Corporations are groups of people. They are not mythical evil structures that are born to kill babies, they are legal entities that represent a group of real human beings just like you.
If we didn't pay taxes then a defense corporation, a road building corp, etc would all be established and would offer services that the government currently provides. These costs would then be passed on to the consumer and everything would end up costing the same. The only difference is the most efficient company would win the contracts so everything should end up cheaper than it currently is because we all know governments are terribly inefficient.
You forget that as a consumer of these services want them to cost less. By paying taxes you are paying to make all goods and services cost less. If companies are just swimming in mountains of profits (as it seems you are alluding to) why don't you start one and reap the benefits of all this free money. The truth is that everything is relative and that someone has to provide and pay for all the services in the society. Every day you are alive in a society you are externalizing costs as a human, why is it all the sudden bad to do it as a corporation (which by the way is just a group of people acting cooperatively to meet a goal).
YouTube has a large number of videos that are not crappy quality. They also happen to be shows, movies and things that a TV user would be more likely to look at than 30 sec clips of dogs or whatever.
Having seen youtube videos on a TV screen I can say it is very viewable and very entertaining to watch with friends. So don't bash it until you try it.
If you are talking facts and figures you are correct. Some teaching requires a back and forth 'conversation' with a teacher. For instance, try teaching writing using only books. Without a teacher pointing out flaws and showing the student where they are going wrong the student doesn't know if they get it. Some subjects are not so cut in stone enough for a student to just read a textbook and know if they truly understand it. Tests administered through a book can't even prove you know it because as many teachers will say, getting the correct answer isn't as important as how you arrived there. I think having a hybrid method is the best regardless. Books are needed because some students need more time than others to absorb information. Books allow those who are slower learners to spend more time on the subject. The teacher is needed to demonstrate the subject to you. These days multimedia are able to fulfill this role a bit easier. Teachers are also needed to answer questions and promote insightful thought processes. Teachers provide a vital role in learning that has no substitute.
Russia is currently looking at how the US teaches art because their students lack insight and creativity. Art is delectably the most important subject to have a teacher to look over your shoulder and give insight into your learning. A book can't give you feedback, or help you be creative. Teachers in Russia teach as if they were walking textbooks, they just give facts and ask for those facts to be repeated. The result is little innovation, little creativity, and a whole bunch of robots that can do the same thing really well. I think if people were taught with textbooks they would be 'learning' but they would have little idea how humans actually interact with the subject which even if it could all be articulated into words, may still not provide the equivalent to a teacher.
I have a perfect example of this that I just went through yesterday. Teaching someone to wake board. First I explained to the person how to do it (a textbook could have done this job) then it was time to try and do it. They tried to follow the instructions but fell forward. They probably didn't have the insight or perspective to know what the did wrong, but I, as a teacher did and I explained that they needed to do to fix the situation. This process went on until they finally learned how to wake board. A book can't do this, a teacher can.
I did not say it was a perfect correlation. Thus it is still possible for it to help, just at a different rate than the mpg/gpm saved in an unadjusted model.
There are plenty of references for the effect... its a well known thing. Exact numbers are hard to come by for obvious reasons but there are documents and news reports out there displaying possible numbers (likely inaccurate ones so I won't post them).
This is misinformation. Exchange doesn't send all your e-mails to a Microsoft server where employees could read it. Companies can also harden their servers and information to their choosing which is far different than a web portal access that is easily 'hackable'; mainly with social engineering.
Now you may not trust Microsoft products and that is fine but to say the security and privacy level of corporate run exchange and google docs/apps is equal is crazy talk.
You are still missing that it is a fact that people drive more when able to do so. Thus the person with the 25mpg car will on average be driving more miles than the 17 mpg person. They both are probably spending the same dollar amount on gas. You are assuming that miles is a proper metric when it is stone solid fact that people vary their driving habits based on prices they pay. In other words people allot a certain amount they will spend on gas (gallons) not a certain number of miles like you are proposing.
