It's not like he's going to keep workers here if we continue to let his company avoid taxes using loopholes. As long as labor in foreign countries is significantly cheaper, they'll just keep moving jobs there.
Also, Microsoft is one of the largest consumers of H-1B visas. If they did decide to move their employees someplace else, they could probably just take them all to the country of origin of the majority of H-1B visa holders without any hassle. They might lose a lot of standard workers, because not many people would move to another country to keep a job, let alone with a pay cut, but do they really care about that?
So what's the difference? They're moving the job anyways. Don't make it easy for them either. Hit them with some anti-trust lawsuits and switch government systems from Windows to Linux; a little "don't let the door hit on you on the ass."
Capitalism at it's best. Verizon has a right to keep the service off until the bill is paid, otherwise it's simply government interference in the free market. This isn't a charity, it's a company. If you didn't want to die, them maybe you should not have gone crazy; it's your own fault and you deserve to die./sarcasm
Anyone remember the story of an elderly man in the Midwest who died because he could not pay his bill and so the utility company reduced his heat in the middle of winter, causing him to freeze to death?
I don't think this is a good idea. The food isn't bad in itself, it's the choice to eat too much of that junk food that's bad. What should happen is that, if your eating choices make you a fatty then your health insurance company should charge you more than everyone else and then use the extra money they get from fatties to cover weight-loss expenditures like nutrition or diet programs (ex. Weight Watchers) or even gym memberships. As long as you go to your meetings and exercise regularly, your health insurance should reimburse you. They do the same for smokers don't they? You pay more for health insurance if you smoke but health insurance usually pays for quit-smoking programs. Of course, this does nothing for the 46 million Americans who don't even have health insurance in the first place.
But this is just another issues that the medical provider and health insurance companies have failed to actually address, so I'm not surprised the government is stepping in. If the private sector would actually do something to combat the obesity problem in the U.S. then the government wouldn't have justification to step in.
At my office, you are banned from heating up fish in the microwave because of the smell. I don't mind the smell, but the people who do complained loud enough that an email was sent out stating that you could no longer heat it up in the microwave. I wish they would send out an email stating that you could no longer fart in your cubicle. The lady in the cube next to me rips some pretty nasty ones, and I'd take the smell of fish over the smell of an SBD any day.
Wow, paying the unsubsidized market rate for a commodity is getting raped?
Anyways, you'll only get raped if you have a gas guzzler. If you have at least a half-decent fuel efficient car, you'll be just fine. If you drive an alternative fuel vehicle, you won't even feel a thing.
Having the customer pay the full, unsubsidized price for gas may actually create real competition in the vehicle fuel market. If people had a choice between gas or an alternative fuel, then the gas companies would have no choice but to keep their prices competitive to that alternative fuel, wouldn't they?
Or worse yet, people may actually get used to driving less and taking public transit as part of their daily commute instead!
Already approved $10 billion in funding.
Routes selected.
EIR done.
This thing is shovel ready, just need the federal funding and private funding to add to it. Plus, it can run at night and on cloudy days.
http://www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov/
In addition there is the Desert Xpress, which is a route from Victorville to Vegas built by the private sector with $0 public tax dollars. When California's High Speed Rail is given the green light, this will be a huge boost to the Desert Xpress project. Extending the route to Palmdale/Lancaster and thus California's high speed rail will be a no brainer.
http://www.desertxpress.com/
Yes, these states should have a free market instead! And by free market, I mean a market where the only regulating done is by the private sector, I don't actually mean it's free from regulation. It's perfectly ok to regulate away competition, as long as its the private sector doing it.
People have no rights in the private sector. Any attempt to force the private sector to recognize the rights of people is government intervention, and conflicts with my laissez-faire ideologies. People have rights like freedom of speech under the government.
Oh and BTW, I think we should shrink the size of the government and let the private sector handle everything.
