How about any business carried out in a magnetically levitated platform (yes the magnets are on the ground, but the transactions occur on the platform while the platform is in the air) - exempt from state regulation including state taxes? I foresee hovering Apple stores, looks cool and saves you money!;-)
>> Describing their current state is not insulting them. Yes it is, if you use inflammatory language like "As soon as you are ready to [...] act like an adult" - you are effectively calling their behavior childish. Even if absolutely true, it is not likely to make the angry person get less angry.
>> He's already pissed off, why exactly do you think he's yelling? There are different levels of pissed off. He may be pissed off because his expectations were not met, or maybe even because he got exactly what he asked for but realized that is not what he wanted, or maybe because of some completely unrelated personal issue. On the other than if he feels disrespected or personally attacked, pissed off can escalate from yelling, to firing you on the spot, or even to physical violence. If you're going to intentionally piss people off, you need to be prepared for anything.
>> Remain calm. Say, "As soon as you are ready to calm down and act like an adult, we can discuss this."
Wrong. That's insulting the client, which is unprofessional. As a contractor a better approach is to sit calmly and listen, take notes, ask clarifying questions, then make sure you bill for the "meeting" time. If you are looking to piss the guy off, look happy or even smile while he's yelling - works much more effectively and you don't have to resort to insults. But, if you want to continue getting paid, I'd suggest not pissing off the client. I've experienced it on one contract a while back and must say, the yelling quickly subsided after the first couple of billing cycles (I always itemized hours worked).
The success of Uber has little to do with the insurance. Their main advantage is the ability to quickly and conveniently find transportation. I've called for a cab in the past, and if you're in the suburbs often was given 45 minute wait times which occasionally stretched to an hour and half. That is why I would call Uber over a cab. Price difference is not negligible but way further down the list of advantages, outweighed even by something as simple as having to know the address of where I am in order to call for a cab ("hey, anybody knows the exact address of this place?"). Saying Uber's main advantage is insurance is like saying digital cameras displayed most conventional film cameras because they are smaller. Yes they are smaller, but that is not their main advantage.
Insurance companies don't lose money in the long run. If NASA insists on SpaceX taking out an insurance policy, that cost will be passed right onto customers (oh wait, NASA being the main one). This is a new and evolving industry, so say the insurance companies determine 1 in 10 launches will fail. So the insurance will cost $25M for every $100M in coverage, add 10% for SpaceX administration, $27.5M. Every $275M of taxpayers money, the insurance industry will pay out $100M. And every time they pay out, the premiums go up too. Subtract 10% if NASA pays their own insurance - either way it's a losing proposition.
Insurance is meant for catastrophic events that would break the insurance holder. If $110M will break NASA, they should not be in space business in its current stage of development (one day it may become as routine as trucking, but not today).
The government does not have the right to sacrifice individuals for the good of the "herd". If they did, the government could kill people just so they can use their organs in other people, one dead saves many. Vaccinations have their risks, personally stopped vaccinating my kids after having to rush one to the hospital the morning after one vaccination. It was one of the risks listed on the waiver we were told. And no, the "herd" did not cover the ER bill, or followup costs. If the government said "we cover 100% of all medical costs caused by complications, no "in network" or "not covered procedure" bullshit, plus a hefty life insurance (not to profit from a death of a child but to add motivation for the government not too mandate risky vaccinations or go bancrupt), then maybe it would be easier to consider. And for those of you who say "risk is 1 in a million" I say "find the insurance company that will pay out on those odds and the cost will be less than the tax collected on the vaccine from production to injection". If you cannot find an insurance to uderwrite such coverage of any complications, then your risk assesment is probably spoonfed to you by the company making the vaccine, and completely wrong.
There is a growing movement of homeschoolers who simply don't want to inflict public schools on their children. Majority of the schools are more about crowd control than education, and you have to send the kids to school designated by the government, no choice at all. Sad but true. It's government sponsored babysitting.