Thus MPG is actually a better metric to describe how the whole system works. In reality no one ever stops buying gas because they have driven over an imaginary number of miles. People do stop buying gas after running out of money though. I understand if you don't get it, you obviously view this as a math problem and are not looking at all the fields of science that can be applied to the case.
You can definitely sell a download or something for $500, what you say in your "license" may change if you can sell that. But in general the answer to your question is yes, you can sell it for $500. Finding a buy is step 1.
Once again, using statistics/math wizardry doesn't change the fact that you go further in the second option 25 - 28 than you get from the 17 - 19 option.
By converting this to a 100 mile run you are twisting the facts to your will.
Go to the store, buy $10 worth of gas(no matter the price). Then drive. You will see you get a higher GAIN in the distance traveled from the 25 - 28 upgrade than in the 17 - 19. Just because the 25mpg already goes further on a gallon should not be included in debate on what is better.
People drive based on PRICE not MILES. If people can drive further for less they will drive more, so fixing the distance driven is an invalid way to measure the gains.
People are much more likely to devote more funds to driving when they can go further, and thus the 2nd driver in your little chart up there would in reality be driving more like 200 miles, and create a larger gallons savings as well.
Please don't look at problems from a high and mighty math perspective without first understanding the problem you are tackling.
People care about how far their money gets them, not what your math games can make it look like they are getting. The facts are people are driven by the price of gas the the money they have available.
I know math just fine and I also know the power it has to create situations like this where you think your method is better mathematically but you fail to see the pragmatic part of the problem(You are correctly answering the wrong question).
Don't buy from these labels. The only way to fight back is with our purchasing power. These companies are in with the government, never expect the law to help.
Then, someday we could have reasonably priced music with reasonable rights to copy what we purchased to multiple devices without being treated like criminals.
Wow, your logic makes no sense. You are sitting here trying to use statistics to make your point but it makes no sense. 17 - 19 is a 2mpg savings. When you drive you go 2 more miles for every gallon. 25 to 28 is a 3mpg savings. You get 3 more miles per gallon you buy. The second deal, which you are bashing, is actually a bigger savings.
Ask to have it removed. Your logic makes no sense. That is like saying I should charge the builder to build on my property after I commissioned him to build there. Power is a service that people WANT. Having power lines going to your house is desirable.
You are sadly mistaken if you think governments are non-for profits. Every politician operating in the system has friends that need to be hooked up and they have their own bills to pay. It will take several layers of publicly funded officials that do nothing but hire other officials that do nothing but hire other people so that those people can decide who to hire to run the medical system. The reason politicians want a system like this is simple. It is another way to create government bloat... another way to expand the size of the government and indirectly, the power, influence and pay of those that control it.
At least in a for profit all these layers eat into the profits of the company and come right out of the pocket of the CEO's and executives. This gives them an incentive to run the thing efficiently, to make themselves as rich as possible.
If you think you can run the health care system so much better, or know someone who can, tell them to start competing in the free market and dominate it. They will get rich and everyone else will get better care. Hell, let the government compete and see how well they do. assuming they don't use tax money to subsidize their failures.
This is just about as unethical as your parents choosing to conceive you. Why does a scientist not have the right to make a human in his lab but a man and a women do have that right? What can be argued is how that created animal is treated after it is created. If it is neglected/abused/treated badly then you can start bitching.
If they are truly smarter then we have nothing to worry about.
But who's definition of smart? Memorization of facts? Raw computing power? How do you even qualify a computer as smart? How do you even qualify a person as smarter than another (when both are very smart)? Assuming we are talking about a really smart human like (no in shape but in thinking patterns) robot then we have nothing to worry about, it will act like and understand human actions and can maybe even do all our work for us so we can do nothing.
In all reality this is a bogus claim because 'smart' has no set definition. It's nearly impossible to measure: People score very differently on different IQ tests does that mean they instantly became smarter or dumber? No. It means smart is subjective in our current world. We don't know the right choices and correct actions, we only know the ones we think are correct. A machine could impress people with a flashy display of knowledge and appear to be smarter than humans right now but is it really smarter?