This argument ignores the fact that the bandwidth caps do not apply to the ISP's own content. They're charging you $2/GB above 15 to watch content from a competitor, but if you want to watch their content there's no cap or extra fee. If I watch 100 GB of Hulu's content, that's going to cost me what... $150 or more? If I watch 100GB of the ISP's content, how much will that cost me? Since you could watch their TV 24/7 and they wouldn't care, I'll bet it's considerably cheaper.
I'd be fine with this cap if it applied to their content as well, but since it doesn't this is borderline double-dipping, clearly anti-competitive and a way to control what content consumers choose to watch.
This is the beginning of the new realignment. If the GOP continues to alienate Snowe and Collins, they'll lose them too. If the Democrats get larger, they could reach a critical mass which results in more fiscally conservative Republicans, who could do without the religious-right's agenda of social issues, leaving their party for the Democrats. The end result would be the splitting of the Democratic party into the fiscal conservatives and the advocates for social services, with the social issues marginalized.
Social issues might come back into the spotlight, at which point the religious groups could reattach themselves to either side, but until the economy starts booming again, banning gay marriage or overturning Roe vs. Wade will not be high priorities.
Did you read this part?
"Since no one else has the right to put this literature up without being sued, the literature that Google deems 'inappropriate' will effectively be banned from the internet for decades until it becomes public domain."
It may not be absolute censorship, since you might be able to find a physical copy of one of these books in a Goodwill somewhere, but it would amount to censorship of internet content.
Like a female rape victim "overreacting" when a man follows her into the woman's restroom. It's called PTSD folks. Even if the man was escorted by cops, say because the other restroom was broken and the guy needed to pee, it's reasonable for the rape survivor to feel uncomfortable in the situation and get the hell out of there.
Discovery has 100 networks that earns them 3 billion from 1.5 billion viewers. Whats to stop them from starting their own over-the-internet subscription service? If their viewers bought only one channel a-la-cart, they could pay 17 cents a month and Discovery would still net 3 billion in a year. With their viewers buying even more channels, or packages, the price per channel could drop even lower, or they could simply pocket more of the revenue.
Channels that are unpopular should die, not be subsidized by other consumers. We already have public television to fill that gap.
Listening to smooth jazz at my desk helps me forget where I am and gets me in the zone, but that only lasts until I hit a wall trying to find a solution for a problem, or N hours pass and my brain starts to fade. At that point, the only solution is some sort of distraction, whether that be a walk around the building or some browsing of Slashdot.
It's important that I'm more interested in the work that I'm doing than the things around me. If my work is enjoyable, then even hunger can't get me out of my zone. If my work becomes tedious, then I become more susceptible to the distractions around me.
The benefit to being in a location other than work is that there are much fewer intrusive distractions.
Is this some kind of pathetic, veiled attempt to dump Bush on the "liberal" Democrats?
Bush was not a "liberal" Republican at all, he was a socially conservative, cut-taxes-print-money-and-spend Republican. Bending the rules doesn't make him "liberal" any more than outright breaking the rules makes Nixon "liberal."
I'm not talking about internet service, I'm talking about television service. What good is 3 or 4 internet companies if they all enforce policies to ensure that only their television services get to ride the cables for free and without limitations?
Artificial wombs could potentially help reduce the number of abortions as well. If we had the ability to successfully transplant a fetus, a mother who did not want to carry the child could now have the child transplanted into an artificial womb. It would give mothers in this situation an alternative, and the question would no longer be why should a woman be forced to carry a child full term, but rather should the child be carried to full term period (result of rape, incest, for example).
Let the companies build whatever roads or cables they want to my house, but don't let them say that when I pay to have stuff delivered that only their delivery company gets to travel on that road for free. Download caps are just a veiled attempt to charge more for television services provided by a third party. It's their attempt to regulate the television market in their favor.
