If they are compulsory, then whichever companies make the approved scanners have a license to print money, right? I can see it now:
McCrafty Scanpro 2004, $399 for a 1 year subscription, or $39.99 a month.
Or you can go with Ed Norton Antivirus Live SuperCop mark VI - the Revenge for $399 for a 1 year subscription.
You need to buy one of them, which one is it? What's that you say? These cost more than your OS and you can't afford it? Sucks to be you... Maybe you should go back to BBSs then.
If the government mandates a software you must use under penalty of law, they should also provide an avenue for all users to acquire it.
God forbid we have speculation in this world. Next thing you know, people will want the right to assemble freely, and practice any religion they want. And I wouldn't fear any politician running with this ball anytime soon. Think about it. 90% of the people who use the Intar-web are people who wouldn't pass such a test. And of those 90%, a lot of them are the more mature type of folk. The exact type of folk who would be pissed off as all hell at Mr/Ms politician who made it so they couldn't email pictures of their daughter's puppy to the grandma, surf the web, play Hearts online, etc. It would be a political suicide mission.
Oh, and your sig reads "Pleasing the unwashed masses is not my task." and you have the nerve to complain about someone else acting elitist?;)
Is that in order to get affected by these newbies screwing up, you have to screw up yourself.
Got infected? Forget Bob accidentally sent you a virus and his missing scanner, where the hell is YOUR scanner? For that matter, why are you opening that.exe file? Why the F**K is your Administrator password set to , convenience? You run an ISP and your customers are all idiots who let worms run around willy-nilly? Force everyone who uses your service to buy a router off of you, and disconnect them if you find them running without it or an equivelant device. The last thing we need is government regulation.
Check your EULA. If you want more than 5 simultaneous connections to your NT/2K web server, you are NOT ALLOWED to use anything but IIS. That way, Microsoft can say they still offer choice, but if you want to use it for anything useful, then not really....
Hell, Star Trek is internally inconsistent as well -- how do you fire a phaser out of your ship's warp field, across normal space, and into another ship's warp field when both ships are travelling at some multiple of the speed of light?
Not to nitpick (and geek out), but you'll notice that when they fight at warp, they either: Use Torpedoes exclusively (which allegedly have their own warp generator) or fire at really close range (so that presumably their warp fields are overlapping)
I don't believe that the author was allowed to speak to anyone with a clue from DeBeers. How could that possibly benefit DeBeers? Deaf and blind cartel's don't remain cartels for long. I would think that DeBeers' history would show that they don't operate under such handicap.
It wasn't the author I was speaking of. I was talking about General Clarke, who met with DeBeers executive James Evans Lombe. One would hope that executive isn't a title handed out to everyone a step up from the mail room. The author talked with a senior scientist from the Diamond High Council in Antwerp, Jef Van Royen.
Given that extracting a resource is almost always cheaper than synthesizing it, DeBeers may still have the upper hand. This can only be true if you have access to the raw material, which is something DeBeers labors long and hard to deny everyone who isn't in the cabal. And mining is never a cheap proposition. With the synthetics, it sounds like the raw materials are electricity, carbon, a couple of chemicals, and time. And even the electricity costs sound minimal (1200 watts/machine)
Who is to say that they don't already posses better synthetic methods of production?
I would think that the reactions of a few of the industry members to the results speaks volumes that they a) don't have the technology themselves, or b)just don't want it used, either by themselves or anyone else. Ever. However, I believe the former is much more likely.
Ultimately the market price of "synthetics" will be dictated by a few factors: - market price of "real" diamonds - eagerness of public to purchase synthetics - available supply of synthetics - cost to produce synthetics
If these guys crank it up, production wise, they might just be able to bludgeon their way into the market with a flood of diamonds at $25 a karat. Wouldn't that make DeBeers happy? But it would be a more prudent strategy to introduce these stones in at a moderate discount and see what takeup is like. After all, if you were somehow able to crank out cars for $50 each, you'd have to be a moron to immediately start selling them for $100 a unit when everyone else sells them for $10000+. You'd start around $6000 instead, and still pocket $5950. Then, if the Big 3 and the East dropped their prices, you could come down to $4000, then $3500, etc., all the while watching the blood drain from the faces of the other mfgs.
Yes, but we're getting to the point where the line between "synthetic" and "natural" stones is blurring to invisibility. Are the synthetic plasma-created diamonds any less a diamond than the ones that came out of the ground? No. In fact, it sounds as if the quality is such that if you had one small flawless "natural" diamond, and one small plasma "synthetic", and then closed your eyes and dropped them both onto a table and let them bounce around, you would not be able to tell the difference as to which stone was which. So, at that point, does it matter? It's the exact same physical material, just arrived at a different way.
