I wouldn't expect the health insurance call processing center to care about getting an angry customer to a person. The logic they employ probably goes like this: The caller probably has a health condition, and this anger is probably placing more stress on the body - higher blood pressure, etc. If this person has a heart attack and dies, we win because we have the money, and this person isn't going to the hospital to create another claim since we have the person on the phone stuck in our menu system. They can't call 911 for help if they are on the line with us. Profit!
This type of story is news for everybody, including nerds. Secondly, she serves or served on the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics which affects funding for one of Slashdot's favorite government programs called NASA. Her husband is also an Astronaut for NASA.
You might need to define vicinity. One option is to send the programmatically SMS of death to every possible combination of mobile phone numbers within you area code. That might hit a few that have roamed outside your area, but would largely accomplish your task.
Maybe the original theatrical releases will be part of the "special features" on the Blu-ray release. In any case, I don't plan to buy it. George Lucas already has enough of my money.
Although I agree with much of your sentiment, I don't think I would accuse Radiohead of needing to accept that the world has changed. Their self-released album In Rainbows for the price of whatever the heck the downloader/music fan wanted to pay was a very up-to-date concept.
This was probably the work of a single reporter who had a New Year's resolution to write a factually correct article without political bias. The writer has fulfilled the terms of the resolution, and will probably resume business as usual tomorrow.
Well said. I was about to post the same question. The progress definitely matters, but the prediction is really not much more than an engineering goal at this point. That goal is secondary to the goal of remaining the market leader. Without intending to start a flame war, I wish the programming side of computing was as interested in making things smaller and faster in code. Sure, there are plenty of academically oriented people working on it, but in practice it seems that most large software vendors lean on the crutch of improved hardware rather than writing tight code that is well optimized. Examples include Adobe, Microsoft, et al.
I think you have Putin confused with Boris Yeltsin. In regard to the move to GNU/Linux, I suspect Putin has seen the number of exploits and malware written for Windows and is aware that much of it originates in Russia.
You just hit on one of my fundamental disagreements with how the US economy now operates. Originally, when companies opened their stock for public purchase, the idea was to get a cash infusion to accomplish some objective (expansion, r&d, and so on). Those stock holders often received a dividend on that purchase. For instance they might have purchased stock at $10 per share, receiving a quarterly dividend of say $0.25. This essentially meant the investor often saw an immediate return on the investment when the company was profitable. In this case, a 10% return annually. This encouraged long term holding of the stock and a more stable stock price that didn't require dramatic 10% growth per year. If the stock holder held the example stock for 10 years before selling, the sale would be pure profit regardless of the stock price at the time of the sale. The problem is that a 100% publicly owned corporation gets very little benefit from the stock market once all of its shares have been bought up since the sales of its shares don't infuse new revenue into the company since those stock exchanges happen solely between 3rd parties.
Now stocks are bought and sold primarily for short term gains since most stocks don't produce dividends. The only motive there is the price of the share, which dictates that the company has to show profit growth. When a company makes a 3% growth in profit instead of 5%, the share price usually takes a significant hit, which is very illogical considering the company has actually improved its value per share. Wall Street now operates on totally unrealistic expectations of infinite 5-10% annual growth which is obviously unsustainable in the long term. This seems painfully obvious to me, but I never hear financial analysts discuss it on "news" shows.
I'm with you on this, and that is one of many reasons I try to avoid Wal-Mart. If the end game is that only one store is left in the race to the bottom on price alone, the end result is a total monopoly. At that point, the winning retailer (Wal-Mart) is no longer required to keep the prices low since there is no longer a competitive need. Of course, the free market capitalism evangelists would claim that another store is free to open to compete. The problem with that is the barrier to entry would be beyond any realistic capability and the competitor could be easily squashed by a short term price adjustment from the monopoly. The good news is that there are currently enough competing stores that actually beat Wal-Mart on some prices, quality, or convenience to keep that from happening on the national level. The problem is that those retailers primarily exist in the larger metropolitan areas and not in towns of populations below 50,000 where competition is desperately needed.
