That's really the pattern now. Multi billion dollar corporations where most of the profits go to a few employees-- not even to the shareholders.
[Citation needed]
No, seriously, if this is not just an occasional occurrence but in fact "the pattern" now, can you cite multiple examples of this, where the majority of profits - not equity but profits as you say - goes to a few employees and not the shareholders?
Considering the problem that brought down Challenger was political not technical I consider the Shuttle fleet to have succeeded in reaching the design threshold of a 1% failure rate.
You make a good point but in the real world there is no difference between political decisions and design decisions. I don't mean to defend all the decisions made in the Challenger launch, but if you could reduce the shuttle's launch window to approximately 120 days per year of ideal launch conditions at Cape Kennedy you would achieve a much higher success threshhold than 1%... at the cost of having an (even more) absurdly massive lack of return on investment for the shuttle program which would almost certainly result in the STS never having been built in the first place.
The proof is left as an exercise for the reader to judge which would have been the better outcome in this regard.
business people really do think differently and they are the ones who are penny wise and pound foolish.
So why are they the rich ones? If they really were "penny wise and pound foolish" that would not be the case.
I know it's popular to bash business owners and executives, but the vast majority of these "business people" you deride need to (and do) have a strategic long-term view of their company's success. Especially for privately-owned businesses, if you have a short-sighted view you go out of business and there's no golden parachute. In the late 1990s and again in the late 2000s there were a small number of very high-profile public company top executives making foolish decisions to get rich quick, true. But by and large there is no class in American society more concerned about long-term wealth and stability than the "business people" you seem to dismiss as short-sighted fools.
Why not just install cell phone jammers in all prisons?... Because that would be a logical, one-shot solution that would end the problem. That's no good for a politician.
Unfortunately, it's just not that simple. Consider that jamming all cellphones in prisons is:
a violation of Federal law
also going to disable the phones of guards and visitors, possibly also creating interference with emergency communications for said guards
likely to create interference with legitimate users outside the prisons (many of these are in populated areas)
in nobody's interest because it sets a precedent allowing the government to start jamming cellular signals in other "essential" areas as well... and watch how quickly those might multiply.
Seriously, as much as you distrust politicians, think about it that there might be reasons this is not a cut-and-dried issue. Sometimes there are just more complexities to things than "bad politicians want more money/power/whatever."
Ever paid attention to the small text at the beginning of football games?
Listen buddy, your overall idea is somewhat reasonable but your examples are over the top and make you look like you don't know anything about sports and/or the leagues' copyright concerns. Here, for example, is the actual text you refer to, which goes at the end of NFL games: "This telecast is copyrighted by the NFL for the private use of our audience. Any other use of this telecast or of any pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the game without the NFL's consent, is prohibited."
The text that spells out just how much the NFL really REALLY doesn't like having games recorded
Sports leagues don't care if you record things in your home for your use. Notice how they've never gone after TiVo, set a broadcast flag or anything else? They call out "private use" because they want commercial establishments - like sports bars etc. - to have to buy "business" TV licenses to show the games because those companies are making lots of cash by using the games to get you in their bar. You can make arguments that "anyone who has a Super Bowl party will get sued!!!! ZOMG!!! ZERG RUSH!!!!!!!" but in the real world this is not what is going to happen, even if it may technically run afoul of the language.
A free and open internet would permit game scores, stats...
These things are already "fair use" by news media. Those disclaimers you're worried about are intended to prevent simulcasts of games from unauthorized parties (i.e. radio/TV/whatever stations basically doing their own play-by-play "I watch the game and tell you what's happening.") This isn't because the NFL doesn't want you to hear what's happening in the game, but because the radio/TV/whatever organizations that are doing the official game broadcasts paid a CRAPLOAD of money for the rights to do so, and expect to have you tune in to them as a result. No tinfoil hats needed here, please move along.
But as users start to do more with their phones, they're going to start to expect usability to improve -- and that's when no amount of additional 'shiny' is going to make the sale.
"Luke, you're going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view."
Having used all the mobile OSes in this discussion extensively (except Symbian), I can say that it's very misleading to make a blanket claim that users will necessarily find iOS and Android lacking when they "start to do more" with their phones or that "usability" will suffer. BlackBerry OS offers a tremendous depth of functionality and usability - for a certain set of tasks. If you are in an enterprise environment, and you want things like easy intranet access, fine-grained IT administrator control over devices, viewing of other users' Exchange free/busy calendars, keyboard shortcuts out the wazoo... then BlackBerry OS has no serious rival, and yes you will find the other OSes lacking in features and "usability." If, however, you are not a hardcore business user and/or are looking for things like a wealth of app availability, media playback features/integration, fast/responsive device UI, et cetera - then iOS and Android are going to provide much better "usability." It's more than a little condescending to dismiss iOS and Android as competing only on "shiny"... they do certain things very very well that RIM doesn't, and vice versa.
