No. The site assumes that if you post something about a product where the whole world can see it, then you consent to being used in an ad. Which seems quite reasonable to me.
The only problem is that it's illegal. You know, it says right in the submission.
Oh, come on, you're missing the big one.
on
Is SETI Worth It?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Weather satellites. You know, the ones that can give you many days' advance warning of hurricanes, so that the death count is in the tens instead of the thousands.
But that's what I don't get! How is it so exciting to force someone that's scared you'll fire them to have flirt-have sex with you? I don't crush ants and go, "ooh look at me, I'm so POWERFUL!"
Except that the AT&T plans could be cheaper if there wasn't a secret subsidy.
How do you claim to know that? Do you have AT&T accounting info? Are you taking into account the extra revenue generated by the volume of new subscribers?
Since AT&T's plans cost the same for the iPhone as for other phones, if it is truly the case that they could be cheaper without the subsidy, then they could be cheaper without. In that case, whether they pay Apple a portion of each activation is kind of irrelevant; you're paying more than what you judge to be the fair price anyway, iPhone or not.
If you don't want stuff you would be ashamed of displayed for everyone to know, don't do stuff that you would be ashamed of.
Privacy isn't just about shame. I have no control over what things would make me look bad in the eyes of other people, and how they might choose to act on this information. In other words, even if I'm not ashamed of some fact about myself, divulging that fact indiscriminately may lead to people who think I should be ashamed of it doing stuff that affects me negatively, both in material and emotional terms. Like denying me employment I'm qualified for, hanging me from a tree, etc.
Go read some Goffman. (Nice quote: "Stigma is a process by which the reaction of others spoils normal identity.")
All these limitations are because Apple also receives a subsidy from AT&T, which is a sort of hidden charge.
Nope, that's not any sort of hidden charge. You pay Apple $400 for the phone, and you pay AT&T each month of your contract for service (the same amount as for other plans).
Those are the only charges you're paying. The payments that AT&T makes to Apple are between the two of them--they're not charges to you in any veridical sense of the term. That's just AT&T choosing to take a hit from its iPhone contracts in order to secure exclusivity on a perceivedly one-of-a-kind phone.
[Apple has] $7.1 billion,/a> or so cash and cash equivalents, another $6.6 billion in short-term investments, 1.4 in accounts receivable. [...] Adobe, OTOH, has less than $600 million in cash and not quite $1.4 billion in short-term investments, and $5.667 billion in total assets. It seems to me that if Apple was desperate enough to buy Adobe, it could probably cut a check.
Um, why are you looking at Adobe's cash and equivalents at all?
If Apple were to buy 100% Adobe, it would pay Adobe's market cap + a premium (due to goodwill and market impact costs). Adobe's market cap is at about $27B. This is considerably more than Apple's cash and equivalents; but even that doesn't matter, because Apple's ability to acquire another company isn't limited by how much cash it has, but rather, by the options available for financing the purchase (e.g., borrowing, issuing new shares, stock swaps). What financing options are available to Apple depend on aspects of Apple's ongoing business other than how much cash they have (e.g., market cap, revenue).
They don't need to have 30 billion in cash right away to buy Adobe. There are other things they can do, that don't require that amount in cash:
Borrow the money. Apple is 5 times as big as Adobe, and has 6 times the revenue.
Raise more money through a stock issue. This one is unlikely, I'd think.
Pursue a merger through a stock swap, taking care that the people who control Apple end up controling the new, merged company. (In this case, it's not technically a purchase; current Adobe shareholders aren't bought off, they instead end up owning a slice of Apple+Adobe.)
This is a function of education and worldliness. Educated multilinguals who spend most of their time with other educated people, or only with people from their own native country, often fail to appreciate how little a lot of people know about the world at large beyond their own local culture.