I will claim that machines made by humans means the human is smarter than the machine still. The human was capable of creating a supplement to the physical limitations of the brain in order to become "smarter" by using the machine. When the machine develops and makes a smarter version of himself, it was still the design of the human that enabled this subsequent design.
Under this definition of theft you are stealing all sorts of information just by reading it and repeating it. For instance, if I read your post then tell my friend about Microsoft stealing from DEC I am stealing from you.
It's not like he walked out with a working copy, he had stuff in his head that he used. It's called experience and those who have it should be allowed to use it. It creates a productive society and is actually the foundation of human knowledge... repeating what you know to others so they can use it.
Maybe I am mistaken about what was used but to me this is just a man who used his knowledge in an area to benefit Microsoft (and himself).
Call this a crime and try and support OSS. I dare you.
Does that really matter in a ethics argument? Ethically they did their duty to tell the customer that people will look at messages. To a customer does it matter if some or all are looked at by humans? I don't see how thee is a difference (ethically).
Someone mod parent up. The service tells the customers that humans could look at it and I am pretty sure that right there means it is ethical (to all those below screaming about ethics).
Bush. Obama probably talked more about the shortcomings of Bush than he argued against... whoever that was. This election was not a vote for Obama, it was a vote of disapproval of Bush.
If they invested money on the assumption that the return on investment was an exclusive phone then I think they do deserve to get that exclusive phone that their own money paid for. Contracts (for investment) can be written with any language they want. This means Verizon, as an investor, does not have to buy shares of stock or ownership in the company. They can invest in a specific product expecting that that specific product is for them. Its not like companies like samsung for example don't sell any phones to other carriers, just not the exclusive ones.
I don't know the details of the financial statements and everything to say if Verizon is paying their share of the dev costs, but regardless I think that this does promote more competition. First, it allows carries to compete with one another for better phones. All the carriers are scrambling to pay for a better phone. This creates a pull on the manufacturers to create better more advanced phones rather than just telling carriers that they have to use their shitty phone because they don't want to develop one. So the current situation creates competition to create better and more advanced phone from both the phone companies and the manufacturers.
The proposed plan will only generate competition in the manufacturing sector... probably driving them out of business as they will compete on price and the phone companies will likely start/buy their own manufacturing businesses.
If these regulations go though Verizon will stop buying phone from phone manufacturers or pouring money into the companies and will just buy one and make their own exclusive phones.
Small companies don't always help the consumer. Things like cell phones and large cell networks both have great economies of scale. Don't underestimate the power a free market can have for the consumer. When the iPhone came out massive amount of research went into new phones. None of them can really compete yet, but without the iPhone (being exclusive) we would have never had this huge jump in competition, lowering of prices etc.
I hate to flame but you really need to gain some reading comprehension skills.
1) I have never disagreed with any of your ideas. I find them to be quite correct in theory.
2) The only thing I was replying to (once again) was about using passive cooling by rerouting traffic to areas where it is night/cooler part of the day. You seem to agree with me on this yet somehow have tried to twist my words and make it seem like I am arguing with you about it.
3) You have also brought in this cheaper electricity thing which is never mentioned in this thread by anyone but you.
4) Yes, using cheaper electricity will save money, I never said anything about that.
I was mainly pointing out the flaws in the parent's post and offered a simple one sentence better solution. You then offered a 3 paragraph solution that included nearly none of same topic that me and parent were talking about. Then you come back again and offer other random points of defense that have nothing to do with this discussion. I should stop now.
Interestingly enough though you say that putting stuff up north is worthless because its far away from people using it, yet you say that rerouting traffic based on time of day is super efficient. Why can't you just route traffic to the north? I'm not talking on the freaking I ice caps here... I am talking northern europe, canada etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Corporations are groups of people. They are not mythical evil structures that are born to kill babies, they are legal entities that represent a group of real human beings just like you.