So let a thousand mobile OS flowers bloom and all that blithering Maoist claptrap. Each platform does at least one thing better than any of the others do, and that platform is best for you if that thing is what you care about most.
Of the one that lets me put on my phone what I want, not what it wants.
The truth is that for most smartphones - even in the USA - that's easy. If you agree to buy a cellphone for its actual retail price without carrier subsidy, you can unlock it. If you want to download a program to "jailbreak" the phone - whether it be iPhone, Android, whatever - you can install anything you want on it.
If you want to get a discount - most likely of several hundred dollars - on the phone price from a cellular carrier, then you can expect them to do plenty of things to make sure you stay a customer for the specified term. If you want your cellular carrier, phone manufacturer or OS maker to provide tech support for when something doesn't work, you should not jailbreak it. Also don't expect them to provide "value add" services, such as app store compatibility, online services, etc.
It's pretty simple - if you're a technophile with sufficient knowhow, you can get whatever you want out of your phone as you bought it. Just don't expect your cellular provider, OS provider or anyone else to do you any favors if you want something different.
When I have to fly I try Southwest first, then Jet Blue. If I can get their on either of those I drive or I don't go.
If you are a "casual" traveler - i.e. you typically travel for personal reasons or at your own discretion - you're dead on. Southwest, JetBlue and Virgin America are inexpensive, comfortable and usually will get you where you need to go on time. These airplanes don't offer much in the way of perks or status programs (other than getting you a free flight now and then), but as a casual flyer that's not a big deal.
But if you fly fairly often (say, 50,000 miles a year or more) for work etc., then the traditional carriers start making a lot more sense - mainly because they do have multiple classes, perks programs etc. For example, United is a pretty terrible airline - more expensive, bad customer service in many cases, less nice cabins... if I were a non-frequently flyer, I wouldn't touch them with a 10-foot pole. However, because I fly a lot on United and its code share partners, I get a lot of perks. Specifically, I know that if my schedule changes and I need to fly standby, I will be able to get on ahead of pretty much anybody else. Ditto for if my flight is cancelled and I need to be rebooked. It's also worth the extra money to me (especially since I'm not usually the one paying it) to know in advance I won't get a middle seat, will get to board first and not have them run out of overhead luggage space, occasionally get upgraded to first class, and so forth. American Airlines to me falls into that group of airlines I'd never look at as a casual flyer but would think strongly about as a business/frequent traveller.
So I think which airlines you look at should be based on your travel profile. I can almost analogize it to business class vs. consumer class Internet services - consumer class is cheaper and is good enough most of the time. If you have special needs or are a heavy user, paying more for the business service is the way to go.
Anonymous is a new animal on the prowl, and there is no historical precedent for what it is.
Yes there is. It's called a "mob," and they have been around for many thousands of years. And the way that authorities have traditionally dealt with them is that even though they'll never catch everyone that was in the mob, they catch a few and make examples out of them. So think twice before you assume that the Internet somehow puts you beyond reach of consequences because you're... "anonymous."
Slavery is seen in the Constitution in a few key places. The first is in the Enumeration Clause, where representatives are apportioned. Each state is given a number of representatives based on its population - in that population, slaves, called "other persons," are counted as three-fifths of a whole person. This compromise was hard-fought, with Northerners wishing that slaves, legally property, be uncounted, much as mules and horses are uncounted. Southerners, however, well aware of the high proportion of slaves to the total population in their states, wanted them counted as whole persons despite their legal status. The three-fifths number was a ratio used by the Congress in contemporary legislation and was agreed upon with little debate.
In Article 1, Section 9, Congress is limited, expressly, from prohibiting the "Importation" of slaves, before 1808. The slave trade was a bone of contention for many, with some who supported slavery abhorring the slave trade. The 1808 date, a compromise of 20 years, allowed the slave trade to continue, but placed a date-certain on its survival. Congress eventually passed a law outlawing the slave trade that became effective on January 1, 1808.
The Fugitive Slave Clause is the last mention. In it, a problem that slave states had with extradition of escaped slaves was resolved. The laws of one state, the clause says, cannot excuse a person from "Service or Labour" in another state. The clause expressly requires that the state in which an escapee is found deliver the slave to the state he escaped from "on Claim of the Party."
Very interesting... it sounds similar to (but far more extreme than) some work situations I have been involved with myself in the past. I'm very curious - why do you think this was? Was it that the women couldn't get a permanent job if they weren't sleeping with someone, or that the women working in the field had a rarefied enough social stratum that they inevitably ended up dating someone they worked with? Or some of both?
This sorta reminds me of Los Alamos preferentially hiring male foreign scientists while treating American female PhD's no better than prostitutes...and then wondering why all their "nucular" secrets go walkabout time and time again.
