The dentist in the article has definitely heard of it by now. His Yelp rating dropped from 4.5 to 3.5 stars in one day after this article was published. Hopefully that (along with the very well researched and written Ars Technica story - journalism isn't dead yet after all) will convince him to change his policy.
Though I have to say, I do hope Yelp takes down all of the bogus reviews people are publishing. If you believe the comments, one of them actually went to the office while passing through town, but the rest have no intention of ever going to this dentist or even discussing the policy with him. Every indication from both the article and valid Yelp reviews is that he's a good dentist who just took bad advice from a bogus medical legal services company (Medical Justice).
It's still a form of compensation - companies have a limited pool of stock used for options that is allocated by their board, and they don't just give it out for no reason. If he wants to receive this form of compensation, he needs to be willing to walk away (if he's not, then there really isn't any reason for them to get extra assurance...)
Exactly. You have to ask - why would the current equity holders want to give up part of their share in the company if, as you say, they are doing "very, very well"?
The answer is, you have to GIVE them a reason. You'll either have to force their hand to some degree if you want it as extra compensation, or else offer to buy stock at the current fair price.
So true. My favorite exemption often demanded is the (already idiotic and not helpful to general security) policy of periodically changing passwords. We peons are expected to come up with a secure, non-duplicated and non-derivative password every 3-6 months that we can somehow remember, while the executives don't want to change theirs since it was already a stretch to remember their wife's birthday for their current password.
Yep, that's exactly what would happen when you ask them to voluntarily lose revenue for the sake of general goodwill.
If, however, you make it illegal to knowingly process payments from a merchant using (already illegal) spam to generate sale (after proper notification from a government entity), that would be a different story.
Here's how a similar process already works today: US govt: "Here's the merchant number of an organization that may or may not be funding terrorist organizations. Shut it down." [...approximately 2.5 seconds later...] VISA: "Done! Would you like us to destroy their credit rating and kidnap their dog as well?"
Actually, moving up to the credit card companies would hugely narrow the bottleneck. You convince VISA, Mastercard, Discover, and Amex to adopt a policy of refusing transactions from any institution knowingly processing spammers' requests, and you're pretty much done. Convincing all of the random shady "banks" around the world to do the same would be a LOT harder (until they lose all credit card processing capability unless they comply!)
I do agree that if they really cared, the problem would already be solved - because the solution is just so damn easy...
It can provide up to 10W of power (4x USB, but short of FireWire power)
Just one nitpick on an otherwise Informative comment...;)
I believe USB 3.0 can do 900mA @ 5v, which is 4.5W. So, Thunderbolt is closer to 2x the power of USB 3.0 (4x USB 2.0, but that's not really the competition...) Still, that is significant, because a lot of external HDDs use more than 5W at full load...
Yeah, good point. That's a particularly slimy practice of EA's. Especially since adding console online support in the first place was conditional on using their own servers (Microsoft would have kept these games running for much longer if they hosted them).
That is true. I guess the problem is that you tend to get a lot more long-term use out of your couch than a video game, and there is no real disadvantage to buying a game used (unlike that pee-stained couch;)
Of course, that just seems like an argument for designing more re-playable games or picking a better business model. I don't hear Blizzard complaining much about used sales hurting World of Warcraft (due to the business model) or Starcraft (due to the replayability). And apparently the Rock Band franchise has had hundreds of millions of DLC downloads for their games. Hell, even EA has figured out how to minimize the market for used sports games by releasing a new one with updated features and player rosters every year...
Wha? If anything, the first Fable game went on too long for me; I didn't buy the sequels because I just couldn't invest the time to get everything out of them.
Then again, when I play RPG adventure-type games like that I tend to try to explore every feature/plotline/mission, rather than finish it as fast as possible and move on. That's why I'm still playing Fallout 3 on and off after 2 years:)
If you are trying to compare the factual accuracy of statements made by Rush Limbaugh or the Bible vs the New York Times or NPR you lost your argument before it started...
There are so many more reasons why the complexity doesn't justify potential advantages, though...
Since multicast is UDP, it's not reliable like HTTP streaming, meaning yet another layer would have to be built on it allowing efficient retransmission to any client(s) that missed a packet (there are some really rough experiments with this but they are even farther away from practicality than multicast itself).
Also, many (most?) people pause, rewind, or fast forward at some time during playback of a streaming movie, so you'd have to constantly be searching for and joining new multicasts.
And, of course, multicast would not take advantage of the huge existing infrastructure of CDNs and HTTP proxies/caches, etc that are currently usable with HTTP streaming.
Not to mention most decent streaming these days supports dynamic bitrate switching, meaning any client can seamlessly switch bitrates depending on their current bandwidth. This is easy to do with HTTP and range requests, etc, but I'd imagine yet another nightmare of complexity and inefficiency with multicast...
Oh, and, of course, IP streaming of most movies (from a "licensing" point of view) is only possible because these streams are encrypted and protected with a variety of DRM solutions, some of which rely on HTTP/HTTPS/SSL, etc, which would take major changes to work with multicast.
