No, really... the network is fine, and constantly being brought up to the state of the art. The real problem is the rapid increase in demand, caused by households with multiple light bulbs. The utility company plans to remedy the problem by putting special meters on the highest-usage households, that will shut off their electrical supply if they use more than 15 kilowatt-hours per month.
For an additional fee, the customers may switch to the "unlimited" plan, which will cut them off after 30 kWh.
Nonsense. Comcast will happily point out that there's a handful of dial-up ISPs you can use if you get an acoustic coupler for your AT&T cell phone, so they're not a monopoly at all...
Competition not only improves quality, but it's the only reason this is being deployed at all. Providers' repeated claims that they should be allowed to merge because they'd innovate anyway is now demonstrated yet again to be utter bullshit.
So the summary is implying that several years ago when Linux Steam work began, somehow Valve knew that Windows 8 would be bad even before Microsoft had done much with it beyond initial planning? TFA actually presents a much more balanced picture: Gabe Newell had an interview, and spoke about many things including wearable computers, open platforms, and Linux support. As usual, the Slashdot submitter posted the most inflammatory piece, and the editors like it that way. TFA only even mentions Windows once, in the quote TFS copied!
It's interesting that you assume what "people with my attitude" are voting, when you have no idea what my voting history has been. Recently, it's been rather pro-union as an incidental effect of other issues.
When my state considered a bill similar to Wisconsin's, I signed my name to the petition against it and spoke at a protest in front of the legislature, because of a single clause that would permanently prevent the government from working with a union at all. I believe unions should be allowed to exist, because they could potentially be a force for good, but they haven't done so in several decades.
People with your attitude have to stop blindly assuming that anti-union folks are magically all the same, and fight to make the union do what's best for the workers, rather than what's best for the union entity.
Oh, yes. How dare I hold an opinion that opposes the opinion of the Union God?!
I'm just a guy who's had to deal with unions from outside their protective shield and hivemind chants, who's seen the madness the union bureaucracy brings. The closest I've been to exploiting unorganized labor was being a young adult with a massive fortune from working at entry level for $1 over minimum wage in an unorganized shop, so I could afford to have a few cookouts to feed my neighbor when the Union God forced his employer out of business.
Perhaps I should clarify that I am opposed to the unions as they exist today, having utterly failed to protect any workforce through the recent economic hardships, outsourcing, or automation trends, yet still able to organize protests against anything threatening their unused power. I believe that unions are a necessary legal entity, as there are employers who should be required to bargain on equal footing, but there is no modern union I've encountered.that actually promotes a better long-term situation for the American workforce.
You can't be anti-union and expect the unions to be effective for you.
I don't expect the union to be effective for me specifically. I expect them to be a force for good before I'll support them, though. There are plenty of ways the unions can earn my support without needing any leverage whatsoever, some of which I've listed. Unfortunately, the various unions I've encountered have made it quite clear that there is no concern for improvement any more, but only higher pay and guaranteed retirement for senior members.
As one example that I alluded to before, I have a friend who is a skilled stage technician, but he can't get a job in his home state because he lacks a theatre degree or equivalent experience in a union-recognized theatre. Now, he's run a community theatre for a few years, but since it can't afford to work with the union, the union won't accept it as a "real" theatre.
In another theater, a different technician friend worked shows for two months with an unstable set piece, because the union carpenters (with exclusive control of all construction equipment, including screwdrivers) never got around to fixing it. Finally after an actor fell off the set during rehearsal, this technician brought in his personal "torque application device" and tightened the set piece. After OSHA was involved because of the fall, the union's official statement was that the safety of non-union actors is not a priority concern for them.
As yet another example, let's consider a teacher from my own hometown, who received a very strict letter from the teachers' union effectively forbidding him from tutoring students on school property after school let out. Apparently the union took offense that a teacher considered education more important than being paid for every moment of his time.
In a UAW machine shop I know of in Michigan, the shop faced financial problems because GM canceled their contract. The overwhelming majority of current employees voted to take a dissolve the current contract and take a pay cut (progressive percentage cut, so the highest-paid owner would be cut most) so the shop could keep running on the income from other orders. The retired union members numbered less than half the employed force, yet had two-thirds the voting power, so they overruled the vote, and the old contract remained until the shop closed just to stick it to that evil management that dared propose cutting pay.
