Actually, the car maker issue is a bit more complex. When Detroit introduced digital speedos in the mid-80s, their assumption was: "Digital is cool and new, so the young people will want these, but the old people will want the analog that to which they've become accustomed."
In fact, it turned out the other way around. Older folks loved the digital readouts with their big, easy to read numbers. Younger people loved the analog dials with their "sporty" image (think of the needles twitching when you rev the engine). So, we now have digital dashes in Cadillacs and Buicks, and analog dashes in Corvettes and Mustangs.
Exactly my point. Tivo is in 1% of US households (last year, 1%). The households that have it tend to be tech-savvy, educated, and richer than average (much like the Slashdot crowd, at least on the first two). I'd say TiVo owners are _FAR_ from a representative sample of TV viewers.
"I just can't help but think that if real viewing stats were used as predictors of progamming popularity, we might have more stuff like Firefly, Mythbusters, Penn & Teller's Bullshit, etc. and less Everyone Loves Raymond, Friends, Frasier, or a million indistinct reality TV shows."
What you really mean to say is "I just can't help but think that if real viewing stats of Slashdot readers only were used as predictors of progamming popularity, we might have more stuff like Firefly, Mythbusters, Penn & Teller's Bullshit, etc. and less Everyone Loves Raymond, Friends, Frasier, or a million indistinct reality TV shows."
Face it, networks show what people watch, and people watch dreck. Nobody's ever gone out of business appealing to the lowest common denominator.
"Even better, since unlike cable, you have your own link to the ISP, so they give you a pretty decent usenet account and don't care if you leech 10 GB/s a day from it."
Well, not really. While the "DSL gives you your own link" line is pretty good marketing spin from the telcos, it's true only in a technical, not practical sense. While you do have a connection directly to the DSLAM, that DSLAM is oversubscribed (i.e. the pipe going to the backbone from the DSLAM is much smaller than # of DSL lines * 768kbps per line). So the effect is much the same on either cable or DSL - if everybody used their max bandwidth all (or even vaguely close to all - oversubscription is usually in the range of 10-40X), the system would collapse. Since, however, users use their connections with different intensity and at different times, when users DO use their connections, they will (on a well-engineered network) see the speeds promised.
Even if people claim not to like advertising, they still respond to it. While many of the people on the do-not-call registry are folks who really won't buy anything from telemarketers, a notable percentage of people will answer yes to BOTH of the following questions:
1. "Do you want to be on the do-not-call list?" 2. "Would you like to sign up for credit card X?" (after being telemarketed)
Advertisers tend to be very savvy about actual (rather than wished-for) human behavior, and ad prices tend to reflect what actually works in terms of generating sales (i.e. CPM, or Cost Per Thousand, is higher for targeted Google keyword ads than for generic banners).
The key issue for search warrants related to physical (i.e. non-cyber) evidence is "plain sight." In other words, if the cops get a warrant to search your apt for drugs, and you have an illegal machine gun lying on the kitchen table, that's admissable. If they've got a warrant to search for drugs, and they find kiddie porn on your (turned-off) computer, that likely wouldn't be admissable, since there's no way that a search for packets of white powder could reasonably involve booting up the PC.
"Investors don't buy stock in companies like SCO. Speculators do. SCO stock isn't an investment, it's a wager."
It's a fuzzy line, though. When you "invest" in ExxonMobil, you're "wagering" that tomorrow's paper won't tell the world that some MIT prof has perfected cold fusion, and is making the technology available for free to the world. All investments are to some degree wagers/speculation, SCO is just somewhat more speculative than most.
"Shorting includes a set date when you promise to buy back the shorted shares. If you know SCO's going down, but guess wrong as to when, and their stock is still elevated when your date comes, you get mauled (hence the requirement for collateral)."
Nope, that's buying a put option. There's no expiration date on a short (except for an event, such as a company sale).
Well, part of the reason there so much more upfront requirement for hardware than software is that it's a LOT easier to fix SW problems that arise than HW problems. You find a SW problem in 6 months? Make a patch available. You find a HW problem? Have everybody rip out their boxes and ship 'em back for replacement/upgrade. Whole different kettle of fish.