"You choose, you pay" is of little comfort to those who get hurt in accidents caused by these cameras. Also, the cameras are abused by governments. For example, I lived in a place where they had speeding cameras mounted on vans parked on the sides of highways. Speed limit was 100km/h. Initially they were set to trigger at some higher speed, but government greed eventually set them at 103km/h. To add to that, they were occasionally lined up one after another, up to 3 or 4 deep, so if you happened to drive by at 104km/h you would receive 4 tickets in a span of few hundred meters, each from a different police dept that parked they unit in a "good spot". So that's the abuse part. On safety part, I personally witnessed 2 car pileups caused by people slamming on breaks to avoid a ticket, on one of those I about killed the moron who jumped out of the photoradar van once the pileup started right in front of my car doing 100km/h -maybe he thought he was superman and he could stop my car with his bare hands. As for red light cameras, I live now in a place where they have them in some parts of town. I once watched them and they start shooting as soon as yellow light happens. I saw people slam on breaks, almost causing accidents. I adopted a different strategy to "not pay the voluntary tax" - i slow down to almost stop before each light, and it's still green i floor it across the intersection - less likely yo cause an accident than slamming on breaks when yellow light shows, though one time i there was a teenage pedestrian who must have thought i was slowing down because i was getting a red light and he decided to start walking across the street agaist a red "don't walk" sign, then almost ended up as my hood ornament - I guess by your logic since he broke the law he deserved to get hurt, yes?
If this can happen at home router level, think what can be done at the ISP. This is not an issue of router security, because your traffic can be intercepted with other techniques, this points to a much larger problem that electronic voting results can be changed in transit and they travel over open internet. Who can change packets in transit, let's see: * US government (NSA, FBI, or any other agency with full access) * Government sponsored hackers (Russia, China, etc...) * Your ISP (Comcast, Verizon, etc) * Backbone ISP (Level3, Sprint, MCI, etc) * Non government sponsored hackers (Anonymous,...) The traffic should be secured end-to-end - both authenticated and encrypted (the latter for privacy reasons).
"It is fully possible to permit law enforcement to do its job while still adequately protecting personal privacy" Absolutely possible, where does it say however that access to people's phone is required for law enforcement to do its job?
“Recent technological advances have the potential to greatly embolden online criminals, providing new methods for abusers to avoid detection,” Absolutely correct, take a look at what the NSA has been doing.
Such a meaningless statement because it isn't backed up by any consequences. How about "Apple will pay 1 billion US dollars to any individual or organization that has any information collected by Apple provided to any government organization, direct or indirect". At least then anyone compromised by Apple will be able to afford a good legal defense.
Having spent time setting up bandwidth management policies (for private companies, not public ISP access) I have to tell you it isn't as straightforward as it seems. Your first and biggest issue is how to recognize applications. Encryption makes it orders of magnitude harder, not to say that without it's easy. Filtering based on source is often the most reliable way to identify traffic type. Second problem will be identifying what traffic can be throttled - some video applications (e.g. Netflix) will automatically lower bitrate when throttled, others do not. ISP may choose to throttle netflix first because they know it will not affect customer experience as much as throttling another video service that does not support lower rates. Then someone will scream that is discrimination against Netflix, So let's say that by some miracle technology you could distinguish video from other streaming, then what? If you throttle everyone equally, then you are putting the service that does not have dynamic bitrate at a disadvantage - you know, what small startup that doesn't have the resources to develop or license such a dynamic streaming agorithm - again, discrimination. So sadly, your bright line will get really fuzzy really quick.
It's the old communist argument - everyone must be equal. That this boils down to is bring everyone to the lowest common denominator. World isn't fair, and good thing because if it was we'd all be on welfare (to be fair to the lazy guy who doesn't want to work, we should all not work to have the same this) - oh wait, who would pay for this welfare for all? I know, the rich guys. Ok, let's see, if we were to spread Bill Gate's fortune across the population of the world, we'd all get what, $10 each? Not to mention there would be no food since all farmers, bakers, and other professions would also be on welfare so it would be fair.