Finally, when I lived in a college town, I had a friend who was a newly-hired professor. The union told him that he wasn't allowed to discuss lessons with me, because my suggestions on how to effectively teach were making his job unfairly easier than the other professors'.
These experiences and others like them are what the union looks like to people outside it. It's an elitist group of thugs who strong-arm their "negotiations" through threats and PR stunts, and move their massive might to get in the way of everyone else getting the job done. Solidarity is not something I want, nor will support it, when it means the almighty Union gets to tell me I can't teach others, protect others, get a job, keep a job, or even talk with friends. Sure, it's nice that the unions were useful in the past to establish weekends, OSHA, and the like, but I do not see that as any justification for eternal indenture to an organization that cares more about a retiree's $70,000/year pension than letting enthusiastic younger workers have a decent life.
I hear lots of people here saying, "well if you're good you won't put up with this sort of abuse." That doesn't work when there is someone as good or nearly as good willing to work for less begging for your job.
What's wrong with that? What gives me the right to determine what someone else's time is worth? If I decide that my time is worth $50/hour, and someone else is willing to do the same job as good as I can for $30/hour, why should I have an inalienable
Oh, come on... Everybody knows that the stock market is just a simple random walk, and any attempts at prediction are futile. Some folks buy, some folks sell, and there's no logic or trends in any of it. Analysts don't really "analyze" anything. They just sit in their offices all day drinking scotch and bourbon, throwing darts at a globe to decide where their next hunting trip will be. When it comes time for the quarter end, they roll some dice to guess what a particular company will do next quarter, then have their hookers/secretaries write it up in a nice fancy report with fancy words like "liquidity" (which is a euphemism for liquor), "market cap" (which refers to what the analyst will use to hide his bald spot), and "projection" (which is a thinly veiled reference to the analyst's penis).
It's not like those guys have to think or anything...
</sarcasm>
Disclaimer: I work with finance folks. I do not understand how they do what they do, and I do not pretend to.
As a very anti-union person, I agree. Let's see the unions actually improve conditions for their workers, and I'll happily sign on. Let's see pressure for 4-day work weeks, now that automation can maintain production. Let's see minimum wage increases to something above 1960s levels. Let's see a reasonable way for union members to express their concern for current jobs, without their votes being overrun by more senior retirees worried mostly about their pension guarantees. Let's see open membership for anyone with a stake in the working conditions of an industry, rather than just those with a certain amount of experience (which must be earned in non-union shops). Let's see something more than pointless political maneuvers to "maintain leverage" and actually do something with that leverage.
As I said, let's see that, and I'll happily sign on.
And why is that amusing? A content-filled and freely-accessible Internet is a resource that the whole community benefits from, and yet Adblock drives up the real cost of having that content and accessibility. Sure, there would be some content without ads, but it'd be limited to corporate-sponsored subconscious marketing endeavors, personal philanthropy, and whatever society can produce in its spare time after paying the bills.
Frankly, what concerns me most about today's software ecosystem is the lack of concern for possession. Between subscription models and cloud services, paying for something gets you limited-time access in exchange for a permanent loss of money.
Once upon a time, you could buy a program (or a license to it) and reasonably expect that the program would remain functional for the foreseeable future. Sure, it might not have the latest features or be compatible with the latest machine, but it'd work one way and stay that way. Now you've got a new interface to web apps every month, no expectation of permanence, and no recourse if your work disappears in a "service interruption".
From an economics standpoint, I fear that this impermanence is devaluing the entire software industry. Since customers aren't getting anything permanent in exchange, they aren't as willing to pay as much (or anything) to purchase it. Since software is now expected to cost $10 or less for a mobile device, the notion that software is cheap is reinforced with every purchase made on a whim. Eventually the tragedy of the commons takes over, and the assumption is made that because the software costs so little to acquire, it also costs so little to produce. In turn, the pressure for low-profit software means there's no budget left for silly things like testing or support.