Re:Not for a while
on
The Diamond Age
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Read the article. One of the cartel guys is so scared by this tech that he was white-faced and shaking by the end of his meeting with Clarke. Another diamond guy told Linares that his father's research was an excellent way to get a bullet in the head.
DeBeers is only where they are because they've had a lock on the supply, and imitations up to this point have been less than convincing. Now we have the real thing, man-made. Especially the vapor process. In fact, the vapor process produces even more perfect diamonds than Mother Nature. DeBeers *should* be scared, since the tech is now in North America and they can't do a damn thing to stop it. In fact, the whole conflict diamond problem is undoubtedly going to be a hindrance to DeBeers trying to badmouth these things. Just think of the upcoming PR:
General Clarke: "These are made by the same processes, and are real carbon diamonds. The structure is the same, it is real. It just took us a lot less time to make" DeBeers: "But *our* diamonds come from our mines in Africa. Surely they're worth more because of that" General Clarke: "How many children were killed because of those African diamonds?" DeBeers: "...but, but, we're sure everyone follows the Kimberly accords..." General Clarke: "Of course. Because bloody military juntas are so concerned with outside trade agreements, right?"
One of the things that apalls me about "ebook sales" by most publishers is that they have the nerve to only knock about 20% off the price of the physical book. I mean, come on! only 20% off, and you don't have to pay for the book being printed, shipped, etc? Baen at least has a cool subscription thing where you get access to 6 different books per month for $15. That's not a bad deal at all.
Do I think it's "right" to take ebooks and read them for free? Not really, but at the same time, here are the publishers starting to gouge people on the electronic front with their (mostly) outrageous prices for e-books. They sound just like the RIAA and their claims that "CD prices will come down once we've finished paying for retooling costs from switching from casettes"
One would think from their actions that most publishers don't want e-book sales to work at all. Hm. Where have we heard that before?
Credit cards, what a great idea! I love paying 10% on my already overpriced purchases. Can I buy a Ferrari with one too?
you don't think places selling computer stuff put the "lease for $5/month" at the top for their health, do you?
No. I think they do that because they want to lease HARDWARE. Software is a completely different animal.
And most leasing companies won't touch a software purchase unless we're talking about a really big purchase for a really big client. Like 6 figures big, for an investment firm type of transaction. Certainly not for the corner print shop who might be bankrupt and selling the Quark licenses on Ebay in 3 months.
Yes, but you're not buying 100 lattes the first day. And I seriously doubt most software stores allow you to finance a software purchase, even if it is a half-dozen copies of $1000 software. Coming up with that kind of cash up-front can be daunting to the smaller users..
Did it ever occur to you that most bands starting out have less ability to dictate terms to a record label than people who are getting their first mortgage have with the bank? It works like this:
(label rep) : Here's our terms. Sign right there and we'll bring you onboard. (band) : Hang on, we are a little unsure about this point here. Can we alter it? (label rep) : Truth be told, I came to town to cut a deal with a band. If you don't like these terms, there are 3 other bands I'm talking to that I'd be just as pleased to go with.
At this point, the band either signs a draconian contract agreeing to give away God knows what, or the A&R rep walks and does business with someone else and the first band continues to play at dingy nightclubs ad nauseum. Fair? No. Life? Yes.
More here on exactly how that works and how bad the band is screwed.
The more northern west coast is more amenable to convertibles. I live in Vancouver BC, where the climate is probably quite a bit like the southern UK with all the rain, and I drive a British convertible as my main vehicle. And those clear November mornings make a great time to drive a convertible with the top down and the coat on:).
Nope. No accident. $1-7-9. That was why he walked around the office bitching about it for an hour. And his options were 1) Buy this adaptor from the only Mac dealer within 100 miles who had it, or 2) don't use his computer any more until he can have one mailed to him from Apple themselves. In light of the fact that his boss took a very dim view of him sitting on his can for the next 3-4 days while Apple sent him a replacement, he paid the $179. And all us PC folk laughed. Masochists, I tell you...
Regarding replacement parts, how much more could they possibly charge for them? A coworker had his power supply go on his Powerbook yesterday, sat there all day sans computer since the "Mac stores" in town were closed Mondays, then today had to pay $179 for a replacement power adaptor. That's reasonable? Or is he "subsidizing" software with that? Why the hell should he "subsidize" anything? There's this real interesting concept. It's called buying what you use. If he's not using it, why pay for it? I buy a computer, I want to get email, surf the web, shell into my Linux servers and play a couple games. Do I care if I can make a movie on it? No. That's why I don't have Adobe Premiere or anything else like that built into the price (iMovie) of the box. If I wanted it, I'd buy it.