A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator,
I hardly think that someone who is up for election in 11 months can be considered a "dictator." Also, think of Bush's problems getting the Energy Bill, appellate judgeships, etc. through Congress; if he's a "dictator," he's a pretty damn ineffective one.
stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship,
Last I checked, everyone could still come and go as they pleased, engage in market transactions, write newspapers and magazines, send letters to the editor, and march on Washington in large numbers. Hardly an environment of "terror and censorship." Again, given the press coverage, if Bush is engaging in "censorship," he's doing a pretty lousy job.
and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
We aren't doing that badly. We could do better (Gitmo bothers the hell out of me), but given that Arabs and those of Arab descent, who represent a very small share of the US population (~1%) represent a very large share of those who have committed terrorist acts on US soil in the last decade (90-95%, depending on whether you count Terry Nichols, or just Tim McVeigh), some focus isn't unreasonable.
Logical reason: providing this stuff is expensive. If you're located at a major access hub (Hudson St in NYC, for example), bandwidth IS cheap ($50/Mbps/month, for committed bandwidth, or thereabouts). If you're a retail customer, then there's the cost of building the infrastructure to you. This is $1000 even in an _extremely_ high density case, (i.e. everyone in your neighborhood also takes the service), and can be much higher. Pulling fiber can cost $10 a foot, and sometimes even more, especially when the plant is underground (digging up the street, repaving, etc.). If a telecom provider has to pull 2000 feet of fiber to get to you (pretty typical, often even more), that can be $20k and up of construction costs. When you then add in operations costs (sysadmins and NOC employees don't work for free, nor does switching/routing gear maintain itself, customer care reps gotta eat, etc.), you're looking at only ~50% of the revenue you take in going to pay back those capital costs.
The real issue isn't whether we'd be burning up a $13BN investment, that money has already been spent. The question is whether spending an additional $1-2BN per year going forward to maintain the ISS is worth it, or just throwing good money after bad.
Bizarrely enough, there's actually a US Supreme Court Decision on this (Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304 (1893)). There was a tariff on fruits, but not veggies, imported from the West Indies. Plaintiff claimed that, since tomatoes are fruits, his imported tomatoes should be exempt from the tariff. The Supremes begged to differ:
"Botanically speaking, tomatoes are the fruit of a vine, just as are cucumbers, squashes, beans and peas. But in the common language of the people... all these are vegetables, which are grown in kitchen gardens, and which, whether eaten cooked or raw, are, like potatoes, carrots, parsnips, turnips, beets, cauliflower, cabbage, celery and lettuce, usually served at dinner in, with or after the soup, fish or meats which constitute the principal part of the repast, and not, like fruits generally, as dessert.
"The attempt to class tomatoes with fruit is not unlike a recent attempt to class beans as seeds, of which Mr. Justice Bradley, speaking for this court, said: 'We do not see why they should be classified as seeds, any more than walnuts should be so classified. Both are seeds in the language of botany or natural history, but not in commerce nor in common parlance.'"
Hence, tomatoes are legally vegetables in the US, botany be damned.
If StarOffice, with Sun's clout behind it, can't make a dent in the MS Office monopoly, what makes anyone think a tiny house like Ability will be able to. So long as MS keeps its licensing fees just below the threshhold where it becomes worth it for an enterprise to switch (and retrain a huge number of people, and deal with the % of files where the formatting won't transfer cleanly, etc.), the biggest competitor for Office 2003 is Office 2000.
I didn't say "a majority of US voters voted for Bush," I said the American people elected him, under the Constitutionally-defined process. In other words, he got a majority of the Electoral College. Wacky? Yup. Evidence that we should scrap the Electoral College? Yup. The correct result under the rules? Yup.
Note also that the Gore campaign had circulated talking points just prior to the 2000 election so their operatives would be prepared to explain why even though GORE lost the popular vote and won the Electoral College, that was a legitimate result. They thought that it would go that way, not the way it turned out.
"the American people should have some say in a situation like went on in Iraq. I didn't vote for the present administration..."