Call me a cranky old fart if you like, but I'm starting to miss the days where software cost $10,000, but if you needed a bug fixed, you could get a technician on site to fix it in an hour. Sure it'd cost you another few hundred dollars, but it's still better than today's model where, if you're lucky, a bug that halts production might get a response after two weeks of jumping through customer service hoops in a third-world call center.
...And what committee or group will hold this vast power of deciding whether a company is serving the public or not? The easily-corrupted government? The easily-swayed uneducated public?The elite educated few?
The Internet is a network of computers. The World Wide Web is a network of information. The Semantic Web is a network of information with contextual meaning in an annotated (preferably machine-readable) form.
Not really a company except in the ways that it is:
In the United States, a company may be a "corporation, partnership, association, joint-stock company, trust, fund, or organized group of persons, whether incorporated or not, and (in an official capacity) any receiver, trustee in bankruptcy, or similar official, or liquidating agent, for any of the foregoing." In the US, a company is not necessarily a corporation.
Of course, companies (and corporations) can be as evil as they want within the law, which is no different that today's model, where the law defines standards of behavior that regularly lag behind modern opinions, and are more influenced by media and panic than actual concern for the public good.
...unless the owner can establish that [...] The motor vehicle was, at the time of the violation, in the care, custody, or control of another person...
Like having rental details available from RelayRide that says the renter was operating the car?
Prohibiting incorporation doesn't have any bearing on how ethically a company behaves. Incorporation is mostly legally useful for limiting liability, so that if one person in a company screws up the whole venture, the others aren't personally liable for the company's failure.
As long as the company is still able to pay its bills, an unincorporated company is just an association of people, free to be as evil as they want.
So freedom to associate is subject to the whims of someone calling themselves the public? Or are we to hold daily votes to close down any company that a majority of people don't like? If we can effectively execute a company, should the same justice be applied to people that the majority of the public just doesn't like?
Rope-walking (and lawn-chair flying) is also calculated risk, based on the skill of the person doing it, and the reason for doing it is to create a spectacle that will draw money to a particular organization.
Without looking too deeply into it (as details on the page are sparse), I see limited use. A pure mesh network won't really function too well beyond village limits, where you'll find one farm every few kilometers. Within a rural village, there aren't (or weren't in 2009) that many smartphones, so I don't see the mesh networking as being too helpful there.
However, what is interesting is that the Serval project appears to work on Wi-Fi, which might allow it to function as a fully-functional Internet connection, too. The notion of mesh-based Internet access across an urban environment opens the door for much greater information access, and than can often inspire an appreciation of education that I rarely found in my school.
Companies exist to serve the public. The profit motive is only a guide.
By what law or logic is this? Last I knew, a "company" was simply a group of people who have pooled their resources to accomplish a common goal. That goal could be "cure cancer", "promote world peace", or simply (and commonly) "make money", but there's no mandate I've ever encountered that they must serve the public.
In fact, I can think of many companies that explicitly do not serve the public, or do so only indirectly. Holding companies, for example, exist to just own other companies. Defense companies will often only serve governments, which may or may not serve the public interest. Foreign financial companies are often merely vehicles for relocating money for tax purposes.
No, no, no... it's gotta be all about me! Every company exists to serve me, and me alone! If those big companies aren't pleasing me, they're wrong and evil!
Please explain where the stupidity lies, then. There's an experienced balloonist and experienced skydiver, both familiar with the characteristics of the atmosphere at the expected altitudes, who have carefully planned and executed a fundraising spectacle after a year of planning and preparation.
Just because something's inefficient or outwardly weird does not make it stupid. This coming weekend I'll be watching people make and set off explosives for the fun of it, in a controlled environment following more-than-adequate safety procedures. The worst injury I've heard of in a decade (or more... I've only recently gotten involved myself) of such events is a "sunburn" from a very bright thermite reaction.
Here's a few more equally-stupid ideas:
Walking on a taut cable suspended between two poles or buildings high above the ground
Sealing oneself inside a self-propelled metal can to be submerged in the ocean for months at a time
Using a steam engine to move a riverboat
Strapping humans into a chair on top of thousands of pounds of volatile fuel, in the hopes of propelling them fast enough that they fall beyond the curvature of the Earth and end up encircling the planet
Strapping humans into a chair on top of even more fuel in the hopes of propelling them into a very large nearby rock, along with a can of somewhat less fuel so then can propel themselves back.
