Ignoring Mexico City, on this continent New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia, Washington DC, and Atlanta all have metropolitan areas over 5 million. I think you are confusing metro areas in Canada with cities in the U.S., or as we like to call it, America.
"Stakeholders" dont' make the quick money
on
The Naked Corporation
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Using Enron or any other corporate scandal as an example in favor of transparency is silly. The "stakeholders" for those companies bear no relation to the people making the very non-transparent decisions.
And those decision makers didn't care about the future of the companies, they just wanted to extract enough money out of them to buy their judgement-proof giant houses in Texas or Florida.
So the issue isn't that well-run corporations should be voluntarily transparent, they already are well-run. The issue should be how to force evil corporations, run by thieving robber barons, into some level of transparency before they've emptied the cookie jar.
>>>Iraq and Afghanistan were two different missions. If you recall, the Taliban was overthrown with a total of zero US ground troops--just the Northern Alliance, US air support, and Pashtun warlords.
If by "overthrown" you mean "left in control of large chunks of the country, and growing rapidly," sure...
How the F*** is there STILL a Taliban AT ALL?
Somebody in Washington needs to get fired over this, and it's whoever started to use money appropriated for Afghanistan operations to plan Iraq, before the Afghan war was won. I'm not taking a position on the Iraq war here, I'm saying that it's been three years, and they haven't found Bin Laden, neutralized Al Queda, or removed all trace of the Taliban from this earth. That makes them abject failures in my book, and the victims of the attacks in Spain, Indonesia, and elsewhere should be pretty damn mad.
I have the opposite experience with Verizon stores:
I had a problem with my own Kyocera 7135 last week. Called customer service, walked me through silly but necessary testing, determined it was, in fact, quite dead. Told me I had to take it into a store.
Brought it to a store the next day - and the nice man in the store said "oh, you have to call for this problem", and proceded to go to a phone and call the very same customer service number I'd called, and arranged for them to ship a new phone.
So it's completely random where to go for problem-solving, depends on the person...
I wonder if any of the U.S. military's gay Arabic translators would have translated the warning about the next big terrorist attack if they hadn't been fired by the Bush administration just for being gay?
Or not...
Target is a subsidiary of what used to be the Dayton-Hudson Corporation (now Target, Inc., since the child process is way more successful than the parent process), which was created by the merger of Dayton's, a Minneapolis based family-owned department store and Hudson's, a Detroit-based family-owned department store. The Hudson family in Detroit has little or nothing to do with Hudson Bay Trading Co. I love how facts get distorted when people remember a word or two and make up a story to go along with what they remember.
Now, "The Bay", a retail chain in Canada may in fact have something to do with the Hudson's Bay Co.
Some chains [Safeway] allow you to type in your "phone number" when you check-out, rather than requiring you to scan a card.
Sign up for a card so you have a "legit" number to use as a last resort if needed, then next time you check out try a random phone number, until you get one (or more) that work. The number I usually use apparantly belongs to a family with young chilrden, as the coupon machine sometimes spits out diaper coupons...
If enough people do this the database gets corrupt (or they require physical cards, which lowers the convenience/compliance and risks alienating customers, which they do not want to do).
>>>...and the corporation that writes the software is motivated to eliminate bugs...
Umm, how exactly does the subscription model motivate them to eliminate bugs? They already have your money, and their business model assumes they will maintain monopoly status so you won't have anywhere else to go when your subscription is up - so how is there any more motivation under this business model?
Seems to me the only thing it increases is guaranteed cashflow and a more predictable revenue model for the corporation.
It's not like an HMO where if you come down with more bugs it costs them more for the treatment - in fact I think it's the opposite - the less they spend on bug fixing, the more of your subscription dollars they get to keep.
In '89, I remember watching CNN's coverage of the Chinese suppression of students in Tianamin Square. The CNN crew didn't have cameras, but had an early ancestor of these phones - it sent the "video" at a frame rate of about 1 frame per MINUTE - the image would come in scan line by scan line, and when it got to the bottom of the screen, start updating again at the top. Very hard to watch, but hey, it was pictures...
Minor point - Senator Jake Garn (R-UT, but did I really need to put in the R when I said UT?) was the first non-astronaut to ride on the shuttle - from NASA's web site: "Senator Garn flew as a payload specialist on STS-51D Discovery (April 12-19, 1985)"
But as a Senator, and retired Navy Pilot and Colonel in the Utah Air National Guard, he wasn't necessarily the first _civilian_ in space; which is what they were trying to put up on the Challenger.
Just privatizing/commercializing something doesn't often solve the problems inherent in it - NASA with or without advertising has a large bureaucracy, which is both a resource (lots o' talent) and a disadvatage (lots o' paychecks).
Selling advertising, while retaining a government near-monopoly on space exploration, won't help the resource/advantage equation get better.
