I hope the RIAA and the MPAA are paying attention.. think of what speeds like that would do for piracy!
I've already had one of the Mexican spam sites order about 10 of these babies. We'll be downloading digital video from Hong Kong and Taipei and pumping it up to California for free.
Who need DVDs when you can crank out theater-quality surround sound pictures at these speeds? There goes the backbone....
And you're right. Government is not an evil, it is a method of conglomerating interests.
An economic system reacts to the inputs. If the inputs say that pollution is free, the economic forces will result in cheaper technologies which pollute, since there is no cost.
And if corporations can get subsidies to take out their weaker rivals, the system will reward the larger corporations, whereas on a true level economic playing field the smaller, quicker corporations might have the upper hand.
Most of our economic models (what you call laws) are based on key assumptions - that all participants have perfect information, in real time, at no cost, and there are no barriers to entry or exit. None of these are true. The Net has come closest, as economic signals are close to perfect, are in near real time (e.g. stock quotes with 15 minute delays), have minimal cost, and barriers are much smaller.
Corporations have been granted, through legal fictions instituted within the last century and a half, the rights of individuals. With those rights they were also supposed to have all the responsibilities of individuals. However, they no longer live up to their responsibilities, and in so doing shift them back on the rest of us. For example, corporations are supposed to pay federal taxes, just as an individual would; but few do, because most corporations can afford to hire lobbyists to make loopholes and attorneys to exploit them--yet few individuals can. So, the tax burden gets shifted to the individuals, when corporations aren't paying their fair percentage.
Another example is the Bahamas loophole which is being used by the US-based insurance companies. By being technically bought out by a shell corporation in the Bahamas, they can do all their business in the US, and pay no taxes.
But your main point is correct - originally, all corporations had a corporate charter, and were to be established for the public good. Corporations not contributing to the public good could be dechartered. Naturally, at some point the large corporations started to use this as a weapon against their smaller competitors, by forcing decharter hearings on them.
Note - I have a very large quantity of assets invested in corporations - I make money off of these, my mom is comfortably retired on one of the trusts I manage even though she never saved a penny for retirement. I'm not pretending I don't know how the game is played, and I'm not going to unilaterally disinvest just because it's unfair.
But - the rest of you all subsidize these operations. You may think you'll become millionaires, but my bet is very very few of you will. Mostly because you subsidize unfair competition by corporations I own stakes in.
Look, the US is strongly biased in favor of corporate welfare, and tech firms are the worst offenders. Major corporations even have special loopholes written for them by Congress and the Senate, and then write off the vacations they give said members as a business expense.
Every time Bill Gates goes on a trip to China to see the Great Wall and play bridge with his buds, the entire trip is a tax write-off for Microsoft, under the guise of "doing business".
When I was a kid, corporations paid three-quarters of the income taxes. Now, people pay almost all of the income taxes. And, it's a scam for the rich, because we get to set up trusts to hide our income legally, and if you elect George Bush, we'll get an even bigger slice of the pie.
And face it, no matter how innovative you may think you are, you're quite unlikely to become a multi-millionaire. There are very few ways to do it - one is to save more than 10 percent of your income (I save 20 percent, much in tax-deferred or tax-exempt accounts, the rest in tax-efficient single stock purchases), another is to steal it (Bill G), a third is to inherit it (most inheritors waste it all, because they spend more than they save).
Yeah, but if it gives off less heat, it needs less fan and less shielding and we don't get the Laptop From Heck or How I Learned To Use My Laptop To Melt Ice Off My Windshield.
Wow -- your packets had to trudge uphill, through the snow at 110 baud *both ways*
*and* your flame wars were bigger
Yup. Heck, we used to make computers out of kits, soldering the chips onto the boards ourselves, and using an oscilliscope to make sure it worked.
And nothing kept us warmer than a good flame war, a real sparker, one that would keep the heart a pumping. Why if we could have bought a PC with 16MHz we would have died and gone to heaven.
We even had to reuse our registers. We didn't PUSH and POP, we used MOV, and we liked it!
when looking at getting a flat screen monitor it would probably be prudent to wait for the technology to further develop.
I agree. My bet is that a $3000 flat-screen monitor will sell for about $1200 in February 2001 and $800 in February 2002. If you want screen res equivalent to a nice CRT, your best bet is wait until February 2001 at the very least, especially if you're going to drop $3000 on it.
It's Marketing 101 - actually, we covered this exact pricing paradigm in a course I took a few years back (maybe it was Marketing 110, not sure). Early adopters pay through the nose.
Yes, chicks dig them, but you'd be better off spending the money on a cool leather jacket - that will work way better...
Or faux penguin jacket, if you want to get the cyber-babes...
Look, scriptkiddies, I've been on the Net since 1978 (yes, I remember when 300 baud was fast and 110 baud was still common, and when 1200 baud came out it was sweet nectar from the Godz). And, really, there has always been flaming.
