I (sometimes) wish the internet was less awesome. Back in the day, it was slow and laggy. You'd use the internet, sure; but you'd go to big LAN parties too.
And then you'd have awesome weekends of all sorts of video games and all sorts of file-sharing (at speeds that put the internet to shame).
With storage as cheap as it is....man....sign me up.
But I don't know anyone who goes to LAN parties anymore, and I don't know where any are.
The idea here is that you have to actively protect your privacy, or it's not valuable to you.
So - you tried to sell your house and posted pictures of your living room. That means you don't value your privacy. Then, when I take pictures of your living room and post them on the internet for profit; you are entitled to a meaningless amount of money because - hey - you clearly don't value your privacy.
Healthier? Not really. Certainly not as a result of education. Better working conditions, stricter regulations maybe. But education? No. We're fattier than ever and happy to be.
'Oh, well, if you sent your boyfriend a picture of you in your underwear - you must not value your privacy. Since you gave a picture to on person that could provide the world with access to it; everyone else can do it too!'
Before HL - I played Quake 2 CTF online for hours and hours and hours. I played some other mods too; but I never got past the first handful of single player levels. It just didn't hold my interest.
HL was the same deal for me. I started the single player but it was slow and boring (for me) compared to the faster paced online play.
Let's say things continue as projected and the internet grinds to a crawl because so many people are doing things like streaming NetFlix. When 40% of all traffic is coming from one company, a commercial company - people start to get upset. Sure, Netflix will say, 'Duh - improve the bandwidth' but nobody is going to want to spend millions of dollars to help some single company make even more money.
Imagine a public park. You probably have one or two within a few miles of your house. Let's say it's got a small playground and occasionally you bring your kids. It's fun. It's nice. Your tax dollars provide it.
One day, you show up and the park is crowded. Kids are EVERYWHERE. Bigger kids are pushing and shoving and your kids can't get on any of the equipment. They hate it. You don't recognize any of the kids either - but then you see an army of large buses. It is some Mega-Corp Day-Care and, instead of building their own park; they are utilizing the publicly available parks. They have so many customers/kids that it renders the park virtually unusable.
You might say, 'What the heck MegaCorp! You are ruining my park.' Because you pay taxes to support that park. But the MegaCorp goes, 'LOL WUT? Public park - STFU'. They aren't going to build a new park, because that would cost them money. They might toss some bucks into the pocket of a politician that plans to run on the 'More Parks for everyone' ticket.
Either the government comes along and regulates use of the park (which causes a ton of anti-gov/big brother types of complaints) or the park remains useless and over-run or you get stuck paying for a bigger park with your tax dollars, even though you don't want higher taxes, and as soon as more parks are built, the MegaCorp ships more and more kids until, in a very short time, you are back in the same position.
At least, 85% of Americans consider themselves middle class. So yeah, everyone supports tax-cuts for the middle class. Everyone supports a stronger middle class.
Did you actually apply for a loan? Entering all of your personal information in each browser to get a final loan rate that they would actually offer you?
Or did you just load the main page with a teaser rate* where the * indicates that it is a POSSIBLE loan rate you might receive?
I wouldn't be at all surprised if the marketing uses your browser to display a different rate. I'd be slightly surprised if the actual rate *you* would be offered for an actual loan changed. It's too easy to use another browser.
I won't disagree with any of that; whether or not it's a good financial decision really depends heavily on your habits and what you value.
I ignore at the TV/speaker/blu-ray (my PS3 is my blu-ray player) cost because I'd have them even if I didn't use them to watch movies. I play video games and watch non-movie TV a lot.
But yeah, I could see how if you look at the total cost of ownership - going to the movies might be cheaper.
I also don't buy movies, ever. Just as a rule. I've got Netflix right now ($10 a month, I think - whatever the 1-disc at a time is); but RedBox is an option out there too - $1 movies, and rarely, I'll still go to BlockBuster if I want a movie.