If we didn't pay taxes then a defense corporation, a road building corp, etc would all be established and would offer services that the government currently provides. These costs would then be passed on to the consumer and everything would end up costing the same. The only difference is the most efficient company would win the contracts so everything should end up cheaper than it currently is because we all know governments are terribly inefficient.
You forget that as a consumer of these services want them to cost less. By paying taxes you are paying to make all goods and services cost less. If companies are just swimming in mountains of profits (as it seems you are alluding to) why don't you start one and reap the benefits of all this free money. The truth is that everything is relative and that someone has to provide and pay for all the services in the society. Every day you are alive in a society you are externalizing costs as a human, why is it all the sudden bad to do it as a corporation (which by the way is just a group of people acting cooperatively to meet a goal).
YouTube has a large number of videos that are not crappy quality. They also happen to be shows, movies and things that a TV user would be more likely to look at than 30 sec clips of dogs or whatever.
Having seen youtube videos on a TV screen I can say it is very viewable and very entertaining to watch with friends. So don't bash it until you try it.
If you are talking facts and figures you are correct. Some teaching requires a back and forth 'conversation' with a teacher. For instance, try teaching writing using only books. Without a teacher pointing out flaws and showing the student where they are going wrong the student doesn't know if they get it. Some subjects are not so cut in stone enough for a student to just read a textbook and know if they truly understand it. Tests administered through a book can't even prove you know it because as many teachers will say, getting the correct answer isn't as important as how you arrived there. I think having a hybrid method is the best regardless. Books are needed because some students need more time than others to absorb information. Books allow those who are slower learners to spend more time on the subject. The teacher is needed to demonstrate the subject to you. These days multimedia are able to fulfill this role a bit easier. Teachers are also needed to answer questions and promote insightful thought processes. Teachers provide a vital role in learning that has no substitute.
Russia is currently looking at how the US teaches art because their students lack insight and creativity. Art is delectably the most important subject to have a teacher to look over your shoulder and give insight into your learning. A book can't give you feedback, or help you be creative. Teachers in Russia teach as if they were walking textbooks, they just give facts and ask for those facts to be repeated. The result is little innovation, little creativity, and a whole bunch of robots that can do the same thing really well. I think if people were taught with textbooks they would be 'learning' but they would have little idea how humans actually interact with the subject which even if it could all be articulated into words, may still not provide the equivalent to a teacher.
I have a perfect example of this that I just went through yesterday. Teaching someone to wake board. First I explained to the person how to do it (a textbook could have done this job) then it was time to try and do it. They tried to follow the instructions but fell forward. They probably didn't have the insight or perspective to know what the did wrong, but I, as a teacher did and I explained that they needed to do to fix the situation. This process went on until they finally learned how to wake board. A book can't do this, a teacher can.
I did not say it was a perfect correlation. Thus it is still possible for it to help, just at a different rate than the mpg/gpm saved in an unadjusted model.
There are plenty of references for the effect... its a well known thing. Exact numbers are hard to come by for obvious reasons but there are documents and news reports out there displaying possible numbers (likely inaccurate ones so I won't post them).
This is misinformation. Exchange doesn't send all your e-mails to a Microsoft server where employees could read it. Companies can also harden their servers and information to their choosing which is far different than a web portal access that is easily 'hackable'; mainly with social engineering.
Now you may not trust Microsoft products and that is fine but to say the security and privacy level of corporate run exchange and google docs/apps is equal is crazy talk.
You are still missing that it is a fact that people drive more when able to do so. Thus the person with the 25mpg car will on average be driving more miles than the 17 mpg person. They both are probably spending the same dollar amount on gas. You are assuming that miles is a proper metric when it is stone solid fact that people vary their driving habits based on prices they pay. In other words people allot a certain amount they will spend on gas (gallons) not a certain number of miles like you are proposing.
Thus MPG is actually a better metric to describe how the whole system works. In reality no one ever stops buying gas because they have driven over an imaginary number of miles. People do stop buying gas after running out of money though. I understand if you don't get it, you obviously view this as a math problem and are not looking at all the fields of science that can be applied to the case.