Oh, so the important thing isn't that the American people didn't vote for the current administration (they did), but that YOU didn't vote for the current adminstration. Sorry, thought we were living in a democracy there for a second, thanks for reminding me that the other 279,999,999 of us don't really matter, it's YOUR opinion that counts.
I presume you mean hordes, as in enormous numbers (e.g. the Mongol Horde), not hoards, as in enormous caches of something stashed away (e.g. hoarding canned goods after the nuclear apocalypse). Hoardes just isn't a word. Is spellchecking the story description _really_ that hard?
"20% of the people in the world do not have enough to eat."
Wrong. 18% of people in DEVELOPING COUNTRIES don't have enough to eat, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. 12% of the global population is malnourished. The numbers are huge enough as it is without getting them wrong.
States certainly can't tax transactions that go _through_ their state (i.e. Oklahoma can't tax an Amazon transaction between my computer in Massachusetts and their server in Seattle just because that transaction takes place over backbone lines), but they certainly can tax transactions that take place with local buyers. The rules are exactly the same for internet and catalog purchases:
1. If your state has a sales tax, you are legally obliged to pay it, even on things you buy out of state. It's called a use tax - if I buy a computer from Dell in TX, and have it shipped to Mass, I'm liable for the 5% Mass tax. 2. The vendor (i.e. Dell) is only obliged to COLLECT the tax if they have a physical presence (called "nexus") in Mass. Otherwise, it's my responsibility to pay the tax directly to the state. In practice, nobody does this, so most internet transactions _appear_ tax free, although they're technically not.
Slashdot Mirror
As my stats professor was fond of saying, "Correlation does not equal causation, but it should make you damn suspicious."
"Bill Gates and Warren Bruffet wear horable clothing. I've seen nicer suits at the local Goodwill than those two wear."
I heard Buffett speak recently, and as he put it "I buy expensive suits, and somehow make them _look_ cheap." It's not his wallet, it's his posture.
"The only Disney movies I've actually paid to see in the last few years were all Pixar animations."
If you were a six-year-old, I think Disney would be worried.
Actually, the car maker issue is a bit more complex. When Detroit introduced digital speedos in the mid-80s, their assumption was: "Digital is cool and new, so the young people will want these, but the old people will want the analog that to which they've become accustomed."
In fact, it turned out the other way around. Older folks loved the digital readouts with their big, easy to read numbers. Younger people loved the analog dials with their "sporty" image (think of the needles twitching when you rev the engine). So, we now have digital dashes in Cadillacs and Buicks, and analog dashes in Corvettes and Mustangs.
"Firefly was a #1 Season Pass on Tivo."
Exactly my point. Tivo is in 1% of US households (last year, 1%). The households that have it tend to be tech-savvy, educated, and richer than average (much like the Slashdot crowd, at least on the first two). I'd say TiVo owners are _FAR_ from a representative sample of TV viewers.
"I just can't help but think that if real viewing stats were used as predictors of progamming popularity, we might have more stuff like Firefly, Mythbusters, Penn & Teller's Bullshit, etc. and less Everyone Loves Raymond, Friends, Frasier, or a million indistinct reality TV shows."
What you really mean to say is "I just can't help but think that if real viewing stats of Slashdot readers only were used as predictors of progamming popularity, we might have more stuff like Firefly, Mythbusters, Penn & Teller's Bullshit, etc. and less Everyone Loves Raymond, Friends, Frasier, or a million indistinct reality TV shows."
Face it, networks show what people watch, and people watch dreck. Nobody's ever gone out of business appealing to the lowest common denominator.
"Even better, since unlike cable, you have your own link to the ISP, so they give you a pretty decent usenet account and don't care if you leech 10 GB/s a day from it."
Well, not really. While the "DSL gives you your own link" line is pretty good marketing spin from the telcos, it's true only in a technical, not practical sense. While you do have a connection directly to the DSLAM, that DSLAM is oversubscribed (i.e. the pipe going to the backbone from the DSLAM is much smaller than # of DSL lines * 768kbps per line). So the effect is much the same on either cable or DSL - if everybody used their max bandwidth all (or even vaguely close to all - oversubscription is usually in the range of 10-40X), the system would collapse. Since, however, users use their connections with different intensity and at different times, when users DO use their connections, they will (on a well-engineered network) see the speeds promised.