Jon's just trying to explain to himself why we flame him. It's simple - he can't stop pontificating on subjects he knows little or nothing about, and does it in a way that aggravates those of us who understand how to write in a truly digital age.
Writing for a magazine is dead wood. Writing for a totally electronic method is digital - brevity is the soul of wit, one should not write about what one does not know.
That aside, the flame wars today are like little sparklers going off in the night compared to the flamefests we had in the old days. Then, it was real flames, flames as tall as buildings, flames that destroyed entire computing departments (which were really subsections of math departments back then), flames that caused people to take your decks (of punched cards) and drop them accidentally.
Now, they'll probably just mess with your bank account or something tame like that.
Man, that was a good paper. It describes people like me exactly - I hate metered phones, even though I'd pay less if I had one. Just as I hate metered email or DSL, even though I'd pay less.
It's emotional. Forget logic. The market reacts to many feedbacks, and one of them is the emotional reaction to pricing plans. Sure, I could switch to Sprint and save money, but I hate having too many choices. I just want to pay one flat rate and phone whenever I want and not think about it. Just as I want an unlimited account for DSL - I'll get a lower speed (256K) but I don't want any cap on how much email I can crank out.
And I'd drop the web in a second, if I had to choose between it and email.
Also, remember that women use the Net differently than men, and they are now a majority of Net users. Women prize email over super-duper graphics and voice streaming geek toys. And they're right.
Seriously, we already have a bunch of people in my fairly small extended family with affleck.com, affleck.org, and affleck.net, which is not fair, if you think about it. Adding.per just gives us one more to squabble over.
And don't get me started on.home - I know two John Affleck's in my immeadiate family, are they supposed to be john.affleck.home and john2.affleck.home and even then it's not fair.
if we're going to implement.per, it has to be a workable string, like john.affleck.wa2.per and john.affleck.fla.per, but with the domain resolvable only at the discrete level, so noone owns affleck.per or john.affleck.per, since they are multiples.
Luckily for me I've got a hyphen in my name, so I can discretely own my last name as a domain, even if the rest of my relatives are SOL.
There's a local startup in Fremont, Center of the Universe, located in Seattle, called Westside.com and they're working on something like this too and have been for a number of years.
I can't say more, I did some user testing for them.
The first possibility is that this is MSFT's way of buying W2K support, just as they hold $125 million in preferred shares of Borland/Inprise (INPR), yet Borland cranks out tons of stuff for Linux regardless.
The second possibility is that this is MSFT's way of ensuring that Corel does not improve the WordPerfect ability to import W2K.
The third possibility (hey, if George Bush can say half a trillion for deficit reduction is a trillion, I can say two is three) is that this is MSFT's way of ensuring that they can say that there is a Linux distro that supports MSFT's extensions (or pollution) of standards such as Kerberos and so on. This is the killer, the other two are non-events.
No, I would not pay any "usage tax" that went to support the RIAA members, or any of the other parasites that live off the backs of the musicians. I buy my CDs direct from musicians, or sometimes when I buy music I checked out on MP3, or at local music events, so that more of a percent of the money goes to the artists in the first place.
They'll take my ripper software out of my cold dead robotic arms when they've unplugged all my CPUs and disabled my backup power supply!
Not only that, he gave Bill G the idea to take MSFT onto the Net, so he definitely should precede him.
And, who will ever forget the immortal words that gave Bill G his recent slogan - "What are we doing tonight, Brain?" "Same thing we do every night, Pinky, try to offload buggy software and Take Over The World!"
Seriously, neither of these two congressmen were that useful - they were both a lot of talk and not much work. Al Gore, strange as it may sound, actually did a lot this decade to make the Net (or the Information Superduperexpressway as he calls it) what it is. Both in popularization and making sure the administration followed through on his earlier work which helped create it.
And, if you're going to mention Rick White, why not mention Rep. Maria Cantwell, who did much more work on this than he ever did, and was responsible for goading him into proposing ideas like these? She's running for US Senate now, but Rick merely cloned (badly) her prior work and carried it on.
Partisanship be darned, credit should lie where it's due - it's not the followers who made it what it is, it's the forerunners, those who fought against what were almost immovable and immutable odds to get the ball rolling. That's like saying that Bill G popularized the Net when he was dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st Century. If he had had his way, the Net would still be FTP and IRC only.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope the RIAA and the MPAA are paying attention.. think of what speeds like that would do for piracy!
....
I've already had one of the Mexican spam sites order about 10 of these babies. We'll be downloading digital video from Hong Kong and Taipei and pumping it up to California for free.
Who need DVDs when you can crank out theater-quality surround sound pictures at these speeds? There goes the backbone
In fact, it was my minor.
