To me the solution to this problem seems obvious. The problem with the current attempts to force competition in the phone industry is that the Telcos have been told to allow their competitors to use their lines and so the consumer ends up with the choice of buy service from the company that owns the lines and therefore can fix problems whether they are with the line or with the service or buy service from the company that can fix problems with the service but has to beg the company whose business the consumer spurned to fix problems with the line. We've all seen plenty of stories about how the service company and the line company go back and forth saying the problem is with the other guy, etc.
The solution is simply to split the Telcos into an infrastructure company that owns the lines, but is not allowed to sell service and a separate company that sells service and is not allowed to be given a better price for access to the infrastructure company's lines than the worst price charged to any of their competitors. This worst price restriction can be phased out as certain milestones are reached, such as no service company in the area having a greater than 30% market share.
'Therefore, every dime the mfg pays, must be charged to the consumer. The difference between "consumer costs" and "manufacturer costs" is only who writes the check-all the money comes from the consumer.'
To me there are a couple of notable benefits to charging the manufacturer rather than there being an add-on cost to the consumer.
First, it keeps the cost of the item, as presented to the consumer, simple. When I'm trying to make a purchasing decision, it's bad enough that I have to add in sales tax in my head, but to then start having to figure out what other fees are going to be tossed in is just a waste of my time and effort. Manufacturers need to have accountants and good record keeping as a matter of staying profitable, so it's not a significant extra burden on them to do these calculations (you can argue about the significance, my opinion is that it is low). [offtopic: These are much my same arguments for why we should not have a personal income tax, but should have corporate.]
Second, if the fee is buried into the manufacturer's cost of goods, then we can build in incentives for them to try and lower those fees (and thus lower their costs, and ultimately their price, so they can gain market share). We (as the government) can offer lower fees for more environmentally friendly products and/or processes or for more efficient recycling systems.
"A much better solution is for Earth friendly groups such as Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, etc., to spend 5% of thier budget buying back:
1. old cars
2. old computers"
The budget of these organizations is probably not large enough to make a significant dent in the amount of materials that need recycling. I'm sure they feel that their resources are better applied towards trying to get a full infrastructure mandated, rather than try and drink from the firehose themselves. They also need to do those things that their donors expect them to do, which is not necessarily to take direct action.
If you prefer more direct action, then you should seek out those organizations that do that. I don't (off the top of my head) know of any organizations to which you can donate money that will specifically be used for recycling, but I donate to both the "Save the Redwoods League" and "The Nature Conservancy". Those two organizations both use the contributions they receive to buy privately owned land for the purpose of preservation. They then donate the land to such things as the National Parks system.
The list of what LOTR:FOTR didn't get nominated for, is also interesting. It was eligible in 17 categories and nominated in 13, so the four awards for which it was snubbed are:
Best Actor
Best Actress Best Supporting Actress Sound Editing
Actually, a large part of why films that are expected to receive Oscar(tm) nominations are released very late in the year, is so that they will still be playing when the nominations are announced. A nomination is usually good for several million more at the box office.
In a floor speech on Thursday, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-New Hampshire) called for a global prohibition on encryption products without backdoors for government surveillance.
"This is something that we need international cooperation on and we need to have movement on in order to get the information that allows us to anticipate and prevent what occurred in New York and in Washington," Gregg said, according to a copy of his remarks that an aide provided.
This is base grandstanding by a politician in the wake of tragedy. Saying that it needs international cooperation is tantamount to admitting that it can't be done and setting up to blame the rest of the world when it fails.
The constitution was written by a group of people that had visceral knowledge of what it means to need a revolution, in the bloodiest sense of that word. Our modern laws would be a lot better if they were informed by that same knowledge.
The shaman took his wand and with it drew the ceremonial words in the sand. He mumbled to himself and bit off a piece of mystic root, drank a mouthful of sacramental wine. With sudden inspiration he crossed out one symbol and substituted another. The spell was done, now he had only to wait and see if it worked.
