I don't know why QuoteMstr's post was modded as flamebait. Several ultra-conservative media types (e.g. Ann Coulter) have attempted to use Obama's middle name as some kind of harbinger of doom and "proof" that this man is up to no good. Furthermore, there's never been a US president with a first name of Barack, nor with a last name of Obama. Using his middle name to avoid a case of mistaken identity is unncessary.
Therefore, I'm left to come to the same conclusion: parent poster only used his middle name as a form of feeble ad hominem.
I use a thinkpad t61 for work, and used a t43 before that, and I have never, ever, ever had any problems with the suspend/resume functions with closing/opening the laptop lid. And I virtually ONLY use suspend/resume because otherwise I have to sit through the ridiculously long log-in script.
I'd say I've reasonably done this at least twice over the last four years, or about 2,500 times, without ever (remembering) any problem like you discuss.
I was actually pleasantly surprised to read his comment,
Now it's like physics - value is never destroyed, it goes somewhere else.
Unfortunately, the rest of his comments came across as clueless. He seems to waffle on any direction to take, and instead provides half-hearted statements about possibily, maybe, some-day, exploring something different. IMO, there's nothing else new here, but a general feeling that he wishes the copyright situation would just return to "normal."
How can a market "already be there" for a new product?
In economic terms, its called a substitute good. Any product, even nonexistent, exists in a market to which it is/will be a substitute good for some other product. I have a difficult time believing that any unrealized or otherwise imagined product could NOT be a substitute for a current good/service.
Though the article summary touts the Red Flag Rule(s) as something that is designed to protect consumer information, I have serious doubts as to the efficacy of such a system.
As stated in the article, it's just a system/rule to force banks/creditors/etc. to identify any suspicious activity (i.e. red flags) in their accounts. It doesn't seem to mention anything about any liability or culpability for false positives or worse--completely missing identity theft in action. That said, I still can't believe (provided the inforamtion is true) that companies continue to balk at this. The sums mentioned in the article--$10,000 to comply--are chump change, even if it's a repeated annual expenditure.
As for usage caps. I really hate it, but I can't really find a good argument against this one. Unfortunately, Internet service is like a utility, or should be, and every utility is based on usage. This is why competition is good. Once a utility has competition, they are forced to compete and lose their monopoly status.
The conversation shouldn't be going "From Unlimited to Caps!" but "From Unlimited to Per Unit!". With caps, if you use less than your cap, you're not getting the cheapest $/unit you could, (you "lose"); if you use more than your cap, you pay punitatively-high overages (you "lose").
Either way, you lose. Either way, the supplier wins. The solution in the best interest of the consumer is a per-unit rate. Like the power company, you pay for what you use.
What is a teacher to do? In-class writing samples would seem to be the only hope of detecting ghostwriting. Students could, of course, argue that at home, they can "polish" their papers, and that therefore they will not resemble the in-class samples. Moreover, checking samples against papers is a thankless and time-consuming task which is only a preliminary to actually evaluating the work. Perhaps there is a computer-based solution to this, but, in the meantime, perhaps potential ghostwriting customers could take their desires to their logical conclusion, and simply buy their degrees on the Internet directly.
The solution is to require enough step-wise work, and forget about the end-product. Require outlines, first, second, & third drafts. Require students to bring in the pieces for colleagues to review during class time. Oversee all this effort/coordination.
When it comes time to hand in the final product, require it include all the other required, outlines, notes, marked-up drafts, etc.
You won't catch any cheaters with this approach, though, but you'll still get the students to do the work. Hopefully the forced, stepwise process teaches the would-be cheaters something--you can't force anyone to learn--but this solution, focusing on the learning and not on the outcome, seems to be the best compromise.
Samuel Greenholtz, a retired manager from Verizon, offered this absolutely impenetrable thinking on why broadband providers needed to impose caps on customers and were forced to charge way too much for them:
While a tiered pricing structure may have been inevitable in the long run, if the corporate bashing horde stayed out of the way, the vast majority of users would have avoided paying more for additional capacity. Time Warner Cable does give the politicians what they are looking for â" more bandwidth availability for all of its subscribers. Still, the lowest speed package is not going to be enough for most of the consumers â" and so they will have to take the higher tier offerings â" along with the new overage charges. Had the MSOs been allowed to just cap excessive users, most of the subs would have continued to receive a reasonable amount of bandwidth at the same flat price.