Are you implying that a.) the particular very smart foreigners that the Department of Energy hires after rigorous background checks are traitors-in-waiting, eager to dispense with the country's nuclear information, b.) women Ph.Ds sell their nuclear secrets to foreign powers because they are disgruntled at work, or c.) both? And do you seriously mean that women Ph.Ds at Los Alamos or LLNL are treated as though they exchange money for sex? Or that they are treated like secretaries? Or they are treated like security risks? Or... what exactly?
Samsung, htc, AT&T, verizon? Mostly they want the initial sale, and then quick obsolescence to keep their revenues up
You may want to rethink that list a little. There are three vendors involved in your ongoing smartphone experience: the equipment maker, the OS vendor and the carrier.
In your list, AT&T and Verizon are carriers. They have an ongoing service relationship with their customers, and they actually LOSE money each time you buy a new phone (at least in the US due to phone subsidies), so they have every incentive to keep you happy with your current phone on your current contract. Similarly, the OS maker (Google, Microsoft, Apple et. al.) wants you to stay happy so the next phone you buy is the same OS... so they have an incentive to get new and improved OS versions into your hands. Samsung and HTC build phones; they get paid when you buy the phone, and they don't make any money when you keep it. So they are actively disincentivized to roll out OS upgrades.
The fact of the matter is that the handset OEMs are the ones that produce phone-specific OS update builds, not the carriers or the OS creators. But they are the parties with the least incentive out of all those three parties to want to produce an update... hence the sorry state of smartphone OS updates.
That's it. No hidden fees or universal service/911 funds.
Probably not for long. Pre-paid wireless accounts in the US have long been exempt from funding 911 service but there is legislation working its way through congress to change that.
It wasn't just Steve Ballmer or Microsoft fighting I-1098... this measure was very unpopular all across Washington State and failed at the polls by a 65% - 35% margin. Washington State is one of the few states in the US without a personal income tax (the sales taxes here are very high to make up for the revenue deficiency). I-1098 would have introduced a personal income tax on the "richest" residents (those making over $200K individually or $400K as a family), but the reason it failed by such a wide margin is that most Washington residents (including me) believed that once they introduced a personal state income tax here, the politicians would plead "necessity" and keep lowering the threshhold over time to the point where most residents would be paying it, and without any decrease of the sales tax to compensate. The majority of the population here is all in favor of education and healthcare, we just don't believe that a state income tax is the way to fund them.
FWIW, Microsoft and other large businesses in Seattle do have a legitimate interest in avoiding a personal state income tax, as for recruiting and keeping high-priced talent there is an advantage for them to come to Redmond and live in a state with no income tax vs. going to some other company - say, in California - and paying the tax rates there. An equivalent pay job offer in the Seattle area vs. many other states actually means more take-home pay here.
You're right that networking equipment has taken leaps and bounds in capacity as computing power has increased, however there are still significant upfront costs to adding more racks of gear to your internal network. But equipment is not where the majority of costs are - they are in the network services.
I thought the largest carriers didn't even PAY for bandwidth, as the traffic was kept inside their own network most of the time? And when it reached another network, they usually had a peering agreement for a VERY low price?
The big carriers and small ISPs have different things they pay for. If I'm a small ISP, I pay much more per Mbps for transit than the big guys do. But I'm also only paying for a few tail circuits to my service area. If I'm a big carrier I pay much less for exchanging traffic with other networks (although I do still pay), but I have to pay for all those long haul circuits that haul my data around the country internally. So even if it costs me very little to exchange that data with other networks, I still have a significant cost just for moving those bits all around the US (or internationally) on my own internal network.
I love how retards like you fail to understand how bandwidth works.
Such charming language. I love how most geeks like you fail to understand how the business of being an ISP works.
Your provisioned circuit speed is not what you are paying for. You are paying for a service which is defined by your ISP, and that can be measured in speed, downloads, minutes or whatever way they wish to charge for the service. And while this seems a gross injustice to you, it is actually what 90%+ of Internet users want and are better served by.
Every Internet service in the world includes some level of oversubscription. So does pretty much every other service with a physical infrastructure: the PSTN in most areas is built to handle no more than 10% of the landlines making a call at once; the highways are "oversubscribed" vs. traffic during peak times; the airlines couldn't handle demand if everyone wanted to fly at the same time; and if everyone wanted to run their garden hoses at full blast simultaneously the public water system would peter out.
The reason for this is that all these services are provided based on a statistical analysis of expected usage. If you wanted to build a phone system that never had dropped calls, the infrastructure would cost multiple X more and your monthly phone bill would be much higher. The highways would all be 30 lanes wide and would probably increase taxes dramatically. And so on. These services all try to strike a compromise between cost of capacity and providing service "good enough" for most people to use.
