You make the same mistake of jumping from "ISP" to "cable company". Cable television infrastructure is just one way of delivering Internet services. If you want to talk about monopolies for ISPs, stick to ISPs. Then count the number of ISPs there are and see if "a lot more than one" doesn't put a crimp in the claim that there is any monopoly for ISPs.
No, it doesn't. There are only three real ways of delivering broadband currently:
Cellular — competition is inherently limited because available spectrum is limited. Therefore, we will never have many more cellular companies than we already have. There is no meaningful competition between them, and they are in the middle of further consolidation, because it turns out even four is more than are practical. Also, unless you just happen to be right next to a tower, LTE service does not even meet the federal minimum limit for being called broadband (25Mb/3Mb). In other words, this might as well not exist.
Fixed wireless — this only works well in high-density areas, and requires unsightly equipment that is often not allowed to be installed. So again, in most areas, this might as well not exist.
Cable/fiber/twisted pair wired infrastructure. Of these, twisted pair doesn't have broadband at any meaningful range, which leaves cable and fiber. So you have at most a duopoly, and that's if the phone company thinks there is enough profit to be made by worth running fiber to your neighborhood. Otherwise, you have a monopoly.
As a result, almost 21% of households have exactly one broadband provider, and that's cable TV. And an additional 19% don't have access to any service that meets the minimum criterial for being broadband (source: Ars Technica). It isn't that I'm ignoring other types of ISPs. They just aren't viable outside of dense population centers, which makes them all entirely moot for the purposes of this discussion.
The OP makes the mistake of ignoring that there are NO government-granted monopolies for ISPs. Not a single one. There USED to be "exclusive franchises" for cable television companies, but that was outlawed more than 20 years ago, and any such franchises are long expired. There MAY be exclusive franchises for wireline telephone companies, but that's for the wireline telephone service, not because they are an ISP.
It should be noted that only local-level franchising laws were banned in 1992. State-level franchising laws are still allowed. But still, it doesn't matter, because as I said, even where local governments opened up their towns to multiple cable companies, the result was almost invariably the complete and total failure of any newcomer.
A local government can "require" two cable companies all it wants to,
Actually, it can't. A government cannot force a company to come into a market to compete. It can only get out of the way and allow them to, which happened under federal law a very long time ago. The fact that nobody wants to compete against an existing company isn't a "government-granted monopoly", it is pure economics.
I think you kind of misunderstood that statement. The construct "X can do Y all it wants to, Z" does not actually imply that X has the right to do Y. Rather, it means that even if we assume that X is capable of doing Y and does so, then Z. I guess it's a southern thing.
Unfortunately, this is true. It's a safe bet that it was written by lobbyists for their corporate masters, and that the American public will get totally and thoroughly screwed. I mean, I could be wrong, but statistically speaking, I'm probably not.
The ISPs do not have natural monopolies. They have government-granted monopolies.
For the majority of the country, the monopoly is, indeed, a natural monopoly. The average lifespan of a second cable company in most of America is measured in single-digit years. We've seen it time and time again. A new company comes in because the old cable company is charging extortionate prices. The existing company drops their prices, undercutting the new company and preventing them from getting enough subscribers to pay off the interest on their physical plant (all those cable lines). After three to five years, the newcomer gives up and sells off its assets to the incumbent, who gets a new (often government-subsidized) network infrastructure at a fraction of the cost of building it themselves.
A local government can "require" two cable companies all it wants to, but in practice, the only way that is ever going to happen is if that government steps in and pays for the cost of running the cable lines. Otherwise, there is way too much first-mover advantage for a second company to ever succeed. And this is true very nearly everywhere, with the possible exception of major cities.
And if the government is building out the infrastructure anyway, then doing it for a for-profit company is just corporate welfare. Why not instead create competition the right way — by leasing the use of that infrastructure non-preferentially to any competitor that wants to do business in your community? This approach, unlike competing wire providers, actually works in practice.
That 'Ability to run Windows apps via WINE' is a big one for me. I have a win32 app that I use WINE to run on Macs (and Linux boxes). That'd be fine if I could build it for ARM and have a WINE for ARM version that'd still run it. But I don't see that appearing any time soon. It took long enough to get WINE up and running for Intel Mac's.