I'm not a big fan of 3d (I've heard some people are more/less sensitive to the effect - it still looks pretty flat to me/not very impressive). But, I will agree in that I don't bother going to the movies anymore.
Back in the day, we had a 27" TV. Standard Def. It wasn't even a flat screen. When a movie came out, it came out on VHS. The speakers were whatever cheap crappy speakers they stuck in the TV at the factory.
The movie theater was *WAY* better than that. WAY BETTER. Even with the handful of annoying people you have to deal with to watch a movie.
But now....I've got a 52" HDTV complete with a fairly nice surround sound system. Instead of a VHS - I've got a blue-ray player.
The only reason I'd go to see a movie at the theater is if I couldn't stand to wait a few months for it to come out on DVD/Blu-ray. I might go for a huge blockbuster 1-2 times a year; but that's it.
If the movie theaters all went 3D - it would, at least, be a technology most people can't get right now, in their living room.
Writing software is more and more like buying a very expensive lottery ticket. Most app developers end up working for pennies on the dollar.
"But the picture starts out bleak. The average developer gets to pocket a mere $3,050 per year, and this is still considered 'above typically successful', and the most typical developer earns less than that per year."
Software scales very, very, very well; but our price point expectations are set by the biggest, most successful companies. If you are a top-of-the-charts record breaking seller, you aren't making $$$.
In this case, with Android, if you don't test for everyone and you get one guy who can't run your app and puts a negative review; it can prevent your app from ever gaining traction. The unpaid hours you spend writing your app are a complete loss.
I'm a software developer by trade. Most of us make pretty good money. Entry/Mid-level software dev is ~$30 an hour. Almost a year ago, I wrote and sold my first app for $5. It works as described, it's gotten lots of praise from my users. 10k hits to the site, 6k downloads of the trial edition. And 24 sales. That's $120. And, even though these 24 users are only paying $5 dollars, they have an unbelievably high expectation for support. I've had to step people through things like 'opening a.zip file', all the while they were condemning my application for 'not working'. Because they couldn't extract the files into the same place before running it. Just processing the sale, approving the charge, etc, etc - takes time.
I'd have made more money working at McDonalds than writing and selling my own application on the net. Sure, it's not the greatest thing since the dawn of computers; but it works, it does exactly what it says it will, and it does it well. Customers are happy. And, for everyone one real sale I get; I've got 10 people who are using the trial version for months.
Most phone devs are in a similar position. For free, people would use it, for money virtually nobody will buy it. When you add market segmentation on top of it, it's even worse. At the very least, it makes the barrier to entry very, very high. You need a lot of time and resources to both develop an app, test it on a slew of different android devices, and provide support for a slew of different android devices; all before you see a single penny.
Very few people can claim they've never been inflicted with any type of virus or malware.
Virtually nobody can claim that everyone they correspond with online is a professional IT Guru and has never fallen victim to a virus or malware.
Even in a perfect world where you trust every Facebook friend with your life; computers are horribly insecure. Now anyone who can compromise one friend of yours can control aspects of your Facebook, which reflects heavily on your image. I've done job interviews where I'd pull up their Facebook (if they had one) before I spoke with them.
Yeah - except for that whole 'land of the free' thing. But yes - there is no reason why the local government, without due process, should be able to enact new laws and taxes to force their citizens to do whatever they want.
People who read Slashdot tend to be in Urban/suburban areas and don't have a good understanding of rual populations.
A city like Phoenix, AZ has about 2700 people per square mile. A county like Yavapi, AZ has about 20 people per square mile.
Let's say, for simplicity sake, a fire station cost 250k a year to keep up and running. Let's also say a fire station can cover 8 square miles.
In the city - 250k covers 21,600 people. That's $11 dollars, annually. Wow - that's cheap. In truth though, only some of those people pay taxes. Let's say 1 in 3 are part of the tax paying workforce. The others are children or not earning any money/retired. So, $33 dollars is what you'd pay to have your house covered per year. Good deal.