Ironically, all of the illogic obsession with net neutrality will result in even more of a usage-based pricing scheme. There will now be several layers of capping. The anti-ISP crowd has actually created a more beneficial pricing system for these companies. And there is certainly nothing unfair about this development. But the clamoring for so-called equality resulted in an acceleration of the removal of the all-you-can-eat advantage for consumers.
Stopthecap.com is referenced in the article to which Slashdot linked. The citation above from Sam Greenholtz was so outlandish, so clearly showing pro-corporate stances, I had to call it out. I didn't think the corporate side was so violently opposed to net neutrality and unlimited bandwidth, but with gems like "illogical obsession" and "corporate bashing horde", I'm surprised that there's not any active raping and pillaging.
They weren't actually worried about common burglars. They were worried about governmental and semi-governmental burglars. The TV licence thugs, the Inland Revenue Service, the Zoning Commission, the Historical Society, those bastards can fine you and put you in prison any time they want. And it only gets worse if they can prove with actual photographs that the new converted alcove on your house is less than a few years old, or that google showed that your television was on last year.
This is modded insightful, but I could use a little explanation on the "TV license thugs", the "Inland Revenue Service", and the others, and how exactly they'd affect your average English Joe.
Sometimes I worry that the people on Slashdot aren't really smarter than your average bears, otherwise I wouldn't keep reading the same, rehashed, "why are they making X versions, that's so dumb" comments over and over.
It's simple economics. And I've seen only very few people stand up and point this out. It makes sense with economic theory. I'm not making any comments on whether or not it's confusing, or on whether or not it's ethical, but just that there is a perfectly logical reason for it: money.
I suppose the best description of their economic practice is Price Discrimination. It's not a new theory, and it happens all over the place (see airline ticket sales). In short, think of your standard supply/demand curve. If you sell one product, at $50, you lose out on the people who would have paid $75 for the product, and you also lose out on the people who will only pay $25 for it. By charging different amounts, they're capturing demand at all (or many more) points on the supply/demand curve, maximizing their efficiency.
Nemesysco's Poly-Layered Voice Analysis... measures voice for a variety of parameters including deception, excitement, stress, mental effort, concentration, hesitation, anger, love and lust. It works prerecorded... Ultimately, the company plans to offer versions of its detectors for cell phones, dating services, teaching aids, toys and games.
Interesting. I wonder how it measures up to method acting.
Screw that, you're really just curious if that phone sex girl is into you or not.
Am I the only one who was expecting a statement from Nemesysco advertising "Our products are for entertainment purposes only." ?
"It was hardly their intention. But since the article was withdrawn, I have received lots of mail and requests for copies of the article. The article would not have been read to this extent if the company had simply ignored it in silence," says Francisco Lacerda to the Dagens Nyheter.
I also find it funny, and sad, that a Swedish entity caved so easily to a legal threat from outside the country (and from outside the country's legal system).
Holy crap people, not everyone *needs* broadband. Watching retarded YouTube videos and other crap isn't an essential part of life. If your only use for the Internet is email and browsing Wikipedia you can get by just fine with dialup. Personally, I'm a bandwidth addict, but my mom couldn't care less. She's happy with email and reading the occasional news story. America isn't going to collapse because these people don't have broadband.
It sounds like your mother doesn't actually do anything productive on the internet, and I'm guessing that everyone else, who is/are also adamant about sticking with dial-up, only sees the internet as a "recreational" area.
Having gone without broadband internet at my mother-in-law's for a year, I can't believe how much more time-consuming it is simply getting directions to a restaurant, or its telephone number, or its hours, etc. without using the internet. It's also really good for comparing prices, reviewing products, house-hunting, car-shopping, health-issue troubleshooting (be it you or your pet). The internet is a fantastically useful tool, for which I'd bet that the intertia of slow dialup speeds is preventing the adoption of such perceptions by such people.
Too True. Some anecdotal evidence for you:
(1) My father refused to switch over to broadband until 2000, despite the pleas of his children. When he switched over, and suddenly didn't have to suffer the painful slowness of 56k, his comment was, said aloud, "Why the hell did I object to this?"
(2) My mother-in-law has refused to switch over to broadband until this past year, even though the dial-up internet for her was so slow, cumbersome, and time-consuming, she almost never even used it anyhow. She'd pull out city maps and use the telephone for directions; I'd generally have to spend an extra 20 minutes figuring out how to get to our destination when at her home. When she switched, the convenience was too great to doubt.