The API that they're emulating is still the same, and there has been a WINE version that runs ARM Windows binaries on ARM Linux for at least a year. Assuming the code is architected sanely, it ought to require little more than a recompile to port it to macOS.
Remove that, you kill the Mac because it will lose all of the Adobe apps, the ability to run Windows either directly or via VM, the ability to run Windows apps via WINE, a ton of software originally written for Linux, and more. It will completely kill the software ecosystem on the Mac and make it literally unusable for a ton of developers who rely on x86-64.
Adobe has been porting Photoshop to iOS for several years in anticipation of just such a move. By the time Apple switches CPUs, a substantial percentage of the Desktop version of Photoshop (if not the entire code base) will have already been ported to run on ARM. I would not be surprised if their other project teams are doing something similar.
What moving to ARM will do, unfortunately, is create a big barrier for anyone still running Photoshop CS6 and Lightroom 6, i.e. the people who refuse to switch to a subscription model. It is unlikely that very many of those users will still be running Photoshop after that, so Adobe's overall market share will take a beating pretty quickly. I hope that the rise of alternative products will fill that gap well enough that Adobe will find themselves pressured to restore their software sales model, but I'm not holding my breath. Either way, my first ARM-based Mac will mark the end of Adobe products for me. I'm done with them.
As for Linux and Windows apps, maybe you missed it, but Windows started transitioning to ARM in 2016, with hardware shipping in late 2017, and Linux has run on ARM processors since the last part of the 20th century. Any software that has strong ties to x86 will have to be rewritten anyway, no matter what Apple does.
Spoken like a true thief.. A thief with a tiny brain who can't read a fucking article.. 52% asshole.. 52% of the work force taking home supplies. You don't think that adds up?
It's hard not to take home office supplies. You're running late to a meeting, so you grab a pen off your desk and stick it in your pocket. Then you forget about it. A week later, your significant other asks if you forgot about something, and that's when you find out that the pen exploded all over the laundry. Or at best, you notice it, and you toss it somewhere to bring with you the next day, and then by the next day, you've forgotten about it. A month goes by, and you see a pen and wonder why it is there, and you put it in the jar with the rest of your pens.
That's not stealing in any meaningful sense of the word. Besides, most employers these days expect you to do some work from home outside of office hours. So if you don't have a few random office supplies from work at home, then your employer is arguably stealing from you.
The real problem is companies that let their bean counters total up the cost of those supplies and then try to find ways to reduce that cost. In aggregate, yes, office supplies add up. But the total collapse of workplace morale when you try to limit those losses adds up to far more damage, both in the short term and long term. Office supplies are simply a part of the cost of doing business, including the ones that end up randomly walking away, whether intentionally or accidentally. And if you can't afford office supplies, you should really take a look at the balance sheet and see how much more expensive your employees are.:-)
Speaking of armies, did anybody else read that headline initially as "Scared shooters don't last long"? My eyes popped out of my head for a moment, before I reread it. I was half expecting some pop psychology discussion of school shootings or gang violence or something.
This is the disadvantage of reading that right after the story about China's social credit system....
If they did this in the U.S., some percentage of creditless people, isolated from family and friends by their inability to travel, and unable to do anything meaningful to escape their stressful lives, would likely lose the will to live, and would probably take a bunch of people with them when they went.
China, with its strict ban on private ownership of firearms, might not have that problem to the same extent, but I would still expect this to cause a significant increase in suicides and murders, and in particular, murders of children by parents.
So pretty much like the main Gab site really. All the people booted off Twitter concentrated in one place. The best you can say about it is that it strongly supports free speech, but you don't go there for the quality of the content.
No, the best that can be said about it is that, at least in theory, it will keep the people who generate that kind of content busy spewing garbage in a semi-offline, crap-filled cesspool while the rest of us have intelligent conversations on the adult version of the Internet. Whether this will play out in practice or not is another question.:-)
I'm a little confused here. WebKit has had a back-forward cache for as long as I can remember, and Chrome forked off of that. How is this not already part of Chrome?
