This is exactly what a Civil Case is for, recovering damages. That includes your time and your
fustrations etc.
but the *not* the time spent pursuing the civil case:) nor the cost adjusted for the risk that you might lose the case.
However, there's nothing to stop a civil case from being pursued on top of a criminal one. What hinders me is that if there is no criminal case, there is no investigation to determine who the hackers were. I don't know who they were. I'm not saying there should be a criminal case in this instance since I don't know who did it and damage was small compared to the other crimes that should be pursued. What I am saying is that in the cases where some someone is caught, the punishment should be very harsh to make the expected value come out right. Since geeks are good at math, they'll have no trouble sensing the deterrant if we make punishment sporadically extremely harsh.
I run a webserver that hosts a number of domains, some for friends, some for non-profits, some slightly e-commercial. I do it mostly for myself, but since I'm already doing it adding the extra ips and domains is no big deal.
My server has been compromised twice. Once trojans are installed, it's pointless to try to figure out what's safe and what's compromised. That sort of analysis takes a day or more, a day which could be spent reinstalling, which course is guaranteed to get finished. All of this activity takes place uncomfortably hunched among the racks in a closet during which time I and a bunch of other people can't get our mail. Dealing with the emergency takes place at some random time the black hats choose, and I have to immediately take several days out of my schedule fixing things.
So, my feeling is: death penalty is not harsh enough. People are doing it on purpose, and they're fucking up my life. The commercial losses are not measurably large, which is what gets the authorities involved, but the stress and disruption to me is huge.
Yeah, I know that teenagers are prank-prone, I was, but that's why their heads need to be put on stakes outside the gates of every town, so the other little twerps will see what they'll get too.
It's not funny, it's not even a challenge, and the punishments should be very harsh.
If both sources are of good quality, tests comparing sound quality are meaningless
unless they are very carefully performed. Double-blind is a must of course, but also the volume of the two samples must be withinn a tiny margin or else the louder of the two will sound "better". Problem is, with different amounts of energy in different parts of the spectrum, it becomes difficult to define "volume" but I think you focus on the midrange (IANAE).
The problem with your example is, it's not important if one sample is crisper than the other, it's how does each sound when compared to the reference/original.
where the _ will be treated as a non-breaking space and the * will get troll(s)(ed)(ing) as a wildcarded stem. Oh yeah, I've found the -timothy and -Jon_Katz to be useful for increasing relevance:)
Now that search might look complicated but I was trying to illustrate a lot. Just get in the habit of doing all your searches with +plus +prefixes , then add in -terms and +/- host: to clean up the results. easy.
Actually, I'd like to see an actual jihad about this stuff sometime: it hasn't happened as far as I know.
But all the noise on Slashdot and elsewhere ought to have by now created some awareness among developers who work at places like Compaq, but still they continue to fail to uphold the GPL. Maybe if they sensed the GPL had some more teeth they might.
first, I had a typo: I said "file" where I meant to say "folder." Let me restate it because it is at odds with what you are saying: From inside of a fresh install of Netscape, not an upgrade, if you edit the bookmarks using their editor, and starting with what they give as defaults, if you delete all of the bookmarks and bookmark folders, they will all come back when you restart.
You can delete many, but not all. In particular, it is deleting one of the last couple of folders that triggers the behavior, something with a name like "Personal" though I may not be remembering that correctly. Also, I have not confirmed this behavior with 4.75, but it did work that way with many of the other 4.* versions, and both for Windows and Linux.
In my experience you can also edit the bookmark file as text without breaking anything.
I can understand them regenerating a bookmark file if there is none, but if I copy a pristine one from another install of netscape they should not overwrite it.