Additionally, the smartphone apps are probably shedding the light on the fact that stores other than Wal-Mart often have a better price on many items. That is something I had observed in comparing prices on groceries when a Super-Center threatened the existence of the local grocery stores in the town in which I previously lived. Just because a store says it always has the low price in its advertisement, it doesn't make it true.
Great insightful and funny comment. Trying to block cell phones as a distraction is futile. The problem is drivers who are looking for distractions. Seeing other drivers texting is quite frightening, but I have seen many other distractions. Some I have witnessed include application of makeup using rear view mirror, reading books and newspapers, browsing for items out of reach, eating with both hands occupied, using a laptop computer, and watching a movie on portable devices.
That is not anywhere close to an exhaustive list, but it is quite obvious that technology cannot solve all distractions.
My art teacher in high school had only partially formed limbs, ie. nothing past the elbow or knees. He used prosthetic legs, but did a variety of things to produce art. When drawing or painting, he would slide the pencil or brush underneath his watch wristband. He also did ink drawings by dropping ink on a page with a straw and then blowing the ink around by forcing air through the straw. When painting things like clouds, he would dip the end of his arm into the paint and just put arm to paper. It was quite impressive to see firsthand.
I would expect it to be higher because there is a good chance the person using IE is doing so on a computer at work without any other option. Thus, they can afford to be screwed since they have a job. The other case is that they are oblivious to danger and can be easily lead, making them an excellent mark.
Note: I am not saying these are my personal beliefs on the matter, just the possible reasoning in play.
You may love IE6, as it is your right. Web Developers, on the other hand, absolutely detest you. When building a website on standards compliant HTML and CSS, you create a beautiful and functioning site and test against everything except IE6 until it is right. Then you spend four times the initial development time hacking away on specific fixes for IE6.
Here is what that argument does not fully consider:
Suppose that Netflix or some other online delivery oriented company doesn't agree to pay Comcast,Time Warner, Cox, and every other major broadband provider extra (and why should they, they probably don't purchase bandwidth from Comcast). Suppose that one of those providers launches their own service and wants to "encourage" its broadband users to purchase their new service. Because there is no regulation, that provider might elect to throttle access to the competitor's service, possibly to the point that it artificially degrades the service. This would obviously be an instance where one company could lose business as a result of the tampering of another. Those end users who are paying the broadband provider for access to the internet, would not be getting what they probably think they are paying for (x dollars per month to get y Mbps of bandwidth to anything on the Internet).
That is looking at the issue at the very small scale. Imagine that it becomes common practice to pay the broadband providers "protection" money (think about the Mafia scheme of having store owners pay them to not rob or damage the store). Large corporations who currently have a presence in a given market with be able to pay the protection fee. Upstarts would not be able to afford to pay the broadband providers and would be at a competitive disadvantage regardless of the quality of their product. Since a large portion of internet traffic is within http/https, we aren't talking necessarily in terms of protocol based shaping. We are talking about source/destination shaping. Suppose that the protection scheme had started in 2000 with Yahoo and Hotmail securing protection. With bandwidth still relatively scarce, those two companies are able to keep upstart Google at bay since their sites load faster than Google's and are able to return results faster. As a result, Google fails and does not become synonymous with search, and Gmail never materializes. Innovation and quality, then, are no longer the primary factors in success.
If there were genuine competition in the broadband market, that scenario would be less likely, but currently users in many areas only have one legitimate option for broadband internet access. If their one option chooses to apply shaping to the internet, those users effectively have no choice about which sites or services to use since they are not dealing with a level playing field. Instead, those customers would actually be buying a walled garden type of service which is essentially the antithesis of what the Internet has been.
The problem with throwing all of the money into grants for research is that you have to have scientists to perform research. If students aren't interested in science, they won't pursue degrees in the sciences. Without a good background in the science prior to attending college, the students who are inclined toward the sciences will have diminished chances of successfully completing a degree. Essentially it boils down to the fact that if there are no more eggs, there will not be any chickens (unless advanced science is involved). Additionally, most would agree that all students need to be exposed to science and technology since those are intertwined with almost everything in today's society. Financial incentives might help, but they are not a solution in and of themselves.
Unfortunately Apple wasted the Cheetah codename as an internal codename for the original initial release of 10.0.0. The newer releases were all faster which is kind of ironic.
