But... on-site setup, customized media software, lifetime labor, quality parts, little to no noise, and a nice pvr case. Let's see tigerdirect.ca compete with that.
*opens yellow pages, finds reputable computer repair shop*
"Hello, I'm purchasing a new computer, how much would it cost for you to install my software, set it up in my office, and provide free labor for the lifespan of the computer?"
It's not going to be ~$700, the implied difference in price you've quoted. You're banking on your reputation, and that's great, more power to you. But if you're telling your customers that they *can't* get the same service and support if they buy from an online volume dealer, you are in fact misleading them.
For most consumer products, especially computers, people can pay for whatever they want from whomever they want, which is what has the manufacturers trying to protect the smaller shops they believe are important to their target market.
I'm not saying MAP is a good idea, I just disagree with the relevance of the parent post.
Ok, here's the "prescribed" worst case scenario: tiny Tim finds Granny's piece, identifies what it is, but can't shoot it. He goes online, finds out how to work it, and "accidentally" blows his head off.
Here's the "real world" worst case scenario:...it's the perfect mugger's weapon... use your imagination!! The sick bastards that designed it obviously have! I can see it now... "Oh those Chinese copies that made their way into the US have nothing to do with us...." Gimme a fu(kin break.
Here's what will actually happen: murders will rise, and Americans will rally around the right to bear arms. So sad.
'it's hard to do good, and to gather data in ways that don't raise privacy concerns or that might help repressive governments to block controversial content.'"
Actually it's pretty easy. Just be a search engine and generate revenues though benign info spidering. They've got it. The second they let politics in, it's over. That would be like traffic lights turning green for BMW's. It just won't work out in the end.
I'd rather see them simply reduce spending and pay off the national debt.
Hear, hear. The impression that China is getting a stranglehold on the US by being their biggest debt holder is completely false, the UK is buying faster than the Chinese, and Japan owns the most of any foreign country, a mere 6%. In any event, the US can always find foreign investment, and 73% of the debt is domesticly owned. Still, I suspect any major foreign investor in the US is expecting more than just a good interest rate.
The scary part is that the US debt is already over 73% of its GDP and rising [note the "debt clock" in the right side column]. The deficit between GDP loss and debt increase is about $24,000 per second.
No, money is created from something. What bankers do that makes money insubstantial is called leverage. A typical leverage structure in a functional economy is 10:1, where there is 10 times as much money issued on loan as there is in actual existence. Sounds crazy, but it works.
The current economic fiasco is due largely to excessive leverage, just like the crash of 1929. Currently, American banks that have either collapsed or are begging for bail-outs were leveraged over 100:1.
The shit hasn't quite hit the fan in Europe yet. Most major European banks are leveraged far more than 100:1, most notably German banks that exceed 400:1. So when European banks start to go tits up (and they will), keep in mind there is no treasury for the Euro. The only bailout funds are from individual countries, who are no doubt going to care more about themselves than an economic union that failed to protect them. So imagine changing currencies in the middle of the greatest economic crisis in 80 years. Think that's a good thing, or bad?
We can test this theory by waiting for the anti-Hawking to run for public office.
Events since 20 January 2001 suggest this has already happened.
Such Hawking/Anti-Hawking paradoxes are bound to have temporal and spacial offsets. Word around the campfire is that the ghost of Newton did the Florida recount personally.
Indeed, patents are the new domain squatting. Patent applicants should be required to demonstrate reasonable facilities and intent to bring the process or product to market. Otherwise inevitable discovery by an apt and able company should supercede impotent IP claims. "I thought of it first" isn't enough.
Since services like S&P began to define it as an industrial.
It was a rhetorical question. There is some irony when Microsoft is considered an industrial leader when the primary objective of their programing staff seems to be to generate legal work. Don't make a better browser, make one that employs every protocol in an arbitrarily improper manner, then embed it into the OS so it's difficult for the typical user to avoid.
Microsoft employs 94,000 people. It owns or leases 677 sites world-wide, 29 million square feet of real estate. It has subsidiaries in every country from A to Z. The programmer is never going to dominate the headcount in an organization that operates on such a scale.
Well no kidding, my point is that the term "industrial" makes one think of a brick-and-mortar assembly line, while Microsoft does more lobbying and bribing than coding.
You do not have to bully anyone to produce drivers for the OS that has 90% of your potential market - and Apple has a lock on damn near 10% of what remains.
Since when does 90% of Microsoft's target market use Vista? Many Windows users who were very skeptical of Vista (and rightly so) are still using XP on their X86 boxes, such as myself. And how dare you exclude Linux from that figure on/.!
