It's got nothing to do with that. As the GP said, this is a total BS interpretation of the statistic. In wireless telco parlance, a "subscriber" is just an active SIM, not a person. So the total # of "subscribers" among mobile systems includes not just cellular phones but also cellular wireless enabled laptops/tablets/Kindles; all the cars out there with OnStar or something similar; every truck or car with a wireless fleet tracker; every cargo container or physical asset that has a wireless location/anti-theft tracker; every FedEx driver who has a cellular-enabled signature capture reader; every utility meter or security camera with a cellular data link... the list goes on and on. "7.1 billion" is probably more like 1/2 people with phones and 1/2 "things" with cellular connections.
ARRRRRRRGHHHH! Sorry to interrupt the Permanent Slashdot Management Hate-Fest, but please RTFA. This theory does not come from some MBA enclave or CEO roundtable. It comes from an ultra left-wing, anti-capitalist academic. It's sort of an extension of Marx's idea that capitalism dehumanizes workers by alienating them from their right to free creative labor by sticking them in brain-draining jobs that consume all their time. It's actually a bit of a muddled critique ("I will say 20% of jobs are BS but I won't say which ones") that attempts to convince people that they shouldn't criticize other jobs they might think were overpaid (like unionized auto workers, as specifically cited) just because the complainer has a job they are unhappy with. In short, it's a load of academic twaddle, but interesting as a conversation starter.
Not to introduce Occam's Razor into a Slashdot discussion, but if CEOs actually believed this, wouldn't they, you know... just fire everybody with useless jobs? You know, to, like, make more money?
And yet somehow Slashdot managed to turn a Bolshie professor's theory on the perils of capitalism into a thread about CEOs. This is part of why I dread clicking on any Slashdot story that involves money or capitalism because so many commenters here think they understand those things but so few actually do. There are many perfectly good reasons to dislike or disrespect most corporate CEOs, you don't have to go fabricating new ones.
But those articles don't actually say that the RBOCs "had billions of government dollars to do it a decade ago, and didn't. Just took the money and pocketed it." It's not like the government handed out billions of dollars in grant money and then the RBOCs said "thanks, suckers!" and ran off.
The RBOCs got approval from local and state governments to charge infrastructure upgrade fees on home phone lines and they got tax breaks to incentive them to upgrade. Unfortunately this was happening at a time when "broadband" technologies were changing rapidly, governments didn't know how to deal with it or regulate it effectively, and the money was wasted - rather than pocketed - on things like installations of tech that was obsolete by the time it went into the ground, cost overruns that make deployments unfeasible, and projects that went nowhere because of overweening government regulations. Think of it like the failed helicopter that the US spent $2 billion on and ended up being cancelled before it ever got to production. It wasn't like Lockheed took that money and just ran away with it... it was spent on real things but the project was so badly mismanaged that, even after all that spending, it was cheaper to just eat the costs and put a stake in it.
Yes, but they are not doing another offering. If you buy Tesla stock today, you are not buying it from the company. You are buying it from a third party who holds it today. Tesla does not see a dime of the exchange of their previously issued shares between you and someone else. Additionally, secondary offers of new shares are very uncommon.
Long story short: when you buy a stock, you are not giving any money to the company you invested in. Your purchase can help them indirectly - pushing up their stock price improves their ability to borrow, attract new employees with stock incentives, etc. - but if you want to help them directly, buy a car. Or go to one of their concerts.
Nobody wants to hear this, but it's the truth and people should understand it:
Unbundling will not happen anytime soon
This is because a handful of TV channels have a f***load of viewers (ESPN, Fox News, etc.)
If your TV station has a f**kload of viewers, you are an idiot if you don't charge cable providers a high fee to carry it
If you paid for each of those channels a la carte, it might be $10+/month or more, just like HBO
Instead, those providers "bundle" those channels with less popular ones because - even though the big channels are the cash cows - they still make money on advertising from less popular channels
For anyone (Disney, Fox, others) who have killer content on one channel, having more channels (even including less popular ones) = more money
People pay higher cable bills, but more niche programming is out there - for example, the fact that you get Cartoon Network/Adult Swim is subsidized by what you pay for CNN. If channels were unbundled, it's unlikely that the ratings of "Adventure Time" or "Venture Brothers" could pay for Cartoon Network to be on the air.
Unbundling may happen at some point, but when it does 70% of today's cable networks will go away. Maybe you don't watch most of them, but recognize that it will result in a diminishing of the wild diversity of programming (brilliant and crap, left and right politically, in many languages) that is arguably one of the best things about the "there's nothing on" diversity of channels today that doesn't appeal to many viewers but serves many previously neglected niches.
Even the ESPN "exclusive" stuff (college basketball and football) can be streamed from somewhere for free.
Just out of curiosity, what are those (legal) options? I would care far less about ESPN if I could get Monday Night Football legally on my TV somewhere else...
This is what happens when you have a government sponsored and allowed monopoly
I always wondered about the decision-making that went into the FCC's rules on this topic. NPR's Planet Money actually did a really interesting podcast on this topic that explains precisely why the choices in the US are far more limited elsewhere. tl;dr version: the FCC had to make a choice between two (at the time) equally competing visions of the broadband market, and they picked the wrong one.