The problem with that flat tuition proposal is that the bulk of state university funding comes from the individual states and private donations to those universities. Tuition costs often reflect the amount of support (or lack of support) that the state legislatures provide. The major exception to that source of funding is the US Government grants associated with research projects. Who you pay the most taxes is not the issue. Who funds the operation of the universities is. Additionally, there are tremendous differences by region/location in the costs associated with running those college campuses: land acquisition costs, labor cost reflecting cost of living, and so on. Some states actually have peering agreements in place which allow students along borders to attend colleges in the adjoining state at the in-state rate. In order to accomplish what you request, a complete change in the funding structure of higher education would be required. I can't name a single congressman or senator with the political courage or capital required to even propose such an endeavor. Would your plan be great for citizens? Maybe. With the current political polarization, we can't even get legislation passed that both parties would want, much less something like this that would definitely be split along ideological boundaries.
Point of clarity here: South Fulton is in Tennessee, thus in the same state. If the responding fire department were from Fulton, the interstate issue would be valid.
For those not familiar with the geography, The town is essentially split on the state border and the laws on either side can be vastly different and create some interesting economic realities. On the Kentucky side of town (Fulton), liquor by the drink in restaurants has been legal for many years, there is no sales tax on unprepared food items in grocery stores, and packaged liquor can be purchased. On the Tennessee side of town, liquor is unavailable by drink at a restaurant or by package and the sales tax on food is about 9.75%. The result is practically no restaurants or grocery stores can survive on the Tennessee side (South Fulton). Until about eight years ago, nearby towns in Martin and Union City did not offer liquor by the drink. This made Fulton, Kentucky a popular destination for dining. The sales tax on food situation still has an impact on grocery stores in those towns as well. Since Kentucky has an income tax, many people choose to live in the northern Tennessee counties but do all of their grocery shopping in Kentucky.
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I wouldn't expect the health insurance call processing center to care about getting an angry customer to a person. The logic they employ probably goes like this: The caller probably has a health condition, and this anger is probably placing more stress on the body - higher blood pressure, etc. If this person has a heart attack and dies, we win because we have the money, and this person isn't going to the hospital to create another claim since we have the person on the phone stuck in our menu system. They can't call 911 for help if they are on the line with us. Profit!
This type of story is news for everybody, including nerds. Secondly, she serves or served on the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics which affects funding for one of Slashdot's favorite government programs called NASA. Her husband is also an Astronaut for NASA.
Right now there are conflicting reports on whether she is dead. There are reports that she is in surgery. In either case, this is an absolute tragedy.
You might need to define vicinity. One option is to send the programmatically SMS of death to every possible combination of mobile phone numbers within you area code. That might hit a few that have roamed outside your area, but would largely accomplish your task.
Maybe the original theatrical releases will be part of the "special features" on the Blu-ray release. In any case, I don't plan to buy it. George Lucas already has enough of my money.
Although I agree with much of your sentiment, I don't think I would accuse Radiohead of needing to accept that the world has changed. Their self-released album In Rainbows for the price of whatever the heck the downloader/music fan wanted to pay was a very up-to-date concept.
This was probably the work of a single reporter who had a New Year's resolution to write a factually correct article without political bias. The writer has fulfilled the terms of the resolution, and will probably resume business as usual tomorrow.
Well said. I was about to post the same question. The progress definitely matters, but the prediction is really not much more than an engineering goal at this point. That goal is secondary to the goal of remaining the market leader. Without intending to start a flame war, I wish the programming side of computing was as interested in making things smaller and faster in code. Sure, there are plenty of academically oriented people working on it, but in practice it seems that most large software vendors lean on the crutch of improved hardware rather than writing tight code that is well optimized. Examples include Adobe, Microsoft, et al.
I think you have Putin confused with Boris Yeltsin. In regard to the move to GNU/Linux, I suspect Putin has seen the number of exploits and malware written for Windows and is aware that much of it originates in Russia.