Even if people claim not to like advertising, they still respond to it. While many of the people on the do-not-call registry are folks who really won't buy anything from telemarketers, a notable percentage of people will answer yes to BOTH of the following questions:
1. "Do you want to be on the do-not-call list?"
2. "Would you like to sign up for credit card X?" (after being telemarketed)
Advertisers tend to be very savvy about actual (rather than wished-for) human behavior, and ad prices tend to reflect what actually works in terms of generating sales (i.e. CPM, or Cost Per Thousand, is higher for targeted Google keyword ads than for generic banners).
The key issue for search warrants related to physical (i.e. non-cyber) evidence is "plain sight." In other words, if the cops get a warrant to search your apt for drugs, and you have an illegal machine gun lying on the kitchen table, that's admissable. If they've got a warrant to search for drugs, and they find kiddie porn on your (turned-off) computer, that likely wouldn't be admissable, since there's no way that a search for packets of white powder could reasonably involve booting up the PC.
"Investors don't buy stock in companies like SCO. Speculators do. SCO stock isn't an investment, it's a wager."
It's a fuzzy line, though. When you "invest" in ExxonMobil, you're "wagering" that tomorrow's paper won't tell the world that some MIT prof has perfected cold fusion, and is making the technology available for free to the world. All investments are to some degree wagers/speculation, SCO is just somewhat more speculative than most.
"Shorting includes a set date when you promise to buy back the shorted shares. If you know SCO's going down, but guess wrong as to when, and their stock is still elevated when your date comes, you get mauled (hence the requirement for collateral)."
Nope, that's buying a put option. There's no expiration date on a short (except for an event, such as a company sale).
Well, part of the reason there so much more upfront requirement for hardware than software is that it's a LOT easier to fix SW problems that arise than HW problems. You find a SW problem in 6 months? Make a patch available. You find a HW problem? Have everybody rip out their boxes and ship 'em back for replacement/upgrade. Whole different kettle of fish.
A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator,
I hardly think that someone who is up for election in 11 months can be considered a "dictator." Also, think of Bush's problems getting the Energy Bill, appellate judgeships, etc. through Congress; if he's a "dictator," he's a pretty damn ineffective one.
stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship,
Last I checked, everyone could still come and go as they pleased, engage in market transactions, write newspapers and magazines, send letters to the editor, and march on Washington in large numbers. Hardly an environment of "terror and censorship." Again, given the press coverage, if Bush is engaging in "censorship," he's doing a pretty lousy job.
and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
We aren't doing that badly. We could do better (Gitmo bothers the hell out of me), but given that Arabs and those of Arab descent, who represent a very small share of the US population (~1%) represent a very large share of those who have committed terrorist acts on US soil in the last decade (90-95%, depending on whether you count Terry Nichols, or just Tim McVeigh), some focus isn't unreasonable.
Logical reason: providing this stuff is expensive. If you're located at a major access hub (Hudson St in NYC, for example), bandwidth IS cheap ($50/Mbps/month, for committed bandwidth, or thereabouts). If you're a retail customer, then there's the cost of building the infrastructure to you. This is $1000 even in an _extremely_ high density case, (i.e. everyone in your neighborhood also takes the service), and can be much higher. Pulling fiber can cost $10 a foot, and sometimes even more, especially when the plant is underground (digging up the street, repaving, etc.). If a telecom provider has to pull 2000 feet of fiber to get to you (pretty typical, often even more), that can be $20k and up of construction costs. When you then add in operations costs (sysadmins and NOC employees don't work for free, nor does switching/routing gear maintain itself, customer care reps gotta eat, etc.), you're looking at only ~50% of the revenue you take in going to pay back those capital costs.
The real issue isn't whether we'd be burning up a $13BN investment, that money has already been spent. The question is whether spending an additional $1-2BN per year going forward to maintain the ISS is worth it, or just throwing good money after bad.
BTW, it's Unabomber, not Unibomber.
