A less bitter way to put it is that most companies would rather take on less risk, even if it means spending more money in the long term. You can't lose money if you don't spend it. And the longer you put off spending it, the longer you haven't had to assume the risk of losing it. They wouldn't call it being "short sighted"; they'd call it being "risk adverse" or simply "smart".
Think of it this way: They make a smaller initial investment, hoping to increase revenue. If revenue actually increases (i.e. the project succeeds), they'll have the money to make additional investments because revenue increased. They may spend more in the long run, but that's the trade off with assuming less risk. If revenue doesn't increase (i.e. the project failed), then they just lose their initial investement and aren't in debt from making some big initial investment.
Also, let's not forget that power companies aren't driven to be overly efficient. They face little competition at best and are complete monopolies at worst. If they start turning too much of a profit, they'll be rewarded with their regulated rates being decreased.
My wife is 9 months pregnant, due to pop any day now. This is our first, so we've been shopping for day care centers. It seems all they want to tell us about is how everything is desanitized constantly. Shoes are not worn into the rooms. Hands are washed immediately after entering the room. Surfaces are sprayed down every few minutes. Each toy is desanitized immediately after a kid puts it down.
I came out of the first tour and said to my wife, "it was great and the only concern I have is that it's too damn clean. My boy's going to need some dirt and filth." Not only are they hampering the kids' natural defenses, but they're also evolving the next uber-germ.
If you want choice in broadband, stop supporting "free" city-sponsored wireless deployments. Wireless is our best hope for having more than 1 or 2 last-mile providers. Wireless opens up the last-mile to allow anyone with a tower in your area to provide service instead of having to bury cables to your house first. The cost of entry for a new service provider is much, much less.
When cities deploy free wireless through tax payer dollars, they've removed any chance of private service providers being able to turn a profit. How can you compete with something that's free? So, where we could have had multiple or even many wireless providers, we have one: the city government.
Wireless for last-mile is still an emerging technology and it's not ready yet, but it's going to stop dead in its tracks if we keep getting excited every time another city brings the 'net to the masses. If you leave the opportunity for service providers to make money, we'll see them driving the technology and the competition. Wireless will evolve into a viable and cheap last mile solution.
Who pays a toll when there's another road you can take?
... the only ones who can change it are the acts themselves.
Pearl Jam tried in the early 90s and ended up canceling most of their tour. They sued and lost. But the internet has changed the playing field. Maybe another band could make a go of it now.
Also, what happened to venues selling tickets directly? They should be in the best position as they're in the same region as the ticket buyers. It seems with all the skinning that ticketmaster does, there's got to be room for a venue to increase their profit margin by selling direct.
What do you mean "supposedly?" Are we still working the conspiracy theories to explain how Bush could have possibly been elected? Twice? After all, it's obvious that no right-thinking, sane person could have voted for him, let alone half the country?
Here's some reality for you: half the country didn't vote for him because they agreed with him 100%. Half the country voted for him because they liked him better than the other choices. Ain't reprentative democracy grand?
So stop it with the conspiracy theories already. I'm sure there was some ballet stuffing and other irregularities, but there was no vast conspiracy! The only vast anything is a misconception that democracy can be perfect and any lack of perfection is due to corruption. Any government is at least a little corrupt. What makes democracy better is it lends itself to transparency and the ability to change leadership peacefully. In other words, we can see significant corruption and deal with it without calling up the militia.
I believe it when I see the first SUV manufacturer file for bankruptcy.
GM is certainly cutting back amid
collapsing SUV sales due largely to increased gas prices. While I'm in favor of an energy tax that reflects the energy source's impact on the environment (driving us to cleaner, efficient sources), gas taxes are simply not popular and unlikely to stick around. Ask California. If we can't increase gas taxes, what's the point of an energy tax? Our best hope today really is that the gov't gets out of the way and stops propping up artificially low energy prices either through subsidies or foreign policy.
Correction: When a company makes secrets other than their own accessible over the internet, they are considered pirates.
In the middle, you have the companies that make only their own secrets freely accessible over the internet. These companies are usually respected and easy to work with.
He arranged a Denial of Service attack. Think of his "fellow students" as zombies and him as a script kiddie, then pretend you're the admin or legit user of this site. Now tell me you wouldn't be a wee bit perturbed. This is akin to willfull destruction of property and saying he's only guilt of refreshing a browser is like saying a car thief is only guilt of moving your car.
A felony is a bit harsh though. Perhaps there were significant damages involved. Or the cops are out of control.
Capitalism doesn't call for an unregulated market. Unregulated is anarchy. Anarchy is bad. Capitalism does best with a lightly regulated market. With capitalism, you must have regulation to make sure everyone is playing fair. Which also means you need regulation to remove monopolies where possible or simply control them where not possible (e.g. public utilities, limited spectrum).
What if our subdivision decided to set up it's own WiFi network?
So you'll need an infrastructure right? A router, a couple access points, some way to manage access, etc. Next you'll probably want someone to run it, unless you feel like having 499 house holds call you ever time they can't get their email. Finally, you'll need a bill collector to make sure everyone's paying in to cover the monthly fees and denying access when they don't.
Congratulations. You've just become a service provider.