When the FCC was considering these rules, they had a choice between going with "telephone"-style rules that would emulate the 1996 Telecom Act requirement of unbundled elements (e.g. the phone company had to let 3rd parties wholesale their DSL and resell it), vs. setting up new broadband technologies as "you build it, you keep it." At the time, new broadband technologies kept popping all over the place - broadband over cable, fiber to the home, satellite, terrestrial wireless, broadband over power lines, etc. The FCC realized that all these new ventures probably wouldn't get built unless they allowed the companies that invested in them to have a monopoly on services over the infrastructure they built. So they bet that consumers would get "choice" by having multiple different last mile technologies, which seemed reasonable at the time.
In the end, all these alternative last mile technologies petered out except cable and fiber, and only cable was near-ubiquitous in its deployment. So that's how we got stuck with the situation that we're in, and it's very difficult to go back and change it now since the companies that built out their infrastructure did so with an understanding of monopoly usage of that investment they made. So it was a bad bet and didn't help US consumers... but at least there was some actual thinking that went into it at the time.
Thanks, I am aware that Level(3) is not a mom-and-pop shop. But their market clout is still nothing compared to the largest consumer broadband ISPs and traditional Tier 1 networks, which in many cases globally are one and the same.
Think about it: the big guys have their own peering relationships that go around L3, and most L3 customers (unless they are mom-and-pops themselves) get transit from more than one provider. So let's say Webhost X buys transit from L3 and Sprint. $BIGISP already peers with both L3 and Sprint. So if the L3 relationship goes away, Webhost X will use Sprint for transit to $BIGISP. The only ones who really stand to lose are the companies who only get transit from L3. And if L3 has no peering with $BIGISP, they become far less valuable to their customers.
Level 3 does not have the leverage in the situation, the big ISPs do. Otherwise they wouldn't be complaining, they would be trying to force the ISPs to increase their peering capacities. I'm guessing this comes down to the same core issue as the recent Cogent hullaballoo... Tier 2 ISP wants more free peering, Tier 1/ISP wants them to buy transit. You may recall that Cogent and Level 3 had this same argument before - but in that case, it was L3 trying to get Cogent to pay up to increase the interconnection! Almost seems a bit karmic to me...
Nobody builds to peak loads because none of the customers want to pay what that would cost. A company that builds its systems for peak loads would have unused bandwidth most of the time, but someone has to pay for it.
Precisely this. I remember many Slashdot discussions of years past when people got all up in arms over the very concept of oversubscription. Networks - dating back to the PSTN as you point out - have never been built to address the peak capacity since most of the time that's a waste of everyone's money. It's like spending the money to build a 10-lane highway to solve for a two-lane road that has traffic jams only after the county fair and is fine the rest of the time. Or having enough food in your refrigerator year-round to cook for the family Thanksgiving dinner - most of it will just go to waste and you spent a lot of money unnecessarily.
That isn't to say that a lot of networks could and should be upgraded; if a network is not meeting daily average usage without packet loss, there is clearly a problem. But I don't think most people who should know better have not wrapped their heads around the idea that ISPs will always, always be selling downstream bandwidth unequal to their upstream capacity.
I can just imagine what a 'dark day' would do to those ISPs
I'm not so sure about that. My guess is that the ISPs being referenced are themselves Tier 1 ISPs and don't rely on peering with Level(3) for anything other than connectivity to L3's own customers. They probably already peer with everyone else worth peering with, separately. So cutting that connection would probably hurt L3's customers far more than the other way around... which, I would guess, is the whole reason these ISPs aren't in a hurry to upgrade their connectivity to L3 in the first place: L3 has no leverage over them.
Further more, when you stop talking because you're concentrating he wont start yelling "Frank, Frank, are you still there, speak up if you're still there Frank, Frank, Frank...
What if it's a blind girlfriend who has abandonment issues?
Why all the snark and angst? The story submission dripped with unwarranted sarcasm ("cast list... handed down to us mere mortals?" What, you wanted them to consult you first?) and negativity ("mother of all retcon films" - the stupid EU stuff was never really canon to be retconned).
I know everyone was disappointed by Episodes 1-3, but let's get over it and give the new movies a chance. Oh, and for the record, yes Episode 1 was utter trash except for about 15 minutes, but Episode 2 was at least marginal and Episode 3 was a decent movie. Attribute all this to George Lucas being a changed person/storyteller and having nobody looking over his shoulder to say "George, that's a stupid idea." (Who elects a queen? And who elects a 14-year-old girl to anything? Oh, and why do you want to prevent Jedis from having kids when using the Force is apparently an inherited trait?) We can all go on about what was wrong with the first three movies, but they were not collectively the unmitigated disaster people love to claim.
I don't think that anyone can deny that George Lucas, in recent years, was an absolutely terrible steward of his own creations - basically "nothing going on" with Star Wars except for an awful animated TV show and EU novels that were a perpetual crapshoot in terms of quality. Star Wars was stagnant and heading downhill in terms of ever building on its legacy. Besides, the EU had run its course - the last novel I read had Han, Luke and Leia running around blowing things up while they practically needed scooters to get around, and the series failed to deliver a really compelling new generation of characters to care about (maybe except Jagged Fel and Ben Skywalker's Sith pseudo-girlfriend).