COMPETITION would - allow NASA to advertise, sure, but ALSO allow other private space-exploration ventures the same regulatory advantages NASA has.
This doesn't mean that I want the private sector to win (I think there's been a lot of benefits to the government having a serious space presence). However, by introducing competition, "Winning" for the NASA bureacracy would change from "getting a Congressional appropriation" or "retiring successfully with a Federal Retirement Account" to "kicking those upstart private space jockeys ass" - a much more powerful motivator.
And if NASA doesn't win, at least somebody will, and space will continue to be paid attention to. After all, in the current model, if NASA "loses", their funding dries up and they shut down.
Or maybe, if we DID teach their children some of the things we taught the children of Germany and Japan in 1946+, some of our problems in that part of the world might go away?
You know, teaching liberal things like a semblance of democracy, tolerance of difference, and some information about freedom?
Ever notice that Japan, arguably the most militant country in the world in 1936, now is Constitutionally prohibited from having a standing military? And in general the people seem to support this policy, to the point of not wanting to even use their limited military means to help the US - an unintended consequence for MacArthur, I'm sure, but true precisely because they have (a semblance of) a democracy?
It seems to me that relying on education as part of the solution to the terrorist problem might not be a bad idea - probably a better idea than shooting, but one recalls that it wasn't until AFTER Germany and Japan surrendered unconditionally that we were able to start the Marshall Plan and provide educational information to their citizens, eh?
Quick reminder - we did NOT create Israel, and in fact our "moratl enemy" at the time, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was the first country to recognize Isreal, not us.
Rmember that at the time, Isreal's coming into existance was a slap in the face of the UK and other western powers.
Or, the bigger message - things change in foreign policy over time - friends don't always stay friends, enemies don't stay enemies, etc.
So don't use false historical analogies without understanding them.
The Taliban have stated that he's a "guest" in their country. When one hosts a guest, one has a responsibility to not have their guests bother the neighbors with loud parties and such.
Or, say, when your guest happens to murder a few thousand civilians at the neighbors place, in a polite society one would ask him or her to depart.
They have not done so, so it appears that they have changed the relationship from "guest" to "protectee". As the terrorists have shown that violence is their preferred method of social interaction, the Taliban must realize that when the neighbors call the police to come in to try and get their "guest" to be more quiet, there might be some additional damage to their home.
I say HAD because a clever theif noticed that instead of a bunch of large metal boxes attached to washing machines, each holding some quarters, there was now a smallish box holding some serious folding money (the machine took >=$5 bills), so they STOLE THE MACHINE that added value to the cards. Eliminate the middle-man.
This happened right after they switched from the quarter-taking laundry machines, which are now, of course, back in service...
Please don't be an alarmist unless you've actually looked at the site, the event is open to all.
However, the Museum is currently housed on an old military facility (that's still owned by the military), so you need picture ID.
Non-citizens, like it says multiple times on the site, just need to bring their passport or Green Card. But everybody needs to make advance reservations so they can run you through whatever security database they use.
It IS the only _broadband_ ISP in my town, or at least that connects to my building - cable-modem service has not yet come to my part of town.
And do you really think that all the other large ISP's won't be doing this soon? As Mom-and-Pop ISP's slowly vanish (or rapidly vanish in large cities), the existing giant ISP's/telcos will start enforcing more and more policies like this, until you'll end up beholden to your ISP's "company store" like a 1920's coal miner.
The SOLE purpose of this is customer-lock-in and web-hosting marketing, and I will bet a large amount of money that every solution that has been offered in these threads will become against Verizon's Terms of Service over the next several months.
You all must have wasted your childhood watching "grown up" Broadway shows and not Disney movies, because Julie Andrews sings "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" in Mary Poppins.
For the same reason that although oil tankers are usually registered in fun-loving, safety-conscious places like Liberia, cruise ships still tend to be registered in the U.S., Norway and other Western countries.
People like to have a certain amount of trust in the organization that puts them on top of a Saturn V...
>>>Now lets get on scaling buildings in a single bound.
Scaling buildings in a single bound is easy, there's lots of technological solutions that can launch a 75kg mass over a large building.
Surviving the impact on the other side, THAT is the hard part!
It's a bird, it's a plane, it's...
a smeared blob of flesh, bone and muscle.
>>>But ya know what? If people working at mcdonald's could type, even just a little bit, the order taking would be incredibly streamline
You are oh-so-correct.
However, I'm betting that Ronald and the other clowns at McD's have spent a lot of time and energy calculating the cost-benefits of training their flunkies to type vs. "push the pretty picture".
Sadly, I think the evidence is that dumbed down wins. Their mascot isn't a clown for nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
Oddly, "grow peanuts" and "run a nuclear reactor" were the same guy...