The endgame here is for the cable companies to control (and hence have pricing leverage over) both content and content distribution. They will make it more expensive for other content providers to reach AT&T's customers, while protecting Time Warner. AT&T doesn't have to get directly involved in negotiations between Time Warner and cable companies to achieve this.
I don't buy that, because that wouldn't be in AT&T's best interests financially. Most of those providers already provide content to cable companies, and AT&T, in addition to being an Internet provider, is also a glorified cable company. Besides owning DirecTV, it also provides cable-TV-equivalent service in FiOS markets. If AT&T decided to reduce other content providers' access to their Internet-based customers, that decision would come back to bite them badly at contract negotiation time when those content providers decide how much to charge AT&T's cable subscribers for their content (and, for that matter, whether to provide it at all).
This, of course, ignores the small number of content providers whose content isn't available as part of AT&T cable (Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, Hulu), but AT&T's existing streaming service is already competing with them, so they already have a pretty strong motive to be evil to them. I don't think having a second motive changes the equation much, if at all.
They probably want to study them to see if there has been any damage from radiation or other issues, but leaving them running longer may help them to find more useful information.
I'm not so sure they really did throw this case, though I'll admit that this was my initial reaction. Given that this is just Time Warner (the group of TV channels) and not Time Warner Cable (the competitor), the antitrust issues involve only indirect competition, so proving that these are real antitrust problems is harder than you might think.
The merger agreement includes an agreement to permanently run Time Warner as a separate company and not interfere with their pricing negotiations with cable companies (the indirect competition issue). Assuming that agreement holds, there aren't any other obvious antitrust issues with this merger that I can see. And if it doesn't hold, then government can step in and break up the company faster than you can say, "See, I told you they couldn't resist the temptation," because the antitrust law violations would be pretty obvious.
So as much as I don't like the idea of AT&T getting any bigger, I'm struggling to see a legal reason for blocking the merger.
Better. Automatically deploy the external airbags whenever the car alarm gets triggered. Suddenly smash-and-grab robbery gets a lot more dangerous, complete with falling glass launched at the attacker's face at high speeds. How soon can we get them installed on every car in the Bay Area?
I don't mean to defend Frontier here (they're in my work area and they completely suck). But it's not unusual for a business line+DSL to cost upwards of $100/mo. A 5-year contract would then be worth $6000+, and early cancellation could constitute damages in the $4k range.
Where do you work where the reasonable damages for early cancellation could be that high? Reasonable damages for early cancellation are limited to the cost of installing the service minus the profit already made from prior use of the service. Even if we assume that they never used the service at all, the entire cost of installing DSL service typically includes:
The DSL equipment (maybe $40)
Having someone plug a single cable into the DSLAM at the central office or remote terminal (maybe $10)
The fee that the DSL company pays your phone company for allowing the previous connection
And in this case, the phone company and the DSL provider are the same entity, so that last one is zero. So unless you're in an area where the central office workers make $50,000 per hour, a $4,000 fee isn't "damages". It's a penalty. There's a difference. And that kind of penalty is clearly unreasonable for an underperforming service.
To the person who wrote this story, I would say that the right thing to do, as a local newspaper, is to start publishing news articles about what's happening, and to interview as many locals about whether their Frontier service is also constantly dropping out. Be factual, be accurate, but be persuasive.
Then take your evidence to the city council and ask them to review your town's franchise agreement with Charter.
Basically, make it clear to Frontier that you're in a position to drive them out of the DSL business in your area (or at least cost them boatloads of money) unless they agree to waive cancellation fees not only for you, but for every single person in your community whose service is having similar problems.
Only part of the news is telling the facts. The other part is serving the public interest. You have a unique opportunity to use your soapbox to serve the public interest here. Use it.
Thanks for the clarification. The alternative - of the moon being subject to friction due to being inside the Earth's atmosphere was concerning me somewhat.
As long as it won't crash into Earth before the sun expands and lights the atmosphere on fire, we're good. At least until the sun expands and lights the atmosphere on fire.
