You claim they intentionally made a crappy product branded with the itunes name
I don't think there would be any poisoning of the ipod brand, since it was branded as the "rokr" and only as being "with itunes". The name "ipod" which is the brand that is really driving sales right now and would likely be on a future apple made crossover device is left unscathed. So a future "iPod Mobile" directly from Apple isn't going to be considered as a follow on to the "Rokr with iTunes".
That said, I don't think Apple wanted the rokr to be an utter failure, but certainly I don't think Apple wanted it to be a great success either. A successful rokr would have competed with its own best selling products, forget poisoning the brand, that would have been poisoning the well.
Microsoft has a trademark for the mark "Windows" relating to computer operating systems. Any claim that they had against him was based on whether there was any confusion in his use of the mark Windows. Notice I say mark, because trademarks don't cover the meaning of words, but rather the form of the word itself. That a trademark contains a word is incidental to the legal protection. And just because he was using it doesn't mean anything.
In this case I think it could have been reasonably inferred that there would have been confusion over whether the product was a Microsoft product or not. But it was the way he was using it and not the mere fact he was using Windows as part of the name.
I could come out and name my store Windows Candy Shop or Windows Records and it would clearly have nothing to do with operating systems. Conceivably I could also just call my company "Windows" as long as it was clear that I didn't provide operating system products or services.
I think to be safe you probably would stay away from using Windows in your name for anything directly related to computers, but trademarks are living things.
It just says that after science has taken a crack at it and we understand just how infinitely improbable it is that such order could come out of universal chaos, we should at least consider the possibility that there was some intelligence behind it.
I'll let you know when science is done taking a crack at it.
Just because elementary and high school biology text books are nearly always woefully behind the state of the art of scientific understanding, doesn't mean the scietific method should be thrown out the window. And merely declaring something as "infinitely improbable" might sound like a proper premise to some people, but to declare something that has actually occured as infinitely improbable is pretty stupid since it happened, so it happened at least once out of an unknown number of possbilities. Unknown is not the same as infinite.
By your boiler plate ID arguments you might as well just say that the hard boiled egg for breakfast was infinitely improbable, just because you can't understand how it all came together to get onto your plate. Statements of probability are meaningless without some knowledge of the universe, or in the case of your hard boiled egg a little knowledge of chickens, chemistry and thermo dynamics is in order and I think you will be able to reproduce that hard boiled egg to a specific degree of precision. Of course, every hard boiled egg is beautifully unique, because heck we are only human.
But I digress, Sagan put it best when he said "Absence of evidence, is not evidence of absense." Applied to evolution, you cannot disprove the mechanism of natural selection just because there are gaps in the fossil record. Every one of those supposedly impossible complex biological features that couldn't possibly have evolved naturally without some intelligence doing some tinkering with the details has some functional corrolary in "simpler" species. The eye is an example I hear all the time, but even the simplest of multicellular organisms can have light sensitivity through well understood photochemical reactions. What you are really saying when you say such complexity is impossible is that you do not understand it, or that you simply do not have the imagination to see how it might have come into being.
I don't see Intelligence as a matter of belief, we know that Intelligence is a part of Creation because we think, therefore it is. But that does not show us that "Intelligence" is the mechanism by which species come into existence or by which they are changed. Except, of course, that we ourselves can create new species and modify existing ones through our own Intelligence. Which is the only merit of Intelligent Design, that we ourselves prove that there can be Intelligence in species design both through modern genetic manipulation and also more traditionally through use of our "Intelligence" to apply selective pressure over many generations. But that is not the Intelligent design that most ID'ers are talking about, if it were then we could have an Intelligent conversation. Until then, we are left with things that are declared by defintion as too complicated to be understood and that is the basis of ID's "reasoning"
If you believe in God you must believe that he is the author of the universe, so to know his law is not just to read that which is transcribed by man, but to seek out what is written in the the universe itself.
What is unfortunately not beyond all comprehension is how human arrogance could have evolved to the point that those who would claim faith would also claim that God has created an incomprehensible universe.