So the EU was done, George Lucas had run the Star Wars empire into the ground, and it was time to start fresh. There's a new sheriff in town, and I'm OK with that. I know this is heresy here, but I actually liked what J.J. Abrams did with the Star Trek reboot. I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt with the new Star Wars movies. Yes, I will go into the theater in December 2015 with managed expectations but I don't understand everyone piling on and assuming they will be terrible.
thank goodness that movies 7-9 won't be stuck in a little narrative box
Thank you, precisely. I say this as someone who has read 15 or so Star Wars EU books and thoroughly enjoyed many of the video games: the EU was >50% shit sandwich.
In fact, it was destined to be shit. Timothy Zahn kickstarted it with some very good (but not as good as some people believe) SF with the Thrawn trilogy. Lucas never thought he was going to go back to Star Wars, so he waved his hand "whatever" and was pleasantly surprised when the royalty checks started rolling back in. "Shadows of the Empire" was interesting (in part because it was the first time sexuality was openly introduced into the Lucas prudish universe) and a few other things. Star Wars video games were great, but who ever imagined those were canon when what you as a player did could impact them? ("History records that Darth Revan boned Bastila... wait, no he didn't. But she became his Dark Side apprentice... wait, no she didn't. It turns out Revan died in a casino on the underworld of Taris because he couldn't make any money playing Pazaak.")
But mainly it just quickly descended into "resurrected or clone Empire person or weapon of the year" bullshit and just wanked itself (and milked its readers) for years.
Then Lucas decides to make Episodes 1-3 and right there you have already invalidated 50% of the mythology of the EU. Spaarti cylinders? Whatsisface the Death Star designer? Using the Force is like some sexually transmitted disease? Jedis can't date? And, if Force ability was hereditary, WHY THE FUCK wouldn't you want Jedis to breed lots of little Jedis? Huuuuuhhhhhh? So the EU was already dead even then.
For the record: despite all its story consistency failings, Episodes 2 & 3 were NOT THAT BAD. Episode 3, in fact, was a genuinely enjoyable movie! Episode 1 was exactly the steaming shitpile that everyone makes it out to be, except for the first 15 minutes, the pod races and Darth Maul's battle with Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon.
But of course it still carried on, and of course the results were mixed. "New Jedi Order" was an interesting idea badly implemented, and I'm sorry but the death of Anakin Solo was a terrible idea. The later series had their ups and downs... take for example the latest, "Fate of the Jedi." There were very enjoyable parts, especially the "Luke and Ben road trip" aspects of visiting all the Force users across the galaxy. But a previously unknown super-Force-user had to be invented out of nowhere, and somehow they repeated the NJO "the bad guys must control Coruscant" story line, and it just ended up being a mess. Would you really expect a new Star Wars movie with Han, Luke and Leia to be constrained by the frequently awful story lines of the last 30 years?
So long story short: the EU was kind of a hot mess and was destined to go away the second anyone tried to remake Star Wars. And even if I miss Kyle Katarn, Admiral Thrawn, the Witches of Dathomir and Mara Jade, it's a trade-off I'm willing to make for decent new movies.
I have *hundreds* of comics through them, but I'm not sure if I will be buying any more with this new system.
Agreed. I have bought hundreds of comics through this app, usually when they are on-sale and/or I'm reading one comic and get hooked and can just use the app to grab the rest of the series or storyline. In-app purchase was key since shopping through the Comixology website was simply not very convenient.
I completely get why Amazon would want to stick it to Apple with a move like this. What I find to be un-Amazon-like is that they are screwing over their customer experience in order to do it. Say what you will about Amazon, they usually work very hard to ensure that it is as easy as possible for customers to hand them money. Here, they're going in the opposite direction just to take a poke at Apple. Very unlike them, and a decision I hope is rectified with a 3.7 version and a mea culpa soon.
You could try the loud protest route, but look how that worked out for the OWS demonstrators.
The OWS protestors accomplished nothing because THEY DIDN'T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK THEY WANTED. They were just protesting against bad things, with no common agenda on how to fix it or what they wanted instead. Christ, they even had to have public meetings (at least in NYC) to decide if they as a group wanted to buy sleeping bags, and even then it took hours because they wanted consensus and some douchebag would always sidetrack the conversation into whether sleeping bags were exploiting the Earth and they should knit their own out of free trade organic non-GMO dandelion roots.
Loud, ORGANIZED protests have a good history of working in this country. See the civil rights movement, anti-nuclear power (for better or worse), anti-US involvement in Vietnam and others. So maybe that's a viable way to go here. Loud protests about what people don't like with no specific agenda or proposals on what they DO want? How can any sane person expect that would achieve anything?
I would agree that Ultraviolet is execrable and worthless. But why iTunes? I find their "digital copy" element quite useful. I can download the HD version to a PC (better quality than I can get from ripping a DVD) and then sync it to an iDevice for watching on the go whenever I want. Alternatively, even if I don't download a local copy, I can also use iTunes to stream the video if I'm too lazy to go get my DVD or BluRay that I bought it with.
Plus, as another commenter suggested, you can sell that download code. Why on earth would you just pitch it?
$300 for the 16 GB model and $350 for a 64 GB model? Knowing what Samsung charges for comparable devices, and knowing how much better economies of scale it has, this sounds exciting but just a little too good to be true.
