Unfortunately, we as customers don't have much choice.
If a monopoly decides to play hardball and give us "my way or the highway", then we have to be willing to forgo the good completely, instead of merely buying it somewhere else.
Boycotts are a lot harder to swallow for customers if there's no alternative besides "nothing".
Can you imagine if the only water on sale was a thousand dollars a gallon, and was filled with toxic waste? You're screwed. You can't survive without water, so your only option is either pay through the nose for poison, or die.
Alas, this example is unfortunately true in some parts of the world, relatively speaking.
Whether or not internet access qualifies as a necessity is open for debate. Talk to a farmer, and then a WoW frag king, and you'll get very different answers.
My point is that choice restrictions take power away from the customer.
The fact that they're over capacity means that demand is greater than supply.
If the price goes up just enough to drive away the excess customers, those that left would be using it to capacity.
But yeah, jacking up prices might not work, because the ISP's are happily screwing the customers who aren't bitchy enough to drop the ISP over lousy service.
In this case the game itself could very well be single threaded. The graphics rendering is a separate operation that can easily be abstracted away.
Since the multicoreness of the GPU's would be a "hardware thang", chances are that only the device drivers or the graphics API would even need to worry about it.
Multithreaded graphics and multithreaded gaming are two very separate things that are not to be confused with each other. Both operate on separate domains of information, using different code, probably even written in different languages if the GPU is instruction based.
I'll guess that the real reason ID theft costs so much more than just the lost money is that greedy corporations who have a vested interest in profiting from your misfortune.
Credit reporting bureaus make a killing on charging you for the very much needed service of clearing up your credit rating. They don't give a shit about you. In fact, the worse your credit rating, the more profitable it is for them, because every rejection means one more report requested by your next attempt at getting credit.
Merchants profit because often times they get to sell the thief high end merchandise with your card.
Credit card companies profit because with all the stonewalling they do against customers, often times they will get to collect on fraudulent charges. And, for cases which are reported, all they do is yank the money out of the merchant's account.
The scammer wins because he gets free stuff.
The only loser in ID theft is the victim. Everyone else is making a killing off of your misfortune.
And let's not forget...
Lawyers who "help" you fix your credit rating and collect liberal fees
Judges and courts who collect fines from ID thieves
ID theft is a lucrative industry for everyone who really matters in corporate america, so it's not going away anytime soon.
Well, if MS won't give Dell the licenses it needs to pre-install XP, then Dell can't sell them...and neither can anyone else. Dell won't lose sales here except to customers who just plain drop out of the market completely.
They're already escrowed the drivers in a sense by requiring an MS signature. Which, by the way, can be arbitrarily revoked anytime MS damn well feels like it. Which means that if you're a driver writer, you kiss MS ass and kiss it real good if you want your hardware running in Vista.
So if MS wanted to, they could do this VERY easily...well, at least on a technical front. Dunno if running a game of signature brinkmanship a la "You play by our rules or we simply won't sign your drivers" would piss off an anti-trust regulator, but we can hope. At any rate, MS can impose whatever terms it damn well wants to.
So unless you've figured out how to use the swapfile to load unsigned code into the kernel, you are *already* at the mercy of vendors who are themselves at the mercy of MS.
If you're going to be doing craploads of torrents and downloading honking huge files, you're going to saturate the network and leave less room for everyone else.
Bandwidth is a scarce resource and should be treated as such.
A flat rate would be just fine by me as long as companies were *HONEST* about the bandwidth they are selling you.
If you pay a flat rate for unlimited usage, you damn well better not get throttled. If you are being squeezed out of bandwidth that you paid money for, you are getting ripped off, period.
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Especially going to nail those that just use a seat to carry a heavy package.
You just know that's good grounds for an appeal in traffic court.
Spamhaus's PBL lists do this as well.
Not quite original, but certainly insightful.
Unfortunately, we as customers don't have much choice.
If a monopoly decides to play hardball and give us "my way or the highway", then we have to be willing to forgo the good completely, instead of merely buying it somewhere else.
Boycotts are a lot harder to swallow for customers if there's no alternative besides "nothing".
Can you imagine if the only water on sale was a thousand dollars a gallon, and was filled with toxic waste? You're screwed. You can't survive without water, so your only option is either pay through the nose for poison, or die.
Alas, this example is unfortunately true in some parts of the world, relatively speaking.
Whether or not internet access qualifies as a necessity is open for debate. Talk to a farmer, and then a WoW frag king, and you'll get very different answers.
My point is that choice restrictions take power away from the customer.
I agree with you, just for entirely different reasons that are based on abstraction rather than concurrency.
The fact that they're over capacity means that demand is greater than supply.