A better metric would be to see how many people who HAVE broadband would prefer to go back to dial-up, as they discovered don't need/want broadband. The article seems to suggest that this number would be practicaly zero.
The next version of that one (with the Razer tie-in) is completely garbage. The D-pad is digital instead of analog; huge mistake, making it completely unusable. It also costs a lot more.
It would make sense if there was astroturfing going on for the forums for that product.
Except that green does not mean cheaper in all cases. Some additives to products are plentiful, cheap, and harmful to the environment. Replacing them with to be "Green" and not harmful usually means a replacement additive that is scarce(r) and/or (more) expensive.
Food is an excellent example of this. Eating organic foods is excellent for your health, but rather expensive. That fast food cheeseburger, while cheap and tasty, is made from low quality products, fillers, and flavorings.
My girlfriend's car was stolen a number of years ago, and when it was recovered, the police weren't even interested in taking fingerprints, despite the fact that there was damage inside the car and property was stolen out of it.
Good for you, Finland.
No shit. My car was--"hotwired" and stolen--used as a getaway car for the criminal or criminals, who had stolen several thousand dollars worth of stereos & merchandise (not even counting the damage caused) from cars in a locked garage at my apartment complex.
There were used cigarettes (I don't smoke), a grimy bandanna, and other periphenalia in the car, and the cops didn't do jack shit. I want to move to Finland.
Unfortunately the PC games market is in a major decline, the wii is a gimmick, and the PS3 is a stark disappointment. If your son is going to play modern console games, and interact socially with his peers on that level, not to mention play online with them, he's going to want this console - and it won't be about the hardware, it will be about the titles.
A Microsoft shill / Xbox troll if ever there was one. "The Xbox is the greatest! All the other systems are jank." -- just as "Interesting" a comment, with less words.
. That is, unlike corn, it's not in competition to food usage.
Unlike corn-based ethanol. Like the waste coffee grounds, part of the corn (e.g the cob) isn't used for human consumption. It, too, is actively being pursued as a possible source energy. Just an FYI from someone in the field, who is actively involved in these kinds of projects.
Mod Parent up. Mod GP down. It's nothing to do with "women taking over the world." It's everything to do with synthetic hormone pollution (read: "Birth Control"). It doesn't need an agenda to be scary & true.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent up!
I don't know why QuoteMstr's post was modded as flamebait. Several ultra-conservative media types (e.g. Ann Coulter) have attempted to use Obama's middle name as some kind of harbinger of doom and "proof" that this man is up to no good. Furthermore, there's never been a US president with a first name of Barack, nor with a last name of Obama. Using his middle name to avoid a case of mistaken identity is unncessary.
Therefore, I'm left to come to the same conclusion: parent poster only used his middle name as a form of feeble ad hominem.
I use a thinkpad t61 for work, and used a t43 before that, and I have never, ever, ever had any problems with the suspend/resume functions with closing/opening the laptop lid. And I virtually ONLY use suspend/resume because otherwise I have to sit through the ridiculously long log-in script.
I'd say I've reasonably done this at least twice over the last four years, or about 2,500 times, without ever (remembering) any problem like you discuss.
Now it's like physics - value is never destroyed, it goes somewhere else.
Unfortunately, the rest of his comments came across as clueless. He seems to waffle on any direction to take, and instead provides half-hearted statements about possibily, maybe, some-day, exploring something different. IMO, there's nothing else new here, but a general feeling that he wishes the copyright situation would just return to "normal."
How can a market "already be there" for a new product?
In economic terms, its called a substitute good. Any product, even nonexistent, exists in a market to which it is/will be a substitute good for some other product. I have a difficult time believing that any unrealized or otherwise imagined product could NOT be a substitute for a current good/service.
Though the article summary touts the Red Flag Rule(s) as something that is designed to protect consumer information, I have serious doubts as to the efficacy of such a system.
As stated in the article, it's just a system/rule to force banks/creditors/etc. to identify any suspicious activity (i.e. red flags) in their accounts. It doesn't seem to mention anything about any liability or culpability for false positives or worse--completely missing identity theft in action. That said, I still can't believe (provided the inforamtion is true) that companies continue to balk at this. The sums mentioned in the article--$10,000 to comply--are chump change, even if it's a repeated annual expenditure.
As for usage caps. I really hate it, but I can't really find a good argument against this one. Unfortunately, Internet service is like a utility, or should be, and every utility is based on usage. This is why competition is good. Once a utility has competition, they are forced to compete and lose their monopoly status.