You just hit on one of my fundamental disagreements with how the US economy now operates. Originally, when companies opened their stock for public purchase, the idea was to get a cash infusion to accomplish some objective (expansion, r&d, and so on). Those stock holders often received a dividend on that purchase. For instance they might have purchased stock at $10 per share, receiving a quarterly dividend of say $0.25. This essentially meant the investor often saw an immediate return on the investment when the company was profitable. In this case, a 10% return annually. This encouraged long term holding of the stock and a more stable stock price that didn't require dramatic 10% growth per year. If the stock holder held the example stock for 10 years before selling, the sale would be pure profit regardless of the stock price at the time of the sale. The problem is that a 100% publicly owned corporation gets very little benefit from the stock market once all of its shares have been bought up since the sales of its shares don't infuse new revenue into the company since those stock exchanges happen solely between 3rd parties.
Now stocks are bought and sold primarily for short term gains since most stocks don't produce dividends. The only motive there is the price of the share, which dictates that the company has to show profit growth. When a company makes a 3% growth in profit instead of 5%, the share price usually takes a significant hit, which is very illogical considering the company has actually improved its value per share. Wall Street now operates on totally unrealistic expectations of infinite 5-10% annual growth which is obviously unsustainable in the long term. This seems painfully obvious to me, but I never hear financial analysts discuss it on "news" shows.
I'm with you on this, and that is one of many reasons I try to avoid Wal-Mart. If the end game is that only one store is left in the race to the bottom on price alone, the end result is a total monopoly. At that point, the winning retailer (Wal-Mart) is no longer required to keep the prices low since there is no longer a competitive need. Of course, the free market capitalism evangelists would claim that another store is free to open to compete. The problem with that is the barrier to entry would be beyond any realistic capability and the competitor could be easily squashed by a short term price adjustment from the monopoly. The good news is that there are currently enough competing stores that actually beat Wal-Mart on some prices, quality, or convenience to keep that from happening on the national level. The problem is that those retailers primarily exist in the larger metropolitan areas and not in towns of populations below 50,000 where competition is desperately needed.
Additionally, the smartphone apps are probably shedding the light on the fact that stores other than Wal-Mart often have a better price on many items. That is something I had observed in comparing prices on groceries when a Super-Center threatened the existence of the local grocery stores in the town in which I previously lived. Just because a store says it always has the low price in its advertisement, it doesn't make it true.
Great insightful and funny comment. Trying to block cell phones as a distraction is futile. The problem is drivers who are looking for distractions. Seeing other drivers texting is quite frightening, but I have seen many other distractions. Some I have witnessed include application of makeup using rear view mirror, reading books and newspapers, browsing for items out of reach, eating with both hands occupied, using a laptop computer, and watching a movie on portable devices. That is not anywhere close to an exhaustive list, but it is quite obvious that technology cannot solve all distractions.
"We came to kick ass and chew bubble gum, and we're all out of gum." Duke Nukem would be proud.
They probably tweaked the design on the confederate rocket.
My art teacher in high school had only partially formed limbs, ie. nothing past the elbow or knees. He used prosthetic legs, but did a variety of things to produce art. When drawing or painting, he would slide the pencil or brush underneath his watch wristband. He also did ink drawings by dropping ink on a page with a straw and then blowing the ink around by forcing air through the straw. When painting things like clouds, he would dip the end of his arm into the paint and just put arm to paper. It was quite impressive to see firsthand.
Serpentarium sounds like the title of a song Metallica should write.
I would expect it to be higher because there is a good chance the person using IE is doing so on a computer at work without any other option. Thus, they can afford to be screwed since they have a job. The other case is that they are oblivious to danger and can be easily lead, making them an excellent mark.
Note: I am not saying these are my personal beliefs on the matter, just the possible reasoning in play.
On the topic of reality distortion fields: jobs /apple versus apple /jobs
You may love IE6, as it is your right. Web Developers, on the other hand, absolutely detest you. When building a website on standards compliant HTML and CSS, you create a beautiful and functioning site and test against everything except IE6 until it is right. Then you spend four times the initial development time hacking away on specific fixes for IE6.