Re:Well, not to defend an evil empire or anything,
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Mandriva Linux 2006 Review
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· Score: 2, Insightful
but Linux often gets critizised for it by the "mainstream" IT press.
That is because most of the time you have to install linux, but Windows comes preloaded. So you will always have people comparing the installation of linux to getting a windows computer which is preconfigured by the hardware vendor, it is an impossible comparison.
I noticed this back in 1998 when I tried installing NT and found that the Windows installer was a lot less friendly than Linux, to the point that it was barely functional and failed several times.
Sure some installers are better than others, but it is irrelevant to market adoption. Linux on the desktop means desktops that come with Linux preinstalled. And it is Dell that is the biggest obstruction to the goal of real choice in desktop OS for the masses.
A rational and consistent intelectual property law would one be that prevented copyrighted content from using copy prevention technology at all. After all it has the protection of law, then why should people be prevented from making fair use of the content?
I see copy prevention technology as being no different conceptually from a trade secret. If you decide to hide a technology as a trade secret rather than sharing a technology through a patent then your technology can be reverse engineered legally and you get no protection under law. The trade off is that society gets access to your new technology and you get legal monopoly for a number of years. If you don't share the technology via a descriptive patent, then you don't get a legal monopoly. So, similarly if you decide to prevent copying using technology rather than by using copyright law, then you should get no benefit under the law because you are ultimately depriving society of the content if it is never released in a copyable form.
But the problem here is that limiting supply doesn't create the perception of scarcity (what a console maker wants), it creates actual scarcity (what a console maker certainly does not want).
How else do you create a perception of scarcity but by actually limiting supply, at least initially or for a period of time? That would be a neat marketing trick to try and maintain there was a scarcity and then have people show up to the store and find the shelves full. And it isn't about driving up individual unit prices unless Microsoft is going to be selling xbox's on ebay itself, it is about driving the perception of value to drive sales.
What Microsoft wants -- what any console maker wants -- is for people to *think* their console is scarce but, in truth, have enough on-hand for so that anyone can purchase it on day one. You don't get that by lowering production.
I'd agree that it seems far fetched that Microsoft would actually lower production being that it costs money to keep those production lines up and running. Far more likely is that they would control distribution for a few days to add to the publicity.
Also there is the implicit assumption in your post that Microsoft has the ability to scale production up to meet initial demand. That's a pretty big assumption to make, especially when you consider that microsoft is aiming for a *global launch*. This could be possible, but seems unlikely.
You may be right and they simply are having some specific parts supply issues or quality control issues which are slowing their production run, but I wanted to point out that you may be wrong and there is nothing rediculous about the idea of a company holding back on supply, maybe for just a few days, just to get a few long lines and empty shelves on tv. Yes, if the xbox is scarce into February, then I'd have to agree with you that would clearly be a negative. But a few days or weeks would not diminish demand or market penetration. The publicity from the scarcity would far outweigh any negative effects that a few days or week would have on sales.
In both cases, I had to work at breaking the copyright mechanism.
I agree with the overall point you are making, that since google is putting up barriers to having access to the whole book at a time it seems that it is not a copyright violation, but copyright is not a "mechanism" but a legal protection. So, when talking about mechanisms and technology you are talking about copy prevention which really has very little to do with a person's legal protection of copyright and has only been recently mixed up because of the ease of digital copying and promulgation of copy prevention technologies.
As a seperate point, I would argue that the law should be changed so that copy protected works should lose copyright altogether, by the same pricipal that a device which the inventor chooses not to patent but rather keeps as a trade secret may be reverse engineered legally.
However, it would be moronic to purposefully drive down supply in order to create "buzz".
No. It is called marketing. In conjuction with a big marketing campaign, it makes perfect sense to limit supply to create a perception of scarcity and value. It is reasonable to conclude that Microsoft had decided on a number of consoles to release the first week based on marketing considerations versus their ability to produce. Your right it is not a conspiracy or particularly evil, it is just marketing 101.