Let's not forget those evil universities whose teaching is not affordable to everyone, those sure are creating a learning divide - we need to close them all. How about those premium bed and mattress manufacturers, good night of sleep definitely helps learning, so someone with a better bed definitely has an unfair advantage. How about those healthy food providers, health is a definite advantage - we should force everyone to eat only what the poorest can afford to level the playing field. Those evil doctors who date to cure people who pay them, hang them all! We all need to go back to the stone age where everything was equal, oh wait, there was this guy who produced stone tools and only gave it to his family and friends, gotta axe him too.
What a retarded communist argument to make... I bet it's the other telco's who sponsored this.
WaffleMonster, I believe you hit the nail on the head - the key is differentiate between bandwidth management and discrimination or preferential treatment. The problem will be how to clearly draw the line between them. If an ISP will start throttling higher bandwidth streams, such as video, before it starts throttling low bandwidth voice calls, some will see is as discrimination, while it may simply be "keep the most customers happy" policy, which prioritizes low bandwidth stream. If an ISP starts throttling p2p downloads so that other customers can stream netflix, p2p operators will scream discrimination, or conspiracy theorist will infer ISP is in bed with Netflix. So while I agree that ISP's that get special status from the government (any company that the government will force me to allow them to dig through my yard, a.k.a. easements) should be regulated by the government and prevented from unfair business related throttling, I think the problem will be clearly defining what that is and then proving it if it occurs. I have in my previous lifetime worked in network management on private links between company offices and such, and believe me, I've never seen a way to throttle that everyone will perceive as fair. Someone will always scream foul. I don't know what a complete solution is to this problem, but one thing that comes to mind is there should never be any throttling occurring unless the connection is close to full (though how you define that is up for debate).
Wherever there are finite bandwidth connections, there will always be throttling. Whether the throttling occurs based on type of traffic, end user limits, or "naturally" sort itself out via TCP or other protocols, throttling will occur as the bottlenecks fill up. If the carriers will not be allowed to do any throttling based on traffic type/source/etc, then the guy that decides to run a p2p file server will have his 500 connections open while your measly 1 netflix connection will get drowned out, as the "natural TCP throttling" tends to divide the bandwidth equally per connection (not per user). Then people will complain about the quality of service, but it will be neutral. What people are really wanting here is "don't throttle me", but that obviously cannot be satisfied for all users.
On the other hand, the providers can implement another type of throttling - financial. Once they start charging you for bandwidth used, folks considering watching a netflix movie for $x per show may start throttling themselves.
If I don't like Apple's bugs or capacity problems, I have the option to never pay for another Apple product. I don't have the option to opt out of ObamaCare.
Exactly right. Personally I would have bought the show and then called the cable company to give me the $2 credit for the blackout. Then again, I got rid of cable few years ago and switched solely to antenna + purchased shows + Netflix, all via a DVR from TiVo. My family monthly TV expenses are less than half of what the cable bill used to be plus everyone is much happier watching commercial free purchased content they can watch downloaded on TiVo, or streamed to a PC or tablet. The only drawback is sometimes you get the show the day after it airs, but it's small.
By the same logic, take the most expensive toll road in the US (think ~$1/mile on some privately run express lanes in California), the add up all the miles everyone in the US drives a day - wow, look at the tens of thousands of dollars the government is saving per car. I'm thinking a large percentage of people get more in "toll" worth from the government than they pay in income tax - 3 car family, 12K miles per year, $36,000 per year in toll benefits!
So what you're saying the new pass rates are for the school system, so they can say "we meet our standards of education"? I guess this is expected from a system that gets paid no matter what their results...
Yes, but they were all called Apple iPad, Apple iPod, Apple iPhone, Apple iMac - why does "Windows*" imply to you cross-compatibility but "Apple i*" does not?
Slashdot Mirror
...except sites such as slashdot will remain vulnerable to ad insertion as they redirect you back to http.