Slashdot Mirror
No, really... the network is fine, and constantly being brought up to the state of the art. The real problem is the rapid increase in demand, caused by households with multiple light bulbs. The utility company plans to remedy the problem by putting special meters on the highest-usage households, that will shut off their electrical supply if they use more than 15 kilowatt-hours per month.
For an additional fee, the customers may switch to the "unlimited" plan, which will cut them off after 30 kWh.
Nonsense. Comcast will happily point out that there's a handful of dial-up ISPs you can use if you get an acoustic coupler for your AT&T cell phone, so they're not a monopoly at all...
Competition not only improves quality, but it's the only reason this is being deployed at all. Providers' repeated claims that they should be allowed to merge because they'd innovate anyway is now demonstrated yet again to be utter bullshit.
So the summary is implying that several years ago when Linux Steam work began, somehow Valve knew that Windows 8 would be bad even before Microsoft had done much with it beyond initial planning? TFA actually presents a much more balanced picture: Gabe Newell had an interview, and spoke about many things including wearable computers, open platforms, and Linux support. As usual, the Slashdot submitter posted the most inflammatory piece, and the editors like it that way. TFA only even mentions Windows once, in the quote TFS copied!
It's interesting that you assume what "people with my attitude" are voting, when you have no idea what my voting history has been. Recently, it's been rather pro-union as an incidental effect of other issues.
When my state considered a bill similar to Wisconsin's, I signed my name to the petition against it and spoke at a protest in front of the legislature, because of a single clause that would permanently prevent the government from working with a union at all. I believe unions should be allowed to exist, because they could potentially be a force for good, but they haven't done so in several decades.
People with your attitude have to stop blindly assuming that anti-union folks are magically all the same, and fight to make the union do what's best for the workers, rather than what's best for the union entity.
Oh, yes. How dare I hold an opinion that opposes the opinion of the Union God?!
I'm just a guy who's had to deal with unions from outside their protective shield and hivemind chants, who's seen the madness the union bureaucracy brings. The closest I've been to exploiting unorganized labor was being a young adult with a massive fortune from working at entry level for $1 over minimum wage in an unorganized shop, so I could afford to have a few cookouts to feed my neighbor when the Union God forced his employer out of business.
Perhaps I should clarify that I am opposed to the unions as they exist today, having utterly failed to protect any workforce through the recent economic hardships, outsourcing, or automation trends, yet still able to organize protests against anything threatening their unused power. I believe that unions are a necessary legal entity, as there are employers who should be required to bargain on equal footing, but there is no modern union I've encountered.that actually promotes a better long-term situation for the American workforce.
You can't be anti-union and expect the unions to be effective for you.
I don't expect the union to be effective for me specifically. I expect them to be a force for good before I'll support them, though. There are plenty of ways the unions can earn my support without needing any leverage whatsoever, some of which I've listed. Unfortunately, the various unions I've encountered have made it quite clear that there is no concern for improvement any more, but only higher pay and guaranteed retirement for senior members.
As one example that I alluded to before, I have a friend who is a skilled stage technician, but he can't get a job in his home state because he lacks a theatre degree or equivalent experience in a union-recognized theatre. Now, he's run a community theatre for a few years, but since it can't afford to work with the union, the union won't accept it as a "real" theatre.
In another theater, a different technician friend worked shows for two months with an unstable set piece, because the union carpenters (with exclusive control of all construction equipment, including screwdrivers) never got around to fixing it. Finally after an actor fell off the set during rehearsal, this technician brought in his personal "torque application device" and tightened the set piece. After OSHA was involved because of the fall, the union's official statement was that the safety of non-union actors is not a priority concern for them.
As yet another example, let's consider a teacher from my own hometown, who received a very strict letter from the teachers' union effectively forbidding him from tutoring students on school property after school let out. Apparently the union took offense that a teacher considered education more important than being paid for every moment of his time.