There's some truth to these criticisms, but AFAICT the main problem has always been that we continue to allow vertical integration between a competitive market (carrier services) and natural-monopoly public infrastructure (phone lines and bandwidth). The minute we separate them, we can deregulate the carrier market all we like, and it will promptly commoditize. Telephone lines can be kept either a a government-provided service (which would probably make their quality work at at about the level of roads), or go back to utility-style control of the maintenance providers.
agreed. If the company is using a public right of way (space on utility poles) or licensed public bandwidth over the airwaves to the exclusion of others, then it should be providing a well defined public service and regulated accordingly.
I like Wikipedia, but it usually ends up being a good idea to double check the information presented there some times.
you could apply that to any source of information: I like ________ , but it usually ends up being a good idea to double check the information presented there sometimes.
Eventually google will start charging, and offer ad-free for a fee, but it's more of the same shit.
And when that happens we dump google in favor of the next company willing to compete on quality, service and price rather than rest on market share alone. That is what the free market is all about.
Google as a monopoly would be just as bad as any other company as a monopoly, but google as a competitor has increased choice and forced competitors to actually compete with new services.
Free broadcast TV, supported solely by advertisement makes just as much sense as it did in the 1950's.
Re:Ma Bell? Yo no entiendo - SHORT VERSION
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Ma Bell is Back
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· Score: 1
think again. AT&T still reaps the benefits of monopoly.
Who do you think rents these phones? It is the elderly, those on fixed incomes who can least afford to spend money foolishly. All because AT&T brainwashed these people into believing that they had to rent their phones from AT&T in order to get phone service. Sure some people might be aware that they can buy a decent phone for the cost of a couple months lease, but many probably just pay the bill because they really don't know they have a choice.
My mother had a AT&T leased phone which was built into the wall in the early 70's which we figure she and my grandparents before her had spent thousands of dollars on over the life of the phone. And beyond the life of the phone, since it had broken many years before and could not be replaced or serviced any longer. Finally after threats they would come and rip it out of the wall (leaving a gaping hole) if she did not continue to pay their blood money, she told them fine to come by and rip it out of the wall, but she wasn't paying them any longer. That was the end of the story for a phone that is rather famous in my family and remains built into the kitchen wall and no AT&T representative with a crowbar has come knocking at the door as they had threatened.
To sugar coat the history of "The Phone Company" and to speak as if their dirty practices are all water under the bridge or that somehow that being a monopoly has nothing to do with the way a company treats its "customers" is beyond reasonable. There is no such thing as a "natural" monopoly. You can apply the same false logic to any business and argue about efficient use of resources and the waste of competition. Large monopolies are only possible under government regulation and since the advent of the corporation there is nothing natural about them. And eventually it is inevitable that monopolies treat their customers like any other resource, to be squeezed for every last drop.
They charge clients $$ for access to the internet, then want to charge the internet for access to their clients.
Yes, this is what the middleman always tries to do, in the case of communications services that is why we impose government regulation, which in turn creates a whole new set of middlemen but this time with guns.
Really what this fucker, Edward Witacre, is saying that his customers need to pay him twice for access to other people's content which his customers themselves go out and request. If he was talking about Spammers only, then that might be an acceptable point, but he wouldn't exaclty be looking out for his customers if he took kickbacks from spammers. So , really we are talking about content that his customers want and are already paying the content providers to receive. And apparently he is charging those customers enough money to make a profit already, so his "need" to charge the other end of the communciation to be able to respond to his customers requests is purely based upon greed not neccesity or any reasonable notion of equity and fairness.
Also, we should beware QoS (Quality of Service), it is the ISPs way of charging for differentiation of services. If the ISPs have their way they will delay packets that haven't paid a QoS tax. Far from being a way of providing better service to those that need it, it is a way of getting those that need lower latency (and can "afford" it) to pay more. So, those that have money (businesses, rich individuals) will get screwed by having to pay more for Internet Access and those that are paying less will get screwed when their packets are queued up for whatever arbitrary amount of time will squeeze the most money out of people. QoS will kill the Internet as a flexible communications platform. QoS is the DRM of networking.