Here's my favorite recent example: an immigrant Mexican waiter at a Chinese restaurant that I go often, when he was told by a fellow (also immigrant Mexican) waiter that I could speak Spanish but wasn't from Mexico, complimented me on how good my Spanish was, and asked me whether I had a Mexican parent. (Spanish is my first language; this happened in the SF Bay Area.) He also had a vague idea that people in Brazil speak Spanish, but in a different way. (His fellow Mexican waiter, who is clearly more educated and worldly, was correcting him throughout.)
While its fun/popular to make fun of the US and English speakers, few other language groups will praise someone for their broken sentences as they make their first attempts. Most people are pretty touchy when their tongue is mispronounced. Perhaps that is fair but I wouldn't say its English speakers looking down on others due to their language (perhaps other things but not language).
What's your basis for claiming this? I live in a majority/minority county of the USA, with a 45% foreign-born population, and I see plenty of US-born, "white" Americans get impatient and annoyed at all those people who can't speak English good 'round these parts.
I think the separation you wish us to conceive between the image of ethnic groups and the image of their languages is artificial, too.
You could argue that people should travel to see the world but when you have a nation that is large and varied as a majority of Europe, what's the need?
The USA is nowhere near as varied as even England, much less Europe. (Maybe you do need to travel to see the world.)
Wait a few years and most Americans will at least be bilingual, the schools have really picked up the amount of Spanish taught.
*ROFL*
Yeah, right. Not going to happen. We'll end up just with a bigger bunch of Anglo-Americans who took some Spanish in high school, and can do nothing with it beyond racist jokes that they think are clever.
Spanish is widely regarded as a "low" language in the USA. As long as this is true, there is a major sociolinguistic impediment to large numbers of non-Hispanics learning much Spanish.
I think this is a general rule for most languages. Paradoxically, people will stop commenting on how 'good' your language skills are only when you are fluent and they don't notice your shortcomings. If someone politely comments that you speak very well in a particular language, most likely you still have some way to go.
That's not my experience. Really, you have to play it by ear when you are given coments like that. When you can speak a language very fluently, it usually does really mean that the person is surprised at how well you can speak the language. (And it gets pretty damn annoying after a while.)
If they'd have been forthcoming with their employees that the world was not all roses, they could have had a chance to get out without needing "illegal insider trading".
If they'd been "forthcoming" with their employees in a way that would satisfy what you seem to expect of them, they'd have given their employees privileged information about the prospects of the company which enabled them to act on it before it was reported to the public at large. Guess what the name is for this? Yup, insider trading.
Of course the reason that the Enron execs didn't tell anybody about the company's real state is because they were selfish. But what you're suggesting they should have done is illegal, and rightly so.
They also followed the advice and hype that came from the Enron executives. They were told that their company was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Sure, they could have sought advice from outside, but why should they expect their employers to be giving them a load of BS?
Because their employers have a conflict of interest, of course!
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree then on whether or not executives are morally obligated to make decisions based on morals.
The ethical quandary you're talking about here is completely moot. Executives of publicly traded companies have the obligation to release truthful information about the company to the public at large, and to not act or enable others to act on that information before they release it. These guys were crassly lying to the public about the company's finances. The right thing to do would have been to stop lying, and publically admit to having lied. Or even better: to not start lying at all.
As it is, SCO owes Novell loads of money. Can Novell stop this sale and/or get the money?
Nope. A change in ownership t doesn't alter any of SCO's obligations towards Novell, nor does it alter SCO's financials. All it does is change one set of owners for another.
Remember stockholders enjoy limited liability; SCO investors can't be held liable for the company's actions for a larger amount than their investment. Novell can't go against SCO shareholders, and SCO shareholders can dispose of their equity as they want; it's none of Novell's business.
The only place where I think he's totally off base is calling the brain "a patchwork". It's not, in fact. It's extremely finely tuned to do what we need it to do...It makes us ferociously competitive animals, and that is proven rather than disproven, by all the security problems that we've been having. If we weren't competitive, we wouldn't have problems. The fact that not everyone works at the same level is irrelevant.