In a UAW machine shop I know of in Michigan, the shop faced financial problems because GM canceled their contract. The overwhelming majority of current employees voted to take a dissolve the current contract and take a pay cut (progressive percentage cut, so the highest-paid owner would be cut most) so the shop could keep running on the income from other orders. The retired union members numbered less than half the employed force, yet had two-thirds the voting power, so they overruled the vote, and the old contract remained until the shop closed just to stick it to that evil management that dared propose cutting pay.
Finally, when I lived in a college town, I had a friend who was a newly-hired professor. The union told him that he wasn't allowed to discuss lessons with me, because my suggestions on how to effectively teach were making his job unfairly easier than the other professors'.
These experiences and others like them are what the union looks like to people outside it. It's an elitist group of thugs who strong-arm their "negotiations" through threats and PR stunts, and move their massive might to get in the way of everyone else getting the job done. Solidarity is not something I want, nor will support it, when it means the almighty Union gets to tell me I can't teach others, protect others, get a job, keep a job, or even talk with friends. Sure, it's nice that the unions were useful in the past to establish weekends, OSHA, and the like, but I do not see that as any justification for eternal indenture to an organization that cares more about a retiree's $70,000/year pension than letting enthusiastic younger workers have a decent life.
I hear lots of people here saying, "well if you're good you won't put up with this sort of abuse." That doesn't work when there is someone as good or nearly as good willing to work for less begging for your job.
What's wrong with that? What gives me the right to determine what someone else's time is worth? If I decide that my time is worth $50/hour, and someone else is willing to do the same job as good as I can for $30/hour, why should I have an inalienable
Oh, come on... Everybody knows that the stock market is just a simple random walk, and any attempts at prediction are futile. Some folks buy, some folks sell, and there's no logic or trends in any of it. Analysts don't really "analyze" anything. They just sit in their offices all day drinking scotch and bourbon, throwing darts at a globe to decide where their next hunting trip will be. When it comes time for the quarter end, they roll some dice to guess what a particular company will do next quarter, then have their hookers/secretaries write it up in a nice fancy report with fancy words like "liquidity" (which is a euphemism for liquor), "market cap" (which refers to what the analyst will use to hide his bald spot), and "projection" (which is a thinly veiled reference to the analyst's penis).
It's not like those guys have to think or anything...
</sarcasm>
Disclaimer: I work with finance folks. I do not understand how they do what they do, and I do not pretend to.
I'll volunteer as an object lesson...
As a very anti-union person, I agree. Let's see the unions actually improve conditions for their workers, and I'll happily sign on. Let's see pressure for 4-day work weeks, now that automation can maintain production. Let's see minimum wage increases to something above 1960s levels. Let's see a reasonable way for union members to express their concern for current jobs, without their votes being overrun by more senior retirees worried mostly about their pension guarantees. Let's see open membership for anyone with a stake in the working conditions of an industry, rather than just those with a certain amount of experience (which must be earned in non-union shops). Let's see something more than pointless political maneuvers to "maintain leverage" and actually do something with that leverage.
As I said, let's see that, and I'll happily sign on.
And why is that amusing? A content-filled and freely-accessible Internet is a resource that the whole community benefits from, and yet Adblock drives up the real cost of having that content and accessibility. Sure, there would be some content without ads, but it'd be limited to corporate-sponsored subconscious marketing endeavors, personal philanthropy, and whatever society can produce in its spare time after paying the bills.
Adblock: Tragedy of the Commons.
You and me both, kid...
Frankly, what concerns me most about today's software ecosystem is the lack of concern for possession. Between subscription models and cloud services, paying for something gets you limited-time access in exchange for a permanent loss of money.
Once upon a time, you could buy a program (or a license to it) and reasonably expect that the program would remain functional for the foreseeable future. Sure, it might not have the latest features or be compatible with the latest machine, but it'd work one way and stay that way. Now you've got a new interface to web apps every month, no expectation of permanence, and no recourse if your work disappears in a "service interruption".
From an economics standpoint, I fear that this impermanence is devaluing the entire software industry. Since customers aren't getting anything permanent in exchange, they aren't as willing to pay as much (or anything) to purchase it. Since software is now expected to cost $10 or less for a mobile device, the notion that software is cheap is reinforced with every purchase made on a whim. Eventually the tragedy of the commons takes over, and the assumption is made that because the software costs so little to acquire, it also costs so little to produce. In turn, the pressure for low-profit software means there's no budget left for silly things like testing or support.