No they don't argue, they just state it as a fact, a premise. That because we don't currently understand how some things came to be that therefore these things must be too complicated to have occured naturally through a process of evolution.
The premise is a false one, that just because we do not have a full accounting of the evolution of things like the eye or butterfly wing or whatever that they must have just popped into existance through some unknown force.
Sure we now have the power to create new species by our own intelligent design through genetic engineering and have spent many thousands of years at least selectively breeding new species of domesticated animals and plants. And many animals that could be called intelligent have similar symbiotic relationships with other species and may have been said to have used their intelligence to influence the evolution of other species. But we are still talking about taking one species and selecting traits until it differentiates enough to become another species.
Intelligent design completely fails to be a rational or scietific thought when its central premise is that that which we currently do not understand must be too complicated to understand. And therefore the result of some higher intelligence.
And what I don't understand is why some self absorbed religious people are offended at the idea that God might have chosen evolution as a part of creation. Creation is a beautiful thing and to me it is pretty clear that evolution is a part of that creation.
Who the hell is going to tell God that he shouldn't let the Universe Design Itself?
Re:Ma Bell? Yo no entiendo - SHORT VERSION
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Ma Bell is Back
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· Score: 1
It didn't work....
But I have to ask. "Do you have a cell phone?"
And what about, Did you ever use a modem to connect to the Internet? I remember my grey beard professor speaking about Ma' Bell being dead against anyone hooking up a modem to their precious telephone lines. It wasn't about the integrity of the system or any such nonsense, but it was about AT&T wanting to make a killing selling data lines to big business and government. Who cares about the economy as a whole when your monopolistic margins are sweet like pie. Who needs to offer new services when you are making great money on your existing ones.
The breakup of AT&T IS what allowed the Internet to become the vaste network it is today.
At one point it was even illegal to connect anything but AT&T owned equipment to the telephone system. That is why you still had and maybe still have many older folks leasing their phones from what was AT&T leasing Co. Imagine leasing a $10 phone for $9 a year. Some people maybe still be doing it out of senility and habit, but thankfully because AT&T was thwarted we don't need to any longer.
Imagine it being a federal crime to connect a non AT&T made cordless phone or an answering machine to a phone line? AT&T didn't have to imagine, because they made it so.
So, for those who believe the break up of AT&T did nothing, maybe you need a little perspective.
If light suddenly decided not to travel in straight lines, or objects suddenly ceased to attract one another in proportion to the ratio of the product of their masses to the distance between them, that would get noticed.
It really depends what you mean by a straight line.
Yes, the poster was wrong, Freedon of speech and expression is a Human right. But it is not protected by that worthless piece of shit that is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Now that is the most vacuous document written by mankind ever to be so foolishly praised. It says nothing. It does nothing.
Oh and did you miss this part. Built into the "Right" to speech and expression is the clause that allows a government or indvidual take away the Right for just about any stupid reason.
(a) For respect of the rights or reputations of others; (b) For the protection of national security or of public order (ordre public), or of public health or morals.
This "International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights" is a impotent document that allows pretty much every reason to punish someone for saying something that you don't like. To sum it up, your "Right" as you have enumerated extends so far as you do not hurt anyone else's reputation (ie don't say anything bad about them) and it can be taken away if someone doesn't like your morals. Oh and lets not get started on that national security and public order bullshit.
Regarding Rights, we need protection from government not by it.
I reread it and I don't see that stated anywhere in this article. Unless you are referencing another article? It was abnormal levels in the enzymes that they tested for not a defect.
It's a basic network service that the Internet is almost useless without. Personally, I think it's pretty scary that one country that, frankly, the world doesn't find very trustworthy right now, controls it.
ICANN controls it. The US just gave them its blessing.
Slashdot Mirror
You claim they intentionally made a crappy product branded with the itunes name
I don't think there would be any poisoning of the ipod brand, since it was branded as the "rokr" and only as being "with itunes". The name "ipod" which is the brand that is really driving sales right now and would likely be on a future apple made crossover device is left unscathed. So a future "iPod Mobile" directly from Apple isn't going to be considered as a follow on to the "Rokr with iTunes".
