Giving away all profits would show some selflessness, would indicate something other than a concern for the bottom line. It's something that even rich humans do on occasion but it is not something that is even imaginable for a corporation.
Consider what happens to company executives who don't make maximum profit for their company. They're fired.
Making money is always the primary concern if not the only real concern. Pfizer's core business is drugs of course they're not going to branch out into cell phones or casinos. I don't see what this has to do with Pfizer caring about anything other than money anyway.
I'm sitting across from a guy who works for a major American company. He has to get VP authorization for travel expenses. Waste of time for the VP (or admin as likely) aside, he tried to get travel auth to fly from Torino, Italy where he lives to Amsterdam where we are working this week and was told to drive 2 hours each way to Milano because the flight was 30 euros cheaper.
Every company tries to take away market share from their competitors and at the end of the day they exist only for one reason (from their own perspective) - to 'increase shareholder value' - just another way of saying 'make money'.
You have said absolutely nothing to indicate otherwise.
Companies make deals with companies all the time, so what. Take Apple (sic) and Samsung for instance. Samsung is a primary vendor of product to Apple and yet they have lawsuits going back and forth constantly.
Companies of all sizes uses lawsuits to delay or stop their competitors all the time. Larger companies with deeper pockets will often sue individuals or smaller companies with smaller pockets with annoying and perhaps not winnable lawsuits to scare them into line.
Corporations have one goal and only one. To make money. They just don't care about anything else because at the end of the day all their investors look at is how much profit they make.
Show me a single instance of a publicly held corporation giving all its profits away and I'll agree that I have a hopelessly paranoid view of corporations.
Yep - I've got a 512G hybrid Seagate (32G of which is SSD) in one bay and a 1T Western Digital in what used to be my optical bay (macbook pro) giving me plenty of storage for not much money at all, relatively speaking, and the 32G does seem to help with performance especially for what I run often.
"It's clear that Apple is an evil company, bent on destroying its competition through incessant lawsuits."
Do you know of any publicly held companies that aren't even and bent on destroying their competition using all means available including but limited to incessant lawsuits?
A social network is for being social. Posting an update that one is in hospital, with the hope of hearing some nice things from one's friends and family is a social activity whether you yourself would do so or not. Sure it isn't the only mechanism to disseminate information but it is a mechanism that people can reasonably expect should work on the largest social networking provider in existence at the moment.
Yes, children can 'happen' to live somewhere where they are born. Additionally, people shouldn't have to give up their homes in order to have reasonable access to something as important as the Internet just so that the corporation(s) in question can have a bit more profit. The corporation wants to make money by providing a service then they can provide that service to everyone who needs it. Win-win. If they don't want to then they don't have to provide it at all.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renunciation_of_citizenship Effective June 2008, U.S. citizens who renounce their citizenship are subject under certain circumstances to an expatriation tax, which is meant to extract from the expatriate taxes that would have been paid had he remained a citizen: all property of a covered expatriate is deemed sold for its fair market value on the day before the expatriation date, which usually results in a capital gain, which is taxable income
If you expatriated after June 16, 2008, the new IRC 877A expatriation rules apply to you if any of the following statements apply.
Your average annual net income tax for the 5 years ending before the date of expatriation or termination of residency is more than a specified amount that is adjusted for inflation ($145,000 for 2009 and 2010, $147,000 for 2011, and $151,000 for 2012).
Your net worth is $2 million or more on the date of your expatriation or termination of residency.
You fail to certify on Form 8854 that you have complied with all U.S. federal tax obligations for the 5 years preceding the date of your expatriation or termination of residency.
List price doesn't mean anything. Cisco discounts heavily to premium resellers like verizon and to large companies who negotiate properly. Discounts of 70% are not unheard of.
It seems to me (and I've been in this industry for a long time) that verizon charged the maximum possible amount for both (oversized and overspecced) products and services and DHS ponied up the money.
It would be interesting to know if this was a closed bid and if not what the other providers would have charged for the deployment.
It would also be interesting to know why DHS is involved at all.
You have to be kidding. Letting luddite politicians control industries they don't understand is bad for a whole lot of reasons.
Like chemical manufacturing, medicine and pharmaceuticals to name a few? Should these be unregulated perhaps? Politicians are politicians and they're not going to understand just about any industry and yet legislation is requires for the benefit of the country as a whole.
You, obviously, do not understand DSL.
You obviously do not understand DSL as there is no technological reason that DSL can't be deployed just about anywhere that humans live. It is strictly a cost issue as you do mention below.
When a company makes a product or service available for some people and not others, there's usually a good reason.
And that reason is of course profit or lack of profit for the company involved.
With DSL, it all has to do with the costs of adding new infrastructure.
Yes and like any other infrastructure that benefits the country and society it should be deployed even when it one instance of it is not profitable as the entire deployment remains profitable. The money they make off the 99% of people where deploying infrastructure is low cost (I'm admittedly pulling this number out of nowhere) will still more than make up for whatever it costs to deploy DSL (or any other form of Internet access if they prefer, i.e. leased line as the real issue is equal access to the Internet and all the benefits that come with it) in the areas that are high cost.