Um, the guy quoted in this article is Gore Vidal, the author, not Al Gore, the failed presidential candidate.
Bizarrely enough, there's actually a US Supreme Court Decision on this (Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304 (1893)). There was a tariff on fruits, but not veggies, imported from the West Indies. Plaintiff claimed that, since tomatoes are fruits, his imported tomatoes should be exempt from the tariff. The Supremes begged to differ:
... all these are vegetables, which are grown in kitchen gardens, and which, whether eaten cooked or raw, are, like potatoes, carrots, parsnips, turnips, beets, cauliflower, cabbage, celery and lettuce, usually served at dinner in, with or after the soup, fish or meats which constitute the principal part of the repast, and not, like fruits generally, as dessert.
"Botanically speaking, tomatoes are the fruit of a vine, just as are cucumbers, squashes, beans and peas. But in the common language of the people
"The attempt to class tomatoes with fruit is not unlike a recent attempt to class beans as seeds, of which Mr. Justice Bradley, speaking for this court, said: 'We do not see why they should be classified as seeds, any more than walnuts should be so classified. Both are seeds in the language of botany or natural history, but not in commerce nor in common parlance.'"
Hence, tomatoes are legally vegetables in the US, botany be damned.
If StarOffice, with Sun's clout behind it, can't make a dent in the MS Office monopoly, what makes anyone think a tiny house like Ability will be able to. So long as MS keeps its licensing fees just below the threshhold where it becomes worth it for an enterprise to switch (and retrain a huge number of people, and deal with the % of files where the formatting won't transfer cleanly, etc.), the biggest competitor for Office 2003 is Office 2000.
I didn't say "a majority of US voters voted for Bush," I said the American people elected him, under the Constitutionally-defined process. In other words, he got a majority of the Electoral College. Wacky? Yup. Evidence that we should scrap the Electoral College? Yup. The correct result under the rules? Yup.
Note also that the Gore campaign had circulated talking points just prior to the 2000 election so their operatives would be prepared to explain why even though GORE lost the popular vote and won the Electoral College, that was a legitimate result. They thought that it would go that way, not the way it turned out.
"the American people should have some say in a situation like went on in Iraq. I didn't vote for the present administration..."
Oh, so the important thing isn't that the American people didn't vote for the current administration (they did), but that YOU didn't vote for the current adminstration. Sorry, thought we were living in a democracy there for a second, thanks for reminding me that the other 279,999,999 of us don't really matter, it's YOUR opinion that counts.
I presume you mean hordes, as in enormous numbers (e.g. the Mongol Horde), not hoards, as in enormous caches of something stashed away (e.g. hoarding canned goods after the nuclear apocalypse). Hoardes just isn't a word. Is spellchecking the story description _really_ that hard?
"20% of the people in the world do not have enough to eat."
Wrong. 18% of people in DEVELOPING COUNTRIES don't have enough to eat, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. 12% of the global population is malnourished. The numbers are huge enough as it is without getting them wrong.
"Don't mod this down just because you disagree."
No, mod it down because it's wrong.
5% of 300MM is 15MM, not 1.5MM. 1% of 15MM is 150k. You've got the end result right (300,000,000*.05*.01=150,000), but the process wrong.
States certainly can't tax transactions that go _through_ their state (i.e. Oklahoma can't tax an Amazon transaction between my computer in Massachusetts and their server in Seattle just because that transaction takes place over backbone lines), but they certainly can tax transactions that take place with local buyers. The rules are exactly the same for internet and catalog purchases:
1. If your state has a sales tax, you are legally obliged to pay it, even on things you buy out of state. It's called a use tax - if I buy a computer from Dell in TX, and have it shipped to Mass, I'm liable for the 5% Mass tax.
2. The vendor (i.e. Dell) is only obliged to COLLECT the tax if they have a physical presence (called "nexus") in Mass. Otherwise, it's my responsibility to pay the tax directly to the state. In practice, nobody does this, so most internet transactions _appear_ tax free, although they're technically not.
Correction: in 2001, Montana highway deaths were 2.30 per 100MM vehicle miles travelled, not 2.28.