That said, I don't think Apple wanted the rokr to be an utter failure, but certainly I don't think Apple wanted it to be a great success either. A successful rokr would have competed with its own best selling products, forget poisoning the brand, that would have been poisoning the well.
Microsoft has a trademark for the mark "Windows" relating to computer operating systems. Any claim that they had against him was based on whether there was any confusion in his use of the mark Windows. Notice I say mark, because trademarks don't cover the meaning of words, but rather the form of the word itself. That a trademark contains a word is incidental to the legal protection. And just because he was using it doesn't mean anything.
In this case I think it could have been reasonably inferred that there would have been confusion over whether the product was a Microsoft product or not. But it was the way he was using it and not the mere fact he was using Windows as part of the name.
I could come out and name my store Windows Candy Shop or Windows Records and it would clearly have nothing to do with operating systems. Conceivably I could also just call my company "Windows" as long as it was clear that I didn't provide operating system products or services.
I think to be safe you probably would stay away from using Windows in your name for anything directly related to computers, but trademarks are living things.
It just says that after science has taken a crack at it and we understand just how infinitely improbable it is that such order could come out of universal chaos, we should at least consider the possibility that there was some intelligence behind it.
I'll let you know when science is done taking a crack at it.
Just because elementary and high school biology text books are nearly always woefully behind the state of the art of scientific understanding, doesn't mean the scietific method should be thrown out the window. And merely declaring something as "infinitely improbable" might sound like a proper premise to some people, but to declare something that has actually occured as infinitely improbable is pretty stupid since it happened, so it happened at least once out of an unknown number of possbilities. Unknown is not the same as infinite.
By your boiler plate ID arguments you might as well just say that the hard boiled egg for breakfast was infinitely improbable, just because you can't understand how it all came together to get onto your plate. Statements of probability are meaningless without some knowledge of the universe, or in the case of your hard boiled egg a little knowledge of chickens, chemistry and thermo dynamics is in order and I think you will be able to reproduce that hard boiled egg to a specific degree of precision. Of course, every hard boiled egg is beautifully unique, because heck we are only human.
But I digress, Sagan put it best when he said "Absence of evidence, is not evidence of absense." Applied to evolution, you cannot disprove the mechanism of natural selection just because there are gaps in the fossil record. Every one of those supposedly impossible complex biological features that couldn't possibly have evolved naturally without some intelligence doing some tinkering with the details has some functional corrolary in "simpler" species. The eye is an example I hear all the time, but even the simplest of multicellular organisms can have light sensitivity through well understood photochemical reactions. What you are really saying when you say such complexity is impossible is that you do not understand it, or that you simply do not have the imagination to see how it might have come into being.
I don't see Intelligence as a matter of belief, we know that Intelligence is a part of Creation because we think, therefore it is. But that does not show us that "Intelligence" is the mechanism by which species come into existence or by which they are changed. Except, of course, that we ourselves can create new species and modify existing ones through our own Intelligence. Which is the only merit of Intelligent Design, that we ourselves prove that there can be Intelligence in species design both through modern genetic manipulation and also more traditionally through use of our "Intelligence" to apply selective pressure over many generations. But that is not the Intelligent design that most ID'ers are talking about, if it were then we could have an Intelligent conversation. Until then, we are left with things that are declared by defintion as too complicated to be understood and that is the basis of ID's "reasoning"
If you believe in God you must believe that he is the author of the universe, so to know his law is not just to read that which is transcribed by man, but to seek out what is written in the the universe itself.
What is unfortunately not beyond all comprehension is how human arrogance could have evolved to the point that those who would claim faith would also claim that God has created an incomprehensible universe.
but Linux often gets critizised for it by the "mainstream" IT press.
That is because most of the time you have to install linux, but Windows comes preloaded. So you will always have people comparing the installation of linux to getting a windows computer which is preconfigured by the hardware vendor, it is an impossible comparison.
I noticed this back in 1998 when I tried installing NT and found that the Windows installer was a lot less friendly than Linux, to the point that it was barely functional and failed several times.