If the phone company is going to charge me $1000/yr for DSL, and place a new CO just for me, then they better be able to get several hundred others in my neighborhood to also get service from the same CO. There's no way that my $1000/yr will pay for it.
If a mandate went in that all companies had to provide DSL to all possible customers, I guarantee there are some people who would be told that their service would costs thousands per month, because of their location. Now, you may think that this is easy to solve, by just price-fixing the cost also. If feel this way, then you should consider voting for Jimmy Carter this year.
Not price fixing but price standardizing where people pay the same amount for the same service from the same provider regardless of where they happen to live. If people living in the rich neighborhood of a major city only have to pay X dollars for service then the poor people who can't afford to live there should arguably also only have to pay X dollars for the same service. The company involved spreads the cost of deployment of a given area and calculates the revenue from a given area - the only thing changing would be the size of the area involved in the calculation.
If it's accurate it is indeed surprising but I would have to have a better look at how the article arrived at the numbers they have before accepting it outright.
Also, I am not convinced that it's only or even primarily for the students' benefit that they are rich.
Thank you for the article though, it does raise an interesting point -
I should expand this to say that even if your provider respects your TOS that the other ISPs in the path of traffic probably are not respecting it.
I should also add that Joe Consumer is generally not trusted with regards to TOS and the provider(s) will protect themselves (and business customers) against accidental or deliberate mismarking of traffic (ie you setting your p2p traffic to TOS network control).
If your ISP doesn't respect your TOS values then you're only ever going to get best effort service.
Changing the technology of the queuing in the network won't help because your traffic is all going into the 'whatever is left' queue at the bottom of the priority stack (or next to the bottom of the priority stack if your ISP has implemented worse than best effort queuing to control p2p and worm traffic) below the provider's own traffic (ie voice, video services they sell) and any business traffic where the business customer has paid for guarantees (for whatever that's actually worth, depending on the provider.
Slashdot Mirror
As if drug traffickers always use the same vehicles....
You're all going to end up waiting at the end because the author has never written an end to the story.
Or Denon ones for that matter...
You forgot M)ore cowbell...
Giving away all profits would show some selflessness, would indicate something other than a concern for the bottom line. It's something that even rich humans do on occasion but it is not something that is even imaginable for a corporation.
Consider what happens to company executives who don't make maximum profit for their company. They're fired.
Making money is always the primary concern if not the only real concern. Pfizer's core business is drugs of course they're not going to branch out into cell phones or casinos. I don't see what this has to do with Pfizer caring about anything other than money anyway.
I'm sitting across from a guy who works for a major American company. He has to get VP authorization for travel expenses. Waste of time for the VP (or admin as likely) aside, he tried to get travel auth to fly from Torino, Italy where he lives to Amsterdam where we are working this week and was told to drive 2 hours each way to Milano because the flight was 30 euros cheaper.
Every company tries to take away market share from their competitors and at the end of the day they exist only for one reason (from their own perspective) - to 'increase shareholder value' - just another way of saying 'make money'.
You have said absolutely nothing to indicate otherwise.
I am perfectly serious.
Companies make deals with companies all the time, so what. Take Apple (sic) and Samsung for instance. Samsung is a primary vendor of product to Apple and yet they have lawsuits going back and forth constantly.
Companies of all sizes uses lawsuits to delay or stop their competitors all the time. Larger companies with deeper pockets will often sue individuals or smaller companies with smaller pockets with annoying and perhaps not winnable lawsuits to scare them into line.
Corporations have one goal and only one. To make money. They just don't care about anything else because at the end of the day all their investors look at is how much profit they make.
Show me a single instance of a publicly held corporation giving all its profits away and I'll agree that I have a hopelessly paranoid view of corporations.
Yep - I've got a 512G hybrid Seagate (32G of which is SSD) in one bay and a 1T Western Digital in what used to be my optical bay (macbook pro) giving me plenty of storage for not much money at all, relatively speaking, and the 32G does seem to help with performance especially for what I run often.
"It's clear that Apple is an evil company, bent on destroying its competition through incessant lawsuits."
Do you know of any publicly held companies that aren't even and bent on destroying their competition using all means available including but limited to incessant lawsuits?
Okay so they need interconnections but interconnections do not require the Internet as it can all be done over private network links.
It becomes a question of cost as private will cost more than shared / public infrastructure but at the end of the day the Internet is not required.
Obligation is one thing...expectation is something altogether different.
You're completely right that they have no obligation but that doesn't mean at all that people won't have expectations from them.
I'd rather see an open source facebook killer project that provides these features for free.
Sounds like a business model that might support an open source social networking model.
Do you know any corporations that aren't soulless?
A social network is for being social. Posting an update that one is in hospital, with the hope of hearing some nice things from one's friends and family is a social activity whether you yourself would do so or not. Sure it isn't the only mechanism to disseminate information but it is a mechanism that people can reasonably expect should work on the largest social networking provider in existence at the moment.
Also at no time did I propose any form of subsidy which is why I didn't bother to answer your other question.