If the price goes up just enough to drive away the excess customers, those that left would be using it to capacity.
But yeah, jacking up prices might not work, because the ISP's are happily screwing the customers who aren't bitchy enough to drop the ISP over lousy service.
Optimistically I'm hoping that their illegal conduct will *prevent* them from getting a license.
In this case the game itself could very well be single threaded. The graphics rendering is a separate operation that can easily be abstracted away.
Since the multicoreness of the GPU's would be a "hardware thang", chances are that only the device drivers or the graphics API would even need to worry about it.
Multithreaded graphics and multithreaded gaming are two very separate things that are not to be confused with each other. Both operate on separate domains of information, using different code, probably even written in different languages if the GPU is instruction based.
No, it's Red Hat doing with patents what GNU and FSF are doing with copyrights.
I'll guess that the real reason ID theft costs so much more than just the lost money is that greedy corporations who have a vested interest in profiting from your misfortune.
Credit reporting bureaus make a killing on charging you for the very much needed service of clearing up your credit rating. They don't give a shit about you. In fact, the worse your credit rating, the more profitable it is for them, because every rejection means one more report requested by your next attempt at getting credit.
Merchants profit because often times they get to sell the thief high end merchandise with your card.
Credit card companies profit because with all the stonewalling they do against customers, often times they will get to collect on fraudulent charges. And, for cases which are reported, all they do is yank the money out of the merchant's account.
The scammer wins because he gets free stuff.
The only loser in ID theft is the victim. Everyone else is making a killing off of your misfortune.
And let's not forget...
Lawyers who "help" you fix your credit rating and collect liberal fees
Judges and courts who collect fines from ID thieves
ID theft is a lucrative industry for everyone who really matters in corporate america, so it's not going away anytime soon.
Any email that *fails* a DKIM check is forged, and is therefore automatically spam.
..." followup*
So use DKIM to authenticate senders, and you can immediately SMTP reject any forgeries. The only messages that are left are:
1. Legitimate email, which should get through
2. Spammers who use real email addresses
once your only problems are number 2, accountability becomes much easier.
*waits for the "your approach to fighting spam advocates a
Yes.
Why?
Well, if MS won't give Dell the licenses it needs to pre-install XP, then Dell can't sell them...and neither can anyone else. Dell won't lose sales here except to customers who just plain drop out of the market completely.
Remember that only signed drivers can be in the kernel.
And also that only MS can sign a driver.
They're already escrowed the drivers in a sense by requiring an MS signature. Which, by the way, can be arbitrarily revoked anytime MS damn well feels like it. Which means that if you're a driver writer, you kiss MS ass and kiss it real good if you want your hardware running in Vista.
So if MS wanted to, they could do this VERY easily...well, at least on a technical front. Dunno if running a game of signature brinkmanship a la "You play by our rules or we simply won't sign your drivers" would piss off an anti-trust regulator, but we can hope. At any rate, MS can impose whatever terms it damn well wants to.
So unless you've figured out how to use the swapfile to load unsigned code into the kernel, you are *already* at the mercy of vendors who are themselves at the mercy of MS.
I wonder how long it would take for Charles Eppes to show up...
I'm glad about this...it shows that MS is scared enough of Linux to actually NOT try to force vista onto a certain part of the market.
Just free market forces at work, nothing to see here...
It's not that we're smart, but that they're dumb.
Nelson says, "Ha ha"
Where did you get "sovereign immunity"?
Don't you mean judicial immunity?
I may not like the military hiring propaganda, but really, how is it different from corporate lobbying unto the general public instead of congress?
Lobbyists are full of crap, but I would rather have them over censorship any day.
"No, the low-use users are simply not permitted to use all that they paid for, and Comcast takes advantage of that fact."
Fixed that for you.
Which is exactly how it SHOULD be.
If you're going to be doing craploads of torrents and downloading honking huge files, you're going to saturate the network and leave less room for everyone else.
Bandwidth is a scarce resource and should be treated as such.
A flat rate would be just fine by me as long as companies were *HONEST* about the bandwidth they are selling you.
If you pay a flat rate for unlimited usage, you damn well better not get throttled. If you are being squeezed out of bandwidth that you paid money for, you are getting ripped off, period.
I am myself in favor of a "you only get charged for what you actually get".
I only hope that commercial interests aren't so incentivized to oversell flat-rate fat pipes to refuse to change their model.
Overselling and undercutting is profitable, especially if you're a monopoly.
Which is probably why we're even AWARE of a scandal in the first place.
Had Norway been corrupter, it might have been silent corruption.
One good way to cut down on spam is to automatically reject any incoming emails that FAIL a DKIM check.
If you can prove it's forged, then there's no point in trying to analyze it any further...IT'S SPAM.