It's not grow or die. It's grow or lose investors.
Precisely. I don't understand why people on Slashdot seem to think that "grow or die" is some kind of imperative. Growth is just much, much more attractive to investors.
Oversimplified explanation: imagine a company which never grows, turns over the same profit every quarter and pays the same dividend year after year after year (other than a tiny bit to compensate for inflation). The market will size that up, figure out what the appropriate worth of that stock is, and its stock price will never change by more than a few percent. If you want to reliably collect your dividend and have little risk, that's the stock for you! And there are definitely investors like that out there.
But you as an investor will never get rich that way. People want to buy into something like Google, Apple, Amazon, whatever (remember the Netscape IPO?) - that starts out at $30 a share and zooms to $300 a share. The only way that happens is if your company grows! So while never growing is fine, it only appeals to a limited set of investors. Most investors want to buy a stock that will go up in value over time. And most companies' CEOs - unless they are in a very old industry where there is little growth potential - will find that if they pursue the "steady state" policy that some of their investors will be pushing them to grow or they will try to oust that CEO and find someone who will grow. Oversimplified, but there it is in a nutshell.
I think there's a bit of a difference between having "good English skills" and spending four or more years of your life taking classes about it
I think there is (unsurprisingly) a lot of misunderstanding among the CS crowd about what an English major actually studies. I was not one myself (journalism and Russian language double-major), but from what I understood from my English major friends in college, it's not poring over obscure grammar rules for four years. It's actually more of a degree in writing and communications, learning how to structure and present information in essay form. It's also studying the various kinds of writing out there for different purposes - ranging from artistic to practical - and learning about how other writers have communicated in the past (literature) and what can be learned from them and applied to written communications today.
You can find an example of typical English 300-level courses here or 400-level courses here. English gets a bad name because there are many unfocused students who pick it as a major because they can't think of anything else to do, but for someone who's serious about it, it can be very intellectually engaging and useful.
If the proletariat is not in control of how the state is operated, then it is not communism, it is totalitarianism.
By that measure, there has never been a sustained communist state on the planet, and almost certainly never will be. So what's the point then? You can call properly something a duck even though it's not the Platonic ideal of a duck.
Indeed the present day US is vastly closer to being an ideal free-market state than North Korea is to being anything that can be approximated as being close to actual communism.
WTF Slashdot? Somehow this got to +5. Seriously?
That's a mighty big assertion. Care to provide, like, any support? North Korea's economy is built on Juche, yes, but it is also heavily built on Communism as well. While it varies from pure Marxist theory in that it has a hereditary dictatorship and not a (never yet achieved anywhere) proletarian rule, the absolute state control of the economy is certainly in line with Marxist theory. In fact, up until the 1980s the Chinese and North Korean systems were equally as Communist, until China adopted a system more akin to Facscism and North Korea stayed the course on Communism.
Whatever you degree you may think the US does or does not represent a "free market" economy has no bearing on whether or not North Korea is a Communist state, which it is.
OM F***ing G. I know this is a popular theme on Slashdot, but please STOP. It is wrong, and stems from a serious misunderstanding about what it means to say that "the US owes China money."
Go to your local bank branch, or hop on E*Trade, and buy a $500 US Savings Bond. Congratulations, the US now owes you money! You just gave the US government $500, and they promise to pay you back that $500 in the future plus interest. US bonds and treasury bills are historically among the safest investments in the world, so they are purchased in huge quantities by individuals, banks, retirement funds, businesses, sovereign wealth funds (like China's) and many others. So technically the US government "owes" money to nearly every investor on the planet at some level. The US issues bond/bills like this - incurring debt - all day every day like clockwork, and it continues to be a high-grade investment choice (it pays out little but is very "safe") around the globe.
Slashdotters who don't understand these financial vehicles seem to think that the US was running short of cash one day and came to China like a pawnbroker, saying "Gosh, China, can you float me a few trillion renminbi until payday?" and that China is therefore exercising control over the US like some mobster holding it over a deadbeat debtor. Instead, China has just been buying sh*tloads of US debt over the counter, like everyone else on the planet.
And, really, what can China do to the US if they want to hurt us? Cash in all their debt at once? Fine, but they will not get their full investment back (remember, US T-bills/bonds only pay you back in full once they have reached their maturity date) and the US will just print more dollars to meet the payout need. We'd experience more inflation in the short term, but the US would actually win out in the long run because China cheated itself out of recouping the full amount of money they loaned us! They could start selling US T-bills at a discount, lowering the market for our debt... but the rest of the world market would snap it all up - yes, even the huge amount that China has - and again they would end up losing money by selling their stake at a discount.
So, once and for all, China has zero political leverage in the US specifically because of its debt holdings. They have a LOT of political leverage because of the size of their market and the resulting pressure from US corporations that want to do business there... but not specifically due to their debt holdings.
Similarly, the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed with stronger Republican support in Congress (80%) than Dem (60-70%).