In a rural place though - that same fire station still costs 250k to run. And let's say it can cover 10 square miles because of less traffic. That's only 200 people. And only 67 or so are paying. That's $3,731 dollars!
In rural America, the types of places where we don't already have fire departments; house aren't next to each other. They are often miles apart.
The fire department had no trouble protecting the paying customer from the spread of the fire. He wasn't placed in danger by his neighbor's decision not to pay.
There are a LOT of things that are generally considered 'good things' to do. Personally, I'd like to keep the ability to decide which of those I want and which I don't.
This guy didn't want to pay for optional fire coverage; so he didn't. I support his right to do that. It didn't hurt anyone but himself.
Eating Vegetables is good too. Should I be forced to pay taxes so that the government can provide free vegetables to myself and my neighbors? It's a good idea to eat vegetables. What about working out? Should taxes be used to provide public gyms? What if I don't want a public gym? What if I have my own gym. Sure, it's a good thing; but why not let me decide if I want to do it?
Those risk assessments are done by the companies in order to provide you a more competitive price. They don't *have* to do it.
In this case, with the $75 dollars, if you felt like it's too high because of your lowered risk; you could choose not to pay it. Or, you could start your own fire dept. and use a better risk assessment model and set your own rates and discounts.
There is nothing in the constitution that says, 'The Government shouldn't let me do stupid things.'
Even if you want to argue that it's stupid NOT to pay $75 dollars to the local government for protection from fire; there is no reason not to give people the choice.
Of course, in this example, the choice was given only because these people are outside the jurisdiction of the government. Regardless, they were given the choice, they declined.
Yeah - because the people who didn't pay $75 to be protected by the fire department and (presumably) the same people who don't have insurance to protect themselves financially in the event - are probably the types that make great financial decisions and have a lot of money.
People don't understand how insurance works. And, in this context, we're essentially talking about Fire Insurance.
For $75 dollars you can 'opt-in'. A *LOT* of people are going to opt-in and pay the $75 dollars. And that's important because it costs a LOT more than $75 dollars to put out a fire. This works because, while a LOT of people will pay $75 dollars, only a very few will actually need the firemen to come and put out a fire. The actual cost in keeping firemen on call, having a firetruck, etc, etc, per fire, might easily be many thousands of dollars.
It only works because people are willing to pay $75 dollars on the small chance their house will catch fire.
What these people did was say, 'Hey - we don't want to pay your stupid $75 dollars. We don't need you. Our house won't catch on fire'. And then....it did. So they called up the same department they didn't want to support and begged them to come and put out the fire.
You can't just say 'Well, charge them $75 now, and put out the fire'. If that happened, NOBODY would pay until their house caught on fire. And instead of $75 dollars, you'd have to charge them $20k. Because that's how much it costs to keep a fire department running. And you'd have lots and lots of people who don't have 20k to pay you.
It only works when you have lots and lots and lots of people paying in and only a few people needing the service.
This is like getting health insurance AFTER you find out you have cancer. They only way insurance works is when you get insurance when you AREN'T sick.
Even if your name *isn't* on Mars, you can still lie and say it is. I mean, I don't think I'd be bragging about that at a party; but if your goal is to impress ditzy blondes.....you can just go ahead and lie, like all the rest of us do.
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I (sometimes) wish the internet was less awesome. Back in the day, it was slow and laggy. You'd use the internet, sure; but you'd go to big LAN parties too.
And then you'd have awesome weekends of all sorts of video games and all sorts of file-sharing (at speeds that put the internet to shame).
With storage as cheap as it is....man....sign me up.
But I don't know anyone who goes to LAN parties anymore, and I don't know where any are.
Sort of.
The idea here is that you have to actively protect your privacy, or it's not valuable to you.