So it is for your ISP. They have statistical models which say (made up example) "we pay for 155 Mbps of transit, and can charge our customers $X/month for service. If we have to pay for 622 Mbps of transit, we would need to charge our customers $2X/month for service. Most users stay well within our current bandwidth usage, but others don't. So in order to keep pricing lower for the majority of users, we will charge more for the heavy users. This way prices stay low for the majority and those who use more will pay for it." This is the model with any oversubscribed service, and it's what you are actually paying for - not your provisioned circuit speed. It's all in your contract if you choose to read it.
Do you know what happens when oversubscribed service providers fail to strike the right balance? In any kind of a free market, people find other solutions. Taking mass transit instead of clogged highways, trucking in bottled water instead of the public water, switching telecom service providers, etc. If you are unhappy to have a bandwidth cap on a residential/consumer service, go buy a business connection where the oversubscription ratio is lower and you may have a true unlimited service.
Any tech-savvy / power user / business would be silly to get an iPhone over a good Android phone or a Blackberry.
That's an odd comparison. For enterprise IT users, the environment with iOS 4 and Android 2.2 (which most of the Android devices in use today aren't running) isn't appreciably different. Both were late to the game with things like strong password enforcement, remote wipe/lock, VPN etc. Both are now in roughly the same place in terms of business support. The only significant difference I see is the lack of a physical keyboard option with iPhone, which is arguably a "must" for heavy business e-mail users.
BlackBerry + BES beats them both up and takes their lunch money in terms of fine-grained enterprise control, and that's even with their last two OS releases being primarily focused on "consumer" features like an app store, better web browsing and media capabilities. The BES throttles every single connected BlackBerry's data pipe via a stateful VPN to the RIM NOC and allows complete enforcement of app loading, web browsing, e-mail filtering and many more things. So while it may make sense to say any (at least enterprise) business user would be crazy not to choose BlackBerry, I think iOS and Android Froyo are roughly the same in this regard.
I want to be able to reach a tower by routing through my neighbor
Making cell phones that are also cell repeaters is very simple as long as you don't mind huge phones that output enough power to toast your bagel while you're waiting.
or his femtocell
If your neighbor sets you up on his femtocell, you can do that already. There's a reason femtocells aren't open by default to any user...
Oh yeah and I want people to know that if you buy your own hardware at&t can't disable the good shit.
As long as you aren't expecting cellular carriers to subsidize the cost of your equipment for you, there's no reason they would disable anything on a handset.
Seriously, there's a reason that "concept phones" like this bug me, which is that some people take away the lesson that there's all these awesome features phones could have if only the evil cellphone manufacturers and carriers weren't standing in the way. All these things are doable - it's just that they all have tradeoffs in size, cost and complexity that 99.99% of customers wouldn't buy, and hence nobody will build them. Maybe OpenMoko... but the success of that kinda speaks for itself.
Plus, they must suck at advertising. This is the first I heard of them.
But wait... Slashbot CorrectThink tells us that 1.) advertising and marketing are bad! 2.) Musicians or writers or artists should just be successful by word of mouth and not need evil corporations to advertise, that's why their model is outdated! And 3.) game companies would just succeed if only they removed all DRM! But this was a DRM-free games company that did no advertising and marketed by word of mouth to geeks... they should have been guaranteed to never go out of business!
PARADOX! PARADOX! NOMAD WILL NOW SELF-DESTRUCT!!!!
I know the comment was intended to be funny, but I figured I'd respond anyway as a gamer - and Nike+ user - who can hopefully help others understand the value proposition.
I was a runner in high school who picked it up again about five years ago as a way to stay fit. I got the Nike+ iPod kit two years ago, and it made a significant difference in my enjoyment of running. It provided essential, purely functional benefits (ability to track my running distance, and play my preferred music or podcasts as I ran). It added useful but secondary "online" elements by having the runs uploaded to the Nike website such as recording my runs and giving me an easy way to statistically analyze them (how often, how far, how fast). And it added tertiary but very fun "game" elements such as the ability to set goals for myself (distance, frequency etc.) and work against them. It wasn't really like a RPG game, it was more a way of making it easy for me to compete against myself. Later, they added some social features to it - like the ability to see your friends' runs, and post your runs automatically to Facebook. Those things were "icing on the cake" rather than a key element.
Bottom line - I already had an iPod and used iTunes. The fact that Nike made it easy to track distance while using my iPod made the sale on their shoes. The "game" elements just made it more fun and make me more satisfied with the purchase.
Slashdot Mirror
That's really the pattern now. Multi billion dollar corporations where most of the profits go to a few employees-- not even to the shareholders.
[Citation needed]
No, seriously, if this is not just an occasional occurrence but in fact "the pattern" now, can you cite multiple examples of this, where the majority of profits - not equity but profits as you say - goes to a few employees and not the shareholders?