I run XP on my desktop, but I use OpenOffice. Should AMD, Intel and Microsoft all get together and jack up the price of CPUs by $200 a unit just so that the price of Office XP can be brought down? Of course not.
Really? Who are these people? I support Open Source and have an extremely dim view of Apple. As I see it, Apple is acting exactly like Microsoft would if they also were able to monopolize the hardware...
Are you trying DOSEmu? I've gotten it to work with some pretty esoteric things, like a line card for reading storage tank probe information, and it works fine...
The problem is that these false positives AREN'T being cleaned up, and in a lot of cases, the people are not allowed to fly, and don't get a refund on their tickets. And they have no real recourse.
Inflation. One of the contribtory causes of inflation (not so much now) is the whole market bubble stupidity of pumping and dumping stocks, particularily what happens after it all falls apart. Here's an interesting piece written, oddly enough, just before the roof fell in. It explains in great detail the effects that everyone investing in paper assets is having on other sectors of the economy, and does a fair job of guessing what will if happen if (when) the artificial valuation disappears (like it did). One of those effects is all of the inflation that the bubble staves off when the bubble rides high comes back with interest (pardon the pun).
Re:shareholders..
on
SCO SCO SCO!
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Oh, that's right. This is the US, where people don't give a crap where a stock will be in a year, just as long as they can pump it and dump it inside a 3 month window. Then later on they wonder why inflation is out of control...
SCO's future business has been DESTROYED by what they've done. Any customers that they tout about buying now, like that chopper contract, is just business that was in the sales pipe already and is now completing. They will see NO new business from anyone who can avoid them from this moment forward.
If I was a shareholder of theirs, you're damn right I'd be pissed. Unless, of course, I was looking for a pump and dump.
In most circumstances Taiwan is almost like a country. They do have their own currency and (small) army, but they can't do things like get a seat at the UN or sign international treaties without the PRC's approval. They're like a teenager still living at home. Sure they can go off to the mall for a while without mentioning it to anyone, but if they decided to knock out one of the walls in their bedroom without telling the parents, there'd be hell to pay.
Slashdot Mirror
If they are compulsory, then whichever companies make the approved scanners have a license to print money, right? I can see it now:
McCrafty Scanpro 2004, $399 for a 1 year subscription, or $39.99 a month.
Or you can go with Ed Norton Antivirus Live SuperCop mark VI - the Revenge for $399 for a 1 year subscription.
You need to buy one of them, which one is it? What's that you say? These cost more than your OS and you can't afford it? Sucks to be you... Maybe you should go back to BBSs then.
If the government mandates a software you must use under penalty of law, they should also provide an avenue for all users to acquire it.
God forbid we have speculation in this world. Next thing you know, people will want the right to assemble freely, and practice any religion they want.
;)
And I wouldn't fear any politician running with this ball anytime soon. Think about it. 90% of the people who use the Intar-web are people who wouldn't pass such a test. And of those 90%, a lot of them are the more mature type of folk. The exact type of folk who would be pissed off as all hell at Mr/Ms politician who made it so they couldn't email pictures of their daughter's puppy to the grandma, surf the web, play Hearts online, etc. It would be a political suicide mission.
Oh, and your sig reads "Pleasing the unwashed masses is not my task." and you have the nerve to complain about someone else acting elitist?
Is that in order to get affected by these newbies screwing up, you have to screw up yourself. .exe file? Why the F**K is your Administrator password set to , convenience?
Got infected? Forget Bob accidentally sent you a virus and his missing scanner, where the hell is YOUR scanner? For that matter, why are you opening that
You run an ISP and your customers are all idiots who let worms run around willy-nilly? Force everyone who uses your service to buy a router off of you, and disconnect them if you find them running without it or an equivelant device.
The last thing we need is government regulation.
Check your EULA. If you want more than 5 simultaneous connections to your NT/2K web server, you are NOT ALLOWED to use anything but IIS.
That way, Microsoft can say they still offer choice, but if you want to use it for anything useful, then not really....
These use FLASH RAM. When you change the battery, nothing gets lost.....
Apple doesn't screw around with its users.
Unless they sign up for iTunes, then have the nerve to move to Canada.
Hell, Star Trek is internally inconsistent as well -- how do you fire a phaser out of your ship's warp field, across normal space, and into another ship's warp field when both ships are travelling at some multiple of the speed of light?
Not to nitpick (and geek out), but you'll notice that when they fight at warp, they either:
Use Torpedoes exclusively (which allegedly have their own warp generator)
or
fire at really close range (so that presumably their warp fields are overlapping)
Just something I've noticed as well...
