You are talking about Standard Oil as if you are reciting a well learned poem. Standard Oil became as big as it did from 1969 to 1911 by finding ways to bring prices down for the end consumer from about 70 cents to about 5 cents in that time period. In that same time period, Rockefeller became one of the richest people in history, much wealthier then the pygmies of billionaires that exist today. The company was growing and increasing its business at a staggering pace and it was innovating to achieve that. Anything, from buying up forests to build their own barrels (and lowering new empty barrel costs by over 80%), to figuring out how to load and unload their products faster on the railroads, to finding ways to be more efficient in railroad delivery, to ensure that the train cars will not be riding empty and thus lowering costs of operating trains and getting discounts because of that, to building up more and more productive capacity.
Saying that a company was a monopoly, when in fact it was broken apart because people just could not compete with its efficiencies to the point that the prices for oil products have NEVER gone down since the moment Standard Oil was broken up.... who exactly got the profits of breaking up that efficient economy of scale but the people that wanted a piece of the pie at the EXPENSE of the consumer and got the politicians to provide it to them.
This was a disgrace then and it is a disgrace now, government is not authorised to distort the markets like that.
I have seen this and dealt with this on a smaller scale though, but they will have to change their business or they will be restructured and their assets will be auctioned off and somebody with a different, more economically viable plan will come in and reuse the bought assets in a different way.
Basically this is the market telling them to change, are they listening? Do they even understand and know how to listen and what to pay attention to and what to discard as irrelevant? What I know is that it is hard to change the minds of the people that are set in their ways and can ride their business right into bankruptcy because they won't change and they are not even interested in understanding what and how to change.
It's not "they", the company was liquidated, somebody else bought the assets and restarted the business without liability of the unworkable union agreements.
I wrote a JE on this the day Hostess was back in business and published it to the/. queue, but as always it wasn't selected to be the story. Of-course this/. story is missing the point that I was making, that under a normal bankruptcy procedure the business is restructured and if it is economically viable it comes back lean and healthy, which is what should always happen under such conditions, including car companies, banks, etc., that's how the market works out bad debts and that's why government shouldn't get its claws into any of it.
No, the point is that the governments are fucktards that are lower that toilet scum and they should eat vomit, because they are intestinal indigestion matter.
Oh, and Bitcoin Foundation has NOTHING TO DO with Bitcoin transfers among people and even if they 'dissolve' Bitcoin transfers between people will not stop, nobody can stop them.
At the minimum there should be full data encryption at the client level, that's just to start. Then there are other problems to solve (cross site code accessing information that it shouldn't be able to access)... Basically your desktop will have to solve issues that application and database servers have to solve and I can imagine this is a much more difficult task to accomplish. With application and database servers at least there are people, whose JOB it is to ensure security of the client data (from programmers to testers and administrators), but on the client side... it's very very sketchy, the number of potential problems is enormous.
Sherwin Smith should be fired immediately. If I threatened my customers, my boss would rightfully fire me on the spot.
- you are confused.
You are not a 'customer' to a government agent, you are not a 'customer' to a government department, you are not a 'customer' of any kind to a government in general, you are captive audience from point of view of monopoly on 'services' and what you really are is a slave and the government is your master.
That's the attitude, you are no longer a citizen, you are a slave. The government is no longer there to 'serve' at your pleasure, it's there to command and terrorise you, it's there to abuse you, steal from you, imprison you, torture and murder you.
A customer is a client to a private company that is there to try and gain your business, that's entirely different from what you are to a government.
It's not fear of 'thinking war machines', it's corruption that allows government to steal enormous amounts of money, be it via taxes and or inflation and borrowing that can be used to pump money into pockets of various connected enterprises, which in turn is pumped back to the politicians that does that. Oh, and the fear and corruption found in the minds of the useful idiots make it all possible by not challenging the government as long as it keeps the free bread and circuses flowing, of-course.
A large, multi-national non-profit org. that hosts content that is looked at by 1000 people at any one time, and that's all the info basically. Nothing about your current usage pattern, nothing about your site, is it dynamic, static, what is it running, what does it do?