So - you tried to sell your house and posted pictures of your living room. That means you don't value your privacy. Then, when I take pictures of your living room and post them on the internet for profit; you are entitled to a meaningless amount of money because - hey - you clearly don't value your privacy.
Healthier? Not really. Certainly not as a result of education. Better working conditions, stricter regulations maybe. But education? No. We're fattier than ever and happy to be.
It sets an interesting precedent...
'Oh, well, if you sent your boyfriend a picture of you in your underwear - you must not value your privacy. Since you gave a picture to on person that could provide the world with access to it; everyone else can do it too!'
I never finished Half-life or half-life 2.
Before HL - I played Quake 2 CTF online for hours and hours and hours. I played some other mods too; but I never got past the first handful of single player levels. It just didn't hold my interest.
HL was the same deal for me. I started the single player but it was slow and boring (for me) compared to the faster paced online play.
Sometimes doctor's amputate the wrong leg.
The solution isn't to pass a law banning medical procedures. The solution is to hold negligent doctor's liable.
I think the problem is in ownership.
Let's say things continue as projected and the internet grinds to a crawl because so many people are doing things like streaming NetFlix. When 40% of all traffic is coming from one company, a commercial company - people start to get upset. Sure, Netflix will say, 'Duh - improve the bandwidth' but nobody is going to want to spend millions of dollars to help some single company make even more money.
Imagine a public park. You probably have one or two within a few miles of your house. Let's say it's got a small playground and occasionally you bring your kids. It's fun. It's nice. Your tax dollars provide it.
One day, you show up and the park is crowded. Kids are EVERYWHERE. Bigger kids are pushing and shoving and your kids can't get on any of the equipment. They hate it. You don't recognize any of the kids either - but then you see an army of large buses. It is some Mega-Corp Day-Care and, instead of building their own park; they are utilizing the publicly available parks. They have so many customers/kids that it renders the park virtually unusable.
You might say, 'What the heck MegaCorp! You are ruining my park.' Because you pay taxes to support that park. But the MegaCorp goes, 'LOL WUT? Public park - STFU'. They aren't going to build a new park, because that would cost them money. They might toss some bucks into the pocket of a politician that plans to run on the 'More Parks for everyone' ticket.
Either the government comes along and regulates use of the park (which causes a ton of anti-gov/big brother types of complaints) or the park remains useless and over-run or you get stuck paying for a bigger park with your tax dollars, even though you don't want higher taxes, and as soon as more parks are built, the MegaCorp ships more and more kids until, in a very short time, you are back in the same position.
At least, 85% of Americans consider themselves middle class. So yeah, everyone supports tax-cuts for the middle class. Everyone supports a stronger middle class.
Because it doesn't mean anything.
Did you actually apply for a loan? Entering all of your personal information in each browser to get a final loan rate that they would actually offer you?
Or did you just load the main page with a teaser rate* where the * indicates that it is a POSSIBLE loan rate you might receive?
I wouldn't be at all surprised if the marketing uses your browser to display a different rate. I'd be slightly surprised if the actual rate *you* would be offered for an actual loan changed. It's too easy to use another browser.
I won't disagree with any of that; whether or not it's a good financial decision really depends heavily on your habits and what you value.
I ignore at the TV/speaker/blu-ray (my PS3 is my blu-ray player) cost because I'd have them even if I didn't use them to watch movies. I play video games and watch non-movie TV a lot.
But yeah, I could see how if you look at the total cost of ownership - going to the movies might be cheaper.
I also don't buy movies, ever. Just as a rule. I've got Netflix right now ($10 a month, I think - whatever the 1-disc at a time is); but RedBox is an option out there too - $1 movies, and rarely, I'll still go to BlockBuster if I want a movie.
I'm not a big fan of 3d (I've heard some people are more/less sensitive to the effect - it still looks pretty flat to me/not very impressive). But, I will agree in that I don't bother going to the movies anymore.