And you're right. Government is not an evil, it is a method of conglomerating interests.
An economic system reacts to the inputs. If the inputs say that pollution is free, the economic forces will result in cheaper technologies which pollute, since there is no cost.
And if corporations can get subsidies to take out their weaker rivals, the system will reward the larger corporations, whereas on a true level economic playing field the smaller, quicker corporations might have the upper hand.
Most of our economic models (what you call laws) are based on key assumptions - that all participants have perfect information, in real time, at no cost, and there are no barriers to entry or exit. None of these are true. The Net has come closest, as economic signals are close to perfect, are in near real time (e.g. stock quotes with 15 minute delays), have minimal cost, and barriers are much smaller.
Corporations have been granted, through legal fictions instituted within the last century and a half, the rights of individuals. With those rights they were also supposed to have all the responsibilities of individuals. However, they no longer live up to their responsibilities, and in so doing shift them back on the rest of us. For example, corporations are supposed to pay federal taxes, just as an individual would; but few do, because most corporations can afford to hire lobbyists to make loopholes and attorneys to exploit them--yet few individuals can. So, the tax burden gets shifted to the individuals, when corporations aren't paying their fair percentage.
Another example is the Bahamas loophole which is being used by the US-based insurance companies. By being technically bought out by a shell corporation in the Bahamas, they can do all their business in the US, and pay no taxes.
But your main point is correct - originally, all corporations had a corporate charter, and were to be established for the public good. Corporations not contributing to the public good could be dechartered. Naturally, at some point the large corporations started to use this as a weapon against their smaller competitors, by forcing decharter hearings on them.
Note - I have a very large quantity of assets invested in corporations - I make money off of these, my mom is comfortably retired on one of the trusts I manage even though she never saved a penny for retirement. I'm not pretending I don't know how the game is played, and I'm not going to unilaterally disinvest just because it's unfair.
But - the rest of you all subsidize these operations. You may think you'll become millionaires, but my bet is very very few of you will. Mostly because you subsidize unfair competition by corporations I own stakes in.
and you'd be right.
Look, the US is strongly biased in favor of corporate welfare, and tech firms are the worst offenders. Major corporations even have special loopholes written for them by Congress and the Senate, and then write off the vacations they give said members as a business expense.
Every time Bill Gates goes on a trip to China to see the Great Wall and play bridge with his buds, the entire trip is a tax write-off for Microsoft, under the guise of "doing business".
When I was a kid, corporations paid three-quarters of the income taxes. Now, people pay almost all of the income taxes. And, it's a scam for the rich, because we get to set up trusts to hide our income legally, and if you elect George Bush, we'll get an even bigger slice of the pie.
And face it, no matter how innovative you may think you are, you're quite unlikely to become a multi-millionaire. There are very few ways to do it - one is to save more than 10 percent of your income (I save 20 percent, much in tax-deferred or tax-exempt accounts, the rest in tax-efficient single stock purchases), another is to steal it (Bill G), a third is to inherit it (most inheritors waste it all, because they spend more than they save).
Yeah, but if it gives off less heat, it needs less fan and less shielding and we don't get the Laptop From Heck or How I Learned To Use My Laptop To Melt Ice Off My Windshield.
Or maybe that's a bad thing.
Wow -- your packets had to trudge uphill, through the snow at 110 baud *both ways*
*and* your flame wars were bigger
Yup. Heck, we used to make computers out of kits, soldering the chips onto the boards ourselves, and using an oscilliscope to make sure it worked.
And nothing kept us warmer than a good flame war, a real sparker, one that would keep the heart a pumping. Why if we could have bought a PC with 16MHz we would have died and gone to heaven.
We even had to reuse our registers. We didn't PUSH and POP, we used MOV, and we liked it!
Hey, newbies! One of the whole points of this "Linux" thing is to actively find and report software bugs, so that they can be fixed.
But then we might have to actually contribute code to open source and actually work, rather than profit off the code of others!
Next thing you know, you'll want us to RTFM!
when looking at getting a flat screen monitor it would probably be prudent to wait for the technology to further develop.
...
...
I agree. My bet is that a $3000 flat-screen monitor will sell for about $1200 in February 2001 and $800 in February 2002. If you want screen res equivalent to a nice CRT, your best bet is wait until February 2001 at the very least, especially if you're going to drop $3000 on it.
It's Marketing 101 - actually, we covered this exact pricing paradigm in a course I took a few years back (maybe it was Marketing 110, not sure). Early adopters pay through the nose.
Yes, chicks dig them, but you'd be better off spending the money on a cool leather jacket - that will work way better
Or faux penguin jacket, if you want to get the cyber-babes
Look, scriptkiddies, I've been on the Net since 1978 (yes, I remember when 300 baud was fast and 110 baud was still common, and when 1200 baud came out it was sweet nectar from the Godz). And, really, there has always been flaming.
