-income folks is very similar to low-income folks, right? Funny thing, someone making $30K getting a $50K house is similar to someone making $100K buying a $250K house, or making $300K buying a multi-million house.
Actually, there is one bright spot. A few companies specialize in mortgages to illegal immigrants. And illegal immigrants have low foreclosure rates.
You know how much lobbying money the banks spend, and yet you believe that the banks would have let such a theoretical law be passed? Wow.
The federal government passed laws which prevented banks from discriminating against low-income people if they could pay the loan amount, but the approval terms were set by the banks. The banks found that they made more money in the short term if they approved bad mortgages and collected those fees. And they know that they'll be held blameless because somehow people believe the banks when they say "it wasn't me, man, it was the government". The perfect scam.
And how is the bank going to make a profit when the loan is underwater? The best that the bank can do in that situation is to recover the loan principle. They can't keep the extra beyond that.
The bank originates the loans and collects fees from the home buyer, then sells the mortgages as mortgage-backed securities and collects fees from the securities buyers. Thus: profit without risk. Well, the risk is that people might start distrusting the banks, but that seems to be solvable by the CEO smiling and saying "hey, trust me. It wasn't my fault!"
If Google wanted to make it easy, they'd distribute a SecurID like local app to disgorge one time passwords when poked with your local passphrase.
Yeah, they could call it something like Google Authenticator. Like any local app or hardware token it's really something you know (the seed in the app), but it is hard enough to get the seed that it is effectively something you have.
I AM NEVER GIVING YOU MY CELLPHONE NUMBER, I DON'T AND NEVER WILL HAVE ONE, I DESPISE THEM. TAKE THE HINT GOOGLE.
I swear if this leads to more messages about this, I am just switching e-mail services. My password is longer than the brain cells of most people who use Gmail, it ain't getting brute forced any time soon.
You despise Google but use their email? You seem to be a very confused person...
Why do you think the length of your password matters? Do you seriously think people are brute-forcing gmail passwords?
Google wants phone numbers for exactly one reason: so that when, against all odds, the gmail account of a self-proclaimed genius is hacked, google can restore the account to their control. Otherwise, after posting screeds about the Evil Google trying to steal their phone number, this theoretical mental midget posts rants about how Google let their account be hacked but somehow cannot determine who is the owner and who is the hacker when a password reset is requested. Google is screwed in the media whatever happens, but you should be glad they err on the side of giving people a reasonably secure channel to recover their account even if they determinedly avoid such sanity.
The internet would have happened with or without his involvement. Giving a politician any kind of credit is kind of ridiculous, IMO.
Let me guess, you were not involved in networking in the late 80s and early 90s.
At the time, the online world consisted of a bunch of walled gardens (AOL, Compuserve, The Source, etc). You bought a subscription to one, and then you could only see content from that one. You could only send mail to other subscribers of that same service. A few gateways between them started to pop up, but all communication was at the whim of the service. THAT is what the internet would have looked like without the government opening up the academic network to anyone. Over time the Free Market selected the internet over those walled gardens, but without the government creating the internet for research (so it was open and not commercially owned), then opening it when demand for online services went from "a very few geeks" to "a number of people", the Free Market would have selected a hegemony of walled gardens.
It's easy to say with hindsight "the internet would have happened", but it was not at all obvious at the time. AOL was much more user-friendly than the Internet, and it had more content, and like Facebook it was where all of your friends were.
By the usual "tax breaks for small business" definition, landowners of the time (often with a few slaves) count as small businesses. Thus, yes, most of the Founding Fathers were private corporations, and therefore...
Yes, this is very true. However, these tend to be the exception and not the rule.
I hear this a lot, but I'm not sure it's at all true.
I've worked with government projects and private projects. I'm not at all sure that the private ones succeeded better than the government ones. For every government "technology refresh" which wastes millions of dollars, I'll raise you dozens of corporate upgrades which ship "whatever the IT director has on his desk" from crony suppliers without any oversight. Failed government projects, like failed private projects, get defunded and closed, while successful ones continue.
And the government successes are truly amazing. While I might prefer better train infrastructure, the US interstate system is an amazing boon to all businesses. My water supply is healthy (safer than bottled water), and I don't worry about a company skimping on the quality to improve their profit by a few percent. Social Security, for all of its warts, is insanely better than what we had before ("thanks for years of work, grandpa, but you're going to starve now").