"The smartphone symbols won't be included in rego numbers and are simply decorative." At least some sanity is currently prevailing, there. Though it's mostly likely due to IT systems that can almost handle ASCII correctly without exploding rather than any intelligence anywhere.
That or because if they didn't precisely match the allowed characters with the glyphs available in their license plate font, you could have a thousand "unique" license plates that all look like this:
The reality is the big corporations just accumulate warchests of offensive patents and then go after each other and small competitors with them, to keep those very small inventors out of the marketplace.
No, not really. Most companies accumulate war chests of patents, but most companies only use them defensively, either so they can negotiate cross-licensing terms when threatened by a real company or as a means to say, "Nope. We had a patent on that ten years before you filed yours" when sued by a non-practicing entity (patent troll).
What makes this particularly absurd is that Qualcomm almost certainly provided a programming spec telling companies how to use their chips, and now Qualcomm is suing Apple, claiming that by following that spec, Apple owes them an additional patent extortion fee. If Apple wasn't planning to develop its own baseband and ditch Qualcomm before all this nonsense, I can pretty much guarantee that they're going to now, because this is just over-the-top appalling behavior for any vendor. That said, I'm assuming that Qualcomm has already realized that their days as an Apple supplier are numbered, and they are just trying to milk the gravy train for every penny it's worth for the short time they have left.
The only question in my mind is why Apple didn't do this ten years ago, back when baseband crashes seemed to be a daily occurrence. Here's hoping the rest of the industry has the courage to follow their lead.
The patent in question, 9,535,490 is not nearly a "technology", though. If I skimmed it correctly, it amounts to basically this:
To save power, the device talking to the cellular modem should collect data for a period of time, and then send it as soon as the timer expires or when the cellular modem provides data in the other direction, whichever comes first, to reduce the number of times you have to power up the modem.
And for that trivial idea, Qualcomm wants $13 per device.
I'll let you ponder how bonkers this is for just a moment before noting that the patent in question also appears to basically be nothing more than an "on a cellular modem" version of Intel's 20100241880 Ethernet power management patent.
So not only is the idea trivial, it wasn't even original. Either:
This idea is so obvious that it should not have been awarded a patent in the first place, having been "invented" by two unrelated people working on unrelated technologies within a few years of each other who probably knew nothing about each other's work, or
Qualcomm knew that this management technique worked in for Ethernet, and decided to reword the idea in a way that would make it hard to spot using simple text searches and file a patent on its use with cellular modems.
Either way, IMO, they're using what should be an invalid patent to extort the entire industry.
13.9 mRem is 139 microsieverts. So using that chart, one hour of exposure is somewhere between "Approximate total dose received at Fukushima Town Hall over two weeks following accident" and "EPA yearly release limit for a nuclear power plant". And about a third of "yearly dose from natural potassium in your body". Not great, but it could be a lot worse.
It does when network effects come into play. Besides more customers tending to result in more customers inherently, there's a secondary effect whereby having more products available tends to result in more customers, and having more customers lets them afford to carry more products. When you get to the point where you can buy essentially anything you want at a single store, other stores start having serious trouble competing with that level of convenience unless you can somehow undercut them on price. Amazon is basically at that point, and their volume means that they're big enough to have their own logistics service, which drives down costs to a point where other stores have trouble undercutting them on price as well.
Amazon barely breaks even on the retail side. Until very recently, it lost money every year.
If by recently, you mean 2003, then yes. Amazon has had some bad quarters since then, and I think one whole year where they were down, but this was mostly because of capital expenditures to increase their potential profitability in the future, plus some expensive product failures like the Fire Phone. If you limit yourself to looking at only the retail part of their business, I don't think that they have been truly unprofitable in a very long time.
If it was anything like a monopoly, it'd be hugely profitable instead.
If you're implying that they would take advantage of their market position to raise prices, that can't happen for two reasons.