The conversation shouldn't be going "From Unlimited to Caps!" but "From Unlimited to Per Unit!". With caps, if you use less than your cap, you're not getting the cheapest $/unit you could, (you "lose"); if you use more than your cap, you pay punitatively-high overages (you "lose").
Either way, you lose. Either way, the supplier wins. The solution in the best interest of the consumer is a per-unit rate. Like the power company, you pay for what you use.
What is a teacher to do? In-class writing samples would seem to be the only hope of detecting ghostwriting. Students could, of course, argue that at home, they can "polish" their papers, and that therefore they will not resemble the in-class samples. Moreover, checking samples against papers is a thankless and time-consuming task which is only a preliminary to actually evaluating the work. Perhaps there is a computer-based solution to this, but, in the meantime, perhaps potential ghostwriting customers could take their desires to their logical conclusion, and simply buy their degrees on the Internet directly.
The solution is to require enough step-wise work, and forget about the end-product. Require outlines, first, second, & third drafts. Require students to bring in the pieces for colleagues to review during class time. Oversee all this effort/coordination.
When it comes time to hand in the final product, require it include all the other required, outlines, notes, marked-up drafts, etc.
You won't catch any cheaters with this approach, though, but you'll still get the students to do the work. Hopefully the forced, stepwise process teaches the would-be cheaters something--you can't force anyone to learn--but this solution, focusing on the learning and not on the outcome, seems to be the best compromise.
I can see it now: ...
"3DTV allows ultra-realistic porn
That would be so money.
Samuel Greenholtz, a retired manager from Verizon, offered this absolutely impenetrable thinking on why broadband providers needed to impose caps on customers and were forced to charge way too much for them:
While a tiered pricing structure may have been inevitable in the long run, if the corporate bashing horde stayed out of the way, the vast majority of users would have avoided paying more for additional capacity. Time Warner Cable does give the politicians what they are looking for â" more bandwidth availability for all of its subscribers. Still, the lowest speed package is not going to be enough for most of the consumers â" and so they will have to take the higher tier offerings â" along with the new overage charges. Had the MSOs been allowed to just cap excessive users, most of the subs would have continued to receive a reasonable amount of bandwidth at the same flat price.
Ironically, all of the illogic obsession with net neutrality will result in even more of a usage-based pricing scheme. There will now be several layers of capping. The anti-ISP crowd has actually created a more beneficial pricing system for these companies. And there is certainly nothing unfair about this development. But the clamoring for so-called equality resulted in an acceleration of the removal of the all-you-can-eat advantage for consumers.
Stopthecap.com is referenced in the article to which Slashdot linked. The citation above from Sam Greenholtz was so outlandish, so clearly showing pro-corporate stances, I had to call it out. I didn't think the corporate side was so violently opposed to net neutrality and unlimited bandwidth, but with gems like "illogical obsession" and "corporate bashing horde", I'm surprised that there's not any active raping and pillaging.
They weren't actually worried about common burglars. They were worried about governmental and semi-governmental burglars. The TV licence thugs, the Inland Revenue Service, the Zoning Commission, the Historical Society, those bastards can fine you and put you in prison any time they want. And it only gets worse if they can prove with actual photographs that the new converted alcove on your house is less than a few years old, or that google showed that your television was on last year.
This is modded insightful, but I could use a little explanation on the "TV license thugs", the "Inland Revenue Service", and the others, and how exactly they'd affect your average English Joe.
The "Score:3 Informative" mod on this post is funnier than the post or its parent.
Sometimes I worry that the people on Slashdot aren't really smarter than your average bears, otherwise I wouldn't keep reading the same, rehashed, "why are they making X versions, that's so dumb" comments over and over.
It's simple economics. And I've seen only very few people stand up and point this out. It makes sense with economic theory. I'm not making any comments on whether or not it's confusing, or on whether or not it's ethical, but just that there is a perfectly logical reason for it: money.
I suppose the best description of their economic practice is Price Discrimination. It's not a new theory, and it happens all over the place (see airline ticket sales). In short, think of your standard supply/demand curve. If you sell one product, at $50, you lose out on the people who would have paid $75 for the product, and you also lose out on the people who will only pay $25 for it. By charging different amounts, they're capturing demand at all (or many more) points on the supply/demand curve, maximizing their efficiency.