The programmer put his hands on the keyboard and entered the commands into the file. He mumbled to himself and bit off a piece of beef jerky, drank a mouthful of Jolt Cola. With sudden inspiration he deleted one operator and substituted another. The program compiled without warnings, now he had only to run it and see if it worked.
When I'm not feeling atheistic or agnostic, I'm a Polytheistic Sollipsist, which is a belief that the universe is a consensual hallucination by all the souls participating in it.
Either that or I believe the Earth is a sitcom for an alien race.
I, for one, dislike trackballs. The arm/hand combo is designed for a number of different types of motion. The fingers allow for small, precise, movements. The wrist is good for small arcs and circles. The elbow allows for large arcs. The shoulder allows for fairly long and straight movements. These can be combined in very flexible and fluid ways without much in the way of conscious thought (once one has gotten used to the mouse in general). I made a point of using a trackball exclusively for several months so as to get past any learning curve and what I learned was that the mouse is an infinitely better pointing device and will likely remain at the head of the pack until touch screens are ubiquitous.
The Justices have obviously been following the case, they know how MS acted throughout the trial. Not just one or two Justices but all of them, and they are informed enough to stop 3 of them from sitting due to conflict on interest. If they follow their conservative background then they will rule in favor of the economy, which is against MS.
Given that the "conflict of interest" that the three judges were removed for was that they previously worked for the DOJ, I have a hard time seeing their removal as anything but pro-Microsoft.
The big advantage to using a robot instead of mounting the gear in the car is that the robot will count towards being able to drive in the carpool lane...
the notion of applying american laws to a global medium is silly
Then you would also be against regulation of the telephones and of radio and television and satellite transmissions, all of which cross international borders? Just let the strongest signal win!
The taxation issue is not applying American laws to a global medium but rather applying American laws to American residents and to American corporations.
There have been several messages/threads discussing session IDs stored in URLs (including sevenval's mechanism of storing it in the domain portion). I implemented a system doing this at the start of 1997 for what has grown to be a fairly large e-commerce site, because we didn't want to force users to accept cookies. We have since had to give up the fight and switch to cookies. When we first started I had guessable session IDs but used the client's IP to verify that the session number in the URL belonged to the requesting client. We later had to discontinue this because customers coming through AOL started having IPs that shifted from page request to page request so they were no longer able to buy through our site. I didn't see any other information coming in from the browser that I could reliably use to verify the client was the same, so I switched to a (reasonably) unguessable session ID. This mostly worked but we ran into a problem where people would find a good deal on our site and post the URL somewhere on the net with the session ID included. If other people followed the link, before the session expired, they would end up in the original poster's account and while they couldn't place an order without supplying their own credit card they still found it disturbing that the system showed them as being in someone else's account (and rightly so). After another couple of rounds of trying to keep cookies out of the equation but still keep each person's session secure I finally gave up and switched to cookies. So I ask, do any of you that hate cookies have a suggestion for a technique that I may have missed that would allow us to stop using them? If not, then I suggest that this potential patent is ultimately doomed as well, at least where ecommerce is concerned.
Slashdot Mirror
The solution is simply to split the Telcos into an infrastructure company that owns the lines, but is not allowed to sell service and a separate company that sells service and is not allowed to be given a better price for access to the infrastructure company's lines than the worst price charged to any of their competitors. This worst price restriction can be phased out as certain milestones are reached, such as no service company in the area having a greater than 30% market share.
First, it keeps the cost of the item, as presented to the consumer, simple. When I'm trying to make a purchasing decision, it's bad enough that I have to add in sales tax in my head, but to then start having to figure out what other fees are going to be tossed in is just a waste of my time and effort. Manufacturers need to have accountants and good record keeping as a matter of staying profitable, so it's not a significant extra burden on them to do these calculations (you can argue about the significance, my opinion is that it is low). [offtopic: These are much my same arguments for why we should not have a personal income tax, but should have corporate.]
