All of the fun of April fools' jokes is in getting one over on someone that you personally know. Duping people on the internet is like shooting fish in a barrel, and has no enjoyment factor, either for the joker or the person being deceived.
I won't lie... I would love to own a Tesla, but when the vehicle costs so much more (just a little more than double, to be specific) than what I would have otherwise been comfortable paying for a car, it only means that if I am to get financing and try to keep the terms to reasonable levels, I would be spending more each month paying for the car than I would on financing for a regular car PLUS gasoline, and that means it would take that much longer for the extra expense of not having to use gasoline to pay for itself, not to mention potentially causing increased levels of hardship upon myself for the duration if I should hit any unexpected financial difficulties.
Oh, and that's not even including the fact that I'd have to drop another 10 thousand dollars of my own money on getting a car charger installed in our condo's garage.
In the end, I'd be looking at having to replace the battery on the car even before the extra amount I was spending would have broken even with how much I would have paid for an otherwise new car, likely pushing the time that it would take for the money I saved on gasoline to break even with the extra expenses to somewhere in the vicinity of about 10 years.
Which is slightly more than the longest single period that I've ever owned any single vehicle.
And it's not a particularly great incentive to look elsewhere for an EV when every other EV manufacturer either also overprices their cars or else makes them look like shit.
No it does not. People keep saying it like it is true, but historically, time and again, each time minimum wage is raised, that is shown to not be the case. The people who bitch about it the loudest generally are suffering more from class envy than they are actually being economically impacted by the wage increase.
Tell me something, won't you think that the low level manager that was managing those minimum wage people will be happy working for the same wage?
Truthfully, that depends on just how close his wage was to whatever the new minimum wage is. While making closer to minimum wage one year than one was the previous year might feel like a demotion, the take-home dollar value has not actually gone down, and the only thing that will lower a person's buying power is actually the rising cost of living.... which continues to rise anyways, even in the years when minimum wage remains stable. Ideally, of course, the manager's salary is increased at least by a modest amount at the same time... perhaps enough to account for the cost of living increase that is liable to be incurred for that year, at which point the only reason that the low level manager would have to complain about the people under him getting larger salary increases than he did would be class envy. If a company cannot afford to do this, then their profit margins are too thin for them to run any kind of long-term sustainable business in the first place. Again, most of the money in a business will not generally be going to the lowest paid workers, even if they may comprise a majority of that company's workforce. Think Pareto Principle here.
I won't dispute that there is a minor bump in the cost of living when minimum wage is increased, but this increase is so minor relative to the rate at which the cost of living already goes up as to be barely distinguishable from noise... much larger increases in the cost of living can occur in a single year due to numerous other factors that can affect global or national economy.
This does not improve things. Economically speaking the workforce will adjust for this increase. One means to adjust is that prices go up. Another is more unemployment.
People keep saying this, but historically, those solutions do not happen at any scale large enough to impact a large segment of workers. It is worth noting that even though minimum wage increases happen in fairly sudden spikes, those spikes don't tend to really put those workers any further ahead than they were before the last increase. In general, it is always just playing catch-up with the cost of living (indeed, that is actually the entire point behind minimum wage... it is not to provide people with some sort of means of avoiding poverty, as some people see it). At best, any given minimum wage increase might improve one's standard of living only because they may have acclimated to earning a certain amount and a sudden increase may allow them to briefly get further ahead. Long before the next minimum wage increase, however, they will be approximately where they were before, barring the possibility that they may have obtained more gainful employment in the interim.
If those people are paid $10/hour now and their wage goes up to $15 then that 1.5 hours for my lunch and coffee will result in that coffee and lunch being $22.50 before long.
This is a commonly misquoted fallacy that is not substantiated by historical evidence.... please note that it is called *MINIMUM* wage... and as a consequence of that, it's overall impact on the economy is quite low, even though the number of workers that are affected by it is quite large. Typically, also, increases in minimum wage are responses to continual rises in the cost of living that have already occurred, and at best such increases are playing catch-up with the costs of living... the additional boost that such a wage increase might cause for the cost of living is invariably relatively minor compared with the size of increase. Bearing in mind, of course, that this is still only true because the amounts typically involved represent such a small portion of the total consumer spending power when you include wealthy individuals. If there weren't such an enormous gap between how much buying power the lowest paid workers have compared with much higher salaried individuals, then increases in minimum wage would be more likely to produce the effects you describe.