Considering the problem that brought down Challenger was political not technical I consider the Shuttle fleet to have succeeded in reaching the design threshold of a 1% failure rate.
You make a good point but in the real world there is no difference between political decisions and design decisions. I don't mean to defend all the decisions made in the Challenger launch, but if you could reduce the shuttle's launch window to approximately 120 days per year of ideal launch conditions at Cape Kennedy you would achieve a much higher success threshhold than 1%... at the cost of having an (even more) absurdly massive lack of return on investment for the shuttle program which would almost certainly result in the STS never having been built in the first place.
The proof is left as an exercise for the reader to judge which would have been the better outcome in this regard.
business people really do think differently and they are the ones who are penny wise and pound foolish.
So why are they the rich ones? If they really were "penny wise and pound foolish" that would not be the case.
I know it's popular to bash business owners and executives, but the vast majority of these "business people" you deride need to (and do) have a strategic long-term view of their company's success. Especially for privately-owned businesses, if you have a short-sighted view you go out of business and there's no golden parachute. In the late 1990s and again in the late 2000s there were a small number of very high-profile public company top executives making foolish decisions to get rich quick, true. But by and large there is no class in American society more concerned about long-term wealth and stability than the "business people" you seem to dismiss as short-sighted fools.
Why not just install cell phone jammers in all prisons? ... Because that would be a logical, one-shot solution that would end the problem. That's no good for a politician.
Unfortunately, it's just not that simple. Consider that jamming all cellphones in prisons is:
Seriously, as much as you distrust politicians, think about it that there might be reasons this is not a cut-and-dried issue. Sometimes there are just more complexities to things than "bad politicians want more money/power/whatever."
Ever paid attention to the small text at the beginning of football games?
Listen buddy, your overall idea is somewhat reasonable but your examples are over the top and make you look like you don't know anything about sports and/or the leagues' copyright concerns. Here, for example, is the actual text you refer to, which goes at the end of NFL games: "This telecast is copyrighted by the NFL for the private use of our audience. Any other use of this telecast or of any pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the game without the NFL's consent, is prohibited."
The text that spells out just how much the NFL really REALLY doesn't like having games recorded
Sports leagues don't care if you record things in your home for your use. Notice how they've never gone after TiVo, set a broadcast flag or anything else? They call out "private use" because they want commercial establishments - like sports bars etc. - to have to buy "business" TV licenses to show the games because those companies are making lots of cash by using the games to get you in their bar. You can make arguments that "anyone who has a Super Bowl party will get sued!!!! ZOMG!!! ZERG RUSH!!!!!!!" but in the real world this is not what is going to happen, even if it may technically run afoul of the language.
A free and open internet would permit game scores, stats...
These things are already "fair use" by news media. Those disclaimers you're worried about are intended to prevent simulcasts of games from unauthorized parties (i.e. radio/TV/whatever stations basically doing their own play-by-play "I watch the game and tell you what's happening.") This isn't because the NFL doesn't want you to hear what's happening in the game, but because the radio/TV/whatever organizations that are doing the official game broadcasts paid a CRAPLOAD of money for the rights to do so, and expect to have you tune in to them as a result. No tinfoil hats needed here, please move along.
But as users start to do more with their phones, they're going to start to expect usability to improve -- and that's when no amount of additional 'shiny' is going to make the sale.
"Luke, you're going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view."
Having used all the mobile OSes in this discussion extensively (except Symbian), I can say that it's very misleading to make a blanket claim that users will necessarily find iOS and Android lacking when they "start to do more" with their phones or that "usability" will suffer. BlackBerry OS offers a tremendous depth of functionality and usability - for a certain set of tasks. If you are in an enterprise environment, and you want things like easy intranet access, fine-grained IT administrator control over devices, viewing of other users' Exchange free/busy calendars, keyboard shortcuts out the wazoo ... then BlackBerry OS has no serious rival, and yes you will find the other OSes lacking in features and "usability." If, however, you are not a hardcore business user and/or are looking for things like a wealth of app availability, media playback features/integration, fast/responsive device UI, et cetera - then iOS and Android are going to provide much better "usability." It's more than a little condescending to dismiss iOS and Android as competing only on "shiny" ... they do certain things very very well that RIM doesn't, and vice versa.
So let a thousand mobile OS flowers bloom and all that blithering Maoist claptrap. Each platform does at least one thing better than any of the others do, and that platform is best for you if that thing is what you care about most.
Of the one that lets me put on my phone what I want, not what it wants.
The truth is that for most smartphones - even in the USA - that's easy. If you agree to buy a cellphone for its actual retail price without carrier subsidy, you can unlock it. If you want to download a program to "jailbreak" the phone - whether it be iPhone, Android, whatever - you can install anything you want on it.
