I read your post and, at first, entirely agreed with it. However, what if the devs deliberately want to keep this problem amidst to perpetuate a reason for ISPs to finally upgrade their infrastructure before further optimizing how the protocol works?
That's quite a retarded suggestion. Upgrading the link with the bottleneck requires a lot of investment (putting a new intercontinental fiber-optic line in isn't the same as digging up a few streets) so the ISPs are quite right to try to put it off as long as they can. It's not underinvestment, it's trying to make the existing investment work for its living properly. And the thing is... it does work for most since most people's network access is sporadic. It's the bulk downloaders that are the problem from the ISP's perspective, and the bulk uploaders too (since most people have asymmetric connections). Now, if the bittorrent users would switch to business-grade connections (i.e., ones that have balanced bandwidth at faster than modem speeds) then they'd be much less of a problem for everyone. But they won't, because they're cheap scum. (Well, a few might be non-scum, but they are definitely still cheap.)
First off, Medicare's going to be insolvent in a few decades. Second, if these people don't have medical insurance, that just puts more burden on Medicare and other state health institutions since they'll be the ones footing the bill for all those ER visits. The other option is to deny these people health care if they can't pay. And if/when that happens, we'll have finally become our own worst enemy.
The fix is to refuse to pay excessive prices for drugs. Instead insist on cutting costs through obvious methods like sticking with generics instead of allowing the drug companies to lock competitors out with patent trickery. You also need to think in terms of some degree of rationing because there isn't an infinite budget available to pay for these things, and never ever will be. Of course, the setting of the level of spending level is a matter of politics both now and for the future, so whether you favor lower taxes or higher care levels will be an interesting tension. But letting the drug companies get away with stiffing the public purse? I for one don't like that...
OK - but the problem then is you keep out competitors from the market.
So? That's really not a problem. The resources don't have to be exploited today, or this decade, or even this century. They're sitting quite happily underground, not going anywhere, ready to be extracted whenever someone feels that, yes, it is worth their while to deal with what would otherwise be the externalities of exploitation.
Of course, if it turns out that it never becomes economic to extract under that regime, then it's just as well if it never gets exploited at all; the net utility could only ever be negative, and any "profit" from the mine for the owners would be at a substantial cost to everyone else (a kind of theft from some perspectives at least).
If you're really paranoid, you could just be extra suspicious of domains that end in two letters (and yes, I am including.us), particularly when the 2nd level name is something you recognize, like paypal, ebay, etc. If you're in China, there may indeed be a legitimate paypal.cn, but I suspect it would set off my spidey sense to see a URL like that show up in my e-mail.
That won't work. There really are a lot of big companies that have country-specific sites that use the two-letter global domains. For example, if you're after books in German then you might be very interested in visiting amazon.de, which is totally legit.
Germany has lots of wildlife yet it's ILLEGAL to drive anywhere but the far right lane, except when passing.
Germany doesn't have a lot of moose roaming around. Sweden OTOH does. There, if you're out in the backwoods you'll often drive well away from the edge of the road if you can (which depends on whether the road is paved or not and how many potholes there are in it; these are independent factors). This can get quite exciting if you suddenly come on a timber truck going the other direction over a blind hill...
Re:Privacy and the real-time web
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· Score: 3, Insightful
5. Replaces a perfectly good, pre-existing protocol, when there's absolutely no sane reason (other than the aforementioned commercialism, of course) to do so? Check.
It's actually XMPP under the hood, which has been around for a few years before Google started getting excited about it. XMPP's jabber application has a number of advantages over IRC (notably the encoding of metadata is nowhere near as horrific) but that's hardly the only use for it.
Doesn't make any sense as a replacement for email though. Maybe as a way to replace POP or IMAP, but SMTP? The advantage of SMTP is its universality (yeah, even Exchange and Notes allegedly...) which means it is great when you need to communicate with someone who is using a different software stack to you.
3) If you're really doing something that must remain confidential - maybe you shouldn't be doing it over wireless in the first place.
Against most real threats, you should be thinking in terms of using SSL over the wire anyway because WPA/AES will not protect packets after they get past the wireless hub.
I would drop any class you did that in and ensure that I reward you with a terrible recommendation and report, if I was your dean I would fire you.