"Of course the uncopyrightable nature of API's have irked many a corporation before..."
I see you haven't been following the Oracle vs Google case, since it's my understanding that the latest ruling on the matter determined exactly the opposite.
... to divulge your own password? Or to at least be compelled to give access to law enforcement?
If so, what happens when they have security systems that evaluate the state of mind of the person entering, and refuses access if they are under any certain kinds of stress, such as if they were being coerced or forced by someone else to let them in. Could this act be interpreted that a person is compelled to *feel* a certain way about assisting law enforcement, and if they didn't feel that way, they could be thrown in jail?
Yes, those exceptions apply even when you aren't law enforcement, but only if you are acting pursuant to a contract that you have with either law enforcement or the government.
Because the DMCA explicitly "does not prohibit any lawfully authorized investigative, protective, information security, or intelligence activity of an officer, agent, or employee of the United States, a State, or a political subdivision of a State, or a person acting pursuant to a contract with the United States, a State, or a political subdivision of a State."
To put it plainly, you can always potentially force a safe open without using the actual key or combination to the safe by physically compromising its structure. Subjecting the safe to physical forces or energies beyond its tolerance limit and the safe will invariably open. If you do that to a phone, however, you won't have anything left to retrieve. So in a sense, the only way to access a locked phone is with a key that the phone recognizes as being correct. This means that the process of unlocking a phone effectively creates a kind of key that, if it were to get misappropriated before it could be destroyed (assuming destroying it later was even the intent), could potentially be used by other parties to unlock additional phones. Ideally, the key would simply fail to work on any other phone and be treated as a random failed hacking attempt even if it were to be so misappropriated, but unfortunately nobody can make a solid guarantee that it would not be possible for anyone to modify such a key to unlock other devices.
An 'ace in the hole' is only a good thing if you actually have something to gain by it that comes by virtue of other people not knowing you have that ace...
What do you gain by people not knowing that you are carrying a weapon, exactly? How does the gun's ability to defend you get reduced if people know that you have it except that you may not even need to use it in the first place? And isn't that the most desirable option?
Actually, it seems like a *very* good idea to me, since by "revealing your strength" as you put it, you may discourage people that are not equipped to cope with someone who is armed from attacking you in the first place. The number of people that would try to attack you is reduced only to those that are otherwise prepared to attack you while you are armed, or else people that are too unobservant to notice, and in either of those cases it wouldn't generally matter if you were carrying concealed or not.
As I said, however... dubious. And outright illegal in many states.
Why would a person who wants to carry a weapon in public in the first place be so concerned about what other people think anyways?
In all honesty, it sounds to me like a contrived excuse for somebody who secretly wants to pretend they are James Bond or something. Which is pretty damn lame reason to be carrying a real gun.
I think the real question is why should you carry your gun concealed in the first place? Because of what other people might think?
that is their problem, not yours. If you are already willing to be carrying a gun anyways, why would you give a damn what people who don't apparently understand what the 2nd amendment is might think about you if they see it?
Or is it just that you want the freedoms that the right to bear arms entails without having to pay the price of a bit of social awkwardness? Which is really worth more to you?
Presumably, the customer will just have to live without streaming, or ideally switch providers if that is an option. Again, by your own admission, we aren't talking about some kind of inalienable right here.
If they have the means to offer services that people actually want, sure. If people don't want the services that the ISP offers which don't count towards their data quotas, they will just use the regular internet service that does, which is what they are paying for in the first place.
The single stance on network neutrality I have is that an ISP should not ever actively degrade the quality of service of any connection in terms of data throughput below the levels that its network is otherwise capable of coping with given the demands that are being made by the ISP's subscribers on the network at the time.