If you want to get a discount - most likely of several hundred dollars - on the phone price from a cellular carrier, then you can expect them to do plenty of things to make sure you stay a customer for the specified term. If you want your cellular carrier, phone manufacturer or OS maker to provide tech support for when something doesn't work, you should not jailbreak it. Also don't expect them to provide "value add" services, such as app store compatibility, online services, etc.
It's pretty simple - if you're a technophile with sufficient knowhow, you can get whatever you want out of your phone as you bought it. Just don't expect your cellular provider, OS provider or anyone else to do you any favors if you want something different.
I'm guessing CDMA antenna at the top, GSM antenna at the bottom and the sides are not antennas.
The Verizon iPhone is CDMA-only ... no GSM at all.
You really only 'care' about how stealthy it is from the front. After all, who cares if the smoldering crater can see you?
You care, because the Surface-To-Air missile heading for your tailpipe cares.
When I have to fly I try Southwest first, then Jet Blue. If I can get their on either of those I drive or I don't go.
If you are a "casual" traveler - i.e. you typically travel for personal reasons or at your own discretion - you're dead on. Southwest, JetBlue and Virgin America are inexpensive, comfortable and usually will get you where you need to go on time. These airplanes don't offer much in the way of perks or status programs (other than getting you a free flight now and then), but as a casual flyer that's not a big deal.
But if you fly fairly often (say, 50,000 miles a year or more) for work etc., then the traditional carriers start making a lot more sense - mainly because they do have multiple classes, perks programs etc. For example, United is a pretty terrible airline - more expensive, bad customer service in many cases, less nice cabins ... if I were a non-frequently flyer, I wouldn't touch them with a 10-foot pole. However, because I fly a lot on United and its code share partners, I get a lot of perks. Specifically, I know that if my schedule changes and I need to fly standby, I will be able to get on ahead of pretty much anybody else. Ditto for if my flight is cancelled and I need to be rebooked. It's also worth the extra money to me (especially since I'm not usually the one paying it) to know in advance I won't get a middle seat, will get to board first and not have them run out of overhead luggage space, occasionally get upgraded to first class, and so forth. American Airlines to me falls into that group of airlines I'd never look at as a casual flyer but would think strongly about as a business/frequent traveller.
So I think which airlines you look at should be based on your travel profile. I can almost analogize it to business class vs. consumer class Internet services - consumer class is cheaper and is good enough most of the time. If you have special needs or are a heavy user, paying more for the business service is the way to go.
You would be suprised who makes up anonymous.
Technically, shouldn't everybody be surprised who makes up Anonymous, including other members of Anonymous?
Anonymous is a new animal on the prowl, and there is no historical precedent for what it is.
Yes there is. It's called a "mob," and they have been around for many thousands of years. And the way that authorities have traditionally dealt with them is that even though they'll never catch everyone that was in the mob, they catch a few and make examples out of them. So think twice before you assume that the Internet somehow puts you beyond reach of consequences because you're ... "anonymous."
Could you perhaps indicate what you're referring to, because I think you're making shit up.
Not the OP, but helping him/her out. This comes from the first match on Googling "us constitution slavery":
Slavery is seen in the Constitution in a few key places. The first is in the Enumeration Clause, where representatives are apportioned. Each state is given a number of representatives based on its population - in that population, slaves, called "other persons," are counted as three-fifths of a whole person. This compromise was hard-fought, with Northerners wishing that slaves, legally property, be uncounted, much as mules and horses are uncounted. Southerners, however, well aware of the high proportion of slaves to the total population in their states, wanted them counted as whole persons despite their legal status. The three-fifths number was a ratio used by the Congress in contemporary legislation and was agreed upon with little debate.
In Article 1, Section 9, Congress is limited, expressly, from prohibiting the "Importation" of slaves, before 1808. The slave trade was a bone of contention for many, with some who supported slavery abhorring the slave trade. The 1808 date, a compromise of 20 years, allowed the slave trade to continue, but placed a date-certain on its survival. Congress eventually passed a law outlawing the slave trade that became effective on January 1, 1808.
The Fugitive Slave Clause is the last mention. In it, a problem that slave states had with extradition of escaped slaves was resolved. The laws of one state, the clause says, cannot excuse a person from "Service or Labour" in another state. The clause expressly requires that the state in which an escapee is found deliver the slave to the state he escaped from "on Claim of the Party."
Very interesting ... it sounds similar to (but far more extreme than) some work situations I have been involved with myself in the past. I'm very curious - why do you think this was? Was it that the women couldn't get a permanent job if they weren't sleeping with someone, or that the women working in the field had a rarefied enough social stratum that they inevitably ended up dating someone they worked with? Or some of both?
