Manufacturers who produced more energy-efficient equipment would pay a lower tax. They would then be able to sell the item for a lower price in order to undercut their competition.
Such taxes can be an excellent way to incentivize positive behaviour that is otherwise difficult to encourage because of externalities or displaced costs.
My experience is that hand washing is faster. Most dishes take under 15 seconds to clean, and often under 5 seconds. The process is pass under the water and rub quickly with my hand. If I can still feel residue or see bits of food (not that often), then it gets a better pass with the sponge and I use hot water (usually I use cold because the hot takes too long to come).
Even using a sponge and soap on each dish, it's about the same amount of time as loading and unloading a dishwasher. I totally don't understand the purpose of those - they just seem to waste a lot of energy and money and space and achieve a lot of nothing.
For best results get the excellent in-cabinet dishracks that drain into the sink, then you don't even have to worry about drying.
Damn. I don't think my electric bill's ever topped $10/month, usually it's in the $7-8 range in my 1000+sqft apartment.
All light bulbs except for the bedside reading lamp are compact fluorescent.
No dryer, just a washer (run about 2x/week) and some clotheslines.
No desktop PC, just a couple laptops. The standard other digital gadgets (DSL modem/router, cordless phone, etc.)
TV, microwave, etc. get switched off at the socket when not in use.
Electric water heater (instant-on, tankless type), gas stove, half-size (waist-high) fridge.
There are three room air conditioners, but I pretty much never use them. There's a floor-standing fan that is always on when I'm home.
I'm gone at least a week per month, so that probably distorts things a bit. When I'm gone the only thing drawing power is the fridge.
Nevertheless sometimes I wonder what I'm doing right. Most of my friends have bills in the range you describe, and I don't think I've gone to any radical extremes. Maybe my meter's busted? Or maybe that little fridge and those spiral bulbs really help a lot.
I never thought of master/slave in that way before. Probably because I'm Norwegian. We hardly know anything about American history. English is a school/TV/computer language here.
Don't worry, you can safely jonathan_lampe's childish offense at the "master" and "slave" terminology. It's in common use in the United States in a wide variety of fields and is not considered offensive by anyone other than off-the-scale radical nutcases, whose own existence is far more offensive than any use of the words in question.
Perhaps we can encourage jonathan_lampe to first worry about "male" and "female" connectors, "white" and "black" hat hackers, "lame" duck presidents, and flame "retard"ants. All of the parties who are no doubt grievously wronged by these terms (females, blacks, and the physically and mentally impaired) are still around in large numbers, whereas slavery was abolished almost 150 years ago.
Oh...you cannot buy many new computers without Windows. Even if you ask, not many vendors (large ones) will sell you without Windows. This practice started with IBM+MS-DOS. I know there was a protest by Unix guys in front of one vendor to get the money back for unopened MS-DOS license. But this cannot be considered 100% MSs fault.
Of course it can. It's a direct consequence of the deals Microsoft makes with vendors. If the PC manufacturers want discounts on Windows - which they need in order to keep their prices down to match the competition - they have to pay for it on every computer they ship.
When his wife is fixing his tie in the $300 Big Ones episode: Under his breath "Stop it. Stop it. It's fine. I will destroy you."
Thanks for the reminder, I loved that.
But what really did it for me was in "Fear of a Bot Planet" when the robot elders kept barking "Silence!" before saying anything. Something about it brought back every ridiculous Dr Who villain and Buck Rogers antagonist I watched as a kid, and reminded me how silly I was to take their campy malice seriously. Even now, thanks to Futurama, just hearing the word "silence" is enough to crack me up on a good day.
I think you're both saying the same thing here -- since SIP is a call setup protocol and not a codec, it doesn't make sense to talk about SIP's voice quality.
I'll put it this way, then: With Skype, you are stuck using their codec, which pretty much always produces horrible results on calls to anywhere but the richest and most developed countries - particularly to cell phones. With SIP, at least you have the option to shop around and find someone who is capable of landing calls at your destination with decent quality.
For example (I have a million of these; this is just the most recent) I just receied a Skype call to my cell phone in Thailand yesterday and it was completely unintelligible, even after several retries. The person then redialed to my USA-based SIP DID which forwarded the call over SIP to a termination service, which is far cheaper than SkypeOut, and the call was crystal clear.
(We don't have the bizarre USian concept of charging people to receive incoming calls.)
This "bizarre" concept is in place because it results in a more efficient market. It's good regulatory policy.
If you have a BT phone, and it costs me 12p a minute for me to call you, I have absolutely no way of switching that business away from BT to someone else who would charge me less. BT has a monopoly on making calls to your phone, and the rates reflect that.
On the other hand, if YOU have to pay BT when you receive a call, and you think it's too expensive, you can switch to another provider who will charge less. This allows competition to drive down the price of making those calls.