You can definitely sell a download or something for $500, what you say in your "license" may change if you can sell that. But in general the answer to your question is yes, you can sell it for $500. Finding a buy is step 1.
Once again, using statistics/math wizardry doesn't change the fact that you go further in the second option 25 - 28 than you get from the 17 - 19 option.
By converting this to a 100 mile run you are twisting the facts to your will.
Go to the store, buy $10 worth of gas(no matter the price). Then drive. You will see you get a higher GAIN in the distance traveled from the 25 - 28 upgrade than in the 17 - 19. Just because the 25mpg already goes further on a gallon should not be included in debate on what is better.
People drive based on PRICE not MILES. If people can drive further for less they will drive more, so fixing the distance driven is an invalid way to measure the gains.
People are much more likely to devote more funds to driving when they can go further, and thus the 2nd driver in your little chart up there would in reality be driving more like 200 miles, and create a larger gallons savings as well.
Please don't look at problems from a high and mighty math perspective without first understanding the problem you are tackling.
People care about how far their money gets them, not what your math games can make it look like they are getting. The facts are people are driven by the price of gas the the money they have available.
I know math just fine and I also know the power it has to create situations like this where you think your method is better mathematically but you fail to see the pragmatic part of the problem(You are correctly answering the wrong question).
Don't buy from these labels. The only way to fight back is with our purchasing power. These companies are in with the government, never expect the law to help.
Then, someday we could have reasonably priced music with reasonable rights to copy what we purchased to multiple devices without being treated like criminals.
Wow, your logic makes no sense. You are sitting here trying to use statistics to make your point but it makes no sense. 17 - 19 is a 2mpg savings. When you drive you go 2 more miles for every gallon. 25 to 28 is a 3mpg savings. You get 3 more miles per gallon you buy. The second deal, which you are bashing, is actually a bigger savings.
Hear of MSDN(AA)? Any decent school probably has access to this stuff.
Ask to have it removed. Your logic makes no sense. That is like saying I should charge the builder to build on my property after I commissioned him to build there. Power is a service that people WANT. Having power lines going to your house is desirable.
A bit of an assumption there(assuming all kids are bad kids). Even the polite, well behaved, children will have their phones disabled.
You are sadly mistaken if you think governments are non-for profits. Every politician operating in the system has friends that need to be hooked up and they have their own bills to pay. It will take several layers of publicly funded officials that do nothing but hire other officials that do nothing but hire other people so that those people can decide who to hire to run the medical system. The reason politicians want a system like this is simple. It is another way to create government bloat... another way to expand the size of the government and indirectly, the power, influence and pay of those that control it.
At least in a for profit all these layers eat into the profits of the company and come right out of the pocket of the CEO's and executives. This gives them an incentive to run the thing efficiently, to make themselves as rich as possible.
If you think you can run the health care system so much better, or know someone who can, tell them to start competing in the free market and dominate it. They will get rich and everyone else will get better care. Hell, let the government compete and see how well they do. assuming they don't use tax money to subsidize their failures.
Depends on what 'this' is. Is it poking a wound that needs treatment or is it banging your head against a brick wall?
In one case you are correct, in the other case badanalogyguy is correct. In both cases an assumption is being made.
RTFA. They are doing nothing unethical. This is about the same as cloning, just a different method.
This is just about as unethical as your parents choosing to conceive you. Why does a scientist not have the right to make a human in his lab but a man and a women do have that right? What can be argued is how that created animal is treated after it is created. If it is neglected/abused/treated badly then you can start bitching.
If they are truly smarter then we have nothing to worry about.
But who's definition of smart? Memorization of facts? Raw computing power? How do you even qualify a computer as smart? How do you even qualify a person as smarter than another (when both are very smart)? Assuming we are talking about a really smart human like (no in shape but in thinking patterns) robot then we have nothing to worry about, it will act like and understand human actions and can maybe even do all our work for us so we can do nothing.