I could go on, but you get the idea... those are a few of the issues involved.:)
Anyway, it's theoretically possible (though not realistic, given the current cable/telco monopolies over the last mile) that multicast with some sort of forward error correction (same method used by broadcast transport stream) could be admopted for live broadcasts. But VOD is a completely different animal...
Correction, you *used to* have marginally less incompetent politicians than in the US. You changed that in 2006, and now just keep making it worse every election afterwards...;)
This only works if all of the consumer devices have a LOT of persistent storage (ie HDD) available. Since almost no TVs, Blu Ray players, tablets, etc, have that, it would cut them all out of a P2P solution (PCs are now the minority of Netflix streaming users, and game consoles won't allow that much space to be used by one app).
VUDU already did this, and it worked really well (able to stream 1080p video in real time). The problem was that it was impossible to grow an online service fast enough selling expensive set-tops with an HDD, so they switched to a streaming model, partnered with CE companies, and embedded the software everywhere possible.
In all seriousness, there is this thing called Multicast.. that works for both IPv4 and IPv6...
Wait, you used multicast and serious in the same sentence?;) It's way, WAY far from anything practical over the Internet in general.
Plus, it's not very useful for video-on-demand apps, since so few people will be simultaneously streaming from the same position in the same content. It could be used for live video broadcast, but as has been pointed out there are a few implementations of that already, and the cable/sat/DSL companies have little interest in changing their model at present (or enabling multicast on their IP networks to let someone else use that model)...
It's irrelevant if the people on board want to opt out of security unless all of the potential victims on the ground do so, as well. Not that the airlines or their insurance companies would even consider the idea, anyway.
Yeah, but the same can be true for training people to spot behavioral cues. And I'm pretty sure it's easier to find and train a few motivated terrorists than 100,000+ competent TSA agents.
I'm not sure why they would release this detail if it's true. It's not like people's opinion is going to change.
Eh, that statement doesn't make much sense... if it wouldn't change people's opinions, there would be no reason to release it if it WASN'T true. If they made it up and that gets discovered, it would be much worse for the US govt's reputation, and there would be absolutely no reason to risk that.
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The dentist in the article has definitely heard of it by now. His Yelp rating dropped from 4.5 to 3.5 stars in one day after this article was published. Hopefully that (along with the very well researched and written Ars Technica story - journalism isn't dead yet after all) will convince him to change his policy.
Though I have to say, I do hope Yelp takes down all of the bogus reviews people are publishing. If you believe the comments, one of them actually went to the office while passing through town, but the rest have no intention of ever going to this dentist or even discussing the policy with him. Every indication from both the article and valid Yelp reviews is that he's a good dentist who just took bad advice from a bogus medical legal services company (Medical Justice).
It's still a form of compensation - companies have a limited pool of stock used for options that is allocated by their board, and they don't just give it out for no reason. If he wants to receive this form of compensation, he needs to be willing to walk away (if he's not, then there really isn't any reason for them to get extra assurance...)
Exactly. You have to ask - why would the current equity holders want to give up part of their share in the company if, as you say, they are doing "very, very well"?
The answer is, you have to GIVE them a reason. You'll either have to force their hand to some degree if you want it as extra compensation, or else offer to buy stock at the current fair price.
GTS 450? I said latest games... ;)
So true. My favorite exemption often demanded is the (already idiotic and not helpful to general security) policy of periodically changing passwords. We peons are expected to come up with a secure, non-duplicated and non-derivative password every 3-6 months that we can somehow remember, while the executives don't want to change theirs since it was already a stretch to remember their wife's birthday for their current password.
Good luck playing the latest games if you just bought a $700 PC...
Yep, that's exactly what would happen when you ask them to voluntarily lose revenue for the sake of general goodwill.
If, however, you make it illegal to knowingly process payments from a merchant using (already illegal) spam to generate sale (after proper notification from a government entity), that would be a different story.
Here's how a similar process already works today:
US govt: "Here's the merchant number of an organization that may or may not be funding terrorist organizations. Shut it down."
[...approximately 2.5 seconds later...]
VISA: "Done! Would you like us to destroy their credit rating and kidnap their dog as well?"
Actually, moving up to the credit card companies would hugely narrow the bottleneck. You convince VISA, Mastercard, Discover, and Amex to adopt a policy of refusing transactions from any institution knowingly processing spammers' requests, and you're pretty much done. Convincing all of the random shady "banks" around the world to do the same would be a LOT harder (until they lose all credit card processing capability unless they comply!)
I do agree that if they really cared, the problem would already be solved - because the solution is just so damn easy...
It can provide up to 10W of power (4x USB, but short of FireWire power)
Just one nitpick on an otherwise Informative comment... ;)
I believe USB 3.0 can do 900mA @ 5v, which is 4.5W. So, Thunderbolt is closer to 2x the power of USB 3.0 (4x USB 2.0, but that's not really the competition...) Still, that is significant, because a lot of external HDDs use more than 5W at full load...