And perhaps you do not recall the difficulty people had when trying to use their peripherals with Vista even after the major online retailers had stopped offering XP pre-installed in favor of Vista, no doubt at Microsoft's insistence. The drivers came a lot slower than anticipated, or not at all.
Targeted advertising based on our credit history and income? I'm pretty sure this counts as "evil".
Firstly, finding something evil about advertising is like finding warmth on the surface of the sun. The word 'advertise' is based on the root 'adverse'. If advertising were a matter of merely directing willing consumers towards one of several viable options, it would be called 'divertising'. Literally speaking, 'advertising' is the craft of making people do the opposite of what they would otherwise do. 'Divertising' is just a fringe benefit.
That being said, I'm actually coming around to the idea of targeting, mostly from an artistic sense. For example, instead of Pepsi doing one huge campaign with Britney Spears, they could do dozens with various personalities relevant to their respective demographics.
Think about it, if your favorite upstart actor, musician, comic, model, whatever, would advance their career substantially from a modest-budget commercial for Pepsi, rewarded largely on the basis of how well sales improved, would you not drink Pepsi instead of Coke? That would lead to more entertaining commercials, instead of Billy Ray screaming at us to buy whatever silly household product they couldn't get onto Walmart shelves.
If advertisers could cheaply offer relevant incentives to do a 180, they would do so rather than concoct surreptitious bullsh|t like "are you sure about your breath?" Without pertinent facts about consumer demographics, they can't provide relevant incentives. Their only recourse is to try con after con until something works. And when you buy a product or service, a large portion of the final price is the cost of advertising the product, much of which is the cost of advertising campaigns that didn't work. No advertising company would be in business if they could not recuperate the costs of failed advertising campaigns. Wouldn't you rather either buy it for less or get some kickback?
I also think it would send a much better message to kids for role models to actually be themselves instead of whatever sells. I initially picked Britney arbitrarily, but as it turns out, there can't be a better example of who should not have gotten millions to sell Pepsi to kids. Well maybe MJ.
Speaking of MJ, there's some new paparazzi shots out of him with kids underwear tied around his upper arm.
You definitely do live in the St. Louis vicinity... What you said is all true.
Nah, it was an educated guess. I simply pulled up the St. Louis downtown core on Google maps with the satellite shot and found an alley on the outskirts of the skyscrapers. They tend to be a bad place to play ball hockey. I've toured many cities in North America, but not St. Louis.
As a touring musician I've seen a few cities with free wifi, Saskatoon for example. I've never encountered one that had any reasonable bandwidth except very late at night (early morning). Can't even load Gmail much less send something or even save a draft.
What it does do is persuade businesses to not provide wifi hotspots, which is really silly. A lot of people get wifi devices because of the free wifi coverage, then get frustrated by the poor bandwidth. The number of wifi devices in the streets should be greater incentive to provide hotspots.
Don't worry, they'll change the WEP password at least once a month.
But seriously, how big a leap would that be compared to monitoring police radio? IMO not enough to outweigh the potential benefits.
Another question is will the recordings be public domain, or semi-public? For example I wanted a recording of a call I placed to the police switchboard (not 911) when an ex-landlord was trying to force his way into my apartment illegally. They charge $35 to search for the call, and another $80 to make a copy. That's what I call semi-public.
So if you had a brand name as widely known as Microsoft, a browser that is clearly better than IE, and wanted to take on Firefox, would you:
A) advertise it on your hugely popular search engine
B) do the same promotions Firefox did
C) make the same moves Microsoft did to establish IE and Apple did to establish Safari
D) all of the above
Let's not forget that the OEM inclusion tactic is not the only means Google is implementing to get people to use Chrome. They're doing EVERYTHING.
I wouldn't be surprised to find a Chrome installer CD in my mailbox, reminiscent of the AOL CD's sent out in droves back when people were clueless about ISP's.
Since when is Microsoft an industrial company? They employ more lawyers than programmers!
I've caught heat here for posting that without published confirmation, but if you include the staff of their outsourced legal on top of their in-house legal, it vastly outnumbers their in-house programming staff. How much outsourced programming staff could they have when they employ legal to bully 3rd party hardware companies to develop drivers for their new OS's?
Case in point, did it take more programmers to develop OOXML than it took lawyers to get the standard approved?
Do you live in St. Louis? I'm not with the RIAA*, I am a fellow youngster living in St. Louis who would like to recieve some illegal stolen music from today's popular artists, then maybe go and drink an alchoholic beverage with you. I have videogames that we can play as well. We can "hang out." I want to emphasize that I am not with the RIAA*.