I suggest you find somebody to look and evaluate your needs, given that you call yourself 'the most geeky of the group', I think I can figure out that you are running almost no dynamic content (dynamic in the sense that there is an application behind your site), so it must be mostly static stuff that somebody updates by hand (probably), or am I wrong? Can't really be sure from the summary. So giving an advice from your summary is basically impossible, you should get somebody to evaluate what you have, what you actually need, then, when you have that information you can ask more questions on/. and people can actually give you a meaningful advice maybe then.
So tell us then, oh mighty TFA, how are we supposed to feel about this? Why should we care?
There is no information in TFA at all as to how are people selected to be invited, who invites them, who comes to listen to the presentations, basically there is no information there, there is only a bunch of pro-feminist nonsense: OMG, there are fewer women than men...... and? Numbers, they are missing. Information... it's missing. How many scientists are men, how many are women, how many 'excellent works' are done by men, how many are done by women, how many men are invited, how many women.
It's not so unimportant if you translate the meaning of this type of research to things like government policies but also the money, stock, bond and other markets.
The performance in the bond and dollar markets for example is definitely less than stellar, but people just can't stop clapping.
Out Of Memory errors, yes, fucking Java, why didn't it learn to run out of memory gracefully, like C and C++, (or maybe PHP or Python or Ruby or just shell script) where this is not a problem obviously and people can't cause memory leaks either according to... you?
But that began to change as the economy turned around. Private investment and advances in technology, brought about by a competition policy that encouraged cable and phone companies to improve their networks, have propelled Americaâ(TM)s networks forward.
and this:
The major causes for low subscribership, as extensive survey research shows, are low interest in the Internet and minimal digital literacy. And too many American households lack the money or interest to buy a computer.
those are contradicting statements and also at least one of them stems from a huge misunderstanding. There is no 'economic recovery', there is only a deepening recession (depression actually) and that's why people aren't buying, between the growing food and energy prices and falling employment levels (and staggering debt obligations) people just don't have the money to spend on luxuries such as more expensive Internet connection.
A company that is not a government will use your data to push more direct ads at you, but that's just a service that actually saves your time. If you are going to be served ads anyway (which I don't see, FF + Adblock), then why would you prefer to have ads that are completely random over ads that may have something to do with your interests in the first place? After all, maybe, just maybe at some point somebody will give you an ad for something that you would actually find really useful?
Now, that's a company trying to make money, it uses your information not against you but actually in a way that can help you (if you ever buy from one of their ads, then in fact they did help you!) that's a company giving YOU information.
That's the exact opposite of what a government is and what it does and why. Government just wants to imprison you or to tax you or to steal from you or murder you or regulate against you in whatever way possible. It also is possible that there are rogue agents within governments that will sell your information to private companies anyway to make a buck, and governments can collect much more aggregate data about you than any company ever could, because governments coerce people (companies) to give up data that many wouldn't give up (especially to other businesses).
So yes, there is much more to fear from governments than companies. I do not fear companies, I fear governments, that's why I am against governments and for individual freedoms of people, people who can start and run companies.
TIPS? HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! TIPS are for people who are looking for safety and yet they are jumping from a pan into an open fire. TIPS are nonsense, they are tied to the official measure of inflation, which is complete nonsense, real inflation is higher by an order of magnitude than what the government pretends it is.
Also in the worst case scenario (hyperinflation and the inevitable depression) you'll get some of your nominal dollars from TIPS but dollars won't have any value.
AFAIC it's much safer to be in foreign currencies than in USA dollars or bonds and it's better to be in foreign stocks than in companies that mainly derive their revenues from sales in USA.
Also it's much better to be in real money (gold) than in any fiat currency, because they are all following the same self-destructive pattern of behaviour because the entire world is an interconnected Keynesian hell, but at least in countries that are productive you can own productive assets and ride out the problem.
Oh, and in case of a hyper inflation it surely is safer to own property than dollars, at least you'll have the land, but don't buy residential, that shit is very overvalued, buy useful land, farm land, mines, land with water wells, something like that.