If an ISP wants to provide access to specific kinds of content hosted by companies that the ISP has partnered with without impacting a user's data quotas, I have no problem with that... but I don't think that should be a justification to presume that the ISP is somehow obligated to make the usage of any competing service that they are not partnered with not count towards those data quotas. Especially since by default data usage applies towards a subscriber's data quota.anyways. The only difference is that in one case it's measuring your data usage between your ISP and you, and in the other case it's measuring your data usage that occurs between your ISP and the larger world outside of it. They are both still your data, and the end user may not be able to tell the difference, but I don't think it's unreasonable for the latter to still count towards a person's data quota when the former does not.
Basically, I just don't see being able to stream content as some sort of inalienable right, even though I think a pretty strong argument can be made that basic broadband access can be almost considered an essential service in modern society.
Sure... but that's what you are paying for when you get your basic internet anyways. The objection seems to be that content that comes upstream of your service provider shouldn't count against a person's data quotas if the provider already has similar kinds of content (eg competing content) cached locally that would not have counted against a person's data quota, and it's that objection that I disagree quite with.
I have no problem with net neutrality in general... what I have a problem with is people who think that certain kinds of content shouldn't count towards a monthly data quota just because a provider may provide a locally cached service with similar types content that doesn't happen to count towards that data cap. It's no more anticompetitive to provide such services to subscribers at no additional cost while still counting anything externally accessed as normal than a modern CPU is somehow being "anti-competitive" against RAM by making access to data that is stored on the cache faster than accessing the regular memory.
Breaking news, companies are marking up their services to the highest price point that the market will bear! Film at 11.
If a company wants to mark up charging more for accessing data outside of their prearranged purview, the only people who are really in a position to debate that point are people who can *actually* provide access to the same content for less.
And really, if it's so cheap to provide access to it, why don't you form your own ISP and charge less?
Oh, wait.... it's not really that simple is it?
Fucking first world problems piss me off... people that complain about not getting such and such a service for free or very little just because it happens to cost the providing company very little when that service is still. in the end, a LUXURY. One might be able to make an argument for basic internet access being essential in our society today, but nobody but the clearly over-privileged would ever sanely try to make an argument that streaming movies or television online is. That it is access to those services that tend to push people up against their monthly data quotas in the first place is superfluous.
That the cost of getting the data onto their network in the first place might be relatively small or not is irrelevant. It costs them something, and it is purely their own policy to decide how to mark the costs of that service up. Who is anyone else to dictate how they are permitted to charge people different amounts depending on the amount of service they use? You could argue that I should be charged just as much for power if I run my air conditioning every day through the summer as I would get charged if I hardly used any power at all.
Stop thinking of it as "content"... and just think of it for what it is.
BIts.
Data... nothing more, nothing less. It's just zero's and ones in the end... and that's what you are paying for... not "content".
Once they already have the data they are going to send to you, it doeesn't cost them any more to provide to you if they got it from somewhere else than it would from their own network, it *CAN* cost them more to get it from somewhere else in the first place so they can send it to you at all. The fact that this cost might be miniscule is wholly irrelevant... it *IS* the cost that you are supposedly paying your provider for in the first place to have basic internet access.
Whereas if the data you are trying to obtain is already physically *on* their network, they don't have to fetch it from anyone else at all... the infrastructure necessary to deliver the data to you is entirely under their jurisdiction, and it is isn't unreasonable to pass some of that savings onto a customer, nor do I think it is unreasonable to charge a customer more money to access data that is *NOT* already on their network and therefore they would have had to pay for in the first place.
Not because of any particular copyrighted status this data may have had, or any arrangements that agencies would have made to provide particular content, but simply because it consumers bandwidth. Bandwidth that, in the end, is what every internet customer is truly paying for.
Objecting that a provider shouldn't count netflix against its data cap when it provides its own competitive service without counting access to that against one's data cap is somehow anticompetitive is like complaining that the fact that your car uses more gasoline to drive across the country than it does on your daily commute.