First, although Amazon, as a selling platform, is a near-monopoly, Amazon as an individual seller on that platform competes on roughly equal footing with independent sellers. If Amazon raised prices too much, they would get undercut by third-party sellers on their own platform, and they would likely make less profit. Of course, they could raise the percentage that they charge on third-party marketplace sales, but this would cause an exodus to one of the other platforms, and again, they would make less profit. And without those third-party vendors, Amazon wouldn't be able to offer nearly the breadth of merchandise that they do, and thus would stop being the go-to place for finding things, which would mean losing market share.
Second, there are still a few too many competitors whose platforms still have some potential to become viable competitors. Although they are dwindling, that's not the same thing as not existing. Move too fast to raise profits, and they would run the risk of erasing their rapid gains of late.
I think the root of the problem is that once your email address or phone number gets stolen from any store or website whose systems get compromised, it gets sold and resold to various scammer groups for nefarious purposes.
If you want me to reliably respond to email, the first step is to pass a law declaring open season on spammers, with a bounty of $1,000 per head, and arm everybody in the world with shotguns.:-)
I would be thrilled to have only 199 unread email messages. In fact, I have 3,592 unread email messages, despite numerous attempts to blacklist spammers, bulk delete spam, unsubscribe from various email lists that companies have put me on without my consent, etc. The volume of garbage is so extreme relative to the actual signal that I've just about given up on email entirely. I try to catch important emails from people I know, but I make no guarantees. The odds of an email never even being noticed until it is too late are probably at least 30% at this point.
Heck, lately, the spam has been coming more and more from our own federal government, whose "We the People" website makes no attempts to validate email addresses whatsoever, resulting in some weeks getting dozens of "Thank You For Your Message" reports from an email alias that I have never used or given out publicly (same username, different well-known hostname). When even the federal IT department can't avoid being part of the problem, it's time to give up on the entire delivery system.
The same is also true for the telephone. When I get calls, unless the number is one that I recognize, I do not answer. Ever. If anybody wants to reach me, they can either:
Call and leave a message; assuming you aren't one of those dirtbag scammers pretending to be from the IRS), I'll call you back. However, if you call and don't leave a voicemail message, there's a decent chance that I will block your number within minutes, so don't call unless you intend to leave a message.
Send me a text, if you have my cell phone number.
Contact me on Facebook.
All other delivery methods are on a best-effort basis, and should be considered unreliable, at best.
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No, it doesn't. There are only three real ways of delivering broadband currently:
As a result, almost 21% of households have exactly one broadband provider, and that's cable TV. And an additional 19% don't have access to any service that meets the minimum criterial for being broadband (source: Ars Technica). It isn't that I'm ignoring other types of ISPs. They just aren't viable outside of dense population centers, which makes them all entirely moot for the purposes of this discussion.
It should be noted that only local-level franchising laws were banned in 1992. State-level franchising laws are still allowed. But still, it doesn't matter, because as I said, even where local governments opened up their towns to multiple cable companies, the result was almost invariably the complete and total failure of any newcomer.
I think you kind of misunderstood that statement. The construct "X can do Y all it wants to, Z" does not actually imply that X has the right to do Y. Rather, it means that even if we assume that X is capable of doing Y and does so, then Z. I guess it's a southern thing.
Unfortunately, this is true. It's a safe bet that it was written by lobbyists for their corporate masters, and that the American public will get totally and thoroughly screwed. I mean, I could be wrong, but statistically speaking, I'm probably not.
For the majority of the country, the monopoly is, indeed, a natural monopoly. The average lifespan of a second cable company in most of America is measured in single-digit years. We've seen it time and time again. A new company comes in because the old cable company is charging extortionate prices. The existing company drops their prices, undercutting the new company and preventing them from getting enough subscribers to pay off the interest on their physical plant (all those cable lines). After three to five years, the newcomer gives up and sells off its assets to the incumbent, who gets a new (often government-subsidized) network infrastructure at a fraction of the cost of building it themselves.
A local government can "require" two cable companies all it wants to, but in practice, the only way that is ever going to happen is if that government steps in and pays for the cost of running the cable lines. Otherwise, there is way too much first-mover advantage for a second company to ever succeed. And this is true very nearly everywhere, with the possible exception of major cities.