(* RIAA here does not refer to Recording Industry Association of America)
I'm in St. Louis, and would love to meet. There's a nice dark alley on Pine between N 11th and N 12th, we could meet there. I assure you that I do not have a gun*.
(* the word 'gun' does not refer to any type of firearm)
What about people like me, that can actually play guitar!! Do you realize how hard it is to ignore the music I know how to play and instead play Simon Says?
A question for you math geeks: can an object of infinite size even HAVE a center?
Well infinite is not the term I'd use here. The potential size of the universe is infinite, but there is a distinct perimeter that is constantly expanding, thank you Edwin Hubble. If you measure the directions of expansion from various parts of the galaxy, they have a distinct point of origin, give or take a really bad Star Trek movie.
The basis of the Copernican Principle is that there is no 'preferred' position in the universe, i.e. no center. The parent article is wrong. So was Copernicus on that small detail. Everything else was bang on and contradicted religious scripture. It's amazing he wasn't burned at the stake for heresy.
Damn, beat me to it. That's my 2nd reason why bandwidth limiting isn't such a big deal:
1: If 98% (just a guess) of the data transmitted by an internet protocol (i.e. BitTorrent) constitutes an illegal act, then of course it makes perfect sense to quash the protocol at the ISP level. But I say use fines collected from pirates to compensate legitimate businesses for their undue data distribution costs, or simply make it a 100% tax deduction. Reward businesses who make the internet the invaluable resource that it is.
2: There will always be a workaround, in this case MLPPP, then something else, then something else. Like DVD encryption, all anyone could ever hope to do is thwart the casual leecher. Those that can't be effectively thwarted do not represent high enough losses to warrant the sort of MAFIAA tactics we're seeing, especially since they also discourage their market from supporting them.
So I say let them compel ISP's to throttle back and think they're accomplishing something.
Slashdot Mirror
But... on-site setup, customized media software, lifetime labor, quality parts, little to no noise, and a nice pvr case. Let's see tigerdirect.ca compete with that.
*opens yellow pages, finds reputable computer repair shop*
"Hello, I'm purchasing a new computer, how much would it cost for you to install my software, set it up in my office, and provide free labor for the lifespan of the computer?"
It's not going to be ~$700, the implied difference in price you've quoted. You're banking on your reputation, and that's great, more power to you. But if you're telling your customers that they *can't* get the same service and support if they buy from an online volume dealer, you are in fact misleading them.
For most consumer products, especially computers, people can pay for whatever they want from whomever they want, which is what has the manufacturers trying to protect the smaller shops they believe are important to their target market.
I'm not saying MAP is a good idea, I just disagree with the relevance of the parent post.
Ok, here's the "prescribed" worst case scenario: tiny Tim finds Granny's piece, identifies what it is, but can't shoot it. He goes online, finds out how to work it, and "accidentally" blows his head off.
Here's the "real world" worst case scenario: ...it's the perfect mugger's weapon... use your imagination!! The sick bastards that designed it obviously have! I can see it now... "Oh those Chinese copies that made their way into the US have nothing to do with us...." Gimme a fu(kin break.
Here's what will actually happen: murders will rise, and Americans will rally around the right to bear arms. So sad.
'it's hard to do good, and to gather data in ways that don't raise privacy concerns or that might help repressive governments to block controversial content.'"
Actually it's pretty easy. Just be a search engine and generate revenues though benign info spidering. They've got it. The second they let politics in, it's over. That would be like traffic lights turning green for BMW's. It just won't work out in the end.
I'd rather see them simply reduce spending and pay off the national debt.
Hear, hear. The impression that China is getting a stranglehold on the US by being their biggest debt holder is completely false, the UK is buying faster than the Chinese, and Japan owns the most of any foreign country, a mere 6%. In any event, the US can always find foreign investment, and 73% of the debt is domesticly owned. Still, I suspect any major foreign investor in the US is expecting more than just a good interest rate.
The scary part is that the US debt is already over 73% of its GDP and rising [note the "debt clock" in the right side column]. The deficit between GDP loss and debt increase is about $24,000 per second.
tick
tick
tick
No, money is created from something. What bankers do that makes money insubstantial is called leverage. A typical leverage structure in a functional economy is 10:1, where there is 10 times as much money issued on loan as there is in actual existence. Sounds crazy, but it works.
The current economic fiasco is due largely to excessive leverage, just like the crash of 1929. Currently, American banks that have either collapsed or are begging for bail-outs were leveraged over 100:1.