I don't believe that the author was allowed to speak to anyone with a clue from DeBeers. How could that possibly benefit DeBeers? Deaf and blind cartel's don't remain cartels for long. I would think that DeBeers' history would show that they don't operate under such handicap.
It wasn't the author I was speaking of. I was talking about General Clarke, who met with DeBeers executive James Evans Lombe. One would hope that executive isn't a title handed out to everyone a step up from the mail room.
The author talked with a senior scientist from the Diamond High Council in Antwerp, Jef Van Royen.
Given that extracting a resource is almost always cheaper than synthesizing it, DeBeers may still have the upper hand.
This can only be true if you have access to the raw material, which is something DeBeers labors long and hard to deny everyone who isn't in the cabal. And mining is never a cheap proposition. With the synthetics, it sounds like the raw materials are electricity, carbon, a couple of chemicals, and time. And even the electricity costs sound minimal (1200 watts/machine)
Who is to say that they don't already posses better synthetic methods of production?
I would think that the reactions of a few of the industry members to the results speaks volumes that they a) don't have the technology themselves, or b)just don't want it used, either by themselves or anyone else. Ever.
However, I believe the former is much more likely.
Ultimately the market price of "synthetics" will be dictated by a few factors:
- market price of "real" diamonds
- eagerness of public to purchase synthetics
- available supply of synthetics
- cost to produce synthetics
If these guys crank it up, production wise, they might just be able to bludgeon their way into the market with a flood of diamonds at $25 a karat. Wouldn't that make DeBeers happy? But it would be a more prudent strategy to introduce these stones in at a moderate discount and see what takeup is like. After all, if you were somehow able to crank out cars for $50 each, you'd have to be a moron to immediately start selling them for $100 a unit when everyone else sells them for $10000+. You'd start around $6000 instead, and still pocket $5950. Then, if the Big 3 and the East dropped their prices, you could come down to $4000, then $3500, etc., all the while watching the blood drain from the faces of the other mfgs.
Yes, but we're getting to the point where the line between "synthetic" and "natural" stones is blurring to invisibility. Are the synthetic plasma-created diamonds any less a diamond than the ones that came out of the ground? No. In fact, it sounds as if the quality is such that if you had one small flawless "natural" diamond, and one small plasma "synthetic", and then closed your eyes and dropped them both onto a table and let them bounce around, you would not be able to tell the difference as to which stone was which. So, at that point, does it matter? It's the exact same physical material, just arrived at a different way.
Read the article. One of the cartel guys is so scared by this tech that he was white-faced and shaking by the end of his meeting with Clarke. Another diamond guy told Linares that his father's research was an excellent way to get a bullet in the head.
DeBeers is only where they are because they've had a lock on the supply, and imitations up to this point have been less than convincing. Now we have the real thing, man-made. Especially the vapor process. In fact, the vapor process produces even more perfect diamonds than Mother Nature. DeBeers *should* be scared, since the tech is now in North America and they can't do a damn thing to stop it. In fact, the whole conflict diamond problem is undoubtedly going to be a hindrance to DeBeers trying to badmouth these things. Just think of the upcoming PR:
General Clarke: "These are made by the same processes, and are real carbon diamonds. The structure is the same, it is real. It just took us a lot less time to make"
DeBeers: "But *our* diamonds come from our mines in Africa. Surely they're worth more because of that"
General Clarke: "How many children were killed because of those African diamonds?"
DeBeers: "...but, but, we're sure everyone follows the Kimberly accords..."
General Clarke: "Of course. Because bloody military juntas are so concerned with outside trade agreements, right?"
One of the things that apalls me about "ebook sales" by most publishers is that they have the nerve to only knock about 20% off the price of the physical book. I mean, come on! only 20% off, and you don't have to pay for the book being printed, shipped, etc? Baen at least has a cool subscription thing where you get access to 6 different books per month for $15. That's not a bad deal at all.
Do I think it's "right" to take ebooks and read them for free? Not really, but at the same time, here are the publishers starting to gouge people on the electronic front with their (mostly) outrageous prices for e-books. They sound just like the RIAA and their claims that "CD prices will come down once we've finished paying for retooling costs from switching from casettes"
One would think from their actions that most publishers don't want e-book sales to work at all. Hm. Where have we heard that before?
Credit cards, what a great idea! I love paying 10% on my already overpriced purchases. Can I buy a Ferrari with one too?
you don't think places selling computer stuff put the "lease for $5/month" at the top for their health, do you?
No. I think they do that because they want to lease HARDWARE. Software is a completely different animal.