True, but that is an artifact of the unusual configuration of the Democratic Party from the 1880s to the 1980s, and is not reflective of the two parties' identities today. For many decades, the South was dominated politically by "Dixiecrats" - Democrats in name (because the Republican Party was so identified with the North) but much closer to modern Republican values in terms of social and fiscal conservatism, hawkish defense views, religious issues, etc. Dixiecrats were something of a historical anachronism, and they defected en masse to the Republican Party in the '80s as the Democrats moved too far to the Left and the Republicans under Reagan embraced the ex-Dixiecrats.
So basically the Democrats from the South who voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act would be Republicans today, and that % number you cite above would be neatly flipped in the opposite direction.
Slashdot Mirror
It's got nothing to do with that. As the GP said, this is a total BS interpretation of the statistic. In wireless telco parlance, a "subscriber" is just an active SIM, not a person. So the total # of "subscribers" among mobile systems includes not just cellular phones but also cellular wireless enabled laptops/tablets/Kindles; all the cars out there with OnStar or something similar; every truck or car with a wireless fleet tracker; every cargo container or physical asset that has a wireless location/anti-theft tracker; every FedEx driver who has a cellular-enabled signature capture reader; every utility meter or security camera with a cellular data link... the list goes on and on. "7.1 billion" is probably more like 1/2 people with phones and 1/2 "things" with cellular connections.
ARRRRRRRGHHHH! Sorry to interrupt the Permanent Slashdot Management Hate-Fest, but please RTFA. This theory does not come from some MBA enclave or CEO roundtable. It comes from an ultra left-wing, anti-capitalist academic. It's sort of an extension of Marx's idea that capitalism dehumanizes workers by alienating them from their right to free creative labor by sticking them in brain-draining jobs that consume all their time. It's actually a bit of a muddled critique ("I will say 20% of jobs are BS but I won't say which ones") that attempts to convince people that they shouldn't criticize other jobs they might think were overpaid (like unionized auto workers, as specifically cited) just because the complainer has a job they are unhappy with. In short, it's a load of academic twaddle, but interesting as a conversation starter.
Not to introduce Occam's Razor into a Slashdot discussion, but if CEOs actually believed this, wouldn't they, you know... just fire everybody with useless jobs? You know, to, like, make more money?
And yet somehow Slashdot managed to turn a Bolshie professor's theory on the perils of capitalism into a thread about CEOs. This is part of why I dread clicking on any Slashdot story that involves money or capitalism because so many commenters here think they understand those things but so few actually do. There are many perfectly good reasons to dislike or disrespect most corporate CEOs, you don't have to go fabricating new ones.
But those articles don't actually say that the RBOCs "had billions of government dollars to do it a decade ago, and didn't. Just took the money and pocketed it." It's not like the government handed out billions of dollars in grant money and then the RBOCs said "thanks, suckers!" and ran off.
The RBOCs got approval from local and state governments to charge infrastructure upgrade fees on home phone lines and they got tax breaks to incentive them to upgrade. Unfortunately this was happening at a time when "broadband" technologies were changing rapidly, governments didn't know how to deal with it or regulate it effectively, and the money was wasted - rather than pocketed - on things like installations of tech that was obsolete by the time it went into the ground, cost overruns that make deployments unfeasible, and projects that went nowhere because of overweening government regulations. Think of it like the failed helicopter that the US spent $2 billion on and ended up being cancelled before it ever got to production. It wasn't like Lockheed took that money and just ran away with it... it was spent on real things but the project was so badly mismanaged that, even after all that spending, it was cheaper to just eat the costs and put a stake in it.
Every public offering makes them money
Yes, but they are not doing another offering. If you buy Tesla stock today, you are not buying it from the company. You are buying it from a third party who holds it today. Tesla does not see a dime of the exchange of their previously issued shares between you and someone else. Additionally, secondary offers of new shares are very uncommon.
Long story short: when you buy a stock, you are not giving any money to the company you invested in. Your purchase can help them indirectly - pushing up their stock price improves their ability to borrow, attract new employees with stock incentives, etc. - but if you want to help them directly, buy a car. Or go to one of their concerts.
Huh, what? Oh, sorry. Wrong Tesla.
Nobody wants to hear this, but it's the truth and people should understand it:
Even the ESPN "exclusive" stuff (college basketball and football) can be streamed from somewhere for free.
Just out of curiosity, what are those (legal) options? I would care far less about ESPN if I could get Monday Night Football legally on my TV somewhere else...
This is what happens when you have a government sponsored and allowed monopoly
I always wondered about the decision-making that went into the FCC's rules on this topic. NPR's Planet Money actually did a really interesting podcast on this topic that explains precisely why the choices in the US are far more limited elsewhere. tl;dr version: the FCC had to make a choice between two (at the time) equally competing visions of the broadband market, and they picked the wrong one.
When the FCC was considering these rules, they had a choice between going with "telephone"-style rules that would emulate the 1996 Telecom Act requirement of unbundled elements (e.g. the phone company had to let 3rd parties wholesale their DSL and resell it), vs. setting up new broadband technologies as "you build it, you keep it." At the time, new broadband technologies kept popping all over the place - broadband over cable, fiber to the home, satellite, terrestrial wireless, broadband over power lines, etc. The FCC realized that all these new ventures probably wouldn't get built unless they allowed the companies that invested in them to have a monopoly on services over the infrastructure they built. So they bet that consumers would get "choice" by having multiple different last mile technologies, which seemed reasonable at the time.