Uh... no.
Ignoring Mexico City, on this continent New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia, Washington DC, and Atlanta all have metropolitan areas over 5 million. I think you are confusing metro areas in Canada with cities in the U.S., or as we like to call it, America.
Using Enron or any other corporate scandal as an example in favor of transparency is silly. The "stakeholders" for those companies bear no relation to the people making the very non-transparent decisions.
And those decision makers didn't care about the future of the companies, they just wanted to extract enough money out of them to buy their judgement-proof giant houses in Texas or Florida.
So the issue isn't that well-run corporations should be voluntarily transparent, they already are well-run. The issue should be how to force evil corporations, run by thieving robber barons, into some level of transparency before they've emptied the cookie jar.
paul
>>>Iraq and Afghanistan were two different missions. If you recall, the Taliban was overthrown with a total of zero US ground troops--just the Northern Alliance, US air support, and Pashtun warlords.
If by "overthrown" you mean "left in control of large chunks of the country, and growing rapidly," sure...
How the F*** is there STILL a Taliban AT ALL?
Somebody in Washington needs to get fired over this, and it's whoever started to use money appropriated for Afghanistan operations to plan Iraq, before the Afghan war was won. I'm not taking a position on the Iraq war here, I'm saying that it's been three years, and they haven't found Bin Laden, neutralized Al Queda, or removed all trace of the Taliban from this earth. That makes them abject failures in my book, and the victims of the attacks in Spain, Indonesia, and elsewhere should be pretty damn mad.
I have the opposite experience with Verizon stores:
I had a problem with my own Kyocera 7135 last week. Called customer service, walked me through silly but necessary testing, determined it was, in fact, quite dead. Told me I had to take it into a store.
Brought it to a store the next day - and the nice man in the store said "oh, you have to call for this problem", and proceded to go to a phone and call the very same customer service number I'd called, and arranged for them to ship a new phone.
So it's completely random where to go for problem-solving, depends on the person...
paul
I wonder if any of the U.S. military's gay Arabic translators would have translated the warning about the next big terrorist attack if they hadn't been fired by the Bush administration just for being gay?
I guess we'll never know.
Check again - the article says SR-1a
Or not...
Target is a subsidiary of what used to be the Dayton-Hudson Corporation (now Target, Inc., since the child process is way more successful than the parent process), which was created by the merger of Dayton's, a Minneapolis based family-owned department store and Hudson's, a Detroit-based family-owned department store. The Hudson family in Detroit has little or nothing to do with Hudson Bay Trading Co. I love how facts get distorted when people remember a word or two and make up a story to go along with what they remember.
Now, "The Bay", a retail chain in Canada may in fact have something to do with the Hudson's Bay Co.
Try this - random grocery cards!
Some chains [Safeway] allow you to type in your "phone number" when you check-out, rather than requiring you to scan a card.
Sign up for a card so you have a "legit" number to use as a last resort if needed, then next time you check out try a random phone number, until you get one (or more) that work. The number I usually use apparantly belongs to a family with young chilrden, as the coupon machine sometimes spits out diaper coupons...
If enough people do this the database gets corrupt (or they require physical cards, which lowers the convenience/compliance and risks alienating customers, which they do not want to do).
only outlaws will get cavities.
Just for fun, replace the word "God" in the above post with "Odin", and "Jesus" with "Thor".
Or perhaps a more apt substitution would be "Ra" and "Osiris"?
Or maybe "Frank Sinatra" and "Elvis" - you make the call...
>>> ...and the corporation that writes the software is motivated to eliminate bugs...
Umm, how exactly does the subscription model motivate them to eliminate bugs? They already have your money, and their business model assumes they will maintain monopoly status so you won't have anywhere else to go when your subscription is up - so how is there any more motivation under this business model?
Seems to me the only thing it increases is guaranteed cashflow and a more predictable revenue model for the corporation.
It's not like an HMO where if you come down with more bugs it costs them more for the treatment - in fact I think it's the opposite - the less they spend on bug fixing, the more of your subscription dollars they get to keep.
paul
In '89, I remember watching CNN's coverage of the Chinese suppression of students in Tianamin Square. The CNN crew didn't have cameras, but had an early ancestor of these phones - it sent the "video" at a frame rate of about 1 frame per MINUTE - the image would come in scan line by scan line, and when it got to the bottom of the screen, start updating again at the top. Very hard to watch, but hey, it was pictures...
So things have come a long way.
Minor point - Senator Jake Garn (R-UT, but did I really need to put in the R when I said UT?) was the first non-astronaut to ride on the shuttle - from NASA's web site: "Senator Garn flew as a payload specialist on STS-51D Discovery (April 12-19, 1985)"
But as a Senator, and retired Navy Pilot and Colonel in the Utah Air National Guard, he wasn't necessarily the first _civilian_ in space; which is what they were trying to put up on the Challenger.