That's B.S. I'm buying internet access from them, not television or phone service. They should make changes to their internet plans and marketing to compete against other ISPs, not to help their own television services compete against other television services. If the market becomes saturated with television competition, so what? Advertisers will still advertise if they know a content provider gets x number of views a day. The customers will benefit heavily from that level of competition with lower prices. Eventually companies will die off and there will be fewer to compete with, maybe the ISP's own television service will go defunct and they'll just have to focus on being an ISP. That's the way the cookie crumbles.
Once again, it's evident that SOMEONE is going to end up regulating the market, whether it be the private sector with these anti-competitive measures or the government with hopefully some level of net neutrality.
There's already a monthly download cap. If I have a 6 Mpbs connections, it's 6 Mbps x 60 sec x 60 min x 24 hours x 30 days = 15552000 Mb a month or approx. 1900 GB a month or 60 GB a day. The problem is that many of us have started to use an amount closer to that rather generous cap, and worse yet it's a cable TV or phone competitor's service that's causing us to use it.
I have no problem with a download cap IF the ISP's TV, phone and other services are also counted towards that cap. In this case, if they make the cap too low, their own services will suffer along with their competitors. You'll just need to watch out for anti-competitive behavior like undercutting television service competitor's by raising ISP prices and subsidizing the costs of their services with that.
These ISPs are angry because they see internet television and phone providers as getting a free ride on their network. They feel that since they built the network, only their services should travel over it for free. But other services don't travel for free, because we pay for the connection.
Download caps and bandwidth limits are bad if the ISP's content is excluded. It's similar to the tactic used by the oil companies in the late 1800s who also happened to own the railroads. Their oil was shipped for free, but any competitors' oil was charged outrageous rates to ensure competitors could not compete in the market. In this case though, it's the consumers that get charged outrageous rates to access the content, while the ISP's content is presented at a lower rate than what it would be if it was included in the cap.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not like he's going to keep workers here if we continue to let his company avoid taxes using loopholes. As long as labor in foreign countries is significantly cheaper, they'll just keep moving jobs there.
Also, Microsoft is one of the largest consumers of H-1B visas. If they did decide to move their employees someplace else, they could probably just take them all to the country of origin of the majority of H-1B visa holders without any hassle. They might lose a lot of standard workers, because not many people would move to another country to keep a job, let alone with a pay cut, but do they really care about that?
So what's the difference? They're moving the job anyways. Don't make it easy for them either. Hit them with some anti-trust lawsuits and switch government systems from Windows to Linux; a little "don't let the door hit on you on the ass."
Capitalism at it's best. Verizon has a right to keep the service off until the bill is paid, otherwise it's simply government interference in the free market. This isn't a charity, it's a company. If you didn't want to die, them maybe you should not have gone crazy; it's your own fault and you deserve to die. /sarcasm
Anyone remember the story of an elderly man in the Midwest who died because he could not pay his bill and so the utility company reduced his heat in the middle of winter, causing him to freeze to death?
I don't think this is a good idea. The food isn't bad in itself, it's the choice to eat too much of that junk food that's bad. What should happen is that, if your eating choices make you a fatty then your health insurance company should charge you more than everyone else and then use the extra money they get from fatties to cover weight-loss expenditures like nutrition or diet programs (ex. Weight Watchers) or even gym memberships. As long as you go to your meetings and exercise regularly, your health insurance should reimburse you. They do the same for smokers don't they? You pay more for health insurance if you smoke but health insurance usually pays for quit-smoking programs. Of course, this does nothing for the 46 million Americans who don't even have health insurance in the first place.
But this is just another issues that the medical provider and health insurance companies have failed to actually address, so I'm not surprised the government is stepping in. If the private sector would actually do something to combat the obesity problem in the U.S. then the government wouldn't have justification to step in.
At my office, you are banned from heating up fish in the microwave because of the smell. I don't mind the smell, but the people who do complained loud enough that an email was sent out stating that you could no longer heat it up in the microwave. I wish they would send out an email stating that you could no longer fart in your cubicle. The lady in the cube next to me rips some pretty nasty ones, and I'd take the smell of fish over the smell of an SBD any day.