When you access data that is not on your providers network, you are actually using more services than you would if the data was already with your provider, so why the hell should anyone who doesn't have an overly developed sense of entitlement believe that they should be getting it for just as little as they could if they weren't using as much resources?
Slashdot Mirror
I thought so too, until I read this. Page 20 is where installation costs are mentioned.
All of the fun of April fools' jokes is in getting one over on someone that you personally know. Duping people on the internet is like shooting fish in a barrel, and has no enjoyment factor, either for the joker or the person being deceived.
I won't lie... I would love to own a Tesla, but when the vehicle costs so much more (just a little more than double, to be specific) than what I would have otherwise been comfortable paying for a car, it only means that if I am to get financing and try to keep the terms to reasonable levels, I would be spending more each month paying for the car than I would on financing for a regular car PLUS gasoline, and that means it would take that much longer for the extra expense of not having to use gasoline to pay for itself, not to mention potentially causing increased levels of hardship upon myself for the duration if I should hit any unexpected financial difficulties.
Oh, and that's not even including the fact that I'd have to drop another 10 thousand dollars of my own money on getting a car charger installed in our condo's garage.
In the end, I'd be looking at having to replace the battery on the car even before the extra amount I was spending would have broken even with how much I would have paid for an otherwise new car, likely pushing the time that it would take for the money I saved on gasoline to break even with the extra expenses to somewhere in the vicinity of about 10 years.
Which is slightly more than the longest single period that I've ever owned any single vehicle.
And it's not a particularly great incentive to look elsewhere for an EV when every other EV manufacturer either also overprices their cars or else makes them look like shit.
No it does not. People keep saying it like it is true, but historically, time and again, each time minimum wage is raised, that is shown to not be the case. The people who bitch about it the loudest generally are suffering more from class envy than they are actually being economically impacted by the wage increase.
Truthfully, that depends on just how close his wage was to whatever the new minimum wage is. While making closer to minimum wage one year than one was the previous year might feel like a demotion, the take-home dollar value has not actually gone down, and the only thing that will lower a person's buying power is actually the rising cost of living.... which continues to rise anyways, even in the years when minimum wage remains stable. Ideally, of course, the manager's salary is increased at least by a modest amount at the same time... perhaps enough to account for the cost of living increase that is liable to be incurred for that year, at which point the only reason that the low level manager would have to complain about the people under him getting larger salary increases than he did would be class envy. If a company cannot afford to do this, then their profit margins are too thin for them to run any kind of long-term sustainable business in the first place. Again, most of the money in a business will not generally be going to the lowest paid workers, even if they may comprise a majority of that company's workforce. Think Pareto Principle here.
I won't dispute that there is a minor bump in the cost of living when minimum wage is increased, but this increase is so minor relative to the rate at which the cost of living already goes up as to be barely distinguishable from noise... much larger increases in the cost of living can occur in a single year due to numerous other factors that can affect global or national economy.
People keep saying this, but historically, those solutions do not happen at any scale large enough to impact a large segment of workers. It is worth noting that even though minimum wage increases happen in fairly sudden spikes, those spikes don't tend to really put those workers any further ahead than they were before the last increase. In general, it is always just playing catch-up with the cost of living (indeed, that is actually the entire point behind minimum wage... it is not to provide people with some sort of means of avoiding poverty, as some people see it). At best, any given minimum wage increase might improve one's standard of living only because they may have acclimated to earning a certain amount and a sudden increase may allow them to briefly get further ahead. Long before the next minimum wage increase, however, they will be approximately where they were before, barring the possibility that they may have obtained more gainful employment in the interim.
This is a commonly misquoted fallacy that is not substantiated by historical evidence.... please note that it is called *MINIMUM* wage... and as a consequence of that, it's overall impact on the economy is quite low, even though the number of workers that are affected by it is quite large. Typically, also, increases in minimum wage are responses to continual rises in the cost of living that have already occurred, and at best such increases are playing catch-up with the costs of living... the additional boost that such a wage increase might cause for the cost of living is invariably relatively minor compared with the size of increase. Bearing in mind, of course, that this is still only true because the amounts typically involved represent such a small portion of the total consumer spending power when you include wealthy individuals. If there weren't such an enormous gap between how much buying power the lowest paid workers have compared with much higher salaried individuals, then increases in minimum wage would be more likely to produce the effects you describe.