How about any business carried out in a magnetically levitated platform (yes the magnets are on the ground, but the transactions occur on the platform while the platform is in the air) - exempt from state regulation including state taxes? I foresee hovering Apple stores, looks cool and saves you money! ;-)
>> Describing their current state is not insulting them.
Yes it is, if you use inflammatory language like "As soon as you are ready to [...] act like an adult" - you are effectively calling their behavior childish. Even if absolutely true, it is not likely to make the angry person get less angry.
>> He's already pissed off, why exactly do you think he's yelling?
There are different levels of pissed off. He may be pissed off because his expectations were not met, or maybe even because he got exactly what he asked for but realized that is not what he wanted, or maybe because of some completely unrelated personal issue. On the other than if he feels disrespected or personally attacked, pissed off can escalate from yelling, to firing you on the spot, or even to physical violence. If you're going to intentionally piss people off, you need to be prepared for anything.
>> Remain calm. Say, "As soon as you are ready to calm down and act like an adult, we can discuss this."
Wrong. That's insulting the client, which is unprofessional. As a contractor a better approach is to sit calmly and listen, take notes, ask clarifying questions, then make sure you bill for the "meeting" time. If you are looking to piss the guy off, look happy or even smile while he's yelling - works much more effectively and you don't have to resort to insults. But, if you want to continue getting paid, I'd suggest not pissing off the client. I've experienced it on one contract a while back and must say, the yelling quickly subsided after the first couple of billing cycles (I always itemized hours worked).
The success of Uber has little to do with the insurance. Their main advantage is the ability to quickly and conveniently find transportation. I've called for a cab in the past, and if you're in the suburbs often was given 45 minute wait times which occasionally stretched to an hour and half. That is why I would call Uber over a cab. Price difference is not negligible but way further down the list of advantages, outweighed even by something as simple as having to know the address of where I am in order to call for a cab ("hey, anybody knows the exact address of this place?"). Saying Uber's main advantage is insurance is like saying digital cameras displayed most conventional film cameras because they are smaller. Yes they are smaller, but that is not their main advantage.
I foresee a wave of notices hitting kindergartens soon...
Insurance companies don't lose money in the long run. If NASA insists on SpaceX taking out an insurance policy, that cost will be passed right onto customers (oh wait, NASA being the main one). This is a new and evolving industry, so say the insurance companies determine 1 in 10 launches will fail. So the insurance will cost $25M for every $100M in coverage, add 10% for SpaceX administration, $27.5M. Every $275M of taxpayers money, the insurance industry will pay out $100M. And every time they pay out, the premiums go up too. Subtract 10% if NASA pays their own insurance - either way it's a losing proposition.
Insurance is meant for catastrophic events that would break the insurance holder. If $110M will break NASA, they should not be in space business in its current stage of development (one day it may become as routine as trucking, but not today).
The government does not have the right to sacrifice individuals for the good of the "herd". If they did, the government could kill people just so they can use their organs in other people, one dead saves many. Vaccinations have their risks, personally stopped vaccinating my kids after having to rush one to the hospital the morning after one vaccination. It was one of the risks listed on the waiver we were told. And no, the "herd" did not cover the ER bill, or followup costs. If the government said "we cover 100% of all medical costs caused by complications, no "in network" or "not covered procedure" bullshit, plus a hefty life insurance (not to profit from a death of a child but to add motivation for the government not too mandate risky vaccinations or go bancrupt), then maybe it would be easier to consider. And for those of you who say "risk is 1 in a million" I say "find the insurance company that will pay out on those odds and the cost will be less than the tax collected on the vaccine from production to injection". If you cannot find an insurance to uderwrite such coverage of any complications, then your risk assesment is probably spoonfed to you by the company making the vaccine, and completely wrong.
There is a growing movement of homeschoolers who simply don't want to inflict public schools on their children. Majority of the schools are more about crowd control than education, and you have to send the kids to school designated by the government, no choice at all. Sad but true. It's government sponsored babysitting.