And if the government is building out the infrastructure anyway, then doing it for a for-profit company is just corporate welfare. Why not instead create competition the right way — by leasing the use of that infrastructure non-preferentially to any competitor that wants to do business in your community? This approach, unlike competing wire providers, actually works in practice.
The API that they're emulating is still the same, and there has been a WINE version that runs ARM Windows binaries on ARM Linux for at least a year. Assuming the code is architected sanely, it ought to require little more than a recompile to port it to macOS.
Adobe has been porting Photoshop to iOS for several years in anticipation of just such a move. By the time Apple switches CPUs, a substantial percentage of the Desktop version of Photoshop (if not the entire code base) will have already been ported to run on ARM. I would not be surprised if their other project teams are doing something similar.
What moving to ARM will do, unfortunately, is create a big barrier for anyone still running Photoshop CS6 and Lightroom 6, i.e. the people who refuse to switch to a subscription model. It is unlikely that very many of those users will still be running Photoshop after that, so Adobe's overall market share will take a beating pretty quickly. I hope that the rise of alternative products will fill that gap well enough that Adobe will find themselves pressured to restore their software sales model, but I'm not holding my breath. Either way, my first ARM-based Mac will mark the end of Adobe products for me. I'm done with them.
As for Linux and Windows apps, maybe you missed it, but Windows started transitioning to ARM in 2016, with hardware shipping in late 2017, and Linux has run on ARM processors since the last part of the 20th century. Any software that has strong ties to x86 will have to be rewritten anyway, no matter what Apple does.
Who wants to bet someone wrote down 12 (dozen) pencils, and someone dropped the parentheses?
It's hard not to take home office supplies. You're running late to a meeting, so you grab a pen off your desk and stick it in your pocket. Then you forget about it. A week later, your significant other asks if you forgot about something, and that's when you find out that the pen exploded all over the laundry. Or at best, you notice it, and you toss it somewhere to bring with you the next day, and then by the next day, you've forgotten about it. A month goes by, and you see a pen and wonder why it is there, and you put it in the jar with the rest of your pens.
That's not stealing in any meaningful sense of the word. Besides, most employers these days expect you to do some work from home outside of office hours. So if you don't have a few random office supplies from work at home, then your employer is arguably stealing from you.
The real problem is companies that let their bean counters total up the cost of those supplies and then try to find ways to reduce that cost. In aggregate, yes, office supplies add up. But the total collapse of workplace morale when you try to limit those losses adds up to far more damage, both in the short term and long term. Office supplies are simply a part of the cost of doing business, including the ones that end up randomly walking away, whether intentionally or accidentally. And if you can't afford office supplies, you should really take a look at the balance sheet and see how much more expensive your employees are. :-)
I have a sneaky suspicion that explosives are even more highly regulated than guns over there.
Speaking of armies, did anybody else read that headline initially as "Scared shooters don't last long"? My eyes popped out of my head for a moment, before I reread it. I was half expecting some pop psychology discussion of school shootings or gang violence or something.
This is the disadvantage of reading that right after the story about China's social credit system....
If they did this in the U.S., some percentage of creditless people, isolated from family and friends by their inability to travel, and unable to do anything meaningful to escape their stressful lives, would likely lose the will to live, and would probably take a bunch of people with them when they went.
China, with its strict ban on private ownership of firearms, might not have that problem to the same extent, but I would still expect this to cause a significant increase in suicides and murders, and in particular, murders of children by parents.
No, the best that can be said about it is that, at least in theory, it will keep the people who generate that kind of content busy spewing garbage in a semi-offline, crap-filled cesspool while the rest of us have intelligent conversations on the adult version of the Internet. Whether this will play out in practice or not is another question. :-)
I'm a little confused here. WebKit has had a back-forward cache for as long as I can remember, and Chrome forked off of that. How is this not already part of Chrome?
I don't buy that, because that wouldn't be in AT&T's best interests financially. Most of those providers already provide content to cable companies, and AT&T, in addition to being an Internet provider, is also a glorified cable company. Besides owning DirecTV, it also provides cable-TV-equivalent service in FiOS markets. If AT&T decided to reduce other content providers' access to their Internet-based customers, that decision would come back to bite them badly at contract negotiation time when those content providers decide how much to charge AT&T's cable subscribers for their content (and, for that matter, whether to provide it at all).
