The first monopoly belonged to IBM. Microsoft took it over. IBM had just signed a punishing agreement with the Justice Department, so they could not extend the IBM brand into new territories in their old, less aggressive way.
Microsoft was not so restrained. They obtained code they did not create, wrapped it as their own operating system, sold it to IBM, and muscled their way up from there.
That Microsoft has small fires at the borders does not detract from its stunning history of turning "IBM compatibility" in total domination of office workflow. What held it back then and now is only organizational ineffectiveness.
It happened to Microsoft, it was pretty much the exact same thing there with bundling IE with Windows.
Despite overwhelming evidence, Microsoft attacked the presiding federal judge and got the court decisions steamrolled. In other words, it won a case it should have lost, setting an example for us all.
It's not a Google vs. Apple competion thing. It's the small startup in a garage vs. Google thing.
This is a fundamental attack on Android by its monopoly-seeking competitors. The FTC and the Justice Department let Microsoft barge into everyone's applications business thirty-some years ago and since then intellectual property protection services have reduced "anti-trust" to a threat that only corporate lawyers can make and that no corporation, foreign or domestic, has to take seriously.
Apple and Microsoft don't want anyone else collecting screen-rent from every garage.
They want Android, the Google investment, to be free just like the label says, only without a source of payback. Otherwise, what? All licenses for Android voided? Gee, too bad Google couldn't monopolize. Oops, I meant monetize.
To put pressure on Apple to lower prices, and on other manufacturers as well.
Consumers did not see the cost of their phones directly, but demanded the best from carriers. Thus they wanted an iPhone first, and their preference in carriers, if any, second. Carriers paid Apple for customers. Apple had a monopoly on the oligopoly.
The United States military protects China's freedom to trade worldwide. It does not protect the economic interests of the people of the United States.
U.S. Foreign debt is not like a bank loan. Regarding China, nearly all is held in the form of U.S. governments bonds specified in U.S. currency. The United States will always be able to pay off its dollar obligations and the only factors keeping it from doing so today are anti-inflation policy and trade policies, both of which at this point favor China more than the United States.
The Romans regarded roadways as military structures. China is currently financing a bigger canal from the Pacific to the Atlantic and it would make sense that they would want reliable transoceanic roads to service their outlying colonies in North America.
It's been a long time since the United States military was dedicated to the interests and the security of the U.S. It protects the gobal economy. Any government dominating the global economy gets to set the military agenda of the United States -- among the many ways it gets to influence the federal government.
China does not have to worry about going broke in the process of establishing a worldwide empire. The colonies are there to finance their own colonialization.
To construct a square one only requires four right angles and a chosen length of side.
A right angle can be devised with common tools without resort to the symbolic representations of mathematics. String, pins, and marker is all you need.
A first-order approximation of historical or cosmological laws doesn't count as religion. Everyone has to resort to such predicates in order to focus. The terms "philosophy" or "perspective" or "ideology" apply, not "religion".
I'd rather bet on a.001% chance that Jesus is Lord than 99.999% chance that life is based on nothing but random chance and death.
Most sperm get a brief swim and that's it.
Your chance of becoming the Messiah are millions of times greater than one sperm's chance of fulfilling its purpose.
Still, most sperm are dedicated to a sense of purpose. That purpose is to be absorbed by a larger cell and trigger the well-programmed growth of a new organism.
Of course, as your yourself are the rare result of a successful sperm, you discount the role of randomness and believe that life has purpose.
Why not?
We are only one generation away from Google Contact Lenses.
Haptic underwear.
Intracranial modems.
Broadband cochlea replacements.
At that point most of will be sensible only to the internal signalling of the larger organism of which we will be but cells.
DNA, against all odds, will have made it past evolution all the way to Intelligent Design.
Of course, eventually -- or perhaps soon, or maybe even now -- we will be a mere organ in the anatomy of a superintelligent intergalactically networked individual.
And what will our role be? Perhaps we will be a remote scouting organ on the lookout for even larger creatures that want to consume us. Or it.
The term "Oxford comma" exists only because the term "Chicago omission" would not indicate something visible. There was no such thing as an Oxford comma until the Chicago omission was invented. Omitting the comma creates a jarring inconsistency, results in unnecessary doubletakes, and fails to convey the cadences and inflections of the spoken sentence.
Actually, this is a move by Big Telecom to claim ownership of the next-generation wireless router and fortify its control over television, Internet, and voice transmissions.
Build your own Internet. This one's already been claimed by stakeholders. Isn't that what they called in the Gold Rush -- staking a claim?
Gather a big financial package and give stuff away to change the direction of traffic in your favor. Don't appear to be evil, but only long enough to command big fees for wasting attention and hijacking browsers.