This place here is filled to the top with those exact sentiments, if you want to understand where the legs grow on this puppy, take a look at my comments and replies to them (and moderation as well), those are the symptoms of the failed society based on the weakminded mob with gigantic feelings of entitlement, that is itching for other people's money and are absolutely explicitly and implicitly standing with any government that promises to steal and subsidise them.
That's the extent of it, that's the same exact thing, as long as we get our share of the loot we DO NOT CARE about individual freedoms that are destroyed by government actions that are aimed not at the entire populations but at groups of people that are split by categories, be it ownership of resources or income levels or being an employer vs being an employee, being straight vs gay, men vs women, white vs blacks or other 'minorities', able bodied vs invalids, etc.etc.
Let me cut right through your nonsensical pro-government fearmongering bullshit.
Standard Oil was broken into pieces by the violent government that destroyed private property rights right there and then on the very same premise, that company was 'dumping' so that later it could 'jack up' prices, yet the company spent about half a century lowering prices while the owners (including Rockefeller) became insanely wealthy selling to an ever increasing consumer base at ever falling prices.
When was the last time you have heard of a 50 year stretch when prices were going DOWN for energy and not up? Standard Oil was it, an economy of scale using that exact business model, destroyed by the powerful government that destroyed individual freedoms.
I would say that was one of the the defining moments in history, when the people running businesses realised just how dangerous it is to allow the mob to set the tone, the rules (if anybody didn't get the hint then, they surely got it by the time of 'great society', which was clearly not great from point of view of individual freedoms).
So the guy wants to build up productivity, energy production, water desalination, entice thousands more people to come to the island, to settle their permanently; he wants to extend and build up the tourism and agriculture industries, yet all he is doing that for is not to increase his own productivity and to sell into more markets than ever at LOWER prices but only so that later he could 'jack up prices' on WATER on his island?
You are as deluded as you are stupid.
Ellison wants to build up his productivity, bring all costs to the lowest points he possibly can so that he can sell to the biggest audience there possibly is.
Everybody BUT governments want lower prices, including manufacturers and investors, I am sure you can never actually understand that fine point, and I don't have 100 more years to explain it to you.
Companies have no incentive to invest in infrastructure if most of the benefits will be reaped by other companies.
- I said income streams, perhaps you mistook that for 'subsidies'.
Private enterprise builds infrastructure all the time, the difference is that to use it you have to pay for it directly and not by using threat of violence (taxes) but pay for it as you use it, which is why it is preferable for all infrastructure projects to be private, that means self sustainable and not dependent on theft and subsidies.
There is difference between money and power, not understanding the difference doesn't change that fact.
Power is what either a dictator with an army that is head of State or some other government system (including democratic system) has over lives of people in either the legal sense and or ability to modify what legal is or go outside of boundaries of legal without being challenged, because it is perceived as legitimate or it just has majority support, explicit or implicit.
Real money is a function of productivity, productive output and savings. Ellison is one of the more productive people in the world, he was able to devise a machine that is his company, that makes him one of the most productive people out there. All of his employees, all of his properties, they are all extensions of this machine.
This machine is powerful in its industry, but IF the government is NOT corrupt, then it cannot be used to obtain government level of power.
Of-course if and when people give government unauthorised power (which is given to governments in order to create discrimination, to steal from minorities, like the rich, and to redistribute to voting majority and then this process is what starts the destruction of a lawful government, which grows in size and creates new branches and laws and systems that destroy individual freedoms and take over everything) then largest companies, wealthiest people MUST fight against such systems before they are devoured by them and possibly they just want to buy power because they also like wielding it.
So if your complaint is that with enough money one can buy power, you should really ask yourself: who gave government all that power to sell?
Slashdot Mirror
You are talking about Standard Oil as if you are reciting a well learned poem. Standard Oil became as big as it did from 1969 to 1911 by finding ways to bring prices down for the end consumer from about 70 cents to about 5 cents in that time period. In that same time period, Rockefeller became one of the richest people in history, much wealthier then the pygmies of billionaires that exist today. The company was growing and increasing its business at a staggering pace and it was innovating to achieve that. Anything, from buying up forests to build their own barrels (and lowering new empty barrel costs by over 80%), to figuring out how to load and unload their products faster on the railroads, to finding ways to be more efficient in railroad delivery, to ensure that the train cars will not be riding empty and thus lowering costs of operating trains and getting discounts because of that, to building up more and more productive capacity.