I see you haven't been following the Oracle vs Google case, since it's my understanding that the latest ruling on the matter determined exactly the opposite.
If so, what happens when they have security systems that evaluate the state of mind of the person entering, and refuses access if they are under any certain kinds of stress, such as if they were being coerced or forced by someone else to let them in. Could this act be interpreted that a person is compelled to *feel* a certain way about assisting law enforcement, and if they didn't feel that way, they could be thrown in jail?
Yes, those exceptions apply even when you aren't law enforcement, but only if you are acting pursuant to a contract that you have with either law enforcement or the government.
Because the DMCA explicitly "does not prohibit any lawfully authorized investigative, protective, information security, or intelligence activity of an officer, agent, or employee of the United States, a State, or a political subdivision of a State, or a person acting pursuant to a contract with the United States, a State, or a political subdivision of a State."
To put it plainly, you can always potentially force a safe open without using the actual key or combination to the safe by physically compromising its structure. Subjecting the safe to physical forces or energies beyond its tolerance limit and the safe will invariably open. If you do that to a phone, however, you won't have anything left to retrieve. So in a sense, the only way to access a locked phone is with a key that the phone recognizes as being correct. This means that the process of unlocking a phone effectively creates a kind of key that, if it were to get misappropriated before it could be destroyed (assuming destroying it later was even the intent), could potentially be used by other parties to unlock additional phones. Ideally, the key would simply fail to work on any other phone and be treated as a random failed hacking attempt even if it were to be so misappropriated, but unfortunately nobody can make a solid guarantee that it would not be possible for anyone to modify such a key to unlock other devices.
What do you gain by people not knowing that you are carrying a weapon, exactly? How does the gun's ability to defend you get reduced if people know that you have it except that you may not even need to use it in the first place? And isn't that the most desirable option?
Actually, it seems like a *very* good idea to me, since by "revealing your strength" as you put it, you may discourage people that are not equipped to cope with someone who is armed from attacking you in the first place. The number of people that would try to attack you is reduced only to those that are otherwise prepared to attack you while you are armed, or else people that are too unobservant to notice, and in either of those cases it wouldn't generally matter if you were carrying concealed or not.
As I said, however... dubious. And outright illegal in many states.
Why would a person who wants to carry a weapon in public in the first place be so concerned about what other people think anyways?
In all honesty, it sounds to me like a contrived excuse for somebody who secretly wants to pretend they are James Bond or something. Which is pretty damn lame reason to be carrying a real gun.
I think the real question is why should you carry your gun concealed in the first place? Because of what other people might think?
that is their problem, not yours. If you are already willing to be carrying a gun anyways, why would you give a damn what people who don't apparently understand what the 2nd amendment is might think about you if they see it?
Or is it just that you want the freedoms that the right to bear arms entails without having to pay the price of a bit of social awkwardness? Which is really worth more to you?
... that doesn't involve doing things that are at the very least dubious, if not actually completely illegal?
Presumably, the customer will just have to live without streaming, or ideally switch providers if that is an option. Again, by your own admission, we aren't talking about some kind of inalienable right here.
Where had you read that it was not multitouch?
If they have the means to offer services that people actually want, sure. If people don't want the services that the ISP offers which don't count towards their data quotas, they will just use the regular internet service that does, which is what they are paying for in the first place.
The single stance on network neutrality I have is that an ISP should not ever actively degrade the quality of service of any connection in terms of data throughput below the levels that its network is otherwise capable of coping with given the demands that are being made by the ISP's subscribers on the network at the time.