They also have another unnecessarily stupid feature. I make my bookmark file be my "display when launch" homepage (why doesn't everybody?) and I would also like to keep the same bookmark file on my HTTP server so I can get to it from other places. This cannot be done conveniently with Netscape because they won't let your bookmark file have the permissions that you'd need to let the webserver get to it, and symbolic links etc. don't work. That kind of shit has "Windows" written all over it, and whomsoever writes that kind of code for unix should be taken out and shot: the user is perfectly capable of securing her own config files.
you've been to college, Troller dude, because there's no way you would come up with that argument on your own. At one time I think it was part of a Nobel prize.
But you are remembering it slightly wrong. It is true that there is a declining marginal utility of wealth, meaning that as you go from 10 to 1,000,000 the additional 10 each time is worth less to you. This is the basis of the widely known concept of being "risk averse". We don't like taking risks because a loss of 10 is more painful than a gain of 10 is good.
But, there is no way to compare how much I value $10 at compared to how much you do. A greedy motherfucker like Bill Gates undoubtedly values $1 more than either of us does.
However, since utility is measured in monetary units, it is guaranteed to be linear. If you save 10 bucks on a book, you have 10 bucks in your pocket. You may not value it as much as the first 10 bucks you ever saved, but its effect on the economy is going to be the same as any other 10 bucks.
Do these free market models account for all the secondary effects putting pressure on economics?
No, they don't. But they do tell us the best way to minimize how fed up the average Joe gets. The problem with something like OPEC raising oil prices is that it does impose pain on people, and there is no avoiding it. It is important not to take measures which impose even more pain which is what governments did in the 70s, and European governments are prone to do today. Give the average Joe stuff to keep him happy, but keep the price of oil high. If things get really out of hand, whip up nationalistic fervor directed toward the OPEC countries. Cartels are immoral anyway, IMHO.
What we are seeing in
europe is that people don't take the "healthy economy makes for happy citizens" rethoric no more.
Europe does not have a healthy economy. They have fairly high unemployment because they pursue policies that generate it, but these programs are popular despite the fact that they generate the problems. The only way to get out of the mess is to educate people about economics.
Netscape has had another evil feature for awhile. If you delete all of their default bookmarks, they come back. I figured it out once, it was triggered by the "Personal Folder" or some name like that. You could delete all the bookmarks, but not that bookmark file.
I recently installed a new 4.75 and it absolutely refused to let me have my old bookmark file copied in. I copied it in and chowned it root
and made it user read only and they still deleted it. Fuckers. I copied my config files from another machine which had been upgraded and the problem went away. Must be a variable in prefs, but it's irritating as hell.
However, I think MS IE is far worse as it has so many features which are sneakier.
oh please.. a merchant has a right to charge every customer as much as that customer will pay for an
item.
that's true in some cases but not in many others. Supermarkets in most states are required to display the price for everyone. Automobiles, you dicker. It is illegal to separate groups of people into classifications and charge them separate prices, with a few exceptions. "Senior Citizen", "Student", "Business Traveler" are some categories that are allowed. Race, age (except v young and v old), fatness, ugliness, ability, and many other other potential categories are forbidden.
In pure economics which is what we're all arguing about with perfect price
differentiation (and perfect competition, equal goods, etc.), McDonald's would know your price
elasticity and charge you appropriately.
mmmm... you've included a misconception of your own. In "pure economics" with "perfect competition", you would also have perfect information about McDonald's productoin costs and also McDonald's would not be able to affect competitive market prices, so you would be in an equally powerful bargaining position and you would not need to pay more than marginal cost for the industry regardless of how much you would be willing to pay under other circumstances.
yeah, but AIM is the defacto standard. Geeks tend to put protocol before market share. DOS sucked, but MS sold a ton of them and it led to Windows hegemony, the Windows that also sucks.
AIM has a ton of people on it, and if you don't pay attention to what happens under the lid, it works. Leveraging that market share is a valuable thing to do, and it can be done today. Introduce better protocols, sure, but interoperate with AIM and more people will adopt. "I don't like AIM because they are not following the standard" does not undermine AOL at all. Most people will look and see: "AOL/AIM does something that I like. This other guy is talking about protocol and I don't even know what that is". The marketing way of thinking (there is something to learn from marketers, it's how they succeed and proliferate) is: people buy benefits, not features. consumers think "AIM features one protocol, NewStandard features a different one. AIM lets me communicate with all my friends today, NewStandard might someday. I'm going with AIM."