Saying that a company was a monopoly, when in fact it was broken apart because people just could not compete with its efficiencies to the point that the prices for oil products have NEVER gone down since the moment Standard Oil was broken up.... who exactly got the profits of breaking up that efficient economy of scale but the people that wanted a piece of the pie at the EXPENSE of the consumer and got the politicians to provide it to them.
This was a disgrace then and it is a disgrace now, government is not authorised to distort the markets like that.
I have seen this and dealt with this on a smaller scale though, but they will have to change their business or they will be restructured and their assets will be auctioned off and somebody with a different, more economically viable plan will come in and reuse the bought assets in a different way.
Basically this is the market telling them to change, are they listening? Do they even understand and know how to listen and what to pay attention to and what to discard as irrelevant? What I know is that it is hard to change the minds of the people that are set in their ways and can ride their business right into bankruptcy because they won't change and they are not even interested in understanding what and how to change.
It's not "they", the company was liquidated, somebody else bought the assets and restarted the business without liability of the unworkable union agreements.
I wrote a JE on this the day Hostess was back in business and published it to the /. queue, but as always it wasn't selected to be the story. Of-course this /. story is missing the point that I was making, that under a normal bankruptcy procedure the business is restructured and if it is economically viable it comes back lean and healthy, which is what should always happen under such conditions, including car companies, banks, etc., that's how the market works out bad debts and that's why government shouldn't get its claws into any of it.
No, the point is that the governments are fucktards that are lower that toilet scum and they should eat vomit, because they are intestinal indigestion matter.
Oh, and Bitcoin Foundation has NOTHING TO DO with Bitcoin transfers among people and even if they 'dissolve' Bitcoin transfers between people will not stop, nobody can stop them.
I don't know why the letter has to be nicely worded?
Why not send back something like this:
eat vomit, you motherfucking pieces of intestinal indigestion, your entire existence is less meaningful than that of toilet scum.
Oh, also we don't have anything to do with bitcoin transfers, you complete brainded fucktards.
why not that letter?
At the minimum there should be full data encryption at the client level, that's just to start. Then there are other problems to solve (cross site code accessing information that it shouldn't be able to access)... Basically your desktop will have to solve issues that application and database servers have to solve and I can imagine this is a much more difficult task to accomplish. With application and database servers at least there are people, whose JOB it is to ensure security of the client data (from programmers to testers and administrators), but on the client side... it's very very sketchy, the number of potential problems is enormous.
Sherwin Smith should be fired immediately. If I threatened my customers, my boss would rightfully fire me on the spot.
- you are confused.
You are not a 'customer' to a government agent, you are not a 'customer' to a government department, you are not a 'customer' of any kind to a government in general, you are captive audience from point of view of monopoly on 'services' and what you really are is a slave and the government is your master.
That's the attitude, you are no longer a citizen, you are a slave. The government is no longer there to 'serve' at your pleasure, it's there to command and terrorise you, it's there to abuse you, steal from you, imprison you, torture and murder you.
A customer is a client to a private company that is there to try and gain your business, that's entirely different from what you are to a government.
Oh yeah, an unholy alliance of two of my most favourite companies.... for when I want to have a nightmare.
They should have put the period right after:
Fear of Thinking.
It's not fear of 'thinking war machines', it's corruption that allows government to steal enormous amounts of money, be it via taxes and or inflation and borrowing that can be used to pump money into pockets of various connected enterprises, which in turn is pumped back to the politicians that does that. Oh, and the fear and corruption found in the minds of the useful idiots make it all possible by not challenging the government as long as it keeps the free bread and circuses flowing, of-course.
A large, multi-national non-profit org. that hosts content that is looked at by 1000 people at any one time, and that's all the info basically. Nothing about your current usage pattern, nothing about your site, is it dynamic, static, what is it running, what does it do?