In the end, all these alternative last mile technologies petered out except cable and fiber, and only cable was near-ubiquitous in its deployment. So that's how we got stuck with the situation that we're in, and it's very difficult to go back and change it now since the companies that built out their infrastructure did so with an understanding of monopoly usage of that investment they made. So it was a bad bet and didn't help US consumers... but at least there was some actual thinking that went into it at the time.
Thanks, I am aware that Level(3) is not a mom-and-pop shop. But their market clout is still nothing compared to the largest consumer broadband ISPs and traditional Tier 1 networks, which in many cases globally are one and the same.
Think about it: the big guys have their own peering relationships that go around L3, and most L3 customers (unless they are mom-and-pops themselves) get transit from more than one provider. So let's say Webhost X buys transit from L3 and Sprint. $BIGISP already peers with both L3 and Sprint. So if the L3 relationship goes away, Webhost X will use Sprint for transit to $BIGISP. The only ones who really stand to lose are the companies who only get transit from L3. And if L3 has no peering with $BIGISP, they become far less valuable to their customers.
Level 3 does not have the leverage in the situation, the big ISPs do. Otherwise they wouldn't be complaining, they would be trying to force the ISPs to increase their peering capacities. I'm guessing this comes down to the same core issue as the recent Cogent hullaballoo... Tier 2 ISP wants more free peering, Tier 1/ISP wants them to buy transit. You may recall that Cogent and Level 3 had this same argument before - but in that case, it was L3 trying to get Cogent to pay up to increase the interconnection! Almost seems a bit karmic to me...
Nobody builds to peak loads because none of the customers want to pay what that would cost. A company that builds its systems for peak loads would have unused bandwidth most of the time, but someone has to pay for it.
Precisely this. I remember many Slashdot discussions of years past when people got all up in arms over the very concept of oversubscription. Networks - dating back to the PSTN as you point out - have never been built to address the peak capacity since most of the time that's a waste of everyone's money. It's like spending the money to build a 10-lane highway to solve for a two-lane road that has traffic jams only after the county fair and is fine the rest of the time. Or having enough food in your refrigerator year-round to cook for the family Thanksgiving dinner - most of it will just go to waste and you spent a lot of money unnecessarily.
That isn't to say that a lot of networks could and should be upgraded; if a network is not meeting daily average usage without packet loss, there is clearly a problem. But I don't think most people who should know better have not wrapped their heads around the idea that ISPs will always, always be selling downstream bandwidth unequal to their upstream capacity.
I can just imagine what a 'dark day' would do to those ISPs
I'm not so sure about that. My guess is that the ISPs being referenced are themselves Tier 1 ISPs and don't rely on peering with Level(3) for anything other than connectivity to L3's own customers. They probably already peer with everyone else worth peering with, separately. So cutting that connection would probably hurt L3's customers far more than the other way around... which, I would guess, is the whole reason these ISPs aren't in a hurry to upgrade their connectivity to L3 in the first place: L3 has no leverage over them.
Further more, when you stop talking because you're concentrating he wont start yelling "Frank, Frank, are you still there, speak up if you're still there Frank, Frank, Frank...
What if it's a blind girlfriend who has abandonment issues?
That is the first reasonable explanation I have ever seen for that. Thank you. I'm not sure I buy it, but it is at least interesting to think about.
Why all the snark and angst? The story submission dripped with unwarranted sarcasm ("cast list... handed down to us mere mortals?" What, you wanted them to consult you first?) and negativity ("mother of all retcon films" - the stupid EU stuff was never really canon to be retconned).
I know everyone was disappointed by Episodes 1-3, but let's get over it and give the new movies a chance. Oh, and for the record, yes Episode 1 was utter trash except for about 15 minutes, but Episode 2 was at least marginal and Episode 3 was a decent movie. Attribute all this to George Lucas being a changed person/storyteller and having nobody looking over his shoulder to say "George, that's a stupid idea." (Who elects a queen? And who elects a 14-year-old girl to anything? Oh, and why do you want to prevent Jedis from having kids when using the Force is apparently an inherited trait?) We can all go on about what was wrong with the first three movies, but they were not collectively the unmitigated disaster people love to claim.
I don't think that anyone can deny that George Lucas, in recent years, was an absolutely terrible steward of his own creations - basically "nothing going on" with Star Wars except for an awful animated TV show and EU novels that were a perpetual crapshoot in terms of quality. Star Wars was stagnant and heading downhill in terms of ever building on its legacy. Besides, the EU had run its course - the last novel I read had Han, Luke and Leia running around blowing things up while they practically needed scooters to get around, and the series failed to deliver a really compelling new generation of characters to care about (maybe except Jagged Fel and Ben Skywalker's Sith pseudo-girlfriend).
So the EU was done, George Lucas had run the Star Wars empire into the ground, and it was time to start fresh. There's a new sheriff in town, and I'm OK with that. I know this is heresy here, but I actually liked what J.J. Abrams did with the Star Trek reboot. I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt with the new Star Wars movies. Yes, I will go into the theater in December 2015 with managed expectations but I don't understand everyone piling on and assuming they will be terrible.
thank goodness that movies 7-9 won't be stuck in a little narrative box
Thank you, precisely. I say this as someone who has read 15 or so Star Wars EU books and thoroughly enjoyed many of the video games: the EU was >50% shit sandwich.