This sorta reminds me of Los Alamos preferentially hiring male foreign scientists while treating American female PhD's no better than prostitutes...and then wondering why all their "nucular" secrets go walkabout time and time again.
Are you implying that a.) the particular very smart foreigners that the Department of Energy hires after rigorous background checks are traitors-in-waiting, eager to dispense with the country's nuclear information, b.) women Ph.Ds sell their nuclear secrets to foreign powers because they are disgruntled at work, or c.) both? And do you seriously mean that women Ph.Ds at Los Alamos or LLNL are treated as though they exchange money for sex? Or that they are treated like secretaries? Or they are treated like security risks? Or ... what exactly?
Samsung, htc, AT&T, verizon? Mostly they want the initial sale, and then quick obsolescence to keep their revenues up
You may want to rethink that list a little. There are three vendors involved in your ongoing smartphone experience: the equipment maker, the OS vendor and the carrier.
In your list, AT&T and Verizon are carriers. They have an ongoing service relationship with their customers, and they actually LOSE money each time you buy a new phone (at least in the US due to phone subsidies), so they have every incentive to keep you happy with your current phone on your current contract. Similarly, the OS maker (Google, Microsoft, Apple et. al.) wants you to stay happy so the next phone you buy is the same OS ... so they have an incentive to get new and improved OS versions into your hands. Samsung and HTC build phones; they get paid when you buy the phone, and they don't make any money when you keep it. So they are actively disincentivized to roll out OS upgrades.
The fact of the matter is that the handset OEMs are the ones that produce phone-specific OS update builds, not the carriers or the OS creators. But they are the parties with the least incentive out of all those three parties to want to produce an update... hence the sorry state of smartphone OS updates.
That's it. No hidden fees or universal service/911 funds.
Probably not for long. Pre-paid wireless accounts in the US have long been exempt from funding 911 service but there is legislation working its way through congress to change that.
It wasn't just Steve Ballmer or Microsoft fighting I-1098 ... this measure was very unpopular all across Washington State and failed at the polls by a 65% - 35% margin. Washington State is one of the few states in the US without a personal income tax (the sales taxes here are very high to make up for the revenue deficiency). I-1098 would have introduced a personal income tax on the "richest" residents (those making over $200K individually or $400K as a family), but the reason it failed by such a wide margin is that most Washington residents (including me) believed that once they introduced a personal state income tax here, the politicians would plead "necessity" and keep lowering the threshhold over time to the point where most residents would be paying it, and without any decrease of the sales tax to compensate. The majority of the population here is all in favor of education and healthcare, we just don't believe that a state income tax is the way to fund them.
FWIW, Microsoft and other large businesses in Seattle do have a legitimate interest in avoiding a personal state income tax, as for recruiting and keeping high-priced talent there is an advantage for them to come to Redmond and live in a state with no income tax vs. going to some other company - say, in California - and paying the tax rates there. An equivalent pay job offer in the Seattle area vs. many other states actually means more take-home pay here.
You're right that networking equipment has taken leaps and bounds in capacity as computing power has increased, however there are still significant upfront costs to adding more racks of gear to your internal network. But equipment is not where the majority of costs are - they are in the network services.
I thought the largest carriers didn't even PAY for bandwidth, as the traffic was kept inside their own network most of the time? And when it reached another network, they usually had a peering agreement for a VERY low price?
The big carriers and small ISPs have different things they pay for. If I'm a small ISP, I pay much more per Mbps for transit than the big guys do. But I'm also only paying for a few tail circuits to my service area. If I'm a big carrier I pay much less for exchanging traffic with other networks (although I do still pay), but I have to pay for all those long haul circuits that haul my data around the country internally. So even if it costs me very little to exchange that data with other networks, I still have a significant cost just for moving those bits all around the US (or internationally) on my own internal network.
I love how retards like you fail to understand how bandwidth works.
Such charming language. I love how most geeks like you fail to understand how the business of being an ISP works.
Your provisioned circuit speed is not what you are paying for. You are paying for a service which is defined by your ISP, and that can be measured in speed, downloads, minutes or whatever way they wish to charge for the service. And while this seems a gross injustice to you, it is actually what 90%+ of Internet users want and are better served by.
Every Internet service in the world includes some level of oversubscription. So does pretty much every other service with a physical infrastructure: the PSTN in most areas is built to handle no more than 10% of the landlines making a call at once; the highways are "oversubscribed" vs. traffic during peak times; the airlines couldn't handle demand if everyone wanted to fly at the same time; and if everyone wanted to run their garden hoses at full blast simultaneously the public water system would peter out.
The reason for this is that all these services are provided based on a statistical analysis of expected usage. If you wanted to build a phone system that never had dropped calls, the infrastructure would cost multiple X more and your monthly phone bill would be much higher. The highways would all be 30 lanes wide and would probably increase taxes dramatically. And so on. These services all try to strike a compromise between cost of capacity and providing service "good enough" for most people to use.