But they can't help but wonder how many of these people would still require food stamps if they sold their car.
This is kind of like the recent "how can they be poor if they have refrigerators and TVs?!?" nonsense. If you don't have a car, you pay for busses (if your area has them). If you don't have a fridge, then you cannot save leftovers and must buy fresh every day (using a car to get to the store). If you don't have a TV and cable, you pay for entertainment some other way (a movie for a family of four is a large chunk of a monthly cable bill). And if someone lost their job a year ago, why would they sell their new reliable car and buy an old unreliable one which will need repairs?
The monitoring portion should be on platforms near the servers, not on your own device (mobile or desktop). Plus something to monitor the monitor, located farther away, preferably at another site. There are no good monitoring packages IMO, but many reasonable and usable ones. All of them should be as scriptable as you need.
You need one device on your person to receive alerts; a cell phone with SMS is good. My current job requires two devices on different networks, but that may be overkill for your situation. Don't do scripting here! All of the scripting should be on the monitoring server. If you're in an area where your cell phone doesn't work, you want to be able to see the alerts elsewhere. (When I'm in another country, I get a sim card for that country and forward alerts there, for example).
You then need something which can connect remotely so you can fix the problem. This could be the same as your alerting device, or it could be a tablet or laptop you keep in the car.
But the issue is not viewing the content; the issue is forcing someone else (Twitter) to give you their copy without a warrant. To continue the analogy, this is letting the police look through your neighbor's photos to find all of the ones they took of your front yard, when your neighbor doesn't want to.
Doesn't surprise me at all. Google is phenomenal at the backend stuff (the OS, their services, etc). User experience stuff, not so much. Kinda the anti-Apple.
A cell phone (or WiFi or BT) is a radio with locked-down frequencies, protocols, and signalling metadata. A cell phone is to a radio, as a tablet is to a computer. Some ham folks still use generic two-way radios, and commercial RF gear is very nice, but 95% of people just want a phone where they can press a few buttons and talk to their grandmother.
my company still won't approve any iPhones or iPads for corporate use because of the weak security features (so the IT guys say), Apple really doesn't 't give a crap about businesses and hence Blackberry stays in business....
Since this was true three years ago, the good news is that your IT folks may only be about three years out of date with technology, thus placing them in the top 20% of corporate IT folks. Hey, I like to be optimistic!
US regulators are pretty light on the fines, so might end up being cheaper and more productive to ignore and pay the fine.
I believe that the fines for showing Janet Jackson's nipple during the Super Bowl were many times worse than the fines for dumping toxic waste into a river for a decade. As always, we Americans have our priorities straight!:-(
Absolutely. As always, the Free Market provides. There are people who make a very good living being expert witnesses in US court, testifying to prove whatever their client's point is.
So you've discovered that when you buy a device from a manufacturer/carrier that is known for not updating their firmware, your firmware is not updated. Whose fault is this?
That was a big part of it, sure, as well as the infighting between the republican congress and democratic president. And a large part of the current deficits are due to income tax losses from massive unemployment, but I figure that if people are going to blame Obama for the deficit now, then we have to thank Clinton for the deficit in 2000. Or we can realize that the deficits under both presidents were greatly affected by external factors.
The deficit under GWBush, on the other hand, should have decreased in 2003-2006 as the economy heated up with the real estate bubble. Since it increased, he gets to own some of that.
To get back on topic: it looks like the Game of Thrones set designers tried to make the head not obviously Bush's. Since nobody noticed until the commentary track came out, I've gotta go with "people are whiners". If people took half the time they spent being offended by little stuff and spent it cleaning up the litter in their neighborhood (yes, even if you weren't the one to litter; see "whiner") then the world would be a bit better tomorrow than it was yesterday. And that's a goal I think we all want.
Well, things were going pretty well for last six years of Clinton and the first six of GWBush.
Absolutely true, as long as you ignore the deficit going from effectively zero at the end of Clinton to very rapid growth during Bush, and guaranteed to get worse as his phased tax cuts continued. And as long as you pretend that the mortgage problems magically started in 2007 and were not a simmering but ignored issue for a decade. And if you ignore that real income for the lower 2/3rds of people was flat or decreased during that time, And if you ignore lots of other warning signs that "things are breaking and will be easy to fix now, but really hard later." Now it's later.