Warning, this is not a good idea! You'd be talking to the dean of mathematics about this, and the dean (being a mathematician) would probably just tell you to stop goofing off by pretending to take notes and to listen and learn to the lecturer instead. The teaching faculty will tend to be intolerant of any student they think is not applying themselves properly...
In the US, you should really try mixing the words "moral" "business" and "law"...I think the resulting explosion would be quite interesting.
The US simply doesn't recognize moral rights (which have a fairly good definition in the Berne Convention, IIRC) when it comes to copyright law. However, the US is also unusual in this respect.
"Cloud Computing" differs from "information superhighway," "cyber" and "web 2.0" in that it's not just a buzzword but an actual strategy shift in software development which is not only creating "marketing babble" but also directing an increasingly large share of global IT expenditures. This is a real fundamental shift away from traditional notions of the "Platform" away from operating system APIs and proprietary client/server applications to ubiquitous web/standards based applications and commoditized scalable third party provided infrastructure. Capital expenses are shifting to operating expenses, and whenever this much money changes focus you have to keep your head on straight and your eyes open.
I know what Cloud Computing is, but you managed to make my eyes glaze over with that babble.
Cloud computing is like traditional managed hosting, except the basic management and accounting timescale is much shorter (i.e., you buy by the hour instead of by the month) and setup time is much shorter. That makes it immensely more flexible, which is very interesting to lots of people in the business world. Yes, it could have happened before; there was no real technical reason why not. But it isn't a technical revolution, but rather a business process one that's mostly happening from the grassroots up.
Raise gas taxes and people use less gas. It's a regressive tax and if you push it too hard you'll see a massive flight to higher millage cars or even non-petrol cars.
This is arguably a reasonable goal in itself, and would be an example of the use of taxation to enforce a social policy. Whether or not you approve of the use of taxes in that way is a political question.
As a second point everyone benefits from good roads not just those who drive on them.
There most certainly is public and communal benefit to having decent physical communications (road, rail, waterways, air) and your message identified at least some of those reasons (snipped for brevity) but that does not mean that it is necessary to subsidize them from general taxation. For example, with modern technology, it's quite possible to make toll roads work even at the local level.
The problem with this is that gas taxes do not even come close to covering the costs of building and maintaining the road network. Public roads are heavily subsidized.
Change "Johnny nervously wrinkled his brow as he reached for his Coke" into "Johhny nervously wrinkled his brow as he reached for his Pepsi".
The potential for awesome failure is particularly high in childrens' books. For example, "Ding Penis Dell, Pussy's in the well" would just put a whole new slant on things.
All that would accomplish is immunity for politicians and their staff from this law.
Unlikely. The UK doesn't go in for granting politicians legal immunity, even when this would be of great benefit for the party in power. I don't know if there are any formal rules in this area though.
Of course, if anyone does decide to use the three-strikes approach, could they please use it against some media types too? Might as well get some benefit out of a bad law...
Momentum = mass * velocity (linear momentum of a particle) Kinetic Energy = 0.5 * mass * velocity^2 (for a newtonian rigid body)
For the correct definitions of mass and velocity, those work for bodies with relativistically-significant speeds. (In short, you can have arbitrarily high kinetic energy and momentum without infinite velocity, because of how the interpretation of mass and time changes. This stuff is very odd when you think about it...)
Nonsense. Mormons are quite free and able to interact with people who "don't buy into their crap." I say it's actually their defining characteristic when compared to other loony cults. Excommunication is reserved for cardinal sins, not merely associating with people who don't buy your crap. Not to mention that excommunication is not the tool of control that it was during the middle ages.
From what I've seen, Mormonism has pretty much crossed over from being a cult to being a religion. In particular, they engage fully with the world, don't encourage suicide in the faithful, and don't try to extort in order to grant access to the hierarchy. (They encourage tithing, but that's actually fairly common across religions and isn't formally tied to advancing within the church.)
OK, to be fair Scientology doesn't appear to be generally encouraging suicide in the faithful either. But they're not fully engaging (i.e., they encourage converts to sever contact with their families) and, as the French court case showed, they're extorting. So they're a cult still, and unfortunately they seem to be intent on subverting normal mechanisms to serve their own warped ends (not a common feature of cults). If they lose the massive fixation with getting all their adherents' money, stop people from cutting themselves off, and definitely leave off trying to hack the legal system to attack their perceived enemies, they'll be a normal religion (with loopy beliefs, but hey, they're not unique in that!) The real question for them is whether they are willing to make the transition, or if they prefer living in their own bizarro-world instead with everyone else dumping on them.