Actually, I find this part even more brilliant - the author wasn't just a random intern "assigned the job", it was the Director of the CDC's Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response (a Rear Admiral!). Nice to see when "the boss" can have a sense of humor, too.
Yeah, good point. That's a particularly slimy practice of EA's. Especially since adding console online support in the first place was conditional on using their own servers (Microsoft would have kept these games running for much longer if they hosted them).
That is true. I guess the problem is that you tend to get a lot more long-term use out of your couch than a video game, and there is no real disadvantage to buying a game used (unlike that pee-stained couch ;)
Of course, that just seems like an argument for designing more re-playable games or picking a better business model. I don't hear Blizzard complaining much about used sales hurting World of Warcraft (due to the business model) or Starcraft (due to the replayability). And apparently the Rock Band franchise has had hundreds of millions of DLC downloads for their games. Hell, even EA has figured out how to minimize the market for used sports games by releasing a new one with updated features and player rosters every year...
Wha? If anything, the first Fable game went on too long for me; I didn't buy the sequels because I just couldn't invest the time to get everything out of them.
Then again, when I play RPG adventure-type games like that I tend to try to explore every feature/plotline/mission, rather than finish it as fast as possible and move on. That's why I'm still playing Fallout 3 on and off after 2 years :)
Don't forget abolish political parties... party affiliation alone is enough to make the decision for a many voters.
If you are trying to compare the factual accuracy of statements made by Rush Limbaugh or the Bible vs the New York Times or NPR you lost your argument before it started...
There are so many more reasons why the complexity doesn't justify potential advantages, though...
Since multicast is UDP, it's not reliable like HTTP streaming, meaning yet another layer would have to be built on it allowing efficient retransmission to any client(s) that missed a packet (there are some really rough experiments with this but they are even farther away from practicality than multicast itself).
Also, many (most?) people pause, rewind, or fast forward at some time during playback of a streaming movie, so you'd have to constantly be searching for and joining new multicasts.
And, of course, multicast would not take advantage of the huge existing infrastructure of CDNs and HTTP proxies/caches, etc that are currently usable with HTTP streaming.
Not to mention most decent streaming these days supports dynamic bitrate switching, meaning any client can seamlessly switch bitrates depending on their current bandwidth. This is easy to do with HTTP and range requests, etc, but I'd imagine yet another nightmare of complexity and inefficiency with multicast...
Oh, and, of course, IP streaming of most movies (from a "licensing" point of view) is only possible because these streams are encrypted and protected with a variety of DRM solutions, some of which rely on HTTP/HTTPS/SSL, etc, which would take major changes to work with multicast.
I could go on, but you get the idea... those are a few of the issues involved. :)
Anyway, it's theoretically possible (though not realistic, given the current cable/telco monopolies over the last mile) that multicast with some sort of forward error correction (same method used by broadcast transport stream) could be admopted for live broadcasts. But VOD is a completely different animal...
Is Men at Work really that biased?
Correction, you *used to* have marginally less incompetent politicians than in the US. You changed that in 2006, and now just keep making it worse every election afterwards... ;)
This only works if all of the consumer devices have a LOT of persistent storage (ie HDD) available. Since almost no TVs, Blu Ray players, tablets, etc, have that, it would cut them all out of a P2P solution (PCs are now the minority of Netflix streaming users, and game consoles won't allow that much space to be used by one app).
VUDU already did this, and it worked really well (able to stream 1080p video in real time). The problem was that it was impossible to grow an online service fast enough selling expensive set-tops with an HDD, so they switched to a streaming model, partnered with CE companies, and embedded the software everywhere possible.
In all seriousness, there is this thing called Multicast.. that works for both IPv4 and IPv6...
Wait, you used multicast and serious in the same sentence? ;) It's way, WAY far from anything practical over the Internet in general.
Plus, it's not very useful for video-on-demand apps, since so few people will be simultaneously streaming from the same position in the same content. It could be used for live video broadcast, but as has been pointed out there are a few implementations of that already, and the cable/sat/DSL companies have little interest in changing their model at present (or enabling multicast on their IP networks to let someone else use that model)...
What your asking for has already been done, they are cable companies.
WHOOSH!
Exactly my point...
It's irrelevant if the people on board want to opt out of security unless all of the potential victims on the ground do so, as well. Not that the airlines or their insurance companies would even consider the idea, anyway.
Of course it is - it's just less accurate when you crash the plane with a bomb instead of the flight controls.
Yeah, but the same can be true for training people to spot behavioral cues. And I'm pretty sure it's easier to find and train a few motivated terrorists than 100,000+ competent TSA agents.
I'm not sure why they would release this detail if it's true. It's not like people's opinion is going to change.
Eh, that statement doesn't make much sense... if it wouldn't change people's opinions, there would be no reason to release it if it WASN'T true. If they made it up and that gets discovered, it would be much worse for the US govt's reputation, and there would be absolutely no reason to risk that.