Sure some installers are better than others, but it is irrelevant to market adoption. Linux on the desktop means desktops that come with Linux preinstalled. And it is Dell that is the biggest obstruction to the goal of real choice in desktop OS for the masses.
Peer review is no substitute for physical experiment and duplicating results.
The universe is always invited to cocktail parties no matter who it pisses off.
How about holding someone responsible (gasp) for any malicious activity that originates FROM their network?
You mean like Verizon, Comcast and other ISPs? Maybe. So if an death threat is issued over Comcast's network, then the Comcast CEO goes to jail?
Or do mean my grandmother's wifi network? I don't think so.
What happens whenever a company has utterly grown itself so large that there's really no room to go anywhere (ala Microsoft)?
That's when a company should issue dividends or buy back stock, when the profit really can't be reinvested back into the company for a gain.
A rational and consistent intelectual property law would one be that prevented copyrighted content from using copy prevention technology at all. After all it has the protection of law, then why should people be prevented from making fair use of the content?
I see copy prevention technology as being no different conceptually from a trade secret. If you decide to hide a technology as a trade secret rather than sharing a technology through a patent then your technology can be reverse engineered legally and you get no protection under law. The trade off is that society gets access to your new technology and you get legal monopoly for a number of years. If you don't share the technology via a descriptive patent, then you don't get a legal monopoly. So, similarly if you decide to prevent copying using technology rather than by using copyright law, then you should get no benefit under the law because you are ultimately depriving society of the content if it is never released in a copyable form.
But the problem here is that limiting supply doesn't create the perception of scarcity (what a console maker wants), it creates actual scarcity (what a console maker certainly does not want).
How else do you create a perception of scarcity but by actually limiting supply, at least initially or for a period of time? That would be a neat marketing trick to try and maintain there was a scarcity and then have people show up to the store and find the shelves full. And it isn't about driving up individual unit prices unless Microsoft is going to be selling xbox's on ebay itself, it is about driving the perception of value to drive sales.
What Microsoft wants -- what any console maker wants -- is for people to *think* their console is scarce but, in truth, have enough on-hand for so that anyone can purchase it on day one. You don't get that by lowering production.
I'd agree that it seems far fetched that Microsoft would actually lower production being that it costs money to keep those production lines up and running. Far more likely is that they would control distribution for a few days to add to the publicity.
Also there is the implicit assumption in your post that Microsoft has the ability to scale production up to meet initial demand. That's a pretty big assumption to make, especially when you consider that microsoft is aiming for a *global launch*. This could be possible, but seems unlikely.
You may be right and they simply are having some specific parts supply issues or quality control issues which are slowing their production run, but I wanted to point out that you may be wrong and there is nothing rediculous about the idea of a company holding back on supply, maybe for just a few days, just to get a few long lines and empty shelves on tv. Yes, if the xbox is scarce into February, then I'd have to agree with you that would clearly be a negative. But a few days or weeks would not diminish demand or market penetration. The publicity from the scarcity would far outweigh any negative effects that a few days or week would have on sales.
the guide said they used one of the computers in the room to simulate the airflow in that room so they could align the systems for better cooling.
I bet that computer simulated the best cooling for itself.
In both cases, I had to work at breaking the copyright mechanism.
I agree with the overall point you are making, that since google is putting up barriers to having access to the whole book at a time it seems that it is not a copyright violation, but copyright is not a "mechanism" but a legal protection. So, when talking about mechanisms and technology you are talking about copy prevention which really has very little to do with a person's legal protection of copyright and has only been recently mixed up because of the ease of digital copying and promulgation of copy prevention technologies.
As a seperate point, I would argue that the law should be changed so that copy protected works should lose copyright altogether, by the same pricipal that a device which the inventor chooses not to patent but rather keeps as a trade secret may be reverse engineered legally.
However, it would be moronic to purposefully drive down supply in order to create "buzz".