Pretending that things were good for Bush's first six years is a wonderful way of blaming the other guys, but does require lots of selective editing. Not that the other guys did all that well, but lots of indicators went into the red during 2001-2006.
No, I said that Microsoft needs to over-deliver and under-price compared to other high-end tablets. Unless they either cost less than established tablets or provide more functionality at the same cost, they will fail. And since these tablets sound like they'll be coming out in Q4, they will need to compete with the iPad which comes out in Q1 2013.
Besides, an Apple iPhone 4S is the same price as a Galaxy SIII. iPads are priced similarly to other high-end tablets. Pricing out a Windows laptop with the same features as a MacBook Pro results in about the same price. Yes, Apple doesn't compete with the bargain-basement, but calling them over-priced is generally based on emotion rather than facts.
I really hope that Microsoft does well with these tablets, because competition pushes everyone to improve. But MS's track record on devices is not good. I expect the worst but hope to be proven wrong.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
I don't think that that is Microsoft's intended strategy, though I agree that that has sometimes been the result. Microsoft has some amazing talent working from them who produce some amazing things, but somehow (bureaucracy? internal strife? managerial lack of vision? some combination probably) the amazing things rarely appear and we mostly get "good enough" products.
These tablets could be amazing, but until we see how the reality matches the hype we'll have no idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Government regulation is why most of the U.S. has a single cable company and a single phone company as their only choices for Internet service. Municipal governments have granted local cable and phone monopolies. Because of this artificial duopoly, government-enforced net neutrality is needed.
No; most of the US has a single cable and phone company because wire infrastructure is insanely expensive to install and maintain. The municipal monopoly deals say things like "if you service the center of town, you also have to service every house in the far edges". Getting rid of those monopolies would mean one or (in large cities) maybe two cable companies serving rich, densely populated regions, and zero companies servicing the rest.
Don't believe me? Surely some libertarian utopia in Texas or New Hampshire has gotten rid of cable monopolies; show me how great their cable and phone options are.
I'll start by pointing out that much of Europe has very strict government regulation on telecommunications. Government mandated monopolies where the monopolist is also mandated to sell access to their lines to other companies. As a result, people there tend to get many corporations competing for their money. A free market caused by strong and sane regulation, rather than the US's weak or nonexistent regulation.
You do realize that in the past 3 years, the percentage of failed mortgages for middle-income and upper-income folks is very similar to low-income folks, right? Funny thing, someone making $30K getting a $50K house is similar to someone making $100K buying a $250K house, or making $300K buying a multi-million house.
Actually, there is one bright spot. A few companies specialize in mortgages to illegal immigrants. And illegal immigrants have low foreclosure rates.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17597739
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2009/spring/minority-meltdown
You know how much lobbying money the banks spend, and yet you believe that the banks would have let such a theoretical law be passed? Wow.
The federal government passed laws which prevented banks from discriminating against low-income people if they could pay the loan amount, but the approval terms were set by the banks. The banks found that they made more money in the short term if they approved bad mortgages and collected those fees. And they know that they'll be held blameless because somehow people believe the banks when they say "it wasn't me, man, it was the government". The perfect scam.
And how is the bank going to make a profit when the loan is underwater? The best that the bank can do in that situation is to recover the loan principle. They can't keep the extra beyond that.
The bank originates the loans and collects fees from the home buyer, then sells the mortgages as mortgage-backed securities and collects fees from the securities buyers. Thus: profit without risk. Well, the risk is that people might start distrusting the banks, but that seems to be solvable by the CEO smiling and saying "hey, trust me. It wasn't my fault!"
If Google wanted to make it easy, they'd distribute a SecurID like local app to disgorge one time passwords when poked with your local passphrase.
Yeah, they could call it something like Google Authenticator. Like any local app or hardware token it's really something you know (the seed in the app), but it is hard enough to get the seed that it is effectively something you have.
I AM NEVER GIVING YOU MY CELLPHONE NUMBER, I DON'T AND NEVER WILL HAVE ONE, I DESPISE THEM.
TAKE THE HINT GOOGLE.
I swear if this leads to more messages about this, I am just switching e-mail services.
My password is longer than the brain cells of most people who use Gmail, it ain't getting brute forced any time soon.
You despise Google but use their email? You seem to be a very confused person...
Why do you think the length of your password matters? Do you seriously think people are brute-forcing gmail passwords?