This, of course, ignores the small number of content providers whose content isn't available as part of AT&T cable (Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, Hulu), but AT&T's existing streaming service is already competing with them, so they already have a pretty strong motive to be evil to them. I don't think having a second motive changes the equation much, if at all.
They probably want to study them to see if there has been any damage from radiation or other issues, but leaving them running longer may help them to find more useful information.
That's just what they said about Spirit.
I'm not so sure they really did throw this case, though I'll admit that this was my initial reaction. Given that this is just Time Warner (the group of TV channels) and not Time Warner Cable (the competitor), the antitrust issues involve only indirect competition, so proving that these are real antitrust problems is harder than you might think.
The merger agreement includes an agreement to permanently run Time Warner as a separate company and not interfere with their pricing negotiations with cable companies (the indirect competition issue). Assuming that agreement holds, there aren't any other obvious antitrust issues with this merger that I can see. And if it doesn't hold, then government can step in and break up the company faster than you can say, "See, I told you they couldn't resist the temptation," because the antitrust law violations would be pretty obvious.
So as much as I don't like the idea of AT&T getting any bigger, I'm struggling to see a legal reason for blocking the merger.
Better. Automatically deploy the external airbags whenever the car alarm gets triggered. Suddenly smash-and-grab robbery gets a lot more dangerous, complete with falling glass launched at the attacker's face at high speeds. How soon can we get them installed on every car in the Bay Area?
Where do you work where the reasonable damages for early cancellation could be that high? Reasonable damages for early cancellation are limited to the cost of installing the service minus the profit already made from prior use of the service. Even if we assume that they never used the service at all, the entire cost of installing DSL service typically includes:
And in this case, the phone company and the DSL provider are the same entity, so that last one is zero. So unless you're in an area where the central office workers make $50,000 per hour, a $4,000 fee isn't "damages". It's a penalty. There's a difference. And that kind of penalty is clearly unreasonable for an underperforming service.
To the person who wrote this story, I would say that the right thing to do, as a local newspaper, is to start publishing news articles about what's happening, and to interview as many locals about whether their Frontier service is also constantly dropping out. Be factual, be accurate, but be persuasive.
Then take your evidence to the city council and ask them to review your town's franchise agreement with Charter.
Basically, make it clear to Frontier that you're in a position to drive them out of the DSL business in your area (or at least cost them boatloads of money) unless they agree to waive cancellation fees not only for you, but for every single person in your community whose service is having similar problems.
Only part of the news is telling the facts. The other part is serving the public interest. You have a unique opportunity to use your soapbox to serve the public interest here. Use it.
Thanks for the clarification. The alternative - of the moon being subject to friction due to being inside the Earth's atmosphere was concerning me somewhat.
As long as it won't crash into Earth before the sun expands and lights the atmosphere on fire, we're good. At least until the sun expands and lights the atmosphere on fire.
That or because if they didn't precisely match the allowed characters with the glyphs available in their license plate font, you could have a thousand "unique" license plates that all look like this:
[] [] [] [] [] [] []
No, not really. Most companies accumulate war chests of patents, but most companies only use them defensively, either so they can negotiate cross-licensing terms when threatened by a real company or as a means to say, "Nope. We had a patent on that ten years before you filed yours" when sued by a non-practicing entity (patent troll).
What makes this particularly absurd is that Qualcomm almost certainly provided a programming spec telling companies how to use their chips, and now Qualcomm is suing Apple, claiming that by following that spec, Apple owes them an additional patent extortion fee. If Apple wasn't planning to develop its own baseband and ditch Qualcomm before all this nonsense, I can pretty much guarantee that they're going to now, because this is just over-the-top appalling behavior for any vendor. That said, I'm assuming that Qualcomm has already realized that their days as an Apple supplier are numbered, and they are just trying to milk the gravy train for every penny it's worth for the short time they have left.