Over beers, one of the people involved with its writing told the story of being asked whether the memo would be out before Thanksgiving and responding, "Without a doubt." That was in 2007!!
So, which Thanksgiving were you thinking he was referring to?
The constitution says ol' Uncle Sam can't perform unreasonable searches or seizures without a warrant, and that to issue a warrant they need probable cause.[...]
If 99% of planes got hijacked and crashed, it would still be unconstitutional.
You do realize that if you take this up with the courts, they'll probably just say that searching you (and everyone else, so there's no specific targeting) before you go on the plane is in fact reasonable? Given that, challenging the constitutionality is probably a non-starter (whether or not you agree with that being a wholly independent matter; the law's not just about your opinion).
I get the impression Amazon didn't want to get involved with SaaS for various reasons previously. (There are others who sell SaaS that's hosted on EC2, perhaps Amazon didn't want to compete with their own customers.)
SaaS is much more boutique than the mass market that Amazon aims at. There's lots of money to be made in the area, but it's about a high value-add through deep expertise in the hosted applications.
The people who do need to watch out are the people selling services based on fairly commoditized applications (e.g., MySQL). Those have the potential market scale to make it as not just an end application, but as a platform that other SaaS providers can build on top. That's the point (Platform as a Service) when it makes sense for the Big Boys (Amazon, Google, Yahoo, IBM, etc.) to turn up and commoditize things, which is pretty much the kiss of death for the small scale high-profit-margin way of working.
The fix for the really small guys? Get closer to your customers, Make your living out of taking the mass offerings and tailoring them to particular clients' exact needs. That's an area where there will continue to be plenty of work, as long as you're not dogmatic about it.
A real worry though is that there seems to be little room for medium sized providers. In particular, there's quite possibly not enough of a space to support the growth of a company in this area from a small player to a very big one. Instead, there's this forced vast gulf between the giants and the minnows. I suspect that there will need to be more regulation round this stuff to prevent such an oligarchy ("gigantarchy"?) from getting overpowerful, which doesn't exactly fill me with glee. But it can't be good for the market overall for there to be hardly any organization of middling size involved.
Why on earth are they proposing to use obituaries? Instead, they should be thinking in terms of the normal documentation required when winding up someone's estate after they die; a death certificate or a notarized copy of one. This isn't as big a hassle as all that, since the executors have to handle all this stuff anyway in order to sort out the deceased's financial affairs...
And that's different from Software As A Service how?
It isn't different. SaaS is one of the ways of delivering things in a cloudy way (particularly when selling direct to end users) but there's also I(nfrastructure)aaS (where Amazon's strength has been for a good while now) and P(latform)aaS, which is where a good number of companies are getting excited (new ways to lock customers in, I suppose...)
If you find it surprising that businesses and media are getting excited over a rebrand of what was there before, you've not been watching this industry for nearly long enough. It happens again and again, over and over. The trick is to spot what will be the next hot BS buzzword ahead of time (and to remember that sometimes the underlying technology can actually be worthwhile).
Upping the atmosphere's CO2 content will just encourage plants and bacteria that thrive on CO2, and the system will pull itself back into line.
Eventually, sure. No guarantee that humanity or our civilization will survive in the meantime. And to be fair, I'm not too bothered about the planet itself, but I do rather have a vested interest in human civilization continuing.
Your email is hidden and I did not see a real name. What makes you not anonymous?
They've got an identity (the slashdot login "davmoo") which you know maps to a particular person, and you can reasonably address remarks to that person (e.g., through the use of this forum). You just can't (easily) discover the map from the identity you have to the person. If they were truly anonymous, you would have no identity at all instead of one with a hidden map.
For example, you're anonymous. That means I have no idea at all which of the billions of people on the planet made the comment. But if davmoo makes another comment, I can see that and correlate it with the others that he's made.
1. the US is much bigger than Europe, with multiple overlapping jurisdictions. It's easy to cover any of the European countries, because they're small and there wasn't a technology transition.
There was a technology transition, and there most certainly are overlapping jurisdictions. Just because you don't see them from your perspective doesn't mean that they aren't there. What there is though is more of a willingness to do something about it.