Second, if the fee is buried into the manufacturer's cost of goods, then we can build in incentives for them to try and lower those fees (and thus lower their costs, and ultimately their price, so they can gain market share). We (as the government) can offer lower fees for more environmentally friendly products and/or processes or for more efficient recycling systems.
If you prefer more direct action, then you should seek out those organizations that do that. I don't (off the top of my head) know of any organizations to which you can donate money that will specifically be used for recycling, but I donate to both the "Save the Redwoods League" and "The Nature Conservancy". Those two organizations both use the contributions they receive to buy privately owned land for the purpose of preservation. They then donate the land to such things as the National Parks system.
Actually, a large part of why films that are expected to receive Oscar(tm) nominations are released very late in the year, is so that they will still be playing when the nominations are announced. A nomination is usually good for several million more at the box office.
This is base grandstanding by a politician in the wake of tragedy. Saying that it needs international cooperation is tantamount to admitting that it can't be done and setting up to blame the rest of the world when it fails.
The constitution was written by a group of people that had visceral knowledge of what it means to need a revolution, in the bloodiest sense of that word. Our modern laws would be a lot better if they were informed by that same knowledge.
When I'm not feeling atheistic or agnostic, I'm a Polytheistic Sollipsist, which is a belief that the universe is a consensual hallucination by all the souls participating in it.
Either that or I believe the Earth is a sitcom for an alien race.
I, for one, dislike trackballs. The arm/hand combo is designed for a number of different types of motion. The fingers allow for small, precise, movements. The wrist is good for small arcs and circles. The elbow allows for large arcs. The shoulder allows for fairly long and straight movements. These can be combined in very flexible and fluid ways without much in the way of conscious thought (once one has gotten used to the mouse in general). I made a point of using a trackball exclusively for several months so as to get past any learning curve and what I learned was that the mouse is an infinitely better pointing device and will likely remain at the head of the pack until touch screens are ubiquitous.
Your mileage may vary.
The Justices have obviously been following the case, they know how MS acted throughout the trial. Not just one or two Justices but all of them, and they are informed enough to stop 3 of them from sitting due to conflict on interest. If they follow their conservative background then they will rule in favor of the economy, which is against MS.
Given that the "conflict of interest" that the three judges were removed for was that they previously worked for the DOJ, I have a hard time seeing their removal as anything but pro-Microsoft.
The big advantage to using a robot instead of mounting the gear in the car is that the robot will count towards being able to drive in the carpool lane...
the notion of applying american laws to a global medium is silly
Then you would also be against regulation of the telephones and of radio and television and satellite transmissions, all of which cross international borders? Just let the strongest signal win!
The taxation issue is not applying American laws to a global medium but rather applying American laws to American residents and to American corporations.
There have been several messages/threads discussing session IDs stored in URLs (including sevenval's mechanism of storing it in the domain portion). I implemented a system doing this at the start of 1997 for what has grown to be a fairly large e-commerce site, because we didn't want to force users to accept cookies. We have since had to give up the fight and switch to cookies. When we first started I had guessable session IDs but used the client's IP to verify that the session number in the URL belonged to the requesting client. We later had to discontinue this because customers coming through AOL started having IPs that shifted from page request to page request so they were no longer able to buy through our site. I didn't see any other information coming in from the browser that I could reliably use to verify the client was the same, so I switched to a (reasonably) unguessable session ID. This mostly worked but we ran into a problem where people would find a good deal on our site and post the URL somewhere on the net with the session ID included. If other people followed the link, before the session expired, they would end up in the original poster's account and while they couldn't place an order without supplying their own credit card they still found it disturbing that the system showed them as being in someone else's account (and rightly so). After another couple of rounds of trying to keep cookies out of the equation but still keep each person's session secure I finally gave up and switched to cookies. So I ask, do any of you that hate cookies have a suggestion for a technique that I may have missed that would allow us to stop using them? If not, then I suggest that this potential patent is ultimately doomed as well, at least where ecommerce is concerned.