"You choose, you pay" is of little comfort to those who get hurt in accidents caused by these cameras. Also, the cameras are abused by governments. For example, I lived in a place where they had speeding cameras mounted on vans parked on the sides of highways. Speed limit was 100km/h. Initially they were set to trigger at some higher speed, but government greed eventually set them at 103km/h. To add to that, they were occasionally lined up one after another, up to 3 or 4 deep, so if you happened to drive by at 104km/h you would receive 4 tickets in a span of few hundred meters, each from a different police dept that parked they unit in a "good spot". So that's the abuse part. On safety part, I personally witnessed 2 car pileups caused by people slamming on breaks to avoid a ticket, on one of those I about killed the moron who jumped out of the photoradar van once the pileup started right in front of my car doing 100km/h -maybe he thought he was superman and he could stop my car with his bare hands. As for red light cameras, I live now in a place where they have them in some parts of town. I once watched them and they start shooting as soon as yellow light happens. I saw people slam on breaks, almost causing accidents. I adopted a different strategy to "not pay the voluntary tax" - i slow down to almost stop before each light, and it's still green i floor it across the intersection - less likely yo cause an accident than slamming on breaks when yellow light shows, though one time i there was a teenage pedestrian who must have thought i was slowing down because i was getting a red light and he decided to start walking across the street agaist a red "don't walk" sign, then almost ended up as my hood ornament - I guess by your logic since he broke the law he deserved to get hurt, yes?
Having watched some of my colleagues trying to submit changes to the linux kernel convinced me that the submission process is 80
If this can happen at home router level, think what can be done at the ISP. This is not an issue of router security, because your traffic can be intercepted with other techniques, this points to a much larger problem that electronic voting results can be changed in transit and they travel over open internet. Who can change packets in transit, let's see:
* US government (NSA, FBI, or any other agency with full access)
* Government sponsored hackers (Russia, China, etc...)
* Your ISP (Comcast, Verizon, etc)
* Backbone ISP (Level3, Sprint, MCI, etc)
* Non government sponsored hackers (Anonymous,...)
The traffic should be secured end-to-end - both authenticated and encrypted (the latter for privacy reasons).
"It is fully possible to permit law enforcement to do its job while still adequately protecting personal privacy"
Absolutely possible, where does it say however that access to people's phone is required for law enforcement to do its job?
“Recent technological advances have the potential to greatly embolden online criminals, providing new methods for abusers to avoid detection,”
Absolutely correct, take a look at what the NSA has been doing.
Such a meaningless statement because it isn't backed up by any consequences. How about "Apple will pay 1 billion US dollars to any individual or organization that has any information collected by Apple provided to any government organization, direct or indirect". At least then anyone compromised by Apple will be able to afford a good legal defense.
Having spent time setting up bandwidth management policies (for private companies, not public ISP access) I have to tell you it isn't as straightforward as it seems. Your first and biggest issue is how to recognize applications. Encryption makes it orders of magnitude harder, not to say that without it's easy. Filtering based on source is often the most reliable way to identify traffic type. Second problem will be identifying what traffic can be throttled - some video applications (e.g. Netflix) will automatically lower bitrate when throttled, others do not. ISP may choose to throttle netflix first because they know it will not affect customer experience as much as throttling another video service that does not support lower rates. Then someone will scream that is discrimination against Netflix, So let's say that by some miracle technology you could distinguish video from other streaming, then what? If you throttle everyone equally, then you are putting the service that does not have dynamic bitrate at a disadvantage - you know, what small startup that doesn't have the resources to develop or license such a dynamic streaming agorithm - again, discrimination. So sadly, your bright line will get really fuzzy really quick.
It's the old communist argument - everyone must be equal. That this boils down to is bring everyone to the lowest common denominator. World isn't fair, and good thing because if it was we'd all be on welfare (to be fair to the lazy guy who doesn't want to work, we should all not work to have the same this) - oh wait, who would pay for this welfare for all? I know, the rich guys. Ok, let's see, if we were to spread Bill Gate's fortune across the population of the world, we'd all get what, $10 each? Not to mention there would be no food since all farmers, bakers, and other professions would also be on welfare so it would be fair.