2. there isn't as much rural subsidy for cellphones. Universal service was for landlines, mainly.
Who cares about the boonies? Why is there such bad service in US urban areas? You'd think that there'd be plenty of people there to pay...
3. the problem is cost vs coverage. You can build out rural areas, but you make less money because there are less people. For urban areas, you start running into interference problems. Plus, you have to constantly build out your infrastructure (see AT&T's infrastructure problems).
Yet Europe is more urbanized and yet manages to solve it with more companies in the market. It can't be an insurmountable problem.
If AT&T only had to operate in Texas, it would be able to do pretty well. AT&T's footprint is national, however. Do you develop Texas completely, or do you cover Michigan and Texas? How about extending to Missouri? etc etc.
Oh for goodness sake! Stop rolling out that "Oooh we've got a big land area" apologist BS. If Texas and Michigan were next door to each other, it would take an almost identical amount of equipment to provide service to them as in their current arrangement as cellphone towers simply don't cover that great an area anyway; the only difference is the requirement for a long-distance call infrastructure between them which already exists. Gee! Guess that means it's not a technical problem that's holding you back.
I reckon that the problem is one of a failure of regulation that's allowed the build-up of large monopolies that feel no need to compete. No (real) competition, so prices are huge and service poor. After all, you're not going to do anything about it as you've got no choice. Either beef up your regulation or get the lube out and bend over...
Techies: your manager simply can't take your word for granted until you make a solid business case for what you want to do. After a while, you may build up trust that just your saying so is enough, but you'll have to put some work in the first few times.
Remember, the manager doesn't understand everything (if he did, he'd be a techie rather than you) but you should be communicating with him to help him understand the key details. On the other hand, it's also important for you to understand the fundamentals of the constraints he's operating under too.
Think of it like an extra set of optimization parameters to work with on the overall problem; solving just the technical side is leaving the whole undone and any engineer worth his salt will appreciate the importance of doing things within budget. If you insist on not taking into account the business side, then you're going to have to provide a range of options with very careful descriptions so that those who do know the business side can see what the drawbacks of a particular decision are.
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I read your post and, at first, entirely agreed with it. However, what if the devs deliberately want to keep this problem amidst to perpetuate a reason for ISPs to finally upgrade their infrastructure before further optimizing how the protocol works?
That's quite a retarded suggestion. Upgrading the link with the bottleneck requires a lot of investment (putting a new intercontinental fiber-optic line in isn't the same as digging up a few streets) so the ISPs are quite right to try to put it off as long as they can. It's not underinvestment, it's trying to make the existing investment work for its living properly. And the thing is... it does work for most since most people's network access is sporadic. It's the bulk downloaders that are the problem from the ISP's perspective, and the bulk uploaders too (since most people have asymmetric connections). Now, if the bittorrent users would switch to business-grade connections (i.e., ones that have balanced bandwidth at faster than modem speeds) then they'd be much less of a problem for everyone. But they won't, because they're cheap scum. (Well, a few might be non-scum, but they are definitely still cheap.)
First off, Medicare's going to be insolvent in a few decades. Second, if these people don't have medical insurance, that just puts more burden on Medicare and other state health institutions since they'll be the ones footing the bill for all those ER visits. The other option is to deny these people health care if they can't pay. And if/when that happens, we'll have finally become our own worst enemy.
The fix is to refuse to pay excessive prices for drugs. Instead insist on cutting costs through obvious methods like sticking with generics instead of allowing the drug companies to lock competitors out with patent trickery. You also need to think in terms of some degree of rationing because there isn't an infinite budget available to pay for these things, and never ever will be. Of course, the setting of the level of spending level is a matter of politics both now and for the future, so whether you favor lower taxes or higher care levels will be an interesting tension. But letting the drug companies get away with stiffing the public purse? I for one don't like that...
OK - but the problem then is you keep out competitors from the market.
So? That's really not a problem. The resources don't have to be exploited today, or this decade, or even this century. They're sitting quite happily underground, not going anywhere, ready to be extracted whenever someone feels that, yes, it is worth their while to deal with what would otherwise be the externalities of exploitation.