So it is for your ISP. They have statistical models which say (made up example) "we pay for 155 Mbps of transit, and can charge our customers $X/month for service. If we have to pay for 622 Mbps of transit, we would need to charge our customers $2X/month for service. Most users stay well within our current bandwidth usage, but others don't. So in order to keep pricing lower for the majority of users, we will charge more for the heavy users. This way prices stay low for the majority and those who use more will pay for it." This is the model with any oversubscribed service, and it's what you are actually paying for - not your provisioned circuit speed. It's all in your contract if you choose to read it.
Do you know what happens when oversubscribed service providers fail to strike the right balance? In any kind of a free market, people find other solutions. Taking mass transit instead of clogged highways, trucking in bottled water instead of the public water, switching telecom service providers, etc. If you are unhappy to have a bandwidth cap on a residential/consumer service, go buy a business connection where the oversubscription ratio is lower and you may have a true unlimited service.
Legality is kind of irrelevant at this point.
As long as there are laws and governments, police and lawyers, legality is never irrelevant.
Any tech-savvy / power user / business would be silly to get an iPhone over a good Android phone or a Blackberry.
That's an odd comparison. For enterprise IT users, the environment with iOS 4 and Android 2.2 (which most of the Android devices in use today aren't running) isn't appreciably different. Both were late to the game with things like strong password enforcement, remote wipe/lock, VPN etc. Both are now in roughly the same place in terms of business support. The only significant difference I see is the lack of a physical keyboard option with iPhone, which is arguably a "must" for heavy business e-mail users.
BlackBerry + BES beats them both up and takes their lunch money in terms of fine-grained enterprise control, and that's even with their last two OS releases being primarily focused on "consumer" features like an app store, better web browsing and media capabilities. The BES throttles every single connected BlackBerry's data pipe via a stateful VPN to the RIM NOC and allows complete enforcement of app loading, web browsing, e-mail filtering and many more things. So while it may make sense to say any (at least enterprise) business user would be crazy not to choose BlackBerry, I think iOS and Android Froyo are roughly the same in this regard.
I want to be able to call someone 10 feet away without a tower
You want one of these then, not a cellphone.
I want to be able to reach a tower by routing through my neighbor
Making cell phones that are also cell repeaters is very simple as long as you don't mind huge phones that output enough power to toast your bagel while you're waiting.
or his femtocell
If your neighbor sets you up on his femtocell, you can do that already. There's a reason femtocells aren't open by default to any user...
Oh yeah and I want people to know that if you buy your own hardware at&t can't disable the good shit.
As long as you aren't expecting cellular carriers to subsidize the cost of your equipment for you, there's no reason they would disable anything on a handset.
Seriously, there's a reason that "concept phones" like this bug me, which is that some people take away the lesson that there's all these awesome features phones could have if only the evil cellphone manufacturers and carriers weren't standing in the way. All these things are doable - it's just that they all have tradeoffs in size, cost and complexity that 99.99% of customers wouldn't buy, and hence nobody will build them. Maybe OpenMoko ... but the success of that kinda speaks for itself.
Plus, they must suck at advertising. This is the first I heard of them.
But wait ... Slashbot CorrectThink tells us that 1.) advertising and marketing are bad! 2.) Musicians or writers or artists should just be successful by word of mouth and not need evil corporations to advertise, that's why their model is outdated! And 3.) game companies would just succeed if only they removed all DRM! But this was a DRM-free games company that did no advertising and marketed by word of mouth to geeks ... they should have been guaranteed to never go out of business!
PARADOX! PARADOX! NOMAD WILL NOW SELF-DESTRUCT!!!!
I know the comment was intended to be funny, but I figured I'd respond anyway as a gamer - and Nike+ user - who can hopefully help others understand the value proposition.
I was a runner in high school who picked it up again about five years ago as a way to stay fit. I got the Nike+ iPod kit two years ago, and it made a significant difference in my enjoyment of running. It provided essential, purely functional benefits (ability to track my running distance, and play my preferred music or podcasts as I ran). It added useful but secondary "online" elements by having the runs uploaded to the Nike website such as recording my runs and giving me an easy way to statistically analyze them (how often, how far, how fast). And it added tertiary but very fun "game" elements such as the ability to set goals for myself (distance, frequency etc.) and work against them. It wasn't really like a RPG game, it was more a way of making it easy for me to compete against myself. Later, they added some social features to it - like the ability to see your friends' runs, and post your runs automatically to Facebook. Those things were "icing on the cake" rather than a key element.
Bottom line - I already had an iPod and used iTunes. The fact that Nike made it easy to track distance while using my iPod made the sale on their shoes. The "game" elements just made it more fun and make me more satisfied with the purchase.