Interesting. I wonder how it measures up to method acting.
Screw that, you're really just curious if that phone sex girl is into you or not.
Am I the only one who was expecting a statement from Nemesysco advertising "Our products are for entertainment purposes only." ?
"It was hardly their intention. But since the article was withdrawn, I have received lots of mail and requests for copies of the article. The article would not have been read to this extent if the company had simply ignored it in silence," says Francisco Lacerda to the Dagens Nyheter.
I also find it funny, and sad, that a Swedish entity caved so easily to a legal threat from outside the country (and from outside the country's legal system).
Holy crap people, not everyone *needs* broadband. Watching retarded YouTube videos and other crap isn't an essential part of life. If your only use for the Internet is email and browsing Wikipedia you can get by just fine with dialup. Personally, I'm a bandwidth addict, but my mom couldn't care less. She's happy with email and reading the occasional news story. America isn't going to collapse because these people don't have broadband.
It sounds like your mother doesn't actually do anything productive on the internet, and I'm guessing that everyone else, who is/are also adamant about sticking with dial-up, only sees the internet as a "recreational" area.
Having gone without broadband internet at my mother-in-law's for a year, I can't believe how much more time-consuming it is simply getting directions to a restaurant, or its telephone number, or its hours, etc. without using the internet. It's also really good for comparing prices, reviewing products, house-hunting, car-shopping, health-issue troubleshooting (be it you or your pet). The internet is a fantastically useful tool, for which I'd bet that the intertia of slow dialup speeds is preventing the adoption of such perceptions by such people.
Too True. Some anecdotal evidence for you:
(1) My father refused to switch over to broadband until 2000, despite the pleas of his children. When he switched over, and suddenly didn't have to suffer the painful slowness of 56k, his comment was, said aloud, "Why the hell did I object to this?" (2) My mother-in-law has refused to switch over to broadband until this past year, even though the dial-up internet for her was so slow, cumbersome, and time-consuming, she almost never even used it anyhow. She'd pull out city maps and use the telephone for directions; I'd generally have to spend an extra 20 minutes figuring out how to get to our destination when at her home. When she switched, the convenience was too great to doubt.
A better metric would be to see how many people who HAVE broadband would prefer to go back to dial-up, as they discovered don't need/want broadband. The article seems to suggest that this number would be practicaly zero.
It would make sense if there was astroturfing going on for the forums for that product.
Wait... this post is +5 insightful? Not funny? I guess the advantages of polycarbonate resin weren't well understood.
Except that green does not mean cheaper in all cases. Some additives to products are plentiful, cheap, and harmful to the environment. Replacing them with to be "Green" and not harmful usually means a replacement additive that is scarce(r) and/or (more) expensive. Food is an excellent example of this. Eating organic foods is excellent for your health, but rather expensive. That fast food cheeseburger, while cheap and tasty, is made from low quality products, fillers, and flavorings.
My girlfriend's car was stolen a number of years ago, and when it was recovered, the police weren't even interested in taking fingerprints, despite the fact that there was damage inside the car and property was stolen out of it.
Good for you, Finland.
No shit. My car was--"hotwired" and stolen--used as a getaway car for the criminal or criminals, who had stolen several thousand dollars worth of stereos & merchandise (not even counting the damage caused) from cars in a locked garage at my apartment complex.
There were used cigarettes (I don't smoke), a grimy bandanna, and other periphenalia in the car, and the cops didn't do jack shit. I want to move to Finland.
Unfortunately the PC games market is in a major decline, the wii is a gimmick, and the PS3 is a stark disappointment. If your son is going to play modern console games, and interact socially with his peers on that level, not to mention play online with them, he's going to want this console - and it won't be about the hardware, it will be about the titles.
A Microsoft shill / Xbox troll if ever there was one. "The Xbox is the greatest! All the other systems are jank." -- just as "Interesting" a comment, with less words.
. That is, unlike corn, it's not in competition to food usage.
Unlike corn-based ethanol. Like the waste coffee grounds, part of the corn (e.g the cob) isn't used for human consumption. It, too, is actively being pursued as a possible source energy. Just an FYI from someone in the field, who is actively involved in these kinds of projects.
Thank god, because I wasn't sure how to relieve myself before the internet showed me how!
Mod Parent up. Mod GP down. It's nothing to do with "women taking over the world." It's everything to do with synthetic hormone pollution (read: "Birth Control"). It doesn't need an agenda to be scary & true.