Here is what that argument does not fully consider:
Suppose that Netflix or some other online delivery oriented company doesn't agree to pay Comcast,Time Warner, Cox, and every other major broadband provider extra (and why should they, they probably don't purchase bandwidth from Comcast). Suppose that one of those providers launches their own service and wants to "encourage" its broadband users to purchase their new service. Because there is no regulation, that provider might elect to throttle access to the competitor's service, possibly to the point that it artificially degrades the service. This would obviously be an instance where one company could lose business as a result of the tampering of another. Those end users who are paying the broadband provider for access to the internet, would not be getting what they probably think they are paying for (x dollars per month to get y Mbps of bandwidth to anything on the Internet).
That is looking at the issue at the very small scale. Imagine that it becomes common practice to pay the broadband providers "protection" money (think about the Mafia scheme of having store owners pay them to not rob or damage the store). Large corporations who currently have a presence in a given market with be able to pay the protection fee. Upstarts would not be able to afford to pay the broadband providers and would be at a competitive disadvantage regardless of the quality of their product. Since a large portion of internet traffic is within http/https, we aren't talking necessarily in terms of protocol based shaping. We are talking about source/destination shaping. Suppose that the protection scheme had started in 2000 with Yahoo and Hotmail securing protection. With bandwidth still relatively scarce, those two companies are able to keep upstart Google at bay since their sites load faster than Google's and are able to return results faster. As a result, Google fails and does not become synonymous with search, and Gmail never materializes. Innovation and quality, then, are no longer the primary factors in success.
If there were genuine competition in the broadband market, that scenario would be less likely, but currently users in many areas only have one legitimate option for broadband internet access. If their one option chooses to apply shaping to the internet, those users effectively have no choice about which sites or services to use since they are not dealing with a level playing field. Instead, those customers would actually be buying a walled garden type of service which is essentially the antithesis of what the Internet has been.
The problem with throwing all of the money into grants for research is that you have to have scientists to perform research. If students aren't interested in science, they won't pursue degrees in the sciences. Without a good background in the science prior to attending college, the students who are inclined toward the sciences will have diminished chances of successfully completing a degree. Essentially it boils down to the fact that if there are no more eggs, there will not be any chickens (unless advanced science is involved). Additionally, most would agree that all students need to be exposed to science and technology since those are intertwined with almost everything in today's society. Financial incentives might help, but they are not a solution in and of themselves.
Unfortunately Apple wasted the Cheetah codename as an internal codename for the original initial release of 10.0.0. The newer releases were all faster which is kind of ironic.
Hey Rick Sanchez! Welcome to Slashdot.
The problem with that flat tuition proposal is that the bulk of state university funding comes from the individual states and private donations to those universities. Tuition costs often reflect the amount of support (or lack of support) that the state legislatures provide. The major exception to that source of funding is the US Government grants associated with research projects. Who you pay the most taxes is not the issue. Who funds the operation of the universities is. Additionally, there are tremendous differences by region/location in the costs associated with running those college campuses: land acquisition costs, labor cost reflecting cost of living, and so on. Some states actually have peering agreements in place which allow students along borders to attend colleges in the adjoining state at the in-state rate. In order to accomplish what you request, a complete change in the funding structure of higher education would be required. I can't name a single congressman or senator with the political courage or capital required to even propose such an endeavor. Would your plan be great for citizens? Maybe. With the current political polarization, we can't even get legislation passed that both parties would want, much less something like this that would definitely be split along ideological boundaries.
Point of clarity here: South Fulton is in Tennessee, thus in the same state. If the responding fire department were from Fulton, the interstate issue would be valid. For those not familiar with the geography, The town is essentially split on the state border and the laws on either side can be vastly different and create some interesting economic realities. On the Kentucky side of town (Fulton), liquor by the drink in restaurants has been legal for many years, there is no sales tax on unprepared food items in grocery stores, and packaged liquor can be purchased. On the Tennessee side of town, liquor is unavailable by drink at a restaurant or by package and the sales tax on food is about 9.75%. The result is practically no restaurants or grocery stores can survive on the Tennessee side (South Fulton). Until about eight years ago, nearby towns in Martin and Union City did not offer liquor by the drink. This made Fulton, Kentucky a popular destination for dining. The sales tax on food situation still has an impact on grocery stores in those towns as well. Since Kentucky has an income tax, many people choose to live in the northern Tennessee counties but do all of their grocery shopping in Kentucky.