Of course, if it turns out that it never becomes economic to extract under that regime, then it's just as well if it never gets exploited at all; the net utility could only ever be negative, and any "profit" from the mine for the owners would be at a substantial cost to everyone else (a kind of theft from some perspectives at least).
If you're really paranoid, you could just be extra suspicious of domains that end in two letters (and yes, I am including .us), particularly when the 2nd level name is something you recognize, like paypal, ebay, etc. If you're in China, there may indeed be a legitimate paypal.cn, but I suspect it would set off my spidey sense to see a URL like that show up in my e-mail.
That won't work. There really are a lot of big companies that have country-specific sites that use the two-letter global domains. For example, if you're after books in German then you might be very interested in visiting amazon.de, which is totally legit.
Germany has lots of wildlife yet it's ILLEGAL to drive anywhere but the far right lane, except when passing.
Germany doesn't have a lot of moose roaming around. Sweden OTOH does. There, if you're out in the backwoods you'll often drive well away from the edge of the road if you can (which depends on whether the road is paved or not and how many potholes there are in it; these are independent factors). This can get quite exciting if you suddenly come on a timber truck going the other direction over a blind hill...
5. Replaces a perfectly good, pre-existing protocol, when there's absolutely no sane reason (other than the aforementioned commercialism, of course) to do so? Check.
It's actually XMPP under the hood, which has been around for a few years before Google started getting excited about it. XMPP's jabber application has a number of advantages over IRC (notably the encoding of metadata is nowhere near as horrific) but that's hardly the only use for it.
Doesn't make any sense as a replacement for email though. Maybe as a way to replace POP or IMAP, but SMTP? The advantage of SMTP is its universality (yeah, even Exchange and Notes allegedly...) which means it is great when you need to communicate with someone who is using a different software stack to you.
3) If you're really doing something that must remain confidential - maybe you shouldn't be doing it over wireless in the first place.
Against most real threats, you should be thinking in terms of using SSL over the wire anyway because WPA/AES will not protect packets after they get past the wireless hub.
I would drop any class you did that in and ensure that I reward you with a terrible recommendation and report, if I was your dean I would fire you.
Warning, this is not a good idea! You'd be talking to the dean of mathematics about this, and the dean (being a mathematician) would probably just tell you to stop goofing off by pretending to take notes and to listen and learn to the lecturer instead. The teaching faculty will tend to be intolerant of any student they think is not applying themselves properly...
In the US, you should really try mixing the words "moral" "business" and "law"...I think the resulting explosion would be quite interesting.
The US simply doesn't recognize moral rights (which have a fairly good definition in the Berne Convention, IIRC) when it comes to copyright law. However, the US is also unusual in this respect.
"Cloud Computing" differs from "information superhighway," "cyber" and "web 2.0" in that it's not just a buzzword but an actual strategy shift in software development which is not only creating "marketing babble" but also directing an increasingly large share of global IT expenditures. This is a real fundamental shift away from traditional notions of the "Platform" away from operating system APIs and proprietary client/server applications to ubiquitous web/standards based applications and commoditized scalable third party provided infrastructure. Capital expenses are shifting to operating expenses, and whenever this much money changes focus you have to keep your head on straight and your eyes open.
I know what Cloud Computing is, but you managed to make my eyes glaze over with that babble.
Cloud computing is like traditional managed hosting, except the basic management and accounting timescale is much shorter (i.e., you buy by the hour instead of by the month) and setup time is much shorter. That makes it immensely more flexible, which is very interesting to lots of people in the business world. Yes, it could have happened before; there was no real technical reason why not. But it isn't a technical revolution, but rather a business process one that's mostly happening from the grassroots up.
Raise gas taxes and people use less gas. It's a regressive tax and if you push it too hard you'll see a massive flight to higher millage cars or even non-petrol cars.
This is arguably a reasonable goal in itself, and would be an example of the use of taxation to enforce a social policy. Whether or not you approve of the use of taxes in that way is a political question.
As a second point everyone benefits from good roads not just those who drive on them.
There most certainly is public and communal benefit to having decent physical communications (road, rail, waterways, air) and your message identified at least some of those reasons (snipped for brevity) but that does not mean that it is necessary to subsidize them from general taxation. For example, with modern technology, it's quite possible to make toll roads work even at the local level.
The problem with this is that gas taxes do not even come close to covering the costs of building and maintaining the road network. Public roads are heavily subsidized.