It is odd that Secretary Pritzger struts with the Internet overseas at a time when stateside the Federal Communications Commission has so much contempt for humans that it is considering allowing service providers to demand payment from content providers.
The international Telecommunications Union, the audience for this grandstanding, is like the FCC, in that it governs the used of electromagnetic spectrum, but in its case for purposes that exceed the sovereignty of any individual nation.
We don't have a Department of Individual Rights in the United States, but by gum we have a Secretary of Commerce.
So from the looks of it, Secretary Pritzger is just greasing the rest of world so those stakeholders can do whatever they plan to do with their stakes.
The article implies a steep logarithmic gain on energy invested into the initial pulses. If Sandia are right, holding the experiment together for a single-digit multiple of the input energy should break even.
Simulations suggest that the Z machine’s maximum current of 27 million amps should be enough to reach breakeven. But the researchers are already setting their sights much higher. A hoped-for upgrade to 60 million amps, they say, would boost the power output into a “high gain” realm of 1000 times input—a giant step toward commercial viability.
You keep a webcam focused on a dam to monitor whether it fails. You see cracks. You watch as the dam washes out, but you warn no one. You are a scientist. You have broken no laws.
Scenario 2:
You are paid to monitor the dam and to issue warnings when appropriate. You see cracks. You watch as the dam washes out, but you warn no one. You are an element of the public safety system and you willfully and criminally left people unprotected. It doesn't matter if you were a scientist under contract.
Strategic sales usually involve an internal champion who has the confidence of senior managers and is betting three to five years of career advancement on the adoption of your product and its strategic importance to your firm. Sales is the process of helping that person acquire endorsements up the chain of command.
The best way to locate an internal champion is to meet with managers who appreciate the need but lack the time to immerse themselves in the decision. They will hand you off.
Incidentally: since you are already publishing your buglist, you personally have very little more to do to gain the trust of an internal champion and your appearance at one or two critical meetings will help senior managers understand that a sale is an alliance. Go to learn, not to teach. You'll do well.
This is not a decision for you and the sales force to negotiate, because there is a large diversity among potential customers and it is the single greatest responsibility of senior management to decide what market segment to invest in.
Publication of the bug list does not look like "disclosure" to the larger and more capable customers. It is a feature that expands the customer's planning, development, and decision ranges. To a smaller customer or one with a shallower requirement, it looks like an apology in advance for everything that could go wrong.
It could be that because ERP software adoption is hard to undo, your competitors are just trying to haul in market share and let the customers discover the truth when it is too late. In that case, your competitors should be forced to lose sales for their lack of transparency.
In the end, I think you can't stop publishing the list for two reasons:
First, because transparency signals the kind of bold and capable team you are, so ceasing the publication would signal that you are not that team any more.
Second, because competitors whose sales proposition is anchored on "the other guys have imperfections that we don't" will always find negatives. A bug list is a way to manage the negatives, because as the negatives evaporate, what's left is transparency.
Advertising revenues from local news is the largest source of income for most local television network affiliates and local car dealerships are the foundation of their revenues. (TV stations get little or nothing for carrying national programming, just the right to borrow the audience for a couple of hours.)
Local television economics is a political protection racket with car dealers as the collection point for funds, precisely as kings and shahs and sultans handed out exclusive franchises for cloths and dyes and wines and every manner of goods.
Car dealers fund a local-news system that ensures that Congressional representatives and state governments are rarely reported on.
Threaten laws protecting car dealers, and get you a lot of enemies who don't want to show their faces.
Will the person who modded my comment down please read it?
He did not set the whole facility on fire. He tore up the floorboards and set fire to whatever was underneath his basement workplace.
He was cutting his own throat with a knife when emergency crew got there.
He wrote that for the first time in a long time he gave a shit.
This is not the profile of a disgruntled worker. It sounds more like a story about a repentant member of some secret police -- domestic surveillance squad.
The reassignment to Hawaii sounds like a promotion, as it was for Snowden.
We'll know more if the government actually brings this guy to trial. That's why I think they won't.
Slashdot Mirror
The first monopoly belonged to IBM. Microsoft took it over. IBM had just signed a punishing agreement with the Justice Department, so they could not extend the IBM brand into new territories in their old, less aggressive way.
Microsoft was not so restrained. They obtained code they did not create, wrapped it as their own operating system, sold it to IBM, and muscled their way up from there.
But they didn't use one monopoly's market power to delve into another. That's what's verboten.
That is precisely what they did do and all they have ever done.
That Microsoft has small fires at the borders does not detract from its stunning history of turning "IBM compatibility" in total domination of office workflow. What held it back then and now is only organizational ineffectiveness.