Think benefits, not features. Think of customer needs, not product capabilities.
You are definitely raising some important issues. Forgive me for not having addressed them, but it's hard to write everything in one post:)
Before I answer them directly, let me cut to the chase and try to get at what an economist thinks you are saying.
A common populist way of thinking is the following: oil prices go up and they hurt the working man. Rich guys can still afford to use lots of petrol "unnecessarily" in their yachts, while the working poor cannot afford to drive their cars to work. And this is commonly the argument used to justify government involvement.
The way to see that this is wrong thinking is the following. Let the government stay out of the oil market, and let the price of oil go very high. To make up for the hardship faced by the poor man, instead of artificially lowering the price of oil, let the government buy expensive oil and give it to the poor man. So, now the poor man has the oil he needs, and the rich man buys the amount he wants, but we've allowed the market price of oil to go high.
Guess what will happen: the poor man will think, "hey, this oil is really valuable. I wouldn't buy it at this price, so why should I waste it driving my car? I'd rather get up early and take the bus, and instead I'll sell my oil at this high price to that rich guy and he'll waste it in his yacht."
You see? in this scenario, the rich and poor men wind up up with the same amount of oil (none for the poor guy, lots for the rich guy) as they do in the "no government policy" case, but this time it was due to the poor man's choice. The difference, the reason it goes down easier, is how much wealth the poor man has compared to the rich, not how much oil.
So, first, learn to separate the issues. Wanting poor people to be wealthier is ok, but accomplish it directly by giving them welfare (hopefully in a way that encourages productivity rather than discouraging it), not by fooling them into wasting oil by making the price artificially low.
The rest of this I'm just going to repeat the argument. skip reading it if you are bored.
Have you been watching the news lately? There/is/ an oil shortage right
now, truck/taxi drivers in europe are blocking highways and oil refinaries for days now. Why are they
doing this? Because government is/not/ fixing oil prices
Yes, definitely true (that is why I used oil as an example:) but the truckers are turning their attention in the wrong direction. The reason that the price of oil has gone up in France is that the price of oil in France has truly gone up. I'm not making a joke, I'm saying it's not artificial, it's real. So, it's really important that those new higher prices filter out through the economy which will not happen if the government intercedes on oil prices. The economically optimal solution is for those truckers to raise the prices of what they do, or if it is no longer worth it, to stop doing it. Here's why: When the price of things that depend on oil reflect the price of oil, the "right" amount of oil will get consumed. If the government intercedes and artificially lowers the prices of oil, they will encourage more oil to be used, but oil is now expensive and its use should not be encouraged. The proper substitution of other sources of power or less energy intensive methods will not take place if oil is given an artificial advantage.
Now, I'm not a starry-eyed idealist. The truckers may have long-term contracts that did not anticipate this "unnatural" price increase (after all, OPEC is suddenly doing it on purpose) and I'm not saying the government should ignore the protests and send all the truckers into the poorhouse. Politically, or to forestall economic dislocations, the government probably must do something. But what the government should do should not be to artificially lower the price of oil. Oil consumption must be discouraged. The government can do things like give easy credit to make sure the economy does not slow down and so industry will have the resources to switch away from oil and give the truckers something else to do, and subsidize truckers to get out of the trucking business, or switch to rail if it is a more efficient energy user, or spend on searching for more oil.
A whole variety of options are available, but the options need to be one-time, short term things to make up for unanticipated switching costs with the goal of helping people adjust to consuming less oil.
The more the government lowers the price of oil, the more oil people will use, and that will drain money from the rest of the economy and waste it on expensive oil.
These people don't seem happy to me.