In fact, it was destined to be shit. Timothy Zahn kickstarted it with some very good (but not as good as some people believe) SF with the Thrawn trilogy. Lucas never thought he was going to go back to Star Wars, so he waved his hand "whatever" and was pleasantly surprised when the royalty checks started rolling back in. "Shadows of the Empire" was interesting (in part because it was the first time sexuality was openly introduced into the Lucas prudish universe) and a few other things. Star Wars video games were great, but who ever imagined those were canon when what you as a player did could impact them? ("History records that Darth Revan boned Bastila... wait, no he didn't. But she became his Dark Side apprentice... wait, no she didn't. It turns out Revan died in a casino on the underworld of Taris because he couldn't make any money playing Pazaak.")
But mainly it just quickly descended into "resurrected or clone Empire person or weapon of the year" bullshit and just wanked itself (and milked its readers) for years.
Then Lucas decides to make Episodes 1-3 and right there you have already invalidated 50% of the mythology of the EU. Spaarti cylinders? Whatsisface the Death Star designer? Using the Force is like some sexually transmitted disease? Jedis can't date? And, if Force ability was hereditary, WHY THE FUCK wouldn't you want Jedis to breed lots of little Jedis? Huuuuuhhhhhh? So the EU was already dead even then.
For the record: despite all its story consistency failings, Episodes 2 & 3 were NOT THAT BAD. Episode 3, in fact, was a genuinely enjoyable movie! Episode 1 was exactly the steaming shitpile that everyone makes it out to be, except for the first 15 minutes, the pod races and Darth Maul's battle with Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon.
But of course it still carried on, and of course the results were mixed. "New Jedi Order" was an interesting idea badly implemented, and I'm sorry but the death of Anakin Solo was a terrible idea. The later series had their ups and downs... take for example the latest, "Fate of the Jedi." There were very enjoyable parts, especially the "Luke and Ben road trip" aspects of visiting all the Force users across the galaxy. But a previously unknown super-Force-user had to be invented out of nowhere, and somehow they repeated the NJO "the bad guys must control Coruscant" story line, and it just ended up being a mess. Would you really expect a new Star Wars movie with Han, Luke and Leia to be constrained by the frequently awful story lines of the last 30 years?
So long story short: the EU was kind of a hot mess and was destined to go away the second anyone tried to remake Star Wars. And even if I miss Kyle Katarn, Admiral Thrawn, the Witches of Dathomir and Mara Jade, it's a trade-off I'm willing to make for decent new movies.
I have *hundreds* of comics through them, but I'm not sure if I will be buying any more with this new system.
Agreed. I have bought hundreds of comics through this app, usually when they are on-sale and/or I'm reading one comic and get hooked and can just use the app to grab the rest of the series or storyline. In-app purchase was key since shopping through the Comixology website was simply not very convenient.
I completely get why Amazon would want to stick it to Apple with a move like this. What I find to be un-Amazon-like is that they are screwing over their customer experience in order to do it. Say what you will about Amazon, they usually work very hard to ensure that it is as easy as possible for customers to hand them money. Here, they're going in the opposite direction just to take a poke at Apple. Very unlike them, and a decision I hope is rectified with a 3.7 version and a mea culpa soon.
You could try the loud protest route, but look how that worked out for the OWS demonstrators.
The OWS protestors accomplished nothing because THEY DIDN'T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK THEY WANTED. They were just protesting against bad things, with no common agenda on how to fix it or what they wanted instead. Christ, they even had to have public meetings (at least in NYC) to decide if they as a group wanted to buy sleeping bags, and even then it took hours because they wanted consensus and some douchebag would always sidetrack the conversation into whether sleeping bags were exploiting the Earth and they should knit their own out of free trade organic non-GMO dandelion roots.
Loud, ORGANIZED protests have a good history of working in this country. See the civil rights movement, anti-nuclear power (for better or worse), anti-US involvement in Vietnam and others. So maybe that's a viable way to go here. Loud protests about what people don't like with no specific agenda or proposals on what they DO want? How can any sane person expect that would achieve anything?
I would agree that Ultraviolet is execrable and worthless. But why iTunes? I find their "digital copy" element quite useful. I can download the HD version to a PC (better quality than I can get from ripping a DVD) and then sync it to an iDevice for watching on the go whenever I want. Alternatively, even if I don't download a local copy, I can also use iTunes to stream the video if I'm too lazy to go get my DVD or BluRay that I bought it with.
Plus, as another commenter suggested, you can sell that download code. Why on earth would you just pitch it?
$300 for the 16 GB model and $350 for a 64 GB model? Knowing what Samsung charges for comparable devices, and knowing how much better economies of scale it has, this sounds exciting but just a little too good to be true.
It's not grow or die. It's grow or lose investors.
Precisely. I don't understand why people on Slashdot seem to think that "grow or die" is some kind of imperative. Growth is just much, much more attractive to investors.
Oversimplified explanation: imagine a company which never grows, turns over the same profit every quarter and pays the same dividend year after year after year (other than a tiny bit to compensate for inflation). The market will size that up, figure out what the appropriate worth of that stock is, and its stock price will never change by more than a few percent. If you want to reliably collect your dividend and have little risk, that's the stock for you! And there are definitely investors like that out there.