It happened to Microsoft, it was pretty much the exact same thing there with bundling IE with Windows.
Despite overwhelming evidence, Microsoft attacked the presiding federal judge and got the court decisions steamrolled. In other words, it won a case it should have lost, setting an example for us all.
It's not a Google vs. Apple competion thing. It's the small startup in a garage vs. Google thing.
This is a fundamental attack on Android by its monopoly-seeking competitors. The FTC and the Justice Department let Microsoft barge into everyone's applications business thirty-some years ago and since then intellectual property protection services have reduced "anti-trust" to a threat that only corporate lawyers can make and that no corporation, foreign or domestic, has to take seriously.
Apple and Microsoft don't want anyone else collecting screen-rent from every garage.
They want Android, the Google investment, to be free just like the label says, only without a source of payback. Otherwise, what? All licenses for Android voided? Gee, too bad Google couldn't monopolize. Oops, I meant monetize.
To put pressure on Apple to lower prices, and on other manufacturers as well.
Consumers did not see the cost of their phones directly, but demanded the best from carriers. Thus they wanted an iPhone first, and their preference in carriers, if any, second. Carriers paid Apple for customers. Apple had a monopoly on the oligopoly.
The United States military protects China's freedom to trade worldwide. It does not protect the economic interests of the people of the United States.
U.S. Foreign debt is not like a bank loan. Regarding China, nearly all is held in the form of U.S. governments bonds specified in U.S. currency. The United States will always be able to pay off its dollar obligations and the only factors keeping it from doing so today are anti-inflation policy and trade policies, both of which at this point favor China more than the United States.
The Romans regarded roadways as military structures. China is currently financing a bigger canal from the Pacific to the Atlantic and it would make sense that they would want reliable transoceanic roads to service their outlying colonies in North America.
It's been a long time since the United States military was dedicated to the interests and the security of the U.S. It protects the gobal economy. Any government dominating the global economy gets to set the military agenda of the United States -- among the many ways it gets to influence the federal government.
China does not have to worry about going broke in the process of establishing a worldwide empire. The colonies are there to finance their own colonialization.
A llifetime of stereotyping will do that to you.
To construct a square one only requires four right angles and a chosen length of side.
A right angle can be devised with common tools without resort to the symbolic representations of mathematics. String, pins, and marker is all you need.
A first-order approximation of historical or cosmological laws doesn't count as religion. Everyone has to resort to such predicates in order to focus. The terms "philosophy" or "perspective" or "ideology" apply, not "religion".
They don't want efficiency. They want innovation.
They don't want to innovate. They want to control the commercialization of new technologies.
Everybody in charge focuses on control first. Since they don't thoroughly follow what you're doing, they monitor by watching you do it.
They don't want anybody else doing what they do.
I'd rather bet on a .001% chance that Jesus is Lord than 99.999% chance that life is based on nothing but random chance and death.
Most sperm get a brief swim and that's it.
Your chance of becoming the Messiah are millions of times greater than one sperm's chance of fulfilling its purpose.
Still, most sperm are dedicated to a sense of purpose. That purpose is to be absorbed by a larger cell and trigger the well-programmed growth of a new organism.
Of course, as your yourself are the rare result of a successful sperm, you discount the role of randomness and believe that life has purpose.
Why not?
We are only one generation away from Google Contact Lenses.
Haptic underwear.
Intracranial modems.
Broadband cochlea replacements.
At that point most of will be sensible only to the internal signalling of the larger organism of which we will be but cells.
DNA, against all odds, will have made it past evolution all the way to Intelligent Design.
Of course, eventually -- or perhaps soon, or maybe even now -- we will be a mere organ in the anatomy of a superintelligent intergalactically networked individual.
And what will our role be? Perhaps we will be a remote scouting organ on the lookout for even larger creatures that want to consume us. Or it.
The term "Oxford comma" exists only because the term "Chicago omission" would not indicate something visible. There was no such thing as an Oxford comma until the Chicago omission was invented. Omitting the comma creates a jarring inconsistency, results in unnecessary doubletakes, and fails to convey the cadences and inflections of the spoken sentence.
In what sense does a camera on wheels even remotely count as human?
Remotely.
Actually, this is a move by Big Telecom to claim ownership of the next-generation wireless router and fortify its control over television, Internet, and voice transmissions.
Build you're own internet.
Now we're talking stakeholders.
Build your own Internet. This one's already been claimed by stakeholders. Isn't that what they called in the Gold Rush -- staking a claim?
Gather a big financial package and give stuff away to change the direction of traffic in your favor. Don't appear to be evil, but only long enough to command big fees for wasting attention and hijacking browsers.