Oops, forgot my /sarcasm tag.
Wow, paying the unsubsidized market rate for a commodity is getting raped?
Anyways, you'll only get raped if you have a gas guzzler. If you have at least a half-decent fuel efficient car, you'll be just fine. If you drive an alternative fuel vehicle, you won't even feel a thing.
Having the customer pay the full, unsubsidized price for gas may actually create real competition in the vehicle fuel market. If people had a choice between gas or an alternative fuel, then the gas companies would have no choice but to keep their prices competitive to that alternative fuel, wouldn't they?
Or worse yet, people may actually get used to driving less and taking public transit as part of their daily commute instead!
Already approved $10 billion in funding. Routes selected. EIR done. This thing is shovel ready, just need the federal funding and private funding to add to it. Plus, it can run at night and on cloudy days. http://www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov/
In addition there is the Desert Xpress, which is a route from Victorville to Vegas built by the private sector with $0 public tax dollars. When California's High Speed Rail is given the green light, this will be a huge boost to the Desert Xpress project. Extending the route to Palmdale/Lancaster and thus California's high speed rail will be a no brainer. http://www.desertxpress.com/
Yes, these states should have a free market instead! And by free market, I mean a market where the only regulating done is by the private sector, I don't actually mean it's free from regulation. It's perfectly ok to regulate away competition, as long as its the private sector doing it.
People have no rights in the private sector. Any attempt to force the private sector to recognize the rights of people is government intervention, and conflicts with my laissez-faire ideologies. People have rights like freedom of speech under the government. Oh and BTW, I think we should shrink the size of the government and let the private sector handle everything.
This argument ignores the fact that the bandwidth caps do not apply to the ISP's own content. They're charging you $2/GB above 15 to watch content from a competitor, but if you want to watch their content there's no cap or extra fee. If I watch 100 GB of Hulu's content, that's going to cost me what... $150 or more? If I watch 100GB of the ISP's content, how much will that cost me? Since you could watch their TV 24/7 and they wouldn't care, I'll bet it's considerably cheaper.
I'd be fine with this cap if it applied to their content as well, but since it doesn't this is borderline double-dipping, clearly anti-competitive and a way to control what content consumers choose to watch.
This is the beginning of the new realignment. If the GOP continues to alienate Snowe and Collins, they'll lose them too. If the Democrats get larger, they could reach a critical mass which results in more fiscally conservative Republicans, who could do without the religious-right's agenda of social issues, leaving their party for the Democrats. The end result would be the splitting of the Democratic party into the fiscal conservatives and the advocates for social services, with the social issues marginalized.
Social issues might come back into the spotlight, at which point the religious groups could reattach themselves to either side, but until the economy starts booming again, banning gay marriage or overturning Roe vs. Wade will not be high priorities.
Did you read this part? "Since no one else has the right to put this literature up without being sued, the literature that Google deems 'inappropriate' will effectively be banned from the internet for decades until it becomes public domain." It may not be absolute censorship, since you might be able to find a physical copy of one of these books in a Goodwill somewhere, but it would amount to censorship of internet content.
The private sector does everything better, including censorship!
Like a female rape victim "overreacting" when a man follows her into the woman's restroom. It's called PTSD folks. Even if the man was escorted by cops, say because the other restroom was broken and the guy needed to pee, it's reasonable for the rape survivor to feel uncomfortable in the situation and get the hell out of there.
Discovery has 100 networks that earns them 3 billion from 1.5 billion viewers. Whats to stop them from starting their own over-the-internet subscription service? If their viewers bought only one channel a-la-cart, they could pay 17 cents a month and Discovery would still net 3 billion in a year. With their viewers buying even more channels, or packages, the price per channel could drop even lower, or they could simply pocket more of the revenue.