Google wants phone numbers for exactly one reason: so that when, against all odds, the gmail account of a self-proclaimed genius is hacked, google can restore the account to their control. Otherwise, after posting screeds about the Evil Google trying to steal their phone number, this theoretical mental midget posts rants about how Google let their account be hacked but somehow cannot determine who is the owner and who is the hacker when a password reset is requested. Google is screwed in the media whatever happens, but you should be glad they err on the side of giving people a reasonably secure channel to recover their account even if they determinedly avoid such sanity.
It started during The First Red Scare (1917–20) inspired by fear of Communism as a recognized political force.
FTFY. Well, the political force was the encouragement and exploitation of that fear. The fear was just a lever.
The internet would have happened with or without his involvement. Giving a politician any kind of credit is kind of ridiculous, IMO.
Let me guess, you were not involved in networking in the late 80s and early 90s.
At the time, the online world consisted of a bunch of walled gardens (AOL, Compuserve, The Source, etc). You bought a subscription to one, and then you could only see content from that one. You could only send mail to other subscribers of that same service. A few gateways between them started to pop up, but all communication was at the whim of the service. THAT is what the internet would have looked like without the government opening up the academic network to anyone. Over time the Free Market selected the internet over those walled gardens, but without the government creating the internet for research (so it was open and not commercially owned), then opening it when demand for online services went from "a very few geeks" to "a number of people", the Free Market would have selected a hegemony of walled gardens.
It's easy to say with hindsight "the internet would have happened", but it was not at all obvious at the time. AOL was much more user-friendly than the Internet, and it had more content, and like Facebook it was where all of your friends were.
Private Corporations wrote the Constitution.
By the usual "tax breaks for small business" definition, landowners of the time (often with a few slaves) count as small businesses. Thus, yes, most of the Founding Fathers were private corporations, and therefore...
Yes, I feel dirty now.
Yes, this is very true. However, these tend to be the exception and not the rule.
I hear this a lot, but I'm not sure it's at all true.
I've worked with government projects and private projects. I'm not at all sure that the private ones succeeded better than the government ones. For every government "technology refresh" which wastes millions of dollars, I'll raise you dozens of corporate upgrades which ship "whatever the IT director has on his desk" from crony suppliers without any oversight. Failed government projects, like failed private projects, get defunded and closed, while successful ones continue.
And the government successes are truly amazing. While I might prefer better train infrastructure, the US interstate system is an amazing boon to all businesses. My water supply is healthy (safer than bottled water), and I don't worry about a company skimping on the quality to improve their profit by a few percent. Social Security, for all of its warts, is insanely better than what we had before ("thanks for years of work, grandpa, but you're going to starve now").
But they can't help but wonder how many of these people would still require food stamps if they sold their car.
This is kind of like the recent "how can they be poor if they have refrigerators and TVs?!?" nonsense. If you don't have a car, you pay for busses (if your area has them). If you don't have a fridge, then you cannot save leftovers and must buy fresh every day (using a car to get to the store). If you don't have a TV and cable, you pay for entertainment some other way (a movie for a family of four is a large chunk of a monthly cable bill). And if someone lost their job a year ago, why would they sell their new reliable car and buy an old unreliable one which will need repairs?
You're doing it wrong IMHO.
The monitoring portion should be on platforms near the servers, not on your own device (mobile or desktop). Plus something to monitor the monitor, located farther away, preferably at another site. There are no good monitoring packages IMO, but many reasonable and usable ones. All of them should be as scriptable as you need.
You need one device on your person to receive alerts; a cell phone with SMS is good. My current job requires two devices on different networks, but that may be overkill for your situation. Don't do scripting here! All of the scripting should be on the monitoring server. If you're in an area where your cell phone doesn't work, you want to be able to see the alerts elsewhere. (When I'm in another country, I get a sim card for that country and forward alerts there, for example).
You then need something which can connect remotely so you can fix the problem. This could be the same as your alerting device, or it could be a tablet or laptop you keep in the car.
But the issue is not viewing the content; the issue is forcing someone else (Twitter) to give you their copy without a warrant. To continue the analogy, this is letting the police look through your neighbor's photos to find all of the ones they took of your front yard, when your neighbor doesn't want to.
Doesn't surprise me at all. Google is phenomenal at the backend stuff (the OS, their services, etc). User experience stuff, not so much. Kinda the anti-Apple.