In all reality this is a bogus claim because 'smart' has no set definition. It's nearly impossible to measure: People score very differently on different IQ tests does that mean they instantly became smarter or dumber? No. It means smart is subjective in our current world. We don't know the right choices and correct actions, we only know the ones we think are correct. A machine could impress people with a flashy display of knowledge and appear to be smarter than humans right now but is it really smarter?
I will claim that machines made by humans means the human is smarter than the machine still.
The human was capable of creating a supplement to the physical limitations of the brain in order to become "smarter" by using the machine.
When the machine develops and makes a smarter version of himself, it was still the design of the human that enabled this subsequent design.
Under this definition of theft you are stealing all sorts of information just by reading it and repeating it. For instance, if I read your post then tell my friend about Microsoft stealing from DEC I am stealing from you.
It's not like he walked out with a working copy, he had stuff in his head that he used. It's called experience and those who have it should be allowed to use it. It creates a productive society and is actually the foundation of human knowledge... repeating what you know to others so they can use it.
Maybe I am mistaken about what was used but to me this is just a man who used his knowledge in an area to benefit Microsoft (and himself).
Call this a crime and try and support OSS. I dare you.
Does that really matter in a ethics argument? Ethically they did their duty to tell the customer that people will look at messages. To a customer does it matter if some or all are looked at by humans? I don't see how thee is a difference (ethically).
Someone mod parent up. The service tells the customers that humans could look at it and I am pretty sure that right there means it is ethical (to all those below screaming about ethics).
Bush. Obama probably talked more about the shortcomings of Bush than he argued against ... whoever that was. This election was not a vote for Obama, it was a vote of disapproval of Bush.
If they invested money on the assumption that the return on investment was an exclusive phone then I think they do deserve to get that exclusive phone that their own money paid for. Contracts (for investment) can be written with any language they want. This means Verizon, as an investor, does not have to buy shares of stock or ownership in the company. They can invest in a specific product expecting that that specific product is for them. Its not like companies like samsung for example don't sell any phones to other carriers, just not the exclusive ones.
I don't know the details of the financial statements and everything to say if Verizon is paying their share of the dev costs, but regardless I think that this does promote more competition. First, it allows carries to compete with one another for better phones. All the carriers are scrambling to pay for a better phone. This creates a pull on the manufacturers to create better more advanced phones rather than just telling carriers that they have to use their shitty phone because they don't want to develop one. So the current situation creates competition to create better and more advanced phone from both the phone companies and the manufacturers.
The proposed plan will only generate competition in the manufacturing sector... probably driving them out of business as they will compete on price and the phone companies will likely start/buy their own manufacturing businesses.
If these regulations go though Verizon will stop buying phone from phone manufacturers or pouring money into the companies and will just buy one and make their own exclusive phones.
Small companies don't always help the consumer. Things like cell phones and large cell networks both have great economies of scale. Don't underestimate the power a free market can have for the consumer. When the iPhone came out massive amount of research went into new phones. None of them can really compete yet, but without the iPhone (being exclusive) we would have never had this huge jump in competition, lowering of prices etc.
I hate to flame but you really need to gain some reading comprehension skills.
1) I have never disagreed with any of your ideas. I find them to be quite correct in theory.
2) The only thing I was replying to (once again) was about using passive cooling by rerouting traffic to areas where it is night/cooler part of the day. You seem to agree with me on this yet somehow have tried to twist my words and make it seem like I am arguing with you about it.
3) You have also brought in this cheaper electricity thing which is never mentioned in this thread by anyone but you.
4) Yes, using cheaper electricity will save money, I never said anything about that.
I was mainly pointing out the flaws in the parent's post and offered a simple one sentence better solution. You then offered a 3 paragraph solution that included nearly none of same topic that me and parent were talking about. Then you come back again and offer other random points of defense that have nothing to do with this discussion. I should stop now.
Interestingly enough though you say that putting stuff up north is worthless because its far away from people using it, yet you say that rerouting traffic based on time of day is super efficient. Why can't you just route traffic to the north? I'm not talking on the freaking I ice caps here... I am talking northern europe, canada etc.
Mountains will work too, good point.