The shit hasn't quite hit the fan in Europe yet. Most major European banks are leveraged far more than 100:1, most notably German banks that exceed 400:1. So when European banks start to go tits up (and they will), keep in mind there is no treasury for the Euro. The only bailout funds are from individual countries, who are no doubt going to care more about themselves than an economic union that failed to protect them. So imagine changing currencies in the middle of the greatest economic crisis in 80 years. Think that's a good thing, or bad?
We can test this theory by waiting for the anti-Hawking to run for public office.
Events since 20 January 2001 suggest this has already happened.
Such Hawking/Anti-Hawking paradoxes are bound to have temporal and spacial offsets. Word around the campfire is that the ghost of Newton did the Florida recount personally.
Mod -1 flamebait, mod +1 impossible to retort without being modded -1 flamebait.
Hoser.
Who wants to remember this past year! Across the board, shit-show of the century!
"We haven't looked at anything other than the iPhone,"
They have never noticed a browser on any cel phone but an iPhone? Where do these people live?
Indeed, patents are the new domain squatting. Patent applicants should be required to demonstrate reasonable facilities and intent to bring the process or product to market. Otherwise inevitable discovery by an apt and able company should supercede impotent IP claims. "I thought of it first" isn't enough.
If you need a lawyer before you do something, you'll need six after. Unless it's a fight worth fighting, move along.
This isn't about the filter, this is about supposed P2P piracy.
What do you think they're trying to filter? Uninformed Slashdot postings? Clearly not.
Major suckage.
Since when is Microsoft an industrial company?
Since services like S&P began to define it as an industrial.
It was a rhetorical question. There is some irony when Microsoft is considered an industrial leader when the primary objective of their programing staff seems to be to generate legal work. Don't make a better browser, make one that employs every protocol in an arbitrarily improper manner, then embed it into the OS so it's difficult for the typical user to avoid.
Microsoft employs 94,000 people. It owns or leases 677 sites world-wide, 29 million square feet of real estate. It has subsidiaries in every country from A to Z. The programmer is never going to dominate the headcount in an organization that operates on such a scale.
Well no kidding, my point is that the term "industrial" makes one think of a brick-and-mortar assembly line, while Microsoft does more lobbying and bribing than coding.
You do not have to bully anyone to produce drivers for the OS that has 90% of your potential market - and Apple has a lock on damn near 10% of what remains.
Since when does 90% of Microsoft's target market use Vista? Many Windows users who were very skeptical of Vista (and rightly so) are still using XP on their X86 boxes, such as myself. And how dare you exclude Linux from that figure on /.!
And perhaps you do not recall the difficulty people had when trying to use their peripherals with Vista even after the major online retailers had stopped offering XP pre-installed in favor of Vista, no doubt at Microsoft's insistence. The drivers came a lot slower than anticipated, or not at all.
Targeted advertising based on our credit history and income? I'm pretty sure this counts as "evil".
Firstly, finding something evil about advertising is like finding warmth on the surface of the sun. The word 'advertise' is based on the root 'adverse'. If advertising were a matter of merely directing willing consumers towards one of several viable options, it would be called 'divertising'. Literally speaking, 'advertising' is the craft of making people do the opposite of what they would otherwise do. 'Divertising' is just a fringe benefit.
That being said, I'm actually coming around to the idea of targeting, mostly from an artistic sense. For example, instead of Pepsi doing one huge campaign with Britney Spears, they could do dozens with various personalities relevant to their respective demographics.
Think about it, if your favorite upstart actor, musician, comic, model, whatever, would advance their career substantially from a modest-budget commercial for Pepsi, rewarded largely on the basis of how well sales improved, would you not drink Pepsi instead of Coke? That would lead to more entertaining commercials, instead of Billy Ray screaming at us to buy whatever silly household product they couldn't get onto Walmart shelves.
If advertisers could cheaply offer relevant incentives to do a 180, they would do so rather than concoct surreptitious bullsh|t like "are you sure about your breath?" Without pertinent facts about consumer demographics, they can't provide relevant incentives. Their only recourse is to try con after con until something works. And when you buy a product or service, a large portion of the final price is the cost of advertising the product, much of which is the cost of advertising campaigns that didn't work. No advertising company would be in business if they could not recuperate the costs of failed advertising campaigns. Wouldn't you rather either buy it for less or get some kickback?
I also think it would send a much better message to kids for role models to actually be themselves instead of whatever sells. I initially picked Britney arbitrarily, but as it turns out, there can't be a better example of who should not have gotten millions to sell Pepsi to kids. Well maybe MJ.
Speaking of MJ, there's some new paparazzi shots out of him with kids underwear tied around his upper arm.