Channels that are unpopular should die, not be subsidized by other consumers. We already have public television to fill that gap.
Listening to smooth jazz at my desk helps me forget where I am and gets me in the zone, but that only lasts until I hit a wall trying to find a solution for a problem, or N hours pass and my brain starts to fade. At that point, the only solution is some sort of distraction, whether that be a walk around the building or some browsing of Slashdot.
It's important that I'm more interested in the work that I'm doing than the things around me. If my work is enjoyable, then even hunger can't get me out of my zone. If my work becomes tedious, then I become more susceptible to the distractions around me.
The benefit to being in a location other than work is that there are much fewer intrusive distractions.
Is this some kind of pathetic, veiled attempt to dump Bush on the "liberal" Democrats?
Bush was not a "liberal" Republican at all, he was a socially conservative, cut-taxes-print-money-and-spend Republican. Bending the rules doesn't make him "liberal" any more than outright breaking the rules makes Nixon "liberal."
I'm not talking about internet service, I'm talking about television service. What good is 3 or 4 internet companies if they all enforce policies to ensure that only their television services get to ride the cables for free and without limitations?
As first I was scared, and then I laughed.
California: 423,970 km^2
Los Angeles: 1,290.6 km^2
San Francisco: 600.7 km^2
Time to board a Maglev: less than 10 minutes
Time to board a 757: 2 hours+
Artificial wombs could potentially help reduce the number of abortions as well. If we had the ability to successfully transplant a fetus, a mother who did not want to carry the child could now have the child transplanted into an artificial womb. It would give mothers in this situation an alternative, and the question would no longer be why should a woman be forced to carry a child full term, but rather should the child be carried to full term period (result of rape, incest, for example).
Let the companies build whatever roads or cables they want to my house, but don't let them say that when I pay to have stuff delivered that only their delivery company gets to travel on that road for free. Download caps are just a veiled attempt to charge more for television services provided by a third party. It's their attempt to regulate the television market in their favor.
That's B.S. I'm buying internet access from them, not television or phone service. They should make changes to their internet plans and marketing to compete against other ISPs, not to help their own television services compete against other television services. If the market becomes saturated with television competition, so what? Advertisers will still advertise if they know a content provider gets x number of views a day. The customers will benefit heavily from that level of competition with lower prices. Eventually companies will die off and there will be fewer to compete with, maybe the ISP's own television service will go defunct and they'll just have to focus on being an ISP. That's the way the cookie crumbles.
Once again, it's evident that SOMEONE is going to end up regulating the market, whether it be the private sector with these anti-competitive measures or the government with hopefully some level of net neutrality.
There's already a monthly download cap. If I have a 6 Mpbs connections, it's 6 Mbps x 60 sec x 60 min x 24 hours x 30 days = 15552000 Mb a month or approx. 1900 GB a month or 60 GB a day. The problem is that many of us have started to use an amount closer to that rather generous cap, and worse yet it's a cable TV or phone competitor's service that's causing us to use it.
I have no problem with a download cap IF the ISP's TV, phone and other services are also counted towards that cap. In this case, if they make the cap too low, their own services will suffer along with their competitors. You'll just need to watch out for anti-competitive behavior like undercutting television service competitor's by raising ISP prices and subsidizing the costs of their services with that.
These ISPs are angry because they see internet television and phone providers as getting a free ride on their network. They feel that since they built the network, only their services should travel over it for free. But other services don't travel for free, because we pay for the connection.
Download caps and bandwidth limits are bad if the ISP's content is excluded. It's similar to the tactic used by the oil companies in the late 1800s who also happened to own the railroads. Their oil was shipped for free, but any competitors' oil was charged outrageous rates to ensure competitors could not compete in the market. In this case though, it's the consumers that get charged outrageous rates to access the content, while the ISP's content is presented at a lower rate than what it would be if it was included in the cap.