The only question in my mind is why Apple didn't do this ten years ago, back when baseband crashes seemed to be a daily occurrence. Here's hoping the rest of the industry has the courage to follow their lead.
The patent in question, 9,535,490 is not nearly a "technology", though. If I skimmed it correctly, it amounts to basically this:
To save power, the device talking to the cellular modem should collect data for a period of time, and then send it as soon as the timer expires or when the cellular modem provides data in the other direction, whichever comes first, to reduce the number of times you have to power up the modem.
And for that trivial idea, Qualcomm wants $13 per device.
I'll let you ponder how bonkers this is for just a moment before noting that the patent in question also appears to basically be nothing more than an "on a cellular modem" version of Intel's 20100241880 Ethernet power management patent.
So not only is the idea trivial, it wasn't even original. Either:
Either way, IMO, they're using what should be an invalid patent to extort the entire industry.
F**k Qualcomm.
13.9 mRem is 139 microsieverts. So using that chart, one hour of exposure is somewhere between "Approximate total dose received at Fukushima Town Hall over two weeks following accident" and "EPA yearly release limit for a nuclear power plant". And about a third of "yearly dose from natural potassium in your body". Not great, but it could be a lot worse.
It does when network effects come into play. Besides more customers tending to result in more customers inherently, there's a secondary effect whereby having more products available tends to result in more customers, and having more customers lets them afford to carry more products. When you get to the point where you can buy essentially anything you want at a single store, other stores start having serious trouble competing with that level of convenience unless you can somehow undercut them on price. Amazon is basically at that point, and their volume means that they're big enough to have their own logistics service, which drives down costs to a point where other stores have trouble undercutting them on price as well.
If by recently, you mean 2003, then yes. Amazon has had some bad quarters since then, and I think one whole year where they were down, but this was mostly because of capital expenditures to increase their potential profitability in the future, plus some expensive product failures like the Fire Phone. If you limit yourself to looking at only the retail part of their business, I don't think that they have been truly unprofitable in a very long time.
If you're implying that they would take advantage of their market position to raise prices, that can't happen for two reasons.
First, although Amazon, as a selling platform, is a near-monopoly, Amazon as an individual seller on that platform competes on roughly equal footing with independent sellers. If Amazon raised prices too much, they would get undercut by third-party sellers on their own platform, and they would likely make less profit. Of course, they could raise the percentage that they charge on third-party marketplace sales, but this would cause an exodus to one of the other platforms, and again, they would make less profit. And without those third-party vendors, Amazon wouldn't be able to offer nearly the breadth of merchandise that they do, and thus would stop being the go-to place for finding things, which would mean losing market share.
Second, there are still a few too many competitors whose platforms still have some potential to become viable competitors. Although they are dwindling, that's not the same thing as not existing. Move too fast to raise profits, and they would run the risk of erasing their rapid gains of late.
I think the root of the problem is that once your email address or phone number gets stolen from any store or website whose systems get compromised, it gets sold and resold to various scammer groups for nefarious purposes.
If you want me to reliably respond to email, the first step is to pass a law declaring open season on spammers, with a bounty of $1,000 per head, and arm everybody in the world with shotguns. :-)
I would be thrilled to have only 199 unread email messages. In fact, I have 3,592 unread email messages, despite numerous attempts to blacklist spammers, bulk delete spam, unsubscribe from various email lists that companies have put me on without my consent, etc. The volume of garbage is so extreme relative to the actual signal that I've just about given up on email entirely. I try to catch important emails from people I know, but I make no guarantees. The odds of an email never even being noticed until it is too late are probably at least 30% at this point.
Heck, lately, the spam has been coming more and more from our own federal government, whose "We the People" website makes no attempts to validate email addresses whatsoever, resulting in some weeks getting dozens of "Thank You For Your Message" reports from an email alias that I have never used or given out publicly (same username, different well-known hostname). When even the federal IT department can't avoid being part of the problem, it's time to give up on the entire delivery system.
The same is also true for the telephone. When I get calls, unless the number is one that I recognize, I do not answer. Ever. If anybody wants to reach me, they can either:
All other delivery methods are on a best-effort basis, and should be considered unreliable, at best.