Back in the day, we had a 27" TV. Standard Def. It wasn't even a flat screen. When a movie came out, it came out on VHS. The speakers were whatever cheap crappy speakers they stuck in the TV at the factory.
The movie theater was *WAY* better than that. WAY BETTER. Even with the handful of annoying people you have to deal with to watch a movie.
But now....I've got a 52" HDTV complete with a fairly nice surround sound system. Instead of a VHS - I've got a blue-ray player.
The only reason I'd go to see a movie at the theater is if I couldn't stand to wait a few months for it to come out on DVD/Blu-ray. I might go for a huge blockbuster 1-2 times a year; but that's it.
If the movie theaters all went 3D - it would, at least, be a technology most people can't get right now, in their living room.
Writing software is more and more like buying a very expensive lottery ticket. Most app developers end up working for pennies on the dollar.
"But the picture starts out bleak. The average developer gets to pocket a mere $3,050 per year, and this is still considered 'above typically successful', and the most typical developer earns less than that per year."
Software scales very, very, very well; but our price point expectations are set by the biggest, most successful companies. If you are a top-of-the-charts record breaking seller, you aren't making $$$.
In this case, with Android, if you don't test for everyone and you get one guy who can't run your app and puts a negative review; it can prevent your app from ever gaining traction. The unpaid hours you spend writing your app are a complete loss.
I'm a software developer by trade. Most of us make pretty good money. Entry/Mid-level software dev is ~$30 an hour. Almost a year ago, I wrote and sold my first app for $5. It works as described, it's gotten lots of praise from my users. 10k hits to the site, 6k downloads of the trial edition. And 24 sales. That's $120. And, even though these 24 users are only paying $5 dollars, they have an unbelievably high expectation for support. I've had to step people through things like 'opening a .zip file', all the while they were condemning my application for 'not working'. Because they couldn't extract the files into the same place before running it. Just processing the sale, approving the charge, etc, etc - takes time.
I'd have made more money working at McDonalds than writing and selling my own application on the net. Sure, it's not the greatest thing since the dawn of computers; but it works, it does exactly what it says it will, and it does it well. Customers are happy. And, for everyone one real sale I get; I've got 10 people who are using the trial version for months.
Most phone devs are in a similar position. For free, people would use it, for money virtually nobody will buy it. When you add market segmentation on top of it, it's even worse. At the very least, it makes the barrier to entry very, very high. You need a lot of time and resources to both develop an app, test it on a slew of different android devices, and provide support for a slew of different android devices; all before you see a single penny.
We call this the LEO Effect.
Very few people can claim they've never been inflicted with any type of virus or malware.
Virtually nobody can claim that everyone they correspond with online is a professional IT Guru and has never fallen victim to a virus or malware.
Even in a perfect world where you trust every Facebook friend with your life; computers are horribly insecure. Now anyone who can compromise one friend of yours can control aspects of your Facebook, which reflects heavily on your image. I've done job interviews where I'd pull up their Facebook (if they had one) before I spoke with them.
Yeah - except for that whole 'land of the free' thing. But yes - there is no reason why the local government, without due process, should be able to enact new laws and taxes to force their citizens to do whatever they want.
People who read Slashdot tend to be in Urban/suburban areas and don't have a good understanding of rual populations.
A city like Phoenix, AZ has about 2700 people per square mile.
A county like Yavapi, AZ has about 20 people per square mile.
Let's say, for simplicity sake, a fire station cost 250k a year to keep up and running. Let's also say a fire station can cover 8 square miles.
In the city - 250k covers 21,600 people. That's $11 dollars, annually. Wow - that's cheap. In truth though, only some of those people pay taxes. Let's say 1 in 3 are part of the tax paying workforce. The others are children or not earning any money/retired. So, $33 dollars is what you'd pay to have your house covered per year. Good deal.
In a rural place though - that same fire station still costs 250k to run. And let's say it can cover 10 square miles because of less traffic. That's only 200 people. And only 67 or so are paying. That's $3,731 dollars!