It is odd that Secretary Pritzger struts with the Internet overseas at a time when stateside the Federal Communications Commission has so much contempt for humans that it is considering allowing service providers to demand payment from content providers.
The international Telecommunications Union, the audience for this grandstanding, is like the FCC, in that it governs the used of electromagnetic spectrum, but in its case for purposes that exceed the sovereignty of any individual nation.
We don't have a Department of Individual Rights in the United States, but by gum we have a Secretary of Commerce.
So from the looks of it, Secretary Pritzger is just greasing the rest of world so those stakeholders can do whatever they plan to do with their stakes.
The article implies a steep logarithmic gain on energy invested into the initial pulses. If Sandia are right, holding the experiment together for a single-digit multiple of the input energy should break even.
Also from the article:
Simulations suggest that the Z machine’s maximum current of 27 million amps should be enough to reach breakeven. But the researchers are already setting their sights much higher. A hoped-for upgrade to 60 million amps, they say, would boost the power output into a “high gain” realm of 1000 times input—a giant step toward commercial viability.
Scenario 1:
You keep a webcam focused on a dam to monitor whether it fails. You see cracks. You watch as the dam washes out, but you warn no one. You are a scientist. You have broken no laws.
Scenario 2:
You are paid to monitor the dam and to issue warnings when appropriate. You see cracks. You watch as the dam washes out, but you warn no one. You are an element of the public safety system and you willfully and criminally left people unprotected. It doesn't matter if you were a scientist under contract.
Strategic sales usually involve an internal champion who has the confidence of senior managers and is betting three to five years of career advancement on the adoption of your product and its strategic importance to your firm. Sales is the process of helping that person acquire endorsements up the chain of command.
The best way to locate an internal champion is to meet with managers who appreciate the need but lack the time to immerse themselves in the decision. They will hand you off.
Incidentally: since you are already publishing your buglist, you personally have very little more to do to gain the trust of an internal champion and your appearance at one or two critical meetings will help senior managers understand that a sale is an alliance. Go to learn, not to teach. You'll do well.
Thank you for showing us the problem.
Your firm is being undermined by a lazy and uncommitted sales force
with little appreciation for the kind of transparency that is involuntary
and with weak relationship-development skills
and with zero tact
and insufficient fear of the bullshit-detection abilities of a technical audience.
Your lead developer is a genius. Look what just happened.
This is not a decision for you and the sales force to negotiate, because there is a large diversity among potential customers and it is the single greatest responsibility of senior management to decide what market segment to invest in.
Publication of the bug list does not look like "disclosure" to the larger and more capable customers. It is a feature that expands the customer's planning, development, and decision ranges. To a smaller customer or one with a shallower requirement, it looks like an apology in advance for everything that could go wrong.
It could be that because ERP software adoption is hard to undo, your competitors are just trying to haul in market share and let the customers discover the truth when it is too late. In that case, your competitors should be forced to lose sales for their lack of transparency.
In the end, I think you can't stop publishing the list for two reasons:
First, because transparency signals the kind of bold and capable team you are, so ceasing the publication would signal that you are not that team any more.
Second, because competitors whose sales proposition is anchored on "the other guys have imperfections that we don't" will always find negatives. A bug list is a way to manage the negatives, because as the negatives evaporate, what's left is transparency.
You are absolutely correct.
Successful investment bankers usually have smooth manners and a gift for softspoken vagueness that makes their duplicity harder to spot.
The mean ornery dogchild is just a midlevel henchmen for the really dangerous types.
And I've paid with for the right to say so.
Advertising revenues from local news is the largest source of income for most local television network affiliates and local car dealerships are the foundation of their revenues. (TV stations get little or nothing for carrying national programming, just the right to borrow the audience for a couple of hours.)
Local television economics is a political protection racket with car dealers as the collection point for funds, precisely as kings and shahs and sultans handed out exclusive franchises for cloths and dyes and wines and every manner of goods.
Car dealers fund a local-news system that ensures that Congressional representatives and state governments are rarely reported on.
Threaten laws protecting car dealers, and get you a lot of enemies who don't want to show their faces.
Will the person who modded my comment down please read it?
He did not set the whole facility on fire. He tore up the floorboards and set fire to whatever was underneath his basement workplace.
He was cutting his own throat with a knife when emergency crew got there.
He wrote that for the first time in a long time he gave a shit.
This is not the profile of a disgruntled worker. It sounds more like a story about a repentant member of some secret police -- domestic surveillance squad.
The reassignment to Hawaii sounds like a promotion, as it was for Snowden.
We'll know more if the government actually brings this guy to trial. That's why I think they won't.