No. It is called marketing. In conjuction with a big marketing campaign, it makes perfect sense to limit supply to create a perception of scarcity and value. It is reasonable to conclude that Microsoft had decided on a number of consoles to release the first week based on marketing considerations versus their ability to produce. Your right it is not a conspiracy or particularly evil, it is just marketing 101.
The way I see it, people should pay income tax in the state that they earn the income, not the state in which they reside.
makes sense.
And a few years after you pick, you will lose at least one.
Life isn't about the choice you made yesterday, it is about the choice you make today.
There's some truth to these criticisms, but AFAICT the main problem has always been that we continue to allow vertical integration between a competitive market (carrier services) and natural-monopoly public infrastructure (phone lines and bandwidth). The minute we separate them, we can deregulate the carrier market all we like, and it will promptly commoditize. Telephone lines can be kept either a a government-provided service (which would probably make their quality work at at about the level of roads), or go back to utility-style control of the maintenance providers.
agreed. If the company is using a public right of way (space on utility poles) or licensed public bandwidth over the airwaves to the exclusion of others, then it should be providing a well defined public service and regulated accordingly.
I like Wikipedia, but it usually ends up being a good idea to double check the information presented there some times.
you could apply that to any source of information: I like ________ , but it usually ends up being a good idea to double check the information presented there sometimes.
Eventually google will start charging, and offer ad-free for a fee, but it's more of the same shit.
And when that happens we dump google in favor of the next company willing to compete on quality, service and price rather than rest on market share alone. That is what the free market is all about.
Google as a monopoly would be just as bad as any other company as a monopoly, but google as a competitor has increased choice and forced competitors to actually compete with new services.
Free broadcast TV, supported solely by advertisement makes just as much sense as it did in the 1950's.
think again. AT&T still reaps the benefits of monopoly.
http://www.att.com/cls/products/corded.html
Who do you think rents these phones? It is the elderly, those on fixed incomes who can least afford to spend money foolishly. All because AT&T brainwashed these people into believing that they had to rent their phones from AT&T in order to get phone service. Sure some people might be aware that they can buy a decent phone for the cost of a couple months lease, but many probably just pay the bill because they really don't know they have a choice.
My mother had a AT&T leased phone which was built into the wall in the early 70's which we figure she and my grandparents before her had spent thousands of dollars on over the life of the phone. And beyond the life of the phone, since it had broken many years before and could not be replaced or serviced any longer. Finally after threats they would come and rip it out of the wall (leaving a gaping hole) if she did not continue to pay their blood money, she told them fine to come by and rip it out of the wall, but she wasn't paying them any longer. That was the end of the story for a phone that is rather famous in my family and remains built into the kitchen wall and no AT&T representative with a crowbar has come knocking at the door as they had threatened.
To sugar coat the history of "The Phone Company" and to speak as if their dirty practices are all water under the bridge or that somehow that being a monopoly has nothing to do with the way a company treats its "customers" is beyond reasonable. There is no such thing as a "natural" monopoly. You can apply the same false logic to any business and argue about efficient use of resources and the waste of competition. Large monopolies are only possible under government regulation and since the advent of the corporation there is nothing natural about them. And eventually it is inevitable that monopolies treat their customers like any other resource, to be squeezed for every last drop.
They charge clients $$ for access to the internet, then want to charge the internet for access to their clients.
Yes, this is what the middleman always tries to do, in the case of communications services that is why we impose government regulation, which in turn creates a whole new set of middlemen but this time with guns.
Really what this fucker, Edward Witacre, is saying that his customers need to pay him twice for access to other people's content which his customers themselves go out and request. If he was talking about Spammers only, then that might be an acceptable point, but he wouldn't exaclty be looking out for his customers if he took kickbacks from spammers. So , really we are talking about content that his customers want and are already paying the content providers to receive. And apparently he is charging those customers enough money to make a profit already, so his "need" to charge the other end of the communciation to be able to respond to his customers requests is purely based upon greed not neccesity or any reasonable notion of equity and fairness.