I suggest you find somebody to look and evaluate your needs, given that you call yourself 'the most geeky of the group', I think I can figure out that you are running almost no dynamic content (dynamic in the sense that there is an application behind your site), so it must be mostly static stuff that somebody updates by hand (probably), or am I wrong? Can't really be sure from the summary. So giving an advice from your summary is basically impossible, you should get somebody to evaluate what you have, what you actually need, then, when you have that information you can ask more questions on /. and people can actually give you a meaningful advice maybe then.
So tell us then, oh mighty TFA, how are we supposed to feel about this? Why should we care?
There is no information in TFA at all as to how are people selected to be invited, who invites them, who comes to listen to the presentations, basically there is no information there, there is only a bunch of pro-feminist nonsense: OMG, there are fewer women than men...... and? Numbers, they are missing. Information... it's missing. How many scientists are men, how many are women, how many 'excellent works' are done by men, how many are done by women, how many men are invited, how many women.
This is an empty 'article'.
cd /usr/java#
ls
jdk1.5.0_22 jdk1.6.0_25 jdk1.7.0 jdk1.7.0_01 jdk1.7.0_05
I dont' see the big problem. It's really as simple as downloading a tar and changing java path.
It's not so unimportant if you translate the meaning of this type of research to things like government policies but also the money, stock, bond and other markets.
The performance in the bond and dollar markets for example is definitely less than stellar, but people just can't stop clapping.
Out Of Memory errors, yes, fucking Java, why didn't it learn to run out of memory gracefully, like C and C++, (or maybe PHP or Python or Ruby or just shell script) where this is not a problem obviously and people can't cause memory leaks either according to ... you?
Let's hope that it is for surveillance only, because next thing you'll learn those drones have machine guns and missiles on them.....
NSA, taking your money and then your privacy and then maybe more of your money and your freedom and life one step at a time.
This:
But that began to change as the economy turned around. Private investment and advances in technology, brought about by a competition policy that encouraged cable and phone companies to improve their networks, have propelled Americaâ(TM)s networks forward.
and this:
The major causes for low subscribership, as extensive survey research shows, are low interest in the Internet and minimal digital literacy. And too many American households lack the money or interest to buy a computer.
those are contradicting statements and also at least one of them stems from a huge misunderstanding. There is no 'economic recovery', there is only a deepening recession (depression actually) and that's why people aren't buying, between the growing food and energy prices and falling employment levels (and staggering debt obligations) people just don't have the money to spend on luxuries such as more expensive Internet connection.
A company that is not a government will use your data to push more direct ads at you, but that's just a service that actually saves your time. If you are going to be served ads anyway (which I don't see, FF + Adblock), then why would you prefer to have ads that are completely random over ads that may have something to do with your interests in the first place? After all, maybe, just maybe at some point somebody will give you an ad for something that you would actually find really useful?
Now, that's a company trying to make money, it uses your information not against you but actually in a way that can help you (if you ever buy from one of their ads, then in fact they did help you!) that's a company giving YOU information.
That's the exact opposite of what a government is and what it does and why. Government just wants to imprison you or to tax you or to steal from you or murder you or regulate against you in whatever way possible. It also is possible that there are rogue agents within governments that will sell your information to private companies anyway to make a buck, and governments can collect much more aggregate data about you than any company ever could, because governments coerce people (companies) to give up data that many wouldn't give up (especially to other businesses).
So yes, there is much more to fear from governments than companies. I do not fear companies, I fear governments, that's why I am against governments and for individual freedoms of people, people who can start and run companies.
TIPS? HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! TIPS are for people who are looking for safety and yet they are jumping from a pan into an open fire. TIPS are nonsense, they are tied to the official measure of inflation, which is complete nonsense, real inflation is higher by an order of magnitude than what the government pretends it is.
Also in the worst case scenario (hyperinflation and the inevitable depression) you'll get some of your nominal dollars from TIPS but dollars won't have any value.
AFAIC it's much safer to be in foreign currencies than in USA dollars or bonds and it's better to be in foreign stocks than in companies that mainly derive their revenues from sales in USA.
Also it's much better to be in real money (gold) than in any fiat currency, because they are all following the same self-destructive pattern of behaviour because the entire world is an interconnected Keynesian hell, but at least in countries that are productive you can own productive assets and ride out the problem.