I bring the subject up because the average Joe needs to understand it so they don't put ridiculous pressure on their governments. The average Joe is unhappy (actually: less happy) because prices have gone up which is the same as wages going down, and that would make anybody unhappy. But what the average Joe needs to realize is that prices really did go up. Really. The average Joe cannot have the same lifestyle as before, standard of living must go down. It's as if you lived on a island and you picked coconuts and caught fish. But one year there are no coconuts: tax fish all you want, your income has still gone down, and so has everybody else's on the island.
Please don't get started about how this won't happen in the US, estimates are this shortage will hit the
US in about three month time.
It's not me who is out of touch here, it is you (I'm saying that in a friendly way:) It has already happened in the US. People in the industry can certainly see ahead three months and prices today have already moved to reflect the various probabilities for the future.
But the point I made a dozen times over in the above is: if the price of oil is allowed to "float" where it should, there will be no shortages. Oil will be expensive, but it will be available for purposes that justify the high price. Let people turn their thermostats down, and cut back on vacation driving so that oil will be available for ambulances, power for industry, etc.
Prices are the lifeblood of the economy, the way that economic decisions are made. Screw with prices and you've screwed the economy.
Why does what they are charging other people even come into the equation?
because it is information about the producers pricing function that you didn't have before.
Is a certain item that worth say,
$15.49 to you, suddenly become worth only $14.49 to you because they are selling it to someone else for
that much?
well, this is sort of obvious: people want the lowest price they can get. Duh. In Econ101 this concept is expressed as "consumer surplus".
If I would pay $30 for something, but I can get it for $20, I'm in a sense $10 worth of happy. The integral of all of the consumers and how extra happy they are is called the "consumer surplus", and it directly measures half of what is so good about free markets.
The other half applies to sellers. If they would sell it for $10, but they can get $20, the producer surplus would be said to be $10 also.
(BTW, The exact same math applies to controlled markets, but if the price or quantity deviates from the "market clearing price" the total size of the surpluses comes out less than maximum. This is why it is wrong for the government to "fix" the price of oil during shortages... overall happiness goes down.)
If a seller can determine exactly how much you are willing to pay and "price discriminate" to single you out, they can turn your surplus into their surplus. This keeps the overall "happiness" (economists call it "utility") the same, but it will also lead to your being less happy, and that's what we may be seeing here.
I say may be because people are making the assumption that the low price is "right" price and the high one is the "wrong" one. What Amazon may be trying to do is not figure out how much each individual will pay, but they may be trying to figure out what the average price should be, by experimenting with different random prices. Probably they are lying though, IMHO, and trying to screw each person on an individual basis. It fits in with some of the other stuff they've done, the one-click patent, changing the terms of the privacy agreement, etc.
this is an old discussion so I can't remember where I said various things. But I wanted to address this one piece to make my overall point clear:
Then, someone finds a backdoor, so that he doesn't have to go see all the
advertising. This does not automatically entitle him to do this, it just means that there was a flaw in the
design (security through obscurity), allowing unauthorized access...Or are you also going to whine when
Microsoft blocks DNS for non-MSN domains on those phone lines, claiming that it was your right?
Face it. AIM is a proprietary messaging system.
I did say in another post that it was not "fair use" of their proprietary standard or servers to circumvent the advertising if that's what pays for it, and the same for using their DNS as a tunnel.
But I don't want you to disparage whining like that. Whining is effective ("the squeaky wheel gets the grease") because companies hate bad PR. I favor open standards, and I dislike monopoly or dominant players, so I think hacking and whining are good strategies for undermining AOL's hegemony in this area. It's the populist version of embrace-extend-smother.
I haven't gone back to the discussion to see where our little exchange here fits in, so forgive me because I frankly can't remember what this was about.