So you want higher gas taxes?
Change "Johnny nervously wrinkled his brow as he reached for his Coke" into "Johhny nervously wrinkled his brow as he reached for his Pepsi".
The potential for awesome failure is particularly high in childrens' books. For example, "Ding Penis Dell, Pussy's in the well" would just put a whole new slant on things.
All that would accomplish is immunity for politicians and their staff from this law.
Unlikely. The UK doesn't go in for granting politicians legal immunity, even when this would be of great benefit for the party in power. I don't know if there are any formal rules in this area though.
Of course, if anyone does decide to use the three-strikes approach, could they please use it against some media types too? Might as well get some benefit out of a bad law...
Momentum = mass * velocity (linear momentum of a particle)
Kinetic Energy = 0.5 * mass * velocity^2 (for a newtonian rigid body)
For the correct definitions of mass and velocity, those work for bodies with relativistically-significant speeds. (In short, you can have arbitrarily high kinetic energy and momentum without infinite velocity, because of how the interpretation of mass and time changes. This stuff is very odd when you think about it...)
Nonsense. Mormons are quite free and able to interact with people who "don't buy into their crap." I say it's actually their defining characteristic when compared to other loony cults. Excommunication is reserved for cardinal sins, not merely associating with people who don't buy your crap. Not to mention that excommunication is not the tool of control that it was during the middle ages.
From what I've seen, Mormonism has pretty much crossed over from being a cult to being a religion. In particular, they engage fully with the world, don't encourage suicide in the faithful, and don't try to extort in order to grant access to the hierarchy. (They encourage tithing, but that's actually fairly common across religions and isn't formally tied to advancing within the church.)
OK, to be fair Scientology doesn't appear to be generally encouraging suicide in the faithful either. But they're not fully engaging (i.e., they encourage converts to sever contact with their families) and, as the French court case showed, they're extorting. So they're a cult still, and unfortunately they seem to be intent on subverting normal mechanisms to serve their own warped ends (not a common feature of cults). If they lose the massive fixation with getting all their adherents' money, stop people from cutting themselves off, and definitely leave off trying to hack the legal system to attack their perceived enemies, they'll be a normal religion (with loopy beliefs, but hey, they're not unique in that!) The real question for them is whether they are willing to make the transition, or if they prefer living in their own bizarro-world instead with everyone else dumping on them.
Over beers, one of the people involved with its writing told the story of being asked whether the memo would be out before Thanksgiving and responding, "Without a doubt." That was in 2007!!
So, which Thanksgiving were you thinking he was referring to?
The constitution says ol' Uncle Sam can't perform unreasonable searches or seizures without a warrant, and that to issue a warrant they need probable cause.[...]
If 99% of planes got hijacked and crashed, it would still be unconstitutional.
You do realize that if you take this up with the courts, they'll probably just say that searching you (and everyone else, so there's no specific targeting) before you go on the plane is in fact reasonable? Given that, challenging the constitutionality is probably a non-starter (whether or not you agree with that being a wholly independent matter; the law's not just about your opinion).
I get the impression Amazon didn't want to get involved with SaaS for various reasons previously. (There are others who sell SaaS that's hosted on EC2, perhaps Amazon didn't want to compete with their own customers.)
SaaS is much more boutique than the mass market that Amazon aims at. There's lots of money to be made in the area, but it's about a high value-add through deep expertise in the hosted applications.
The people who do need to watch out are the people selling services based on fairly commoditized applications (e.g., MySQL). Those have the potential market scale to make it as not just an end application, but as a platform that other SaaS providers can build on top. That's the point (Platform as a Service) when it makes sense for the Big Boys (Amazon, Google, Yahoo, IBM, etc.) to turn up and commoditize things, which is pretty much the kiss of death for the small scale high-profit-margin way of working.
The fix for the really small guys? Get closer to your customers, Make your living out of taking the mass offerings and tailoring them to particular clients' exact needs. That's an area where there will continue to be plenty of work, as long as you're not dogmatic about it.
A real worry though is that there seems to be little room for medium sized providers. In particular, there's quite possibly not enough of a space to support the growth of a company in this area from a small player to a very big one. Instead, there's this forced vast gulf between the giants and the minnows. I suspect that there will need to be more regulation round this stuff to prevent such an oligarchy ("gigantarchy"?) from getting overpowerful, which doesn't exactly fill me with glee. But it can't be good for the market overall for there to be hardly any organization of middling size involved.