If an ISP wants to provide access to specific kinds of content hosted by companies that the ISP has partnered with without impacting a user's data quotas, I have no problem with that... but I don't think that should be a justification to presume that the ISP is somehow obligated to make the usage of any competing service that they are not partnered with not count towards those data quotas. Especially since by default data usage applies towards a subscriber's data quota.anyways. The only difference is that in one case it's measuring your data usage between your ISP and you, and in the other case it's measuring your data usage that occurs between your ISP and the larger world outside of it. They are both still your data, and the end user may not be able to tell the difference, but I don't think it's unreasonable for the latter to still count towards a person's data quota when the former does not.
Basically, I just don't see being able to stream content as some sort of inalienable right, even though I think a pretty strong argument can be made that basic broadband access can be almost considered an essential service in modern society.
Sure... but that's what you are paying for when you get your basic internet anyways. The objection seems to be that content that comes upstream of your service provider shouldn't count against a person's data quotas if the provider already has similar kinds of content (eg competing content) cached locally that would not have counted against a person's data quota, and it's that objection that I disagree quite with.
I have no problem with net neutrality in general... what I have a problem with is people who think that certain kinds of content shouldn't count towards a monthly data quota just because a provider may provide a locally cached service with similar types content that doesn't happen to count towards that data cap. It's no more anticompetitive to provide such services to subscribers at no additional cost while still counting anything externally accessed as normal than a modern CPU is somehow being "anti-competitive" against RAM by making access to data that is stored on the cache faster than accessing the regular memory.
Breaking news, companies are marking up their services to the highest price point that the market will bear! Film at 11.
If a company wants to mark up charging more for accessing data outside of their prearranged purview, the only people who are really in a position to debate that point are people who can *actually* provide access to the same content for less.
And really, if it's so cheap to provide access to it, why don't you form your own ISP and charge less?
Oh, wait.... it's not really that simple is it?
Fucking first world problems piss me off... people that complain about not getting such and such a service for free or very little just because it happens to cost the providing company very little when that service is still. in the end, a LUXURY. One might be able to make an argument for basic internet access being essential in our society today, but nobody but the clearly over-privileged would ever sanely try to make an argument that streaming movies or television online is. That it is access to those services that tend to push people up against their monthly data quotas in the first place is superfluous.
That the cost of getting the data onto their network in the first place might be relatively small or not is irrelevant. It costs them something, and it is purely their own policy to decide how to mark the costs of that service up. Who is anyone else to dictate how they are permitted to charge people different amounts depending on the amount of service they use? You could argue that I should be charged just as much for power if I run my air conditioning every day through the summer as I would get charged if I hardly used any power at all.
Stop thinking of it as "content"... and just think of it for what it is.
BIts.
Data... nothing more, nothing less. It's just zero's and ones in the end... and that's what you are paying for... not "content".
Once they already have the data they are going to send to you, it doeesn't cost them any more to provide to you if they got it from somewhere else than it would from their own network, it *CAN* cost them more to get it from somewhere else in the first place so they can send it to you at all. The fact that this cost might be miniscule is wholly irrelevant... it *IS* the cost that you are supposedly paying your provider for in the first place to have basic internet access.
Whereas if the data you are trying to obtain is already physically *on* their network, they don't have to fetch it from anyone else at all... the infrastructure necessary to deliver the data to you is entirely under their jurisdiction, and it is isn't unreasonable to pass some of that savings onto a customer, nor do I think it is unreasonable to charge a customer more money to access data that is *NOT* already on their network and therefore they would have had to pay for in the first place.
Not because of any particular copyrighted status this data may have had, or any arrangements that agencies would have made to provide particular content, but simply because it consumers bandwidth. Bandwidth that, in the end, is what every internet customer is truly paying for.
Objecting that a provider shouldn't count netflix against its data cap when it provides its own competitive service without counting access to that against one's data cap is somehow anticompetitive is like complaining that the fact that your car uses more gasoline to drive across the country than it does on your daily commute.
When you access data that is not on your providers network, you are actually using more services than you would if the data was already with your provider, so why the hell should anyone who doesn't have an overly developed sense of entitlement believe that they should be getting it for just as little as they could if they weren't using as much resources?
By that reasoning, again, free local calling while charging for long distance should be considered anticompetitive, should it not?