However, reading this little bit it occurs to me that it might not be as simple as you think. Tivo makes the machine and the encryption (is it actually encrypted?), but the copyright holders are the movie/TV studios and they have no particular agreements with Tivo. So, I still think the video stored in a Tivo might be considered "fair use" copies: walks like a VCR, quacks like a VCR, it is a VCR, not a CSSed DVD.
Of course, IANAL, but I throw it out there as a thought.
I was going to make a joke about a company that had never heard of Slashdot (till they were sorry they did) but I can't remember the name of it... what was that "Linux" company that was going to go public but they didn't really have a distro of their own, then they put one up and it was totally ripped off and bogus... I can't remember their name. And what ever happened to them?
whoever the Russian mafia says. I mean, really, do they think they can keep this uncorrupted? There going to use all Russian models, and the winner is going to be a fat woman in a black dress like in those old Pepsi ads: "Shvimvear.... Shpacesuit..."
It might be considered a superior solution to
offload the terminal functions to a separate processor inside a dumb terminal. Also known as
'multiprocessing' in case you weren't aware of the term.
When companies compile databases about you, what you watch, etc., they can be merged with the other databases, what you buy, where you surf etc. Say you go to buy a car. The salesman looks you up, learns all about you and can drop a few little tidbits in conversation causing you to suddenly believe the guy's your long lost brother.
Boom. You've just overpaid this "trusted friend" for your car.
Doncha think it's neat when your dentist says, "so, how's the bicycling..." Jeez, he really remembers you. What a guy... but he's simply written it all down from the last time. Think of it that way and suddenly there's this sleazy cynic with his hands in your mouth.
Slashdot Mirror
but the *not* the time spent pursuing the civil case :) nor the cost adjusted for the risk that you might lose the case.
However, there's nothing to stop a civil case from being pursued on top of a criminal one. What hinders me is that if there is no criminal case, there is no investigation to determine who the hackers were. I don't know who they were. I'm not saying there should be a criminal case in this instance since I don't know who did it and damage was small compared to the other crimes that should be pursued. What I am saying is that in the cases where some someone is caught, the punishment should be very harsh to make the expected value come out right. Since geeks are good at math, they'll have no trouble sensing the deterrant if we make punishment sporadically extremely harsh.
My server has been compromised twice. Once trojans are installed, it's pointless to try to figure out what's safe and what's compromised. That sort of analysis takes a day or more, a day which could be spent reinstalling, which course is guaranteed to get finished. All of this activity takes place uncomfortably hunched among the racks in a closet during which time I and a bunch of other people can't get our mail. Dealing with the emergency takes place at some random time the black hats choose, and I have to immediately take several days out of my schedule fixing things.
So, my feeling is: death penalty is not harsh enough. People are doing it on purpose, and they're fucking up my life. The commercial losses are not measurably large, which is what gets the authorities involved, but the stress and disruption to me is huge.
Yeah, I know that teenagers are prank-prone, I was, but that's why their heads need to be put on stakes outside the gates of every town, so the other little twerps will see what they'll get too. It's not funny, it's not even a challenge, and the punishments should be very harsh.
The problem with your example is, it's not important if one sample is crisper than the other, it's how does each sound when compared to the reference/original.
+ insist on a word or phrase or meta term
- reject a word, phrase, or meta term
where the meta terms are
host:
url:
image:
link:
title:
...and many more
So, to find Signal 11 trolling on Slashdot and not on Kuro5hin:
+Signal_11 +troll* +host:slashdot -host:kuro5hin -timothy -Jon_Katz
where the _ will be treated as a non-breaking space and the * will get troll(s)(ed)(ing) as a wildcarded stem. Oh yeah, I've found the -timothy and -Jon_Katz to be useful for increasing relevance :)
Now that search might look complicated but I was trying to illustrate a lot. Just get in the habit of doing all your searches with +plus +prefixes , then add in -terms and +/- host: to clean up the results. easy.
But all the noise on Slashdot and elsewhere ought to have by now created some awareness among developers who work at places like Compaq, but still they continue to fail to uphold the GPL. Maybe if they sensed the GPL had some more teeth they might.