But you as an investor will never get rich that way. People want to buy into something like Google, Apple, Amazon, whatever (remember the Netscape IPO?) - that starts out at $30 a share and zooms to $300 a share. The only way that happens is if your company grows! So while never growing is fine, it only appeals to a limited set of investors. Most investors want to buy a stock that will go up in value over time. And most companies' CEOs - unless they are in a very old industry where there is little growth potential - will find that if they pursue the "steady state" policy that some of their investors will be pushing them to grow or they will try to oust that CEO and find someone who will grow. Oversimplified, but there it is in a nutshell.
I think there's a bit of a difference between having "good English skills" and spending four or more years of your life taking classes about it
I think there is (unsurprisingly) a lot of misunderstanding among the CS crowd about what an English major actually studies. I was not one myself (journalism and Russian language double-major), but from what I understood from my English major friends in college, it's not poring over obscure grammar rules for four years. It's actually more of a degree in writing and communications, learning how to structure and present information in essay form. It's also studying the various kinds of writing out there for different purposes - ranging from artistic to practical - and learning about how other writers have communicated in the past (literature) and what can be learned from them and applied to written communications today.
You can find an example of typical English 300-level courses here or 400-level courses here. English gets a bad name because there are many unfocused students who pick it as a major because they can't think of anything else to do, but for someone who's serious about it, it can be very intellectually engaging and useful.
Worst president of my lifetime. Not even close.
Your writing skills are excellent for someone who was born after George W. Bush left office.
If the proletariat is not in control of how the state is operated, then it is not communism, it is totalitarianism.
By that measure, there has never been a sustained communist state on the planet, and almost certainly never will be. So what's the point then? You can call properly something a duck even though it's not the Platonic ideal of a duck.
Indeed the present day US is vastly closer to being an ideal free-market state than North Korea is to being anything that can be approximated as being close to actual communism.
WTF Slashdot? Somehow this got to +5. Seriously?
That's a mighty big assertion. Care to provide, like, any support? North Korea's economy is built on Juche, yes, but it is also heavily built on Communism as well. While it varies from pure Marxist theory in that it has a hereditary dictatorship and not a (never yet achieved anywhere) proletarian rule, the absolute state control of the economy is certainly in line with Marxist theory. In fact, up until the 1980s the Chinese and North Korean systems were equally as Communist, until China adopted a system more akin to Facscism and North Korea stayed the course on Communism.
Whatever you degree you may think the US does or does not represent a "free market" economy has no bearing on whether or not North Korea is a Communist state, which it is.
China has the US by the balls via debt
OM F***ing G. I know this is a popular theme on Slashdot, but please STOP. It is wrong, and stems from a serious misunderstanding about what it means to say that "the US owes China money."
Go to your local bank branch, or hop on E*Trade, and buy a $500 US Savings Bond. Congratulations, the US now owes you money! You just gave the US government $500, and they promise to pay you back that $500 in the future plus interest. US bonds and treasury bills are historically among the safest investments in the world, so they are purchased in huge quantities by individuals, banks, retirement funds, businesses, sovereign wealth funds (like China's) and many others. So technically the US government "owes" money to nearly every investor on the planet at some level. The US issues bond/bills like this - incurring debt - all day every day like clockwork, and it continues to be a high-grade investment choice (it pays out little but is very "safe") around the globe.
Slashdotters who don't understand these financial vehicles seem to think that the US was running short of cash one day and came to China like a pawnbroker, saying "Gosh, China, can you float me a few trillion renminbi until payday?" and that China is therefore exercising control over the US like some mobster holding it over a deadbeat debtor. Instead, China has just been buying sh*tloads of US debt over the counter, like everyone else on the planet.
And, really, what can China do to the US if they want to hurt us? Cash in all their debt at once? Fine, but they will not get their full investment back (remember, US T-bills/bonds only pay you back in full once they have reached their maturity date) and the US will just print more dollars to meet the payout need. We'd experience more inflation in the short term, but the US would actually win out in the long run because China cheated itself out of recouping the full amount of money they loaned us! They could start selling US T-bills at a discount, lowering the market for our debt ... but the rest of the world market would snap it all up - yes, even the huge amount that China has - and again they would end up losing money by selling their stake at a discount.
So, once and for all, China has zero political leverage in the US specifically because of its debt holdings. They have a LOT of political leverage because of the size of their market and the resulting pressure from US corporations that want to do business there ... but not specifically due to their debt holdings.
Similarly, the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed with stronger Republican support in Congress (80%) than Dem (60-70%).
True, but that is an artifact of the unusual configuration of the Democratic Party from the 1880s to the 1980s, and is not reflective of the two parties' identities today. For many decades, the South was dominated politically by "Dixiecrats" - Democrats in name (because the Republican Party was so identified with the North) but much closer to modern Republican values in terms of social and fiscal conservatism, hawkish defense views, religious issues, etc. Dixiecrats were something of a historical anachronism, and they defected en masse to the Republican Party in the '80s as the Democrats moved too far to the Left and the Republicans under Reagan embraced the ex-Dixiecrats.
So basically the Democrats from the South who voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act would be Republicans today, and that % number you cite above would be neatly flipped in the opposite direction.