Just privatizing/commercializing something doesn't often solve the problems inherent in it - NASA with or without advertising has a large bureaucracy, which is both a resource (lots o' talent) and a disadvatage (lots o' paychecks).
Selling advertising, while retaining a government near-monopoly on space exploration, won't help the resource/advantage equation get better.
COMPETITION would - allow NASA to advertise, sure, but ALSO allow other private space-exploration ventures the same regulatory advantages NASA has.
This doesn't mean that I want the private sector to win (I think there's been a lot of benefits to the government having a serious space presence). However, by introducing competition, "Winning" for the NASA bureacracy would change from "getting a Congressional appropriation" or "retiring successfully with a Federal Retirement Account" to "kicking those upstart private space jockeys ass" - a much more powerful motivator.
And if NASA doesn't win, at least somebody will, and space will continue to be paid attention to. After all, in the current model, if NASA "loses", their funding dries up and they shut down.
So, Go Team NASA! Beat the corporate space guys!
paul
Or maybe, if we DID teach their children some of the things we taught the children of Germany and Japan in 1946+, some of our problems in that part of the world might go away?
You know, teaching liberal things like a semblance of democracy, tolerance of difference, and some information about freedom?
Ever notice that Japan, arguably the most militant country in the world in 1936, now is Constitutionally prohibited from having a standing military? And in general the people seem to support this policy, to the point of not wanting to even use their limited military means to help the US - an unintended consequence for MacArthur, I'm sure, but true precisely because they have (a semblance of) a democracy?
It seems to me that relying on education as part of the solution to the terrorist problem might not be a bad idea - probably a better idea than shooting, but one recalls that it wasn't until AFTER Germany and Japan surrendered unconditionally that we were able to start the Marshall Plan and provide educational information to their citizens, eh?
paul
Quick reminder - we did NOT create Israel, and in fact our "moratl enemy" at the time, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was the first country to recognize Isreal, not us.
Rmember that at the time, Isreal's coming into existance was a slap in the face of the UK and other western powers.
Or, the bigger message - things change in foreign policy over time - friends don't always stay friends, enemies don't stay enemies, etc.
So don't use false historical analogies without understanding them.
Let me explain.
The Taliban have stated that he's a "guest" in their country. When one hosts a guest, one has a responsibility to not have their guests bother the neighbors with loud parties and such.
Or, say, when your guest happens to murder a few thousand civilians at the neighbors place, in a polite society one would ask him or her to depart.
They have not done so, so it appears that they have changed the relationship from "guest" to "protectee". As the terrorists have shown that violence is their preferred method of social interaction, the Taliban must realize that when the neighbors call the police to come in to try and get their "guest" to be more quiet, there might be some additional damage to their home.
It's unfortunate, but it happens.
In my building, we had a similar setup.
I say HAD because a clever theif noticed that instead of a bunch of large metal boxes attached to washing machines, each holding some quarters, there was now a smallish box holding some serious folding money (the machine took >=$5 bills), so they STOLE THE MACHINE that added value to the cards. Eliminate the middle-man.
This happened right after they switched from the quarter-taking laundry machines, which are now, of course, back in service...
paul
Please don't be an alarmist unless you've actually looked at the site, the event is open to all.
However, the Museum is currently housed on an old military facility (that's still owned by the military), so you need picture ID.
Non-citizens, like it says multiple times on the site, just need to bring their passport or Green Card. But everybody needs to make advance reservations so they can run you through whatever security database they use.
paul
It IS the only _broadband_ ISP in my town, or at least that connects to my building - cable-modem service has not yet come to my part of town.
And do you really think that all the other large ISP's won't be doing this soon? As Mom-and-Pop ISP's slowly vanish (or rapidly vanish in large cities), the existing giant ISP's/telcos will start enforcing more and more policies like this, until you'll end up beholden to your ISP's "company store" like a 1920's coal miner.
The SOLE purpose of this is customer-lock-in and web-hosting marketing, and I will bet a large amount of money that every solution that has been offered in these threads will become against Verizon's Terms of Service over the next several months.
paul
Of course.
People like to have a certain amount of trust in the organization that puts them on top of a Saturn V...
Scaling buildings in a single bound is easy, there's lots of technological solutions that can launch a 75kg mass over a large building. Surviving the impact on the other side, THAT is the hard part!
It's a bird, it's a plane, it's...
a smeared blob of flesh, bone and muscle.
You are oh-so-correct.
However, I'm betting that Ronald and the other clowns at McD's have spent a lot of time and energy calculating the cost-benefits of training their flunkies to type vs. "push the pretty picture".
Sadly, I think the evidence is that dumbed down wins. Their mascot isn't a clown for nothing.