This is why the TOTAL cost per minute (between the person making the call and the person receiving it) is lower in countries that use or have switched to caller-pays (e.g., USA, Hong Kong, China, Singapore, and apparently soon Australia).
Caller-pays is a false economy, you pay more in the long run, unless you never make calls and people always call you. That is obviously a somewhat rare case since for every minute someone is receiving a call, someone else is making one.
America is really a pretty xenophobic place, generally hostile to most everything non-American
America is deeply conservative and fearful of change.
The American educational system penalises innovation and creative thinking.
American politics are always parochial. If a proposal doesn't somehow poke a stick in the eye of those bastards in the next village/city/state/country, then it's not going to pass.
Sorry, I don't live in the USA, so your clever riposte falls a little flat. But I've worked there too, and it's pretty clear that your points don't stand up.
I cannot think of a country that rewards innovation and creative thinking more. Or one that's borrowed more liberally from the people, ideas, and other strengths of the rest of the world.
While there can be an ugly us-vs-them aspect to politics, especially the speechmaking, it is a fact (amply demonstrated by the success of many policies) that genuinely productive solutions quite often win out.
I don't care about offshoring jobs and I don't have many problems with telemarketers, but I do find that almost all of my Indian call centre experiences are negative.
Every time I get routed to one, I end up talking to someone who has no power to do anything, no access to information beyond what I could get from the web or from the automated voice response system, and the critical thinking skills of a muffin.
Fortunately many companies seem to be backing off of their headling plunges into delegating crucial customer relations roles to unknown low-skilled workers on the other side of the planet. The reason they got in there was because there were a lot of English-speaking people who worked cheap, and now they're starting to realise those criteria alone weren't enough. There are other places (e.g., Philippines, Malaysia) that meet those requirements, and also feature governments that are open to foreign commerce and populations that are positively inclined toward the outside world.
I think this VoIP move by the Indian government reflects the reasons why call centre offshoring there has been a failure (and after working there, I could have predicted this a long time ago). Some broad generalisations that I will stand behind:
India is really a pretty xenophobic place, generally hostile to most everything non-Indian.
India is deeply conservative and fearful of change.
The Indian educational system penalises innovation and creative thinking.
Indian politics are always parochial. If a proposal doesn't somehow poke a stick in the eye of those bastards in the next village/city/state/country, then it's not going to pass.
This is the mentality that leads to shutting out VoIP services that could dramatically enhance the ability of Indian business to compete globally in new and exciting ways. Rather than eliminate economic friction by reducing taxes on services with a high productivity multiplier value, they would rather bureaucratise the sector into the ground and collect some short-term revenue from those damned foreigners.
What would happen if you'd try to login to an openid enabled slashdot? Well as a first step, you'd provide your openid url to slashdot (without password). Slashdot would then contact the server where the openid url comes from and ask it to confirm the identity. Assuming this is the first time you visit slashdot and that you are already logged into your openid account, you will be redirected to the the openid site and it will ask you if you want to give slashdot permission to authenticate you and also what personal data to expose to slashdot.
Or, if the Slashdot admins were in a frisky mood, they could skip the openid redirection and proxy it instead - 90% of users wouldn't look at the top of the window and notice - and with any luck, snarf a copy of your password.
As far as I can tell, this is nothing new-- there are a variety of publicly available programs that have done the same thing since as early as 1996, when China and Singapore first announced their intentions to censor the Web. One such tool is CGIProxy, but there are others.
My first thought was that this was Triangle Boy all over again (except without Safeweb on the other end, but that was sort of immaterial anyway).
I'm not sure why you are concerning yourself with stupid people who are willing to pay for something pointless.
Not at all pointless for people who have temporarily or permanently left the USA. Mail delivery to many countries is unreliable and slow. Being able to see important things right away would be tremendously useful.
I have to rely on trusted people to receive my mail, use their judgment to sort the useful stuff from the spam, and deal with everything intelligently. I would much rather take the burden off their shoulders and do it myself.
At the moment I have some trust questions about the Remote Control Mail thing, but once (if) the niche starts to see some competition and there is greater assurance of confidentiality (through insurance or whatever) I will be thrilled to sign up.
The widespread and almost casual use of "non-lethals" in these situations clearly goes beyond their intended purpose.
Nonlethals have just become a substitute for good police work.
The number one test of a good officer is how well he (or she) can solve a problem without resorting to the use of force. If he can look someone in the eye, figure out what is going through that person's head, and assert the authority or voice the reasoning necessary to get compliance with a lawful request, he has done his job properly. Resorting to force to compel behavior is already a kind of failure. Of course there are some people out there who are just hell-bent on harming others - that's why the option of force exists - but clearly that's not what Tabatabainejad was about.
And resorting to force to compel behavior when the person in question is not being violent and is causing no harm to anyone, well, that's beyond failure as an officer, that's failure as a human being.