Why on earth are they proposing to use obituaries? Instead, they should be thinking in terms of the normal documentation required when winding up someone's estate after they die; a death certificate or a notarized copy of one. This isn't as big a hassle as all that, since the executors have to handle all this stuff anyway in order to sort out the deceased's financial affairs...
And that's different from Software As A Service how?
It isn't different. SaaS is one of the ways of delivering things in a cloudy way (particularly when selling direct to end users) but there's also I(nfrastructure)aaS (where Amazon's strength has been for a good while now) and P(latform)aaS, which is where a good number of companies are getting excited (new ways to lock customers in, I suppose...)
If you find it surprising that businesses and media are getting excited over a rebrand of what was there before, you've not been watching this industry for nearly long enough. It happens again and again, over and over. The trick is to spot what will be the next hot BS buzzword ahead of time (and to remember that sometimes the underlying technology can actually be worthwhile).
Upping the atmosphere's CO2 content will just encourage plants and bacteria that thrive on CO2, and the system will pull itself back into line.
Eventually, sure. No guarantee that humanity or our civilization will survive in the meantime. And to be fair, I'm not too bothered about the planet itself, but I do rather have a vested interest in human civilization continuing.
Your email is hidden and I did not see a real name. What makes you not anonymous?
They've got an identity (the slashdot login "davmoo") which you know maps to a particular person, and you can reasonably address remarks to that person (e.g., through the use of this forum). You just can't (easily) discover the map from the identity you have to the person. If they were truly anonymous, you would have no identity at all instead of one with a hidden map.
For example, you're anonymous. That means I have no idea at all which of the billions of people on the planet made the comment. But if davmoo makes another comment, I can see that and correlate it with the others that he's made.
1. the US is much bigger than Europe, with multiple overlapping jurisdictions. It's easy to cover any of the European countries, because they're small and there wasn't a technology transition.
There was a technology transition, and there most certainly are overlapping jurisdictions. Just because you don't see them from your perspective doesn't mean that they aren't there. What there is though is more of a willingness to do something about it.
2. there isn't as much rural subsidy for cellphones. Universal service was for landlines, mainly.
Who cares about the boonies? Why is there such bad service in US urban areas? You'd think that there'd be plenty of people there to pay...
3. the problem is cost vs coverage. You can build out rural areas, but you make less money because there are less people. For urban areas, you start running into interference problems. Plus, you have to constantly build out your infrastructure (see AT&T's infrastructure problems).
Yet Europe is more urbanized and yet manages to solve it with more companies in the market. It can't be an insurmountable problem.
If AT&T only had to operate in Texas, it would be able to do pretty well. AT&T's footprint is national, however. Do you develop Texas completely, or do you cover Michigan and Texas? How about extending to Missouri? etc etc.
Oh for goodness sake! Stop rolling out that "Oooh we've got a big land area" apologist BS. If Texas and Michigan were next door to each other, it would take an almost identical amount of equipment to provide service to them as in their current arrangement as cellphone towers simply don't cover that great an area anyway; the only difference is the requirement for a long-distance call infrastructure between them which already exists. Gee! Guess that means it's not a technical problem that's holding you back.
I reckon that the problem is one of a failure of regulation that's allowed the build-up of large monopolies that feel no need to compete. No (real) competition, so prices are huge and service poor. After all, you're not going to do anything about it as you've got no choice. Either beef up your regulation or get the lube out and bend over...
Techies: your manager simply can't take your word for granted until you make a solid business case for what you want to do. After a while, you may build up trust that just your saying so is enough, but you'll have to put some work in the first few times.
Remember, the manager doesn't understand everything (if he did, he'd be a techie rather than you) but you should be communicating with him to help him understand the key details. On the other hand, it's also important for you to understand the fundamentals of the constraints he's operating under too.
Think of it like an extra set of optimization parameters to work with on the overall problem; solving just the technical side is leaving the whole undone and any engineer worth his salt will appreciate the importance of doing things within budget. If you insist on not taking into account the business side, then you're going to have to provide a range of options with very careful descriptions so that those who do know the business side can see what the drawbacks of a particular decision are.