He's on the patch.
You definitely do live in the St. Louis vicinity... What you said is all true.
Nah, it was an educated guess. I simply pulled up the St. Louis downtown core on Google maps with the satellite shot and found an alley on the outskirts of the skyscrapers. They tend to be a bad place to play ball hockey. I've toured many cities in North America, but not St. Louis.
As a touring musician I've seen a few cities with free wifi, Saskatoon for example. I've never encountered one that had any reasonable bandwidth except very late at night (early morning). Can't even load Gmail much less send something or even save a draft.
What it does do is persuade businesses to not provide wifi hotspots, which is really silly. A lot of people get wifi devices because of the free wifi coverage, then get frustrated by the poor bandwidth. The number of wifi devices in the streets should be greater incentive to provide hotspots.
Don't worry, they'll change the WEP password at least once a month.
But seriously, how big a leap would that be compared to monitoring police radio? IMO not enough to outweigh the potential benefits.
Another question is will the recordings be public domain, or semi-public? For example I wanted a recording of a call I placed to the police switchboard (not 911) when an ex-landlord was trying to force his way into my apartment illegally. They charge $35 to search for the call, and another $80 to make a copy. That's what I call semi-public.
So if you had a brand name as widely known as Microsoft, a browser that is clearly better than IE, and wanted to take on Firefox, would you:
A) advertise it on your hugely popular search engine
B) do the same promotions Firefox did
C) make the same moves Microsoft did to establish IE and Apple did to establish Safari
D) all of the above
Let's not forget that the OEM inclusion tactic is not the only means Google is implementing to get people to use Chrome. They're doing EVERYTHING.
I wouldn't be surprised to find a Chrome installer CD in my mailbox, reminiscent of the AOL CD's sent out in droves back when people were clueless about ISP's.
Since when is Microsoft an industrial company? They employ more lawyers than programmers!
I've caught heat here for posting that without published confirmation, but if you include the staff of their outsourced legal on top of their in-house legal, it vastly outnumbers their in-house programming staff. How much outsourced programming staff could they have when they employ legal to bully 3rd party hardware companies to develop drivers for their new OS's?
Case in point, did it take more programmers to develop OOXML than it took lawyers to get the standard approved?
Do you live in St. Louis? I'm not with the RIAA*, I am a fellow youngster living in St. Louis who would like to recieve some illegal stolen music from today's popular artists, then maybe go and drink an alchoholic beverage with you. I have videogames that we can play as well. We can "hang out." I want to emphasize that I am not with the RIAA*.
(* RIAA here does not refer to Recording Industry Association of America)
I'm in St. Louis, and would love to meet. There's a nice dark alley on Pine between N 11th and N 12th, we could meet there. I assure you that I do not have a gun*.
(* the word 'gun' does not refer to any type of firearm)
What about people like me, that can actually play guitar!! Do you realize how hard it is to ignore the music I know how to play and instead play Simon Says?
They apparently sent 18 notices [smh.com.au] and iiNet refused to do anything because they were allegations rather than court ordered actions.
Wow. 18 notices? Jeez. That's like the number of people at an average bus stop at 4PM in a typical city.
How many customers does iiNet have?
A question for you math geeks: can an object of infinite size even HAVE a center?
Well infinite is not the term I'd use here. The potential size of the universe is infinite, but there is a distinct perimeter that is constantly expanding, thank you Edwin Hubble. If you measure the directions of expansion from various parts of the galaxy, they have a distinct point of origin, give or take a really bad Star Trek movie.
The basis of the Copernican Principle is that there is no 'preferred' position in the universe, i.e. no center. The parent article is wrong. So was Copernicus on that small detail. Everything else was bang on and contradicted religious scripture. It's amazing he wasn't burned at the stake for heresy.
Damn, beat me to it. That's my 2nd reason why bandwidth limiting isn't such a big deal:
1: If 98% (just a guess) of the data transmitted by an internet protocol (i.e. BitTorrent) constitutes an illegal act, then of course it makes perfect sense to quash the protocol at the ISP level. But I say use fines collected from pirates to compensate legitimate businesses for their undue data distribution costs, or simply make it a 100% tax deduction. Reward businesses who make the internet the invaluable resource that it is.
2: There will always be a workaround, in this case MLPPP, then something else, then something else. Like DVD encryption, all anyone could ever hope to do is thwart the casual leecher. Those that can't be effectively thwarted do not represent high enough losses to warrant the sort of MAFIAA tactics we're seeing, especially since they also discourage their market from supporting them.
So I say let them compel ISP's to throttle back and think they're accomplishing something.