A cell phone (or WiFi or BT) is a radio with locked-down frequencies, protocols, and signalling metadata. A cell phone is to a radio, as a tablet is to a computer. Some ham folks still use generic two-way radios, and commercial RF gear is very nice, but 95% of people just want a phone where they can press a few buttons and talk to their grandmother.
You make an excellent point in support of TFA!
Nice! You've distilled the basic problem with software patents. Sadly I have no mod points.
my company still won't approve any iPhones or iPads for corporate use because of the weak security features (so the IT guys say), Apple really doesn't 't give a crap about businesses and hence Blackberry stays in business....
Since this was true three years ago, the good news is that your IT folks may only be about three years out of date with technology, thus placing them in the top 20% of corporate IT folks. Hey, I like to be optimistic!
US regulators are pretty light on the fines, so might end up being cheaper and more productive to ignore and pay the fine.
I believe that the fines for showing Janet Jackson's nipple during the Super Bowl were many times worse than the fines for dumping toxic waste into a river for a decade. As always, we Americans have our priorities straight! :-(
Absolutely. As always, the Free Market provides. There are people who make a very good living being expert witnesses in US court, testifying to prove whatever their client's point is.
Which makes it different from the last 40 years, where care got more expensive so the insurer's 30-50% got bigger?
So you've discovered that when you buy a device from a manufacturer/carrier that is known for not updating their firmware, your firmware is not updated. Whose fault is this?
That was a big part of it, sure, as well as the infighting between the republican congress and democratic president. And a large part of the current deficits are due to income tax losses from massive unemployment, but I figure that if people are going to blame Obama for the deficit now, then we have to thank Clinton for the deficit in 2000. Or we can realize that the deficits under both presidents were greatly affected by external factors.
The deficit under GWBush, on the other hand, should have decreased in 2003-2006 as the economy heated up with the real estate bubble. Since it increased, he gets to own some of that.
To get back on topic: it looks like the Game of Thrones set designers tried to make the head not obviously Bush's. Since nobody noticed until the commentary track came out, I've gotta go with "people are whiners". If people took half the time they spent being offended by little stuff and spent it cleaning up the litter in their neighborhood (yes, even if you weren't the one to litter; see "whiner") then the world would be a bit better tomorrow than it was yesterday. And that's a goal I think we all want.
Well, things were going pretty well for last six years of Clinton and the first six of GWBush.
Absolutely true, as long as you ignore the deficit going from effectively zero at the end of Clinton to very rapid growth during Bush, and guaranteed to get worse as his phased tax cuts continued. And as long as you pretend that the mortgage problems magically started in 2007 and were not a simmering but ignored issue for a decade. And if you ignore that real income for the lower 2/3rds of people was flat or decreased during that time, And if you ignore lots of other warning signs that "things are breaking and will be easy to fix now, but really hard later." Now it's later.
Pretending that things were good for Bush's first six years is a wonderful way of blaming the other guys, but does require lots of selective editing. Not that the other guys did all that well, but lots of indicators went into the red during 2001-2006.
They buy iPads because everyone else has an iPad, and they don't want to get left behind.
Protip: Whenever you think that you are smart and everyone else is a sheep, the way to spot the idiot is to look in a mirror.
No, I said that Microsoft needs to over-deliver and under-price compared to other high-end tablets. Unless they either cost less than established tablets or provide more functionality at the same cost, they will fail. And since these tablets sound like they'll be coming out in Q4, they will need to compete with the iPad which comes out in Q1 2013.
Besides, an Apple iPhone 4S is the same price as a Galaxy SIII. iPads are priced similarly to other high-end tablets. Pricing out a Windows laptop with the same features as a MacBook Pro results in about the same price. Yes, Apple doesn't compete with the bargain-basement, but calling them over-priced is generally based on emotion rather than facts.
I really hope that Microsoft does well with these tablets, because competition pushes everyone to improve. But MS's track record on devices is not good. I expect the worst but hope to be proven wrong.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
I don't think that that is Microsoft's intended strategy, though I agree that that has sometimes been the result. Microsoft has some amazing talent working from them who produce some amazing things, but somehow (bureaucracy? internal strife? managerial lack of vision? some combination probably) the amazing things rarely appear and we mostly get "good enough" products.
These tablets could be amazing, but until we see how the reality matches the hype we'll have no idea.