Yes, children can 'happen' to live somewhere where they are born. Additionally, people shouldn't have to give up their homes in order to have reasonable access to something as important as the Internet just so that the corporation(s) in question can have a bit more profit. The corporation wants to make money by providing a service then they can provide that service to everyone who needs it. Win-win. If they don't want to then they don't have to provide it at all.
Some interesting bits around this:
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renunciation_of_citizenship
Effective June 2008, U.S. citizens who renounce their citizenship are subject under certain circumstances to an expatriation tax, which is meant to extract from the expatriate taxes that would have been paid had he remained a citizen: all property of a covered expatriate is deemed sold for its fair market value on the day before the expatriation date, which usually results in a capital gain, which is taxable income
and those conditions are listed here: http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/international/article/0,,id=97245,00.html
If you expatriated after June 16, 2008, the new IRC 877A expatriation rules apply to you if any of the following statements apply.
Your average annual net income tax for the 5 years ending before the date of expatriation or termination of residency is more than a specified amount that is adjusted for inflation ($145,000 for 2009 and 2010, $147,000 for 2011, and $151,000 for 2012).
Your net worth is $2 million or more on the date of your expatriation or termination of residency.
You fail to certify on Form 8854 that you have complied with all U.S. federal tax obligations for the 5 years preceding the date of your expatriation or termination of residency.
Not to mention other vendors than Cisco...
List price doesn't mean anything. Cisco discounts heavily to premium resellers like verizon and to large companies who negotiate properly. Discounts of 70% are not unheard of.
It seems to me (and I've been in this industry for a long time) that verizon charged the maximum possible amount for both (oversized and overspecced) products and services and DHS ponied up the money.
It would be interesting to know if this was a closed bid and if not what the other providers would have charged for the deployment.
It would also be interesting to know why DHS is involved at all.
You have to be kidding. Letting luddite politicians control industries they don't understand is bad for a whole lot of reasons.
Like chemical manufacturing, medicine and pharmaceuticals to name a few? Should these be unregulated perhaps? Politicians are politicians and they're not going to understand just about any industry and yet legislation is requires for the benefit of the country as a whole.
You, obviously, do not understand DSL.
You obviously do not understand DSL as there is no technological reason that DSL can't be deployed just about anywhere that humans live. It is strictly a cost issue as you do mention below.
When a company makes a product or service available for some people and not others, there's usually a good reason.
And that reason is of course profit or lack of profit for the company involved.
With DSL, it all has to do with the costs of adding new infrastructure.
Yes and like any other infrastructure that benefits the country and society it should be deployed even when it one instance of it is not profitable as the entire deployment remains profitable. The money they make off the 99% of people where deploying infrastructure is low cost (I'm admittedly pulling this number out of nowhere) will still more than make up for whatever it costs to deploy DSL (or any other form of Internet access if they prefer, i.e. leased line as the real issue is equal access to the Internet and all the benefits that come with it) in the areas that are high cost.
Unlike basic phone lines, DSL performance is extremely sensitive to the distance from the CO.
If the phone company is going to charge me $1000/yr for DSL, and place a new CO just for me, then they better be able to get several hundred others in my neighborhood to also get service from the same CO. There's no way that my $1000/yr will pay for it.
If a mandate went in that all companies had to provide DSL to all possible customers, I guarantee there are some people who would be told that their service would costs thousands per month, because of their location. Now, you may think that this is easy to solve, by just price-fixing the cost also. If feel this way, then you should consider voting for Jimmy Carter this year.
Not price fixing but price standardizing where people pay the same amount for the same service from the same provider regardless of where they happen to live. If people living in the rich neighborhood of a major city only have to pay X dollars for service then the poor people who can't afford to live there should arguably also only have to pay X dollars for the same service. The company involved spreads the cost of deployment of a given area and calculates the revenue from a given area - the only thing changing would be the size of the area involved in the calculation.
"Perhaps the worst part is that hundreds of the routers are sitting in their boxes, unused, two years after the purchase."
No. The worst part is that 'Homeland Security' is involved at all in such a project.
If it's accurate it is indeed surprising but I would have to have a better look at how the article arrived at the numbers they have before accepting it outright.
Also, I am not convinced that it's only or even primarily for the students' benefit that they are rich.
Thank you for the article though, it does raise an interesting point -
I know...but thanks :-)
I should expand this to say that even if your provider respects your TOS that the other ISPs in the path of traffic probably are not respecting it.
I should also add that Joe Consumer is generally not trusted with regards to TOS and the provider(s) will protect themselves (and business customers) against accidental or deliberate mismarking of traffic (ie you setting your p2p traffic to TOS network control).
If your ISP doesn't respect your TOS values then you're only ever going to get best effort service.
Changing the technology of the queuing in the network won't help because your traffic is all going into the 'whatever is left' queue at the bottom of the priority stack (or next to the bottom of the priority stack if your ISP has implemented worse than best effort queuing to control p2p and worm traffic) below the provider's own traffic (ie voice, video services they sell) and any business traffic where the business customer has paid for guarantees (for whatever that's actually worth, depending on the provider.