The officers who did this are a far greater threat to safety on the UCLA campus than that student would ever be. I do hope the university administration recognizes this and responds accordingly. If they do not, then we must seriously question the administration's commitment to protecting their students.
So with a sufficiently large honeypot net I should be able to get in right at the beginning of the pump phase, right? Just look for the first trickle of spams about a certain stock.
I always wanted to hook up a Perl script to my eTrade account; here's my chance. And for me it's perfectly legal, since I'm not the one doing the pumping. See you all in Tahiti, suckas.
Would this not disrupt the ISP's 'Common Carrier' status? If they are filtering any part of the internet, then they become liable to filter all the parts that may violate law, including children finding porn, warez, bootlegged movies, etc..
You know a lot of ISPs that will pass out traffic to 192.168.*.*? I don't. You think that by configuring their routers thusly, they have suddenly assumed legal responsibility for all their customers' kiddie porn?
Several people have mentioned using unique email addresses to "figure out who sold my email address". But while it may be LIKELY that (in this case) allofmp3.com sold you out, it could also be the operator of any of 15 routers between you and them. It wouldn't take much for an employee of a major ISP to tap a router and have it scan TCP packets for email addresses.
Because, after all, of all the confidential data that someone in this position would be able to intercept, there's nothing more lucrative than email addresses. Ah yes, an email address, the Hope Diamond of the internet.
Do you honestly think that someone would risk their job by installing unauthorised equipment to snoop email addresses, of all things? Most of which can easily be found by other, risk-free means anyway?
Slashdot Mirror
Manufacturers who produced more energy-efficient equipment would pay a lower tax. They would then be able to sell the item for a lower price in order to undercut their competition.
Such taxes can be an excellent way to incentivize positive behaviour that is otherwise difficult to encourage because of externalities or displaced costs.
Even using a sponge and soap on each dish, it's about the same amount of time as loading and unloading a dishwasher. I totally don't understand the purpose of those - they just seem to waste a lot of energy and money and space and achieve a lot of nothing.
For best results get the excellent in-cabinet dishracks that drain into the sink, then you don't even have to worry about drying.
Damn. I don't think my electric bill's ever topped $10/month, usually it's in the $7-8 range in my 1000+sqft apartment.
Nevertheless sometimes I wonder what I'm doing right. Most of my friends have bills in the range you describe, and I don't think I've gone to any radical extremes. Maybe my meter's busted? Or maybe that little fridge and those spiral bulbs really help a lot.
Don't worry, you can safely jonathan_lampe's childish offense at the "master" and "slave" terminology. It's in common use in the United States in a wide variety of fields and is not considered offensive by anyone other than off-the-scale radical nutcases, whose own existence is far more offensive than any use of the words in question.
Perhaps we can encourage jonathan_lampe to first worry about "male" and "female" connectors, "white" and "black" hat hackers, "lame" duck presidents, and flame "retard"ants. All of the parties who are no doubt grievously wronged by these terms (females, blacks, and the physically and mentally impaired) are still around in large numbers, whereas slavery was abolished almost 150 years ago.
In no case does it make sense to read through the entire result set rather than just the first 5 items.
Priced a retail copy of Red Hat Enterprise Server recently? A whole lotta GPL software in there.
Of course it can. It's a direct consequence of the deals Microsoft makes with vendors. If the PC manufacturers want discounts on Windows - which they need in order to keep their prices down to match the competition - they have to pay for it on every computer they ship.
Thanks for the reminder, I loved that.
But what really did it for me was in "Fear of a Bot Planet" when the robot elders kept barking "Silence!" before saying anything. Something about it brought back every ridiculous Dr Who villain and Buck Rogers antagonist I watched as a kid, and reminded me how silly I was to take their campy malice seriously. Even now, thanks to Futurama, just hearing the word "silence" is enough to crack me up on a good day.
Because in the real world, some of us need to talk to people whose telephony environment is outside of our dogmatic influence.
I'll put it this way, then: With Skype, you are stuck using their codec, which pretty much always produces horrible results on calls to anywhere but the richest and most developed countries - particularly to cell phones. With SIP, at least you have the option to shop around and find someone who is capable of landing calls at your destination with decent quality.
For example (I have a million of these; this is just the most recent) I just receied a Skype call to my cell phone in Thailand yesterday and it was completely unintelligible, even after several retries. The person then redialed to my USA-based SIP DID which forwarded the call over SIP to a termination service, which is far cheaper than SkypeOut, and the call was crystal clear.
They charged for quite a while before running the temporary free promo.
I live around the corner from a place called "Master Ee Leech Therapy" in Malaysia.
No Zeppelins though.
Unlike T-Mobile which is a charity?
I bought an Orange SIM card from an Orange shop in the Netherlands two weeks ago.