Ehh, check your facts, Europe != Netherlands.
In my experience you can also edit the bookmark file as text without breaking anything. I can understand them regenerating a bookmark file if there is none, but if I copy a pristine one from another install of netscape they should not overwrite it.
They also have another unnecessarily stupid feature. I make my bookmark file be my "display when launch" homepage (why doesn't everybody?) and I would also like to keep the same bookmark file on my HTTP server so I can get to it from other places. This cannot be done conveniently with Netscape because they won't let your bookmark file have the permissions that you'd need to let the webserver get to it, and symbolic links etc. don't work. That kind of shit has "Windows" written all over it, and whomsoever writes that kind of code for unix should be taken out and shot: the user is perfectly capable of securing her own config files.
But you are remembering it slightly wrong. It is true that there is a declining marginal utility of wealth, meaning that as you go from 10 to 1,000,000 the additional 10 each time is worth less to you. This is the basis of the widely known concept of being "risk averse". We don't like taking risks because a loss of 10 is more painful than a gain of 10 is good. But, there is no way to compare how much I value $10 at compared to how much you do. A greedy motherfucker like Bill Gates undoubtedly values $1 more than either of us does.
However, since utility is measured in monetary units, it is guaranteed to be linear. If you save 10 bucks on a book, you have 10 bucks in your pocket. You may not value it as much as the first 10 bucks you ever saved, but its effect on the economy is going to be the same as any other 10 bucks.
No, they don't. But they do tell us the best way to minimize how fed up the average Joe gets. The problem with something like OPEC raising oil prices is that it does impose pain on people, and there is no avoiding it. It is important not to take measures which impose even more pain which is what governments did in the 70s, and European governments are prone to do today. Give the average Joe stuff to keep him happy, but keep the price of oil high. If things get really out of hand, whip up nationalistic fervor directed toward the OPEC countries. Cartels are immoral anyway, IMHO.
What we are seeing in europe is that people don't take the "healthy economy makes for happy citizens" rethoric no more.
Europe does not have a healthy economy. They have fairly high unemployment because they pursue policies that generate it, but these programs are popular despite the fact that they generate the problems. The only way to get out of the mess is to educate people about economics.
I recently installed a new 4.75 and it absolutely refused to let me have my old bookmark file copied in. I copied it in and chowned it root and made it user read only and they still deleted it. Fuckers. I copied my config files from another machine which had been upgraded and the problem went away. Must be a variable in prefs, but it's irritating as hell.
However, I think MS IE is far worse as it has so many features which are sneakier.
that's true in some cases but not in many others. Supermarkets in most states are required to display the price for everyone. Automobiles, you dicker. It is illegal to separate groups of people into classifications and charge them separate prices, with a few exceptions. "Senior Citizen", "Student", "Business Traveler" are some categories that are allowed. Race, age (except v young and v old), fatness, ugliness, ability, and many other other potential categories are forbidden.
mmmm... you've included a misconception of your own. In "pure economics" with "perfect competition", you would also have perfect information about McDonald's productoin costs and also McDonald's would not be able to affect competitive market prices, so you would be in an equally powerful bargaining position and you would not need to pay more than marginal cost for the industry regardless of how much you would be willing to pay under other circumstances.
AIM has a ton of people on it, and if you don't pay attention to what happens under the lid, it works. Leveraging that market share is a valuable thing to do, and it can be done today. Introduce better protocols, sure, but interoperate with AIM and more people will adopt. "I don't like AIM because they are not following the standard" does not undermine AOL at all. Most people will look and see: "AOL/AIM does something that I like. This other guy is talking about protocol and I don't even know what that is". The marketing way of thinking (there is something to learn from marketers, it's how they succeed and proliferate) is: people buy benefits, not features. consumers think "AIM features one protocol, NewStandard features a different one. AIM lets me communicate with all my friends today, NewStandard might someday. I'm going with AIM."