Ah. So, unlike Schneier, you are both an evolutionary biologist and a neuroscientist. Thanks for setting the record straight.
If you read Schneier's regular blog, you'll see that he regularly talks about security topics in general, not just IT security. The tagging of this talk as being narrowly related to that may be a case of inaccurate reporting; given what Schneier regularly talks about, I'd have been surprised if his talk hadn't covered non-IT security topics.
Imagine that every time a woman was raped, the police chose from a hat and arrested and tried a random person.
Yeah, and imagine they always picked a black guy, and then always judged and executed him the same day, in front of a cheering crowd who would somewhat prefer lynching him, but is OK with the proceedings as they are.
Would that make your wife safer on the streets alone at night? Having a random guy in jail while the real rapist is still out on the hunt?
Ground control to clambake: rape by strangers in dark alleys at night only accounts for a minority of rapes. Most rape is acquaintance rape. Please stop using the dark alley scenario as the stereotypical, representative rape case; it perpetuates the myth that "nice" guys don't rape, a myth that's very convenient for said "nice" guys.
QoS is legal, and it should exist. Prioritizing classes of traffic is OK, provided the classes are generic classes of traffic (e.g., email, web, ftp, p2p, voip, etc).
There are two big, intimately related problems here:
It's very hard to say what the classes of traffic should be, and which tier they should fall into. E.g., should downloading a big file over http be on the same class as displaying a webpage?
For the scheme to work at its best, all networks that relay your packets must agree about priorities to some extent. It doesn't matter if your home router prioritizes your VoIP traffic if your upstream treats it as bulk.
I have a creeping suspicion that the only way to solve this problem is to avoid deciding a priori what traffic should be which category, and simply sell traffic for each tier at a different rate. Then it's up to subscribers and their applications to categorize traffic into the tiers according to their own criteria and budget. An alternative idea: you pay a flat rate, but you have different bandwidth caps for different QoS tiers. The highest priority tier should have enough bandwidth for however many VoIP conversations you wish to have at the same time, the "normal" tier has the regular traffic bandwidth figures sold now, and the bulk one has no caps on maximum bandwidth, but is preempted by other tiers.
The biggest obstacle to this kind of scheme, of course, is software support and UI issues.
If you have any backing for your claim that the internet somehow relied on asymmetrical bandwidth selling [...]
Come on, this isn't rocket science. Shared communication networks, whether it's TV, radio, the telephone network or the internet, are built to share a limited amount of bandwidth among a number of users who would overwhelm it if they all tried to use the bandwidth independently at once.
In traditional TV and radio, the mechanism is to use broadcast: everybody can tune into the station at once, but they will all get the same signal. In the telephone network, the mechanism is a cap on the number of circuits: if everybody tried to make a call at the same time, all the circuits would get busy, and some people thus wouldn't be able to call. In wide area computer networks, everybody can get full bandwidth to non-local networks only if they don't get it all the time.
Suppose you had a network that allowed everybody to get full bandwidth all the time, instantanesouly, to everybody else in the network, with content completely distinct from everybody else. What would the topology of that network be? Essentially, it would have a permanent full-bandwidth connection between every node to any other (i.e., a graph that has an edge connecting every pair of vertices). Building such a network is economically unfeasible; the question is what to sacrifice.
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The only problem is that it's illegal. You know, it says right in the submission.
Weather satellites. You know, the ones that can give you many days' advance warning of hurricanes, so that the death count is in the tens instead of the thousands.
Well... good for you.
How do you claim to know that? Do you have AT&T accounting info? Are you taking into account the extra revenue generated by the volume of new subscribers?
Since AT&T's plans cost the same for the iPhone as for other phones, if it is truly the case that they could be cheaper without the subsidy, then they could be cheaper without. In that case, whether they pay Apple a portion of each activation is kind of irrelevant; you're paying more than what you judge to be the fair price anyway, iPhone or not.