And most leasing companies won't touch a software purchase unless we're talking about a really big purchase for a really big client. Like 6 figures big, for an investment firm type of transaction. Certainly not for the corner print shop who might be bankrupt and selling the Quark licenses on Ebay in 3 months.
Yes, but you're not buying 100 lattes the first day. And I seriously doubt most software stores allow you to finance a software purchase, even if it is a half-dozen copies of $1000 software. Coming up with that kind of cash up-front can be daunting to the smaller users..
Wow. That's good.
Did it ever occur to you that most bands starting out have less ability to dictate terms to a record label than people who are getting their first mortgage have with the bank? It works like this:
(label rep) : Here's our terms. Sign right there and we'll bring you onboard.
(band) : Hang on, we are a little unsure about this point here. Can we alter it?
(label rep) : Truth be told, I came to town to cut a deal with a band. If you don't like these terms, there are 3 other bands I'm talking to that I'd be just as pleased to go with.
At this point, the band either signs a draconian contract agreeing to give away God knows what, or the A&R rep walks and does business with someone else and the first band continues to play at dingy nightclubs ad nauseum. Fair? No. Life? Yes.
More here on exactly how that works and how bad the band is screwed.
The more northern west coast is more amenable to convertibles. I live in Vancouver BC, where the climate is probably quite a bit like the southern UK with all the rain, and I drive a British convertible as my main vehicle. And those clear November mornings make a great time to drive a convertible with the top down and the coat on :).
Nope. No accident. $1-7-9. That was why he walked around the office bitching about it for an hour. And his options were 1) Buy this adaptor from the only Mac dealer within 100 miles who had it, or 2) don't use his computer any more until he can have one mailed to him from Apple themselves. In light of the fact that his boss took a very dim view of him sitting on his can for the next 3-4 days while Apple sent him a replacement, he paid the $179. And all us PC folk laughed. Masochists, I tell you...
Regarding replacement parts, how much more could they possibly charge for them? A coworker had his power supply go on his Powerbook yesterday, sat there all day sans computer since the "Mac stores" in town were closed Mondays, then today had to pay $179 for a replacement power adaptor. That's reasonable? Or is he "subsidizing" software with that? Why the hell should he "subsidize" anything? There's this real interesting concept. It's called buying what you use. If he's not using it, why pay for it? I buy a computer, I want to get email, surf the web, shell into my Linux servers and play a couple games. Do I care if I can make a movie on it? No. That's why I don't have Adobe Premiere or anything else like that built into the price (iMovie) of the box. If I wanted it, I'd buy it.
I run XP on my desktop, but I use OpenOffice. Should AMD, Intel and Microsoft all get together and jack up the price of CPUs by $200 a unit just so that the price of Office XP can be brought down? Of course not.
Really? Who are these people? I support Open Source and have an extremely dim view of Apple. As I see it, Apple is acting exactly like Microsoft would if they also were able to monopolize the hardware...
Are you trying DOSEmu? I've gotten it to work with some pretty esoteric things, like a line card for reading storage tank probe information, and it works fine...
No way! Space 1999! Uh, well, maybe not 1999 anymore, but...
The problem is that these false positives AREN'T being cleaned up, and in a lot of cases, the people are not allowed to fly, and don't get a refund on their tickets. And they have no real recourse.
Inflation. One of the contribtory causes of inflation (not so much now) is the whole market bubble stupidity of pumping and dumping stocks, particularily what happens after it all falls apart. Here's an interesting piece written, oddly enough, just before the roof fell in. It explains in great detail the effects that everyone investing in paper assets is having on other sectors of the economy, and does a fair job of guessing what will if happen if (when) the artificial valuation disappears (like it did). One of those effects is all of the inflation that the bubble staves off when the bubble rides high comes back with interest (pardon the pun).
Oh, that's right. This is the US, where people don't give a crap where a stock will be in a year, just as long as they can pump it and dump it inside a 3 month window. Then later on they wonder why inflation is out of control...
SCO's future business has been DESTROYED by what they've done. Any customers that they tout about buying now, like that chopper contract, is just business that was in the sales pipe already and is now completing. They will see NO new business from anyone who can avoid them from this moment forward.
If I was a shareholder of theirs, you're damn right I'd be pissed. Unless, of course, I was looking for a pump and dump.
In most circumstances Taiwan is almost like a country. They do have their own currency and (small) army, but they can't do things like get a seat at the UN or sign international treaties without the PRC's approval. They're like a teenager still living at home. Sure they can go off to the mall for a while without mentioning it to anyone, but if they decided to knock out one of the walls in their bedroom without telling the parents, there'd be hell to pay.