Oh, and in case of a hyper inflation it surely is safer to own property than dollars, at least you'll have the land, but don't buy residential, that shit is very overvalued, buy useful land, farm land, mines, land with water wells, something like that.
AT&T? What a gigantic fail on your part, AT&T was granted the monopoly status BY government, which killed 3000 of its viable competitors. As I said, you are as stupid as you are ignorant and I have no time for you.
This place here is filled to the top with those exact sentiments, if you want to understand where the legs grow on this puppy, take a look at my comments and replies to them (and moderation as well), those are the symptoms of the failed society based on the weakminded mob with gigantic feelings of entitlement, that is itching for other people's money and are absolutely explicitly and implicitly standing with any government that promises to steal and subsidise them.
That's the extent of it, that's the same exact thing, as long as we get our share of the loot we DO NOT CARE about individual freedoms that are destroyed by government actions that are aimed not at the entire populations but at groups of people that are split by categories, be it ownership of resources or income levels or being an employer vs being an employee, being straight vs gay, men vs women, white vs blacks or other 'minorities', able bodied vs invalids, etc.etc.
Let me cut right through your nonsensical pro-government fearmongering bullshit.
Standard Oil was broken into pieces by the violent government that destroyed private property rights right there and then on the very same premise, that company was 'dumping' so that later it could 'jack up' prices, yet the company spent about half a century lowering prices while the owners (including Rockefeller) became insanely wealthy selling to an ever increasing consumer base at ever falling prices.
When was the last time you have heard of a 50 year stretch when prices were going DOWN for energy and not up? Standard Oil was it, an economy of scale using that exact business model, destroyed by the powerful government that destroyed individual freedoms.
I would say that was one of the the defining moments in history, when the people running businesses realised just how dangerous it is to allow the mob to set the tone, the rules (if anybody didn't get the hint then, they surely got it by the time of 'great society', which was clearly not great from point of view of individual freedoms).
So the guy wants to build up productivity, energy production, water desalination, entice thousands more people to come to the island, to settle their permanently; he wants to extend and build up the tourism and agriculture industries, yet all he is doing that for is not to increase his own productivity and to sell into more markets than ever at LOWER prices but only so that later he could 'jack up prices' on WATER on his island?
You are as deluded as you are stupid.
Ellison wants to build up his productivity, bring all costs to the lowest points he possibly can so that he can sell to the biggest audience there possibly is.
Everybody BUT governments want lower prices, including manufacturers and investors, I am sure you can never actually understand that fine point, and I don't have 100 more years to explain it to you.
and with enough government you are NSA, haven't you been paying attention to the current US history?
Companies have no incentive to invest in infrastructure if most of the benefits will be reaped by other companies.
- I said income streams, perhaps you mistook that for 'subsidies'.
Private enterprise builds infrastructure all the time, the difference is that to use it you have to pay for it directly and not by using threat of violence (taxes) but pay for it as you use it, which is why it is preferable for all infrastructure projects to be private, that means self sustainable and not dependent on theft and subsidies.
There is difference between money and power, not understanding the difference doesn't change that fact.
Power is what either a dictator with an army that is head of State or some other government system (including democratic system) has over lives of people in either the legal sense and or ability to modify what legal is or go outside of boundaries of legal without being challenged, because it is perceived as legitimate or it just has majority support, explicit or implicit.
Real money is a function of productivity, productive output and savings. Ellison is one of the more productive people in the world, he was able to devise a machine that is his company, that makes him one of the most productive people out there. All of his employees, all of his properties, they are all extensions of this machine.
This machine is powerful in its industry, but IF the government is NOT corrupt, then it cannot be used to obtain government level of power.
Of-course if and when people give government unauthorised power (which is given to governments in order to create discrimination, to steal from minorities, like the rich, and to redistribute to voting majority and then this process is what starts the destruction of a lawful government, which grows in size and creates new branches and laws and systems that destroy individual freedoms and take over everything) then largest companies, wealthiest people MUST fight against such systems before they are devoured by them and possibly they just want to buy power because they also like wielding it.
So if your complaint is that with enough money one can buy power, you should really ask yourself: who gave government all that power to sell?