Privacy isn't just about shame. I have no control over what things would make me look bad in the eyes of other people, and how they might choose to act on this information. In other words, even if I'm not ashamed of some fact about myself, divulging that fact indiscriminately may lead to people who think I should be ashamed of it doing stuff that affects me negatively, both in material and emotional terms. Like denying me employment I'm qualified for, hanging me from a tree, etc.
Go read some Goffman. (Nice quote: "Stigma is a process by which the reaction of others spoils normal identity.")
Nope, that's not any sort of hidden charge. You pay Apple $400 for the phone, and you pay AT&T each month of your contract for service (the same amount as for other plans).
Those are the only charges you're paying. The payments that AT&T makes to Apple are between the two of them--they're not charges to you in any veridical sense of the term. That's just AT&T choosing to take a hit from its iPhone contracts in order to secure exclusivity on a perceivedly one-of-a-kind phone.
Not knowing the finer points of crazy English spelling doesn't make somebody an idiot.
Um, why are you looking at Adobe's cash and equivalents at all?
If Apple were to buy 100% Adobe, it would pay Adobe's market cap + a premium (due to goodwill and market impact costs). Adobe's market cap is at about $27B. This is considerably more than Apple's cash and equivalents; but even that doesn't matter, because Apple's ability to acquire another company isn't limited by how much cash it has, but rather, by the options available for financing the purchase (e.g., borrowing, issuing new shares, stock swaps). What financing options are available to Apple depend on aspects of Apple's ongoing business other than how much cash they have (e.g., market cap, revenue).
This is a function of education and worldliness. Educated multilinguals who spend most of their time with other educated people, or only with people from their own native country, often fail to appreciate how little a lot of people know about the world at large beyond their own local culture.
Here's my favorite recent example: an immigrant Mexican waiter at a Chinese restaurant that I go often, when he was told by a fellow (also immigrant Mexican) waiter that I could speak Spanish but wasn't from Mexico, complimented me on how good my Spanish was, and asked me whether I had a Mexican parent. (Spanish is my first language; this happened in the SF Bay Area.) He also had a vague idea that people in Brazil speak Spanish, but in a different way. (His fellow Mexican waiter, who is clearly more educated and worldly, was correcting him throughout.)
What's your basis for claiming this? I live in a majority/minority county of the USA, with a 45% foreign-born population, and I see plenty of US-born, "white" Americans get impatient and annoyed at all those people who can't speak English good 'round these parts.
I think the separation you wish us to conceive between the image of ethnic groups and the image of their languages is artificial, too.
The USA is nowhere near as varied as even England, much less Europe. (Maybe you do need to travel to see the world.)
*ROFL*
Yeah, right. Not going to happen. We'll end up just with a bigger bunch of Anglo-Americans who took some Spanish in high school, and can do nothing with it beyond racist jokes that they think are clever.
Spanish is widely regarded as a "low" language in the USA. As long as this is true, there is a major sociolinguistic impediment to large numbers of non-Hispanics learning much Spanish.
The point isn't whether it is news. The point is that is shouldn't be news.
That's not my experience. Really, you have to play it by ear when you are given coments like that. When you can speak a language very fluently, it usually does really mean that the person is surprised at how well you can speak the language. (And it gets pretty damn annoying after a while.)
If they'd been "forthcoming" with their employees in a way that would satisfy what you seem to expect of them, they'd have given their employees privileged information about the prospects of the company which enabled them to act on it before it was reported to the public at large. Guess what the name is for this? Yup, insider trading.
Of course the reason that the Enron execs didn't tell anybody about the company's real state is because they were selfish. But what you're suggesting they should have done is illegal, and rightly so.
Because their employers have a conflict of interest, of course!