This "bizarre" concept is in place because it results in a more efficient market. It's good regulatory policy.
If you have a BT phone, and it costs me 12p a minute for me to call you, I have absolutely no way of switching that business away from BT to someone else who would charge me less. BT has a monopoly on making calls to your phone, and the rates reflect that.
On the other hand, if YOU have to pay BT when you receive a call, and you think it's too expensive, you can switch to another provider who will charge less. This allows competition to drive down the price of making those calls.
This is why the TOTAL cost per minute (between the person making the call and the person receiving it) is lower in countries that use or have switched to caller-pays (e.g., USA, Hong Kong, China, Singapore, and apparently soon Australia).
Caller-pays is a false economy, you pay more in the long run, unless you never make calls and people always call you. That is obviously a somewhat rare case since for every minute someone is receiving a call, someone else is making one.
Sorry, I don't live in the USA, so your clever riposte falls a little flat. But I've worked there too, and it's pretty clear that your points don't stand up.
I cannot think of a country that rewards innovation and creative thinking more. Or one that's borrowed more liberally from the people, ideas, and other strengths of the rest of the world.
While there can be an ugly us-vs-them aspect to politics, especially the speechmaking, it is a fact (amply demonstrated by the success of many policies) that genuinely productive solutions quite often win out.
I don't care about offshoring jobs and I don't have many problems with telemarketers, but I do find that almost all of my Indian call centre experiences are negative.
Every time I get routed to one, I end up talking to someone who has no power to do anything, no access to information beyond what I could get from the web or from the automated voice response system, and the critical thinking skills of a muffin.
Fortunately many companies seem to be backing off of their headling plunges into delegating crucial customer relations roles to unknown low-skilled workers on the other side of the planet. The reason they got in there was because there were a lot of English-speaking people who worked cheap, and now they're starting to realise those criteria alone weren't enough. There are other places (e.g., Philippines, Malaysia) that meet those requirements, and also feature governments that are open to foreign commerce and populations that are positively inclined toward the outside world.
I think this VoIP move by the Indian government reflects the reasons why call centre offshoring there has been a failure (and after working there, I could have predicted this a long time ago). Some broad generalisations that I will stand behind:
This is the mentality that leads to shutting out VoIP services that could dramatically enhance the ability of Indian business to compete globally in new and exciting ways. Rather than eliminate economic friction by reducing taxes on services with a high productivity multiplier value, they would rather bureaucratise the sector into the ground and collect some short-term revenue from those damned foreigners.
Or, if the Slashdot admins were in a frisky mood, they could skip the openid redirection and proxy it instead - 90% of users wouldn't look at the top of the window and notice - and with any luck, snarf a copy of your password.
My first thought was that this was Triangle Boy all over again (except without Safeweb on the other end, but that was sort of immaterial anyway).
Not at all pointless for people who have temporarily or permanently left the USA. Mail delivery to many countries is unreliable and slow. Being able to see important things right away would be tremendously useful.
I have to rely on trusted people to receive my mail, use their judgment to sort the useful stuff from the spam, and deal with everything intelligently. I would much rather take the burden off their shoulders and do it myself.
At the moment I have some trust questions about the Remote Control Mail thing, but once (if) the niche starts to see some competition and there is greater assurance of confidentiality (through insurance or whatever) I will be thrilled to sign up.
Nonlethals have just become a substitute for good police work.
The number one test of a good officer is how well he (or she) can solve a problem without resorting to the use of force. If he can look someone in the eye, figure out what is going through that person's head, and assert the authority or voice the reasoning necessary to get compliance with a lawful request, he has done his job properly. Resorting to force to compel behavior is already a kind of failure. Of course there are some people out there who are just hell-bent on harming others - that's why the option of force exists - but clearly that's not what Tabatabainejad was about.
And resorting to force to compel behavior when the person in question is not being violent and is causing no harm to anyone, well, that's beyond failure as an officer, that's failure as a human being.
The officers who did this are a far greater threat to safety on the UCLA campus than that student would ever be. I do hope the university administration recognizes this and responds accordingly. If they do not, then we must seriously question the administration's commitment to protecting their students.
So with a sufficiently large honeypot net I should be able to get in right at the beginning of the pump phase, right? Just look for the first trickle of spams about a certain stock.
I always wanted to hook up a Perl script to my eTrade account; here's my chance. And for me it's perfectly legal, since I'm not the one doing the pumping. See you all in Tahiti, suckas.
That seems to be a red herring. Why not just switch to Zoneedit or some other free DNS service?
Because, after all, of all the confidential data that someone in this position would be able to intercept, there's nothing more lucrative than email addresses. Ah yes, an email address, the Hope Diamond of the internet.
Do you honestly think that someone would risk their job by installing unauthorised equipment to snoop email addresses, of all things? Most of which can easily be found by other, risk-free means anyway?