Let's not forget those evil universities whose teaching is not affordable to everyone, those sure are creating a learning divide - we need to close them all. How about those premium bed and mattress manufacturers, good night of sleep definitely helps learning, so someone with a better bed definitely has an unfair advantage. How about those healthy food providers, health is a definite advantage - we should force everyone to eat only what the poorest can afford to level the playing field. Those evil doctors who date to cure people who pay them, hang them all! We all need to go back to the stone age where everything was equal, oh wait, there was this guy who produced stone tools and only gave it to his family and friends, gotta axe him too.
What a retarded communist argument to make... I bet it's the other telco's who sponsored this.
WaffleMonster, I believe you hit the nail on the head - the key is differentiate between bandwidth management and discrimination or preferential treatment. The problem will be how to clearly draw the line between them. If an ISP will start throttling higher bandwidth streams, such as video, before it starts throttling low bandwidth voice calls, some will see is as discrimination, while it may simply be "keep the most customers happy" policy, which prioritizes low bandwidth stream. If an ISP starts throttling p2p downloads so that other customers can stream netflix, p2p operators will scream discrimination, or conspiracy theorist will infer ISP is in bed with Netflix. So while I agree that ISP's that get special status from the government (any company that the government will force me to allow them to dig through my yard, a.k.a. easements) should be regulated by the government and prevented from unfair business related throttling, I think the problem will be clearly defining what that is and then proving it if it occurs. I have in my previous lifetime worked in network management on private links between company offices and such, and believe me, I've never seen a way to throttle that everyone will perceive as fair. Someone will always scream foul. I don't know what a complete solution is to this problem, but one thing that comes to mind is there should never be any throttling occurring unless the connection is close to full (though how you define that is up for debate).
Wherever there are finite bandwidth connections, there will always be throttling. Whether the throttling occurs based on type of traffic, end user limits, or "naturally" sort itself out via TCP or other protocols, throttling will occur as the bottlenecks fill up. If the carriers will not be allowed to do any throttling based on traffic type/source/etc, then the guy that decides to run a p2p file server will have his 500 connections open while your measly 1 netflix connection will get drowned out, as the "natural TCP throttling" tends to divide the bandwidth equally per connection (not per user). Then people will complain about the quality of service, but it will be neutral. What people are really wanting here is "don't throttle me", but that obviously cannot be satisfied for all users.
On the other hand, the providers can implement another type of throttling - financial. Once they start charging you for bandwidth used, folks considering watching a netflix movie for $x per show may start throttling themselves.
If I don't like Apple's bugs or capacity problems, I have the option to never pay for another Apple product. I don't have the option to opt out of ObamaCare.
Exactly right. Personally I would have bought the show and then called the cable company to give me the $2 credit for the blackout. Then again, I got rid of cable few years ago and switched solely to antenna + purchased shows + Netflix, all via a DVR from TiVo. My family monthly TV expenses are less than half of what the cable bill used to be plus everyone is much happier watching commercial free purchased content they can watch downloaded on TiVo, or streamed to a PC or tablet. The only drawback is sometimes you get the show the day after it airs, but it's small.
You mean absence of legal FREE means, since they could have shelled out $1.99 and download it legally from services such as Amazon, no?
By the same logic, take the most expensive toll road in the US (think ~$1/mile on some privately run express lanes in California), the add up all the miles everyone in the US drives a day - wow, look at the tens of thousands of dollars the government is saving per car. I'm thinking a large percentage of people get more in "toll" worth from the government than they pay in income tax - 3 car family, 12K miles per year, $36,000 per year in toll benefits!
So what you're saying the new pass rates are for the school system, so they can say "we meet our standards of education"? I guess this is expected from a system that gets paid no matter what their results...
Yes, but they were all called Apple iPad, Apple iPod, Apple iPhone, Apple iMac - why does "Windows*" imply to you cross-compatibility but "Apple i*" does not?