The ethical quandary you're talking about here is completely moot. Executives of publicly traded companies have the obligation to release truthful information about the company to the public at large, and to not act or enable others to act on that information before they release it. These guys were crassly lying to the public about the company's finances. The right thing to do would have been to stop lying, and publically admit to having lied. Or even better: to not start lying at all.
Where did I claim such a thing?
Also note that your formulation implies that the shareholders owe the company's debt. I assume you know better.
Nope. A change in ownership t doesn't alter any of SCO's obligations towards Novell, nor does it alter SCO's financials. All it does is change one set of owners for another.
Remember stockholders enjoy limited liability; SCO investors can't be held liable for the company's actions for a larger amount than their investment. Novell can't go against SCO shareholders, and SCO shareholders can dispose of their equity as they want; it's none of Novell's business.
Ah. So, unlike Schneier, you are both an evolutionary biologist and a neuroscientist. Thanks for setting the record straight.
If you read Schneier's regular blog, you'll see that he regularly talks about security topics in general, not just IT security. The tagging of this talk as being narrowly related to that may be a case of inaccurate reporting; given what Schneier regularly talks about, I'd have been surprised if his talk hadn't covered non-IT security topics.
Schneier is neither an evolutionary biologist nor a neuroscientist. Why is his bad opinion on these matters news?
Important hint: DON'T PICK THE FISH.
Yeah, and imagine they always picked a black guy, and then always judged and executed him the same day, in front of a cheering crowd who would somewhat prefer lynching him, but is OK with the proceedings as they are.
Ground control to clambake: rape by strangers in dark alleys at night only accounts for a minority of rapes. Most rape is acquaintance rape. Please stop using the dark alley scenario as the stereotypical, representative rape case; it perpetuates the myth that "nice" guys don't rape, a myth that's very convenient for said "nice" guys.
There are two big, intimately related problems here:
It's very hard to say what the classes of traffic should be, and which tier they should fall into. E.g., should downloading a big file over http be on the same class as displaying a webpage?
For the scheme to work at its best, all networks that relay your packets must agree about priorities to some extent. It doesn't matter if your home router prioritizes your VoIP traffic if your upstream treats it as bulk.
I have a creeping suspicion that the only way to solve this problem is to avoid deciding a priori what traffic should be which category, and simply sell traffic for each tier at a different rate. Then it's up to subscribers and their applications to categorize traffic into the tiers according to their own criteria and budget. An alternative idea: you pay a flat rate, but you have different bandwidth caps for different QoS tiers. The highest priority tier should have enough bandwidth for however many VoIP conversations you wish to have at the same time, the "normal" tier has the regular traffic bandwidth figures sold now, and the bulk one has no caps on maximum bandwidth, but is preempted by other tiers.
The biggest obstacle to this kind of scheme, of course, is software support and UI issues.
Come on, this isn't rocket science. Shared communication networks, whether it's TV, radio, the telephone network or the internet, are built to share a limited amount of bandwidth among a number of users who would overwhelm it if they all tried to use the bandwidth independently at once.
In traditional TV and radio, the mechanism is to use broadcast: everybody can tune into the station at once, but they will all get the same signal. In the telephone network, the mechanism is a cap on the number of circuits: if everybody tried to make a call at the same time, all the circuits would get busy, and some people thus wouldn't be able to call. In wide area computer networks, everybody can get full bandwidth to non-local networks only if they don't get it all the time.
Suppose you had a network that allowed everybody to get full bandwidth all the time, instantanesouly, to everybody else in the network, with content completely distinct from everybody else. What would the topology of that network be? Essentially, it would have a permanent full-bandwidth connection between every node to any other (i.e., a graph that has an edge connecting every pair of vertices). Building such a network is economically unfeasible; the question is what to sacrifice.
Yeah. And when developers say that, 95% of the time, you can file it under "Blame the User."
Because I studied it for about 8 years, 5 of which were with some of the most reknowned linguists in the USA?
You mister righto, me no speako goodo englisho. Me henceofortho shutupo mine moutho.