Call me a cranky old fart if you like, but I'm starting to miss the days where software cost $10,000, but if you needed a bug fixed, you could get a technician on site to fix it in an hour. Sure it'd cost you another few hundred dollars, but it's still better than today's model where, if you're lucky, a bug that halts production might get a response after two weeks of jumping through customer service hoops in a third-world call center.
Now get off my lawn.
...And what committee or group will hold this vast power of deciding whether a company is serving the public or not? The easily-corrupted government? The easily-swayed uneducated public?The elite educated few?
The Internet is a network of computers. The World Wide Web is a network of information. The Semantic Web is a network of information with contextual meaning in an annotated (preferably machine-readable) form.
Not really a company except in the ways that it is:
In the United States, a company may be a "corporation, partnership, association, joint-stock company, trust, fund, or organized group of persons, whether incorporated or not, and (in an official capacity) any receiver, trustee in bankruptcy, or similar official, or liquidating agent, for any of the foregoing." In the US, a company is not necessarily a corporation.
Of course, companies (and corporations) can be as evil as they want within the law, which is no different that today's model, where the law defines standards of behavior that regularly lag behind modern opinions, and are more influenced by media and panic than actual concern for the public good.
...unless the owner can establish that [...] The motor vehicle was, at the time of the violation, in the care, custody, or control of another person...
Like having rental details available from RelayRide that says the renter was operating the car?
Prohibiting incorporation doesn't have any bearing on how ethically a company behaves. Incorporation is mostly legally useful for limiting liability, so that if one person in a company screws up the whole venture, the others aren't personally liable for the company's failure.
As long as the company is still able to pay its bills, an unincorporated company is just an association of people, free to be as evil as they want.
So freedom to associate is subject to the whims of someone calling themselves the public? Or are we to hold daily votes to close down any company that a majority of people don't like? If we can effectively execute a company, should the same justice be applied to people that the majority of the public just doesn't like?
Rope-walking (and lawn-chair flying) is also calculated risk, based on the skill of the person doing it, and the reason for doing it is to create a spectacle that will draw money to a particular organization.
The quigglers are galorping slydoodles merfilly, while gormbars poktarafa pumph.
Without looking too deeply into it (as details on the page are sparse), I see limited use. A pure mesh network won't really function too well beyond village limits, where you'll find one farm every few kilometers. Within a rural village, there aren't (or weren't in 2009) that many smartphones, so I don't see the mesh networking as being too helpful there.
However, what is interesting is that the Serval project appears to work on Wi-Fi, which might allow it to function as a fully-functional Internet connection, too. The notion of mesh-based Internet access across an urban environment opens the door for much greater information access, and than can often inspire an appreciation of education that I rarely found in my school.
Companies exist to serve the public. The profit motive is only a guide.
By what law or logic is this? Last I knew, a "company" was simply a group of people who have pooled their resources to accomplish a common goal. That goal could be "cure cancer", "promote world peace", or simply (and commonly) "make money", but there's no mandate I've ever encountered that they must serve the public.
In fact, I can think of many companies that explicitly do not serve the public, or do so only indirectly. Holding companies, for example, exist to just own other companies. Defense companies will often only serve governments, which may or may not serve the public interest. Foreign financial companies are often merely vehicles for relocating money for tax purposes.
No, no, no... it's gotta be all about me! Every company exists to serve me, and me alone! If those big companies aren't pleasing me, they're wrong and evil!
</sarcasm>
Please explain where the stupidity lies, then. There's an experienced balloonist and experienced skydiver, both familiar with the characteristics of the atmosphere at the expected altitudes, who have carefully planned and executed a fundraising spectacle after a year of planning and preparation.
Just because something's inefficient or outwardly weird does not make it stupid. This coming weekend I'll be watching people make and set off explosives for the fun of it, in a controlled environment following more-than-adequate safety procedures. The worst injury I've heard of in a decade (or more... I've only recently gotten involved myself) of such events is a "sunburn" from a very bright thermite reaction.
Here's a few more equally-stupid ideas:
Humans are stupid creatures, indeed!