In rural America, the types of places where we don't already have fire departments; house aren't next to each other. They are often miles apart.
The fire department had no trouble protecting the paying customer from the spread of the fire. He wasn't placed in danger by his neighbor's decision not to pay.
There are a LOT of things that are generally considered 'good things' to do. Personally, I'd like to keep the ability to decide which of those I want and which I don't.
This guy didn't want to pay for optional fire coverage; so he didn't. I support his right to do that. It didn't hurt anyone but himself.
Eating Vegetables is good too. Should I be forced to pay taxes so that the government can provide free vegetables to myself and my neighbors? It's a good idea to eat vegetables. What about working out? Should taxes be used to provide public gyms? What if I don't want a public gym? What if I have my own gym. Sure, it's a good thing; but why not let me decide if I want to do it?
I'm moving to the middle of nowhere. I have 20 acres of land. There is no fire department.
Are you saying I shouldn't be able to live on my land? Or are you saying you want to donate your tax dollars to fund my fire department?
Those risk assessments are done by the companies in order to provide you a more competitive price. They don't *have* to do it.
In this case, with the $75 dollars, if you felt like it's too high because of your lowered risk; you could choose not to pay it. Or, you could start your own fire dept. and use a better risk assessment model and set your own rates and discounts.
There is nothing in the constitution that says, 'The Government shouldn't let me do stupid things.'
Even if you want to argue that it's stupid NOT to pay $75 dollars to the local government for protection from fire; there is no reason not to give people the choice.
Of course, in this example, the choice was given only because these people are outside the jurisdiction of the government. Regardless, they were given the choice, they declined.
Ummm - it's not a no-win situation.
Pay $75 if you want protection or come up with your own solution. Don't want to rely on the local fire-department? Why should you have to?
Maybe I've got amazing insurance that covers fire and, hey, if my house catches fire - who cares? I'm just getting a brand new one.
Maybe I've installed some state of the art sprinkler system in my home. Maybe I've built my house out of metal. Who knows.
If I don't want or need fire protection, I shouldn't have to pay for it.
They aren't in the town. The town let's people outside of it's jurisdiction opt-in.
People in the town are forced to opt-in via their taxes (property taxes I'm guessing)
Yeah - because the people who didn't pay $75 to be protected by the fire department and (presumably) the same people who don't have insurance to protect themselves financially in the event - are probably the types that make great financial decisions and have a lot of money.
People don't understand how insurance works. And, in this context, we're essentially talking about Fire Insurance.
For $75 dollars you can 'opt-in'. A *LOT* of people are going to opt-in and pay the $75 dollars. And that's important because it costs a LOT more than $75 dollars to put out a fire. This works because, while a LOT of people will pay $75 dollars, only a very few will actually need the firemen to come and put out a fire. The actual cost in keeping firemen on call, having a firetruck, etc, etc, per fire, might easily be many thousands of dollars.
It only works because people are willing to pay $75 dollars on the small chance their house will catch fire.
What these people did was say, 'Hey - we don't want to pay your stupid $75 dollars. We don't need you. Our house won't catch on fire'. And then....it did. So they called up the same department they didn't want to support and begged them to come and put out the fire.
You can't just say 'Well, charge them $75 now, and put out the fire'. If that happened, NOBODY would pay until their house caught on fire. And instead of $75 dollars, you'd have to charge them $20k. Because that's how much it costs to keep a fire department running. And you'd have lots and lots of people who don't have 20k to pay you.
It only works when you have lots and lots and lots of people paying in and only a few people needing the service.
This is like getting health insurance AFTER you find out you have cancer. They only way insurance works is when you get insurance when you AREN'T sick.
Here's a tip....
Even if your name *isn't* on Mars, you can still lie and say it is. I mean, I don't think I'd be bragging about that at a party; but if your goal is to impress ditzy blondes.....you can just go ahead and lie, like all the rest of us do.