Also, we should beware QoS (Quality of Service), it is the ISPs way of charging for differentiation of services. If the ISPs have their way they will delay packets that haven't paid a QoS tax. Far from being a way of providing better service to those that need it, it is a way of getting those that need lower latency (and can "afford" it) to pay more. So, those that have money (businesses, rich individuals) will get screwed by having to pay more for Internet Access and those that are paying less will get screwed when their packets are queued up for whatever arbitrary amount of time will squeeze the most money out of people. QoS will kill the Internet as a flexible communications platform. QoS is the DRM of networking.
ID argues that this wouldn't be enough.
No they don't argue, they just state it as a fact, a premise. That because we don't currently understand how some things came to be that therefore these things must be too complicated to have occured naturally through a process of evolution.
The premise is a false one, that just because we do not have a full accounting of the evolution of things like the eye or butterfly wing or whatever that they must have just popped into existance through some unknown force.
Sure we now have the power to create new species by our own intelligent design through genetic engineering and have spent many thousands of years at least selectively breeding new species of domesticated animals and plants. And many animals that could be called intelligent have similar symbiotic relationships with other species and may have been said to have used their intelligence to influence the evolution of other species. But we are still talking about taking one species and selecting traits until it differentiates enough to become another species.
Intelligent design completely fails to be a rational or scietific thought when its central premise is that that which we currently do not understand must be too complicated to understand. And therefore the result of some higher intelligence.
And what I don't understand is why some self absorbed religious people are offended at the idea that God might have chosen evolution as a part of creation. Creation is a beautiful thing and to me it is pretty clear that evolution is a part of that creation.
Who the hell is going to tell God that he shouldn't let the Universe Design Itself?
It didn't work. ...
But I have to ask. "Do you have a cell phone?"
And what about, Did you ever use a modem to connect to the Internet? I remember my grey beard professor speaking about Ma' Bell being dead against anyone hooking up a modem to their precious telephone lines. It wasn't about the integrity of the system or any such nonsense, but it was about AT&T wanting to make a killing selling data lines to big business and government. Who cares about the economy as a whole when your monopolistic margins are sweet like pie. Who needs to offer new services when you are making great money on your existing ones.
The breakup of AT&T IS what allowed the Internet to become the vaste network it is today.
At one point it was even illegal to connect anything but AT&T owned equipment to the telephone system. That is why you still had and maybe still have many older folks leasing their phones from what was AT&T leasing Co. Imagine leasing a $10 phone for $9 a year. Some people maybe still be doing it out of senility and habit, but thankfully because AT&T was thwarted we don't need to any longer.
Imagine it being a federal crime to connect a non AT&T made cordless phone or an answering machine to a phone line? AT&T didn't have to imagine, because they made it so.
So, for those who believe the break up of AT&T did nothing, maybe you need a little perspective.
If light suddenly decided not to travel in straight lines, or objects suddenly ceased to attract one another in proportion to the ratio of the product of their masses to the distance between them, that would get noticed.
It really depends what you mean by a straight line.
Yes, the poster was wrong, Freedon of speech and expression is a Human right. But it is not protected by that worthless piece of shit that is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Now that is the most vacuous document written by mankind ever to be so foolishly praised. It says nothing. It does nothing.
Oh and did you miss this part. Built into the "Right" to speech and expression is the clause that allows a government or indvidual take away the Right for just about any stupid reason.
(a) For respect of the rights or reputations of others;
(b) For the protection of national security or of public order (ordre public), or of public health or morals.
This "International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights" is a impotent document that allows pretty much every reason to punish someone for saying something that you don't like. To sum it up, your "Right" as you have enumerated extends so far as you do not hurt anyone else's reputation (ie don't say anything bad about them) and it can be taken away if someone doesn't like your morals. Oh and lets not get started on that national security and public order bullshit.
Regarding Rights, we need protection from government not by it.
I reread it and I don't see that stated anywhere in this article. Unless you are referencing another article? It was abnormal levels in the enzymes that they tested for not a defect.
It's a basic network service that the Internet is almost useless without. Personally, I think it's pretty scary that one country that, frankly, the world doesn't find very trustworthy right now, controls it.
ICANN controls it. The US just gave them its blessing.