Think benefits, not features. Think of customer needs, not product capabilities.
A common populist way of thinking is the following: oil prices go up and they hurt the working man. Rich guys can still afford to use lots of petrol "unnecessarily" in their yachts, while the working poor cannot afford to drive their cars to work. And this is commonly the argument used to justify government involvement.
The way to see that this is wrong thinking is the following. Let the government stay out of the oil market, and let the price of oil go very high. To make up for the hardship faced by the poor man, instead of artificially lowering the price of oil, let the government buy expensive oil and give it to the poor man. So, now the poor man has the oil he needs, and the rich man buys the amount he wants, but we've allowed the market price of oil to go high.
Guess what will happen: the poor man will think, "hey, this oil is really valuable. I wouldn't buy it at this price, so why should I waste it driving my car? I'd rather get up early and take the bus, and instead I'll sell my oil at this high price to that rich guy and he'll waste it in his yacht."
You see? in this scenario, the rich and poor men wind up up with the same amount of oil (none for the poor guy, lots for the rich guy) as they do in the "no government policy" case, but this time it was due to the poor man's choice. The difference, the reason it goes down easier, is how much wealth the poor man has compared to the rich, not how much oil.
So, first, learn to separate the issues. Wanting poor people to be wealthier is ok, but accomplish it directly by giving them welfare (hopefully in a way that encourages productivity rather than discouraging it), not by fooling them into wasting oil by making the price artificially low.
The rest of this I'm just going to repeat the argument. skip reading it if you are bored.
Have you been watching the news lately? There /is/ an oil shortage right
now, truck/taxi drivers in europe are blocking highways and oil refinaries for days now. Why are they
doing this? Because government is /not/ fixing oil prices
Yes, definitely true (that is why I used oil as an example :) but the truckers are turning their attention in the wrong direction. The reason that the price of oil has gone up in France is that the price of oil in France has truly gone up. I'm not making a joke, I'm saying it's not artificial, it's real. So, it's really important that those new higher prices filter out through the economy which will not happen if the government intercedes on oil prices. The economically optimal solution is for those truckers to raise the prices of what they do, or if it is no longer worth it, to stop doing it. Here's why: When the price of things that depend on oil reflect the price of oil, the "right" amount of oil will get consumed. If the government intercedes and artificially lowers the prices of oil, they will encourage more oil to be used, but oil is now expensive and its use should not be encouraged. The proper substitution of other sources of power or less energy intensive methods will not take place if oil is given an artificial advantage.
Now, I'm not a starry-eyed idealist. The truckers may have long-term contracts that did not anticipate this "unnatural" price increase (after all, OPEC is suddenly doing it on purpose) and I'm not saying the government should ignore the protests and send all the truckers into the poorhouse. Politically, or to forestall economic dislocations, the government probably must do something. But what the government should do should not be to artificially lower the price of oil. Oil consumption must be discouraged. The government can do things like give easy credit to make sure the economy does not slow down and so industry will have the resources to switch away from oil and give the truckers something else to do, and subsidize truckers to get out of the trucking business, or switch to rail if it is a more efficient energy user, or spend on searching for more oil.
A whole variety of options are available, but the options need to be one-time, short term things to make up for unanticipated switching costs with the goal of helping people adjust to consuming less oil. The more the government lowers the price of oil, the more oil people will use, and that will drain money from the rest of the economy and waste it on expensive oil.
These people don't seem happy to me.
I bring the subject up because the average Joe needs to understand it so they don't put ridiculous pressure on their governments. The average Joe is unhappy (actually: less happy) because prices have gone up which is the same as wages going down, and that would make anybody unhappy. But what the average Joe needs to realize is that prices really did go up. Really. The average Joe cannot have the same lifestyle as before, standard of living must go down. It's as if you lived on a island and you picked coconuts and caught fish. But one year there are no coconuts: tax fish all you want, your income has still gone down, and so has everybody else's on the island.