Jon's just trying to explain to himself why we flame him. It's simple - he can't stop pontificating on subjects he knows little or nothing about, and does it in a way that aggravates those of us who understand how to write in a truly digital age.
Writing for a magazine is dead wood. Writing for a totally electronic method is digital - brevity is the soul of wit, one should not write about what one does not know.
That aside, the flame wars today are like little sparklers going off in the night compared to the flamefests we had in the old days. Then, it was real flames, flames as tall as buildings, flames that destroyed entire computing departments (which were really subsections of math departments back then), flames that caused people to take your decks (of punched cards) and drop them accidentally.
Now, they'll probably just mess with your bank account or something tame like that.
Yeah, but in the screenshot, Tux has no fish.
That is not a happy penguin.
Must have fish, or can't compile.
Man, that was a good paper. It describes people like me exactly - I hate metered phones, even though I'd pay less if I had one. Just as I hate metered email or DSL, even though I'd pay less.
It's emotional. Forget logic. The market reacts to many feedbacks, and one of them is the emotional reaction to pricing plans. Sure, I could switch to Sprint and save money, but I hate having too many choices. I just want to pay one flat rate and phone whenever I want and not think about it. Just as I want an unlimited account for DSL - I'll get a lower speed (256K) but I don't want any cap on how much email I can crank out.
And I'd drop the web in a second, if I had to choose between it and email.
Also, remember that women use the Net differently than men, and they are now a majority of Net users. Women prize email over super-duper graphics and voice streaming geek toys. And they're right.
I think it is a bit premature to talk of W2k's demise...
You mean they released it already? I must have missed it, maybe when I was at Burning Man or else it just didn't make much splash.
Is anyone using it? I've only seen MS Office 2000 and it just seems to be real slow for all I can tell.
Seriously, we already have a bunch of people in my fairly small extended family with affleck.com, affleck.org, and affleck.net, which is not fair, if you think about it. Adding .per just gives us one more to squabble over.
.home - I know two John Affleck's in my immeadiate family, are they supposed to be john.affleck.home and john2.affleck.home and even then it's not fair.
.per, it has to be a workable string, like john.affleck.wa2.per and john.affleck.fla.per, but with the domain resolvable only at the discrete level, so noone owns affleck.per or john.affleck.per, since they are multiples.
And don't get me started on
if we're going to implement
Luckily for me I've got a hyphen in my name, so I can discretely own my last name as a domain, even if the rest of my relatives are SOL.
There's a local startup in Fremont, Center of the Universe, located in Seattle, called Westside.com and they're working on something like this too and have been for a number of years.
I can't say more, I did some user testing for them.
The first possibility is that this is MSFT's way of buying W2K support, just as they hold $125 million in preferred shares of Borland/Inprise (INPR), yet Borland cranks out tons of stuff for Linux regardless.
The second possibility is that this is MSFT's way of ensuring that Corel does not improve the WordPerfect ability to import W2K.
The third possibility (hey, if George Bush can say half a trillion for deficit reduction is a trillion, I can say two is three) is that this is MSFT's way of ensuring that they can say that there is a Linux distro that supports MSFT's extensions (or pollution) of standards such as Kerberos and so on. This is the killer, the other two are non-events.
[note - I own MSFT shares, but not Corel shares]
No, I would not pay any "usage tax" that went to support the RIAA members, or any of the other parasites that live off the backs of the musicians. I buy my CDs direct from musicians, or sometimes when I buy music I checked out on MP3, or at local music events, so that more of a percent of the money goes to the artists in the first place.
They'll take my ripper software out of my cold dead robotic arms when they've unplugged all my CPUs and disabled my backup power supply!
Not only that, he gave Bill G the idea to take MSFT onto the Net, so he definitely should precede him.
And, who will ever forget the immortal words that gave Bill G his recent slogan - "What are we doing tonight, Brain?" "Same thing we do every night, Pinky, try to offload buggy software and Take Over The World!"
Seriously, neither of these two congressmen were that useful - they were both a lot of talk and not much work. Al Gore, strange as it may sound, actually did a lot this decade to make the Net (or the Information Superduperexpressway as he calls it) what it is. Both in popularization and making sure the administration followed through on his earlier work which helped create it. And, if you're going to mention Rick White, why not mention Rep. Maria Cantwell, who did much more work on this than he ever did, and was responsible for goading him into proposing ideas like these? She's running for US Senate now, but Rick merely cloned (badly) her prior work and carried it on. Partisanship be darned, credit should lie where it's due - it's not the followers who made it what it is, it's the forerunners, those who fought against what were almost immovable and immutable odds to get the ball rolling. That's like saying that Bill G popularized the Net when he was dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st Century. If he had had his way, the Net would still be FTP and IRC only.