Please don't get started about how this won't happen in the US, estimates are this shortage will hit the US in about three month time.
It's not me who is out of touch here, it is you (I'm saying that in a friendly way :) It has already happened in the US. People in the industry can certainly see ahead three months and prices today have already moved to reflect the various probabilities for the future.
But the point I made a dozen times over in the above is: if the price of oil is allowed to "float" where it should, there will be no shortages. Oil will be expensive, but it will be available for purposes that justify the high price. Let people turn their thermostats down, and cut back on vacation driving so that oil will be available for ambulances, power for industry, etc.
Prices are the lifeblood of the economy, the way that economic decisions are made. Screw with prices and you've screwed the economy.
because it is information about the producers pricing function that you didn't have before.
Is a certain item that worth say, $15.49 to you, suddenly become worth only $14.49 to you because they are selling it to someone else for that much?
well, this is sort of obvious: people want the lowest price they can get. Duh. In Econ101 this concept is expressed as "consumer surplus".
If a seller can determine exactly how much you are willing to pay and "price discriminate" to single you out, they can turn your surplus into their surplus. This keeps the overall "happiness" (economists call it "utility") the same, but it will also lead to your being less happy, and that's what we may be seeing here.
I say may be because people are making the assumption that the low price is "right" price and the high one is the "wrong" one. What Amazon may be trying to do is not figure out how much each individual will pay, but they may be trying to figure out what the average price should be, by experimenting with different random prices. Probably they are lying though, IMHO, and trying to screw each person on an individual basis. It fits in with some of the other stuff they've done, the one-click patent, changing the terms of the privacy agreement, etc.
nuts.
Then, someone finds a backdoor, so that he doesn't have to go see all the advertising. This does not automatically entitle him to do this, it just means that there was a flaw in the design (security through obscurity), allowing unauthorized access...Or are you also going to whine when Microsoft blocks DNS for non-MSN domains on those phone lines, claiming that it was your right? Face it. AIM is a proprietary messaging system.
I did say in another post that it was not "fair use" of their proprietary standard or servers to circumvent the advertising if that's what pays for it, and the same for using their DNS as a tunnel.
But I don't want you to disparage whining like that. Whining is effective ("the squeaky wheel gets the grease") because companies hate bad PR. I favor open standards, and I dislike monopoly or dominant players, so I think hacking and whining are good strategies for undermining AOL's hegemony in this area. It's the populist version of embrace-extend-smother.
However, reading this little bit it occurs to me that it might not be as simple as you think. Tivo makes the machine and the encryption (is it actually encrypted?), but the copyright holders are the movie/TV studios and they have no particular agreements with Tivo. So, I still think the video stored in a Tivo might be considered "fair use" copies: walks like a VCR, quacks like a VCR, it is a VCR, not a CSSed DVD.
Of course, IANAL, but I throw it out there as a thought.
I was going to make a joke about a company that had never heard of Slashdot (till they were sorry they did) but I can't remember the name of it... what was that "Linux" company that was going to go public but they didn't really have a distro of their own, then they put one up and it was totally ripped off and bogus... I can't remember their name. And what ever happened to them?
whoever the Russian mafia says. I mean, really, do they think they can keep this uncorrupted? There going to use all Russian models, and the winner is going to be a fat woman in a black dress like in those old Pepsi ads: "Shvimvear.... Shpacesuit..."
where've you been? they just ran that show a couple of weeks ago... :) OK, OK, that was callous.
what goes with a blue dress? blew genes, of course
Gee, you'd better race out and buy one.
Boom. You've just overpaid this "trusted friend" for your car.
Doncha think it's neat when your dentist says, "so, how's the bicycling..." Jeez, he really remembers you. What a guy... but he's simply written it all down from the last time. Think of it that way and suddenly there's this sleazy cynic with his hands in your mouth.
you mean like videotaping? but videotaping is legally considered "fair use", so you'd be wrong.