If it's law, it'll be made possible. It'll be engineered that way by the law abiding and in this case, anyone that wants to make money from VoIP falls into the "law abiding" category. I'm talking about service providers, equipment manufacturers, and software vendors. Given the choice of breaking the law and protecting what should be your right to privacy, you'll lose.
I think what you're referring to are those that don't care about making money. Call them the "VoIP underground." But its worse than that. As soon as they organize, the government has something to go after. Open source projects count as organized. You'll be left with getting your renegade VoIP software from some kiddy in an IRC channel. Who knows what'll worms/trojans/nastiness will be in that code? Or you can writing it yourself. These are the people the FBI will never be able to stop. A small population and not ideal for the FBI, but I gather they're willing take what they can get easily and work on these deviants later. (Of course they're deviants! Why else would they be hiding?)
Or the requirements fed to the engineers were wrong or grossly exagerated. Not suprising since we hadn't been there before and didn't really know what it was like on the surface.
So, they planned for the worst case environment on Mars and found things more hospitable. Lucky us.
Is there too much corporate welfare? Yes. But is it just corporate? How about pandering and pork barreling in general? It's called corruption and happens anytime you have guys with $100k salaries making $billion decisions. It's our job to keep an eye on it, vote out the worst of it, and prosecute the disgusting cases (DeLay anyone?). Screaming "the sky is falling" ain't helping much is it? Except Slashdot calls you "insightful". Proud?
The world is getting smaller and the Internet and free trade are the reasons. We're getting to know the people on the other side of the world and there's less talk of "them" and more talk of "us." The more we know them and our cultures and economies intertwine, the less likely we'll want to kill them. That's right: free trade promotes peace. If our economy suffers and we lose some jobs, so be it. We've been fat dumb and happy long enough. Peace is worth it.
Christ, don't you want to help people in poor countries? You have two choices: keep giving them money or give them jobs. Wouldn't you rather be self-sufficient? Don't you think they feel the same way?
And as far as your misuse of the Patriot Act goes... Show me a systematic misuse of the "terrorist" label to prosecute non-violent protestors, and I'll show a free press correcting the system. Is it a good Act? No. Haven't you noticed an effort to tone it down or get rid of it? Ain't democracy fun? If the sky was falling as you suggest, it'd be here to stay.
In the meantime, the unemployment rate is low, the standard of living is high, we can still protest and dissent all we want (non-violently), and most people are happy. Where's your beef?
Finally, if you think the country's headed to 1984, shouldn't you be holding onto that gun? Plan A is the voting booth. Protest is Plan B. At some point, we'll be needing the guns.
Sure, 99.9% of us do nothing in our life of note and "they" don't need to bother. But if you're in the 0.1% that stands out and has a measurable affect on the world, then you better worry. "They" don't need to spy on all of us, just the few that matter.
Ok, so you're in the 99.9% and what do you care about the 0.1%? Ask yourself, where would we be without the deviants that thought up radical ideas like human rights, gravity, evolution, democracy, electricity, the automobile, the transistor. All of these things had a dramatic affect on history and shook society's foundation. Don't you think "they" would have preferred to maintain the status quo and not have their power threatened?
Next to "abortion", saying "global warming" is the quickest way to fire up a troll fest. What's sad is everyone's so busy arguing they've missed the point. On the left, you've got chicken little screaming the sky is falling. On the right, they've stuck their head in the sand.
Hey lefties: calm down, New York isn't going to be washed away tomorrow and screaming your head off about "catastrophic changes" just makes you come off as wack jobs.
Oh and you righties: tell me how you can have 6 billion people on a single planet without affecting it somehow? You haven't noticed we've cut down a couple trees, paved some highways, and shot some bunnies?
Sadly, instead of managing our impact on the planet, we've let the extremist sink us into a troll fest.
I think it's false to imply that if we find life in a Mars like place on Earth, then there must be life on Mars. After all, on Earth, life may have developed somewhere/sometime friendlier and adapted to these harsh conditions. Mars may not have a friendly place or had a friendly time.
Mars ain't the same as Earth and life ain't simple. For that matter, science ain't simple. But we're learning and that's cool.
... the U.S. will use every means at their disposal - including the U.N. - to try and cling on a little longer...
Kind of like Old Europe is doing now, eh?
I agree with you, almost: the UN sucks because no one comes to it with global interests in mind, only national interests. It ain't just the US.
The UN should stick to what it's good at: talking. It is invaluable as a diplomatic meeting place, but only gets into trouble when it tries to do something. When you're talking, you're representing your nation. But when you're doing something, you have to work as a team to get anywhere. Nations might work together, but only so long as it doesn't interfere with their national goals, and that's where it all falls apart.
I used the word "popular" on purpose. I'd prefer to be able to say "good idea", but the reality is majority rules in democratic governments. If you want to protect minorities, or individual rights, you better get that done early. Don't count on it being added later.
I've flipped jobs more than I'd like to admit, but I usually land in telecom. Despite that these jobs are all in the same specialty and usually java development work, I still spend months trying to understand what's going on in a group meeting. Every worksite has it's own culture (e.g. terms, in jokes, personalities) and much of it has nothing to do with technology.
No one had to work to sell it. Congress fell over itself to pass it. Feingold was the only senator to vote against it. There was a bit more resistance in the house, but still passed with ease. As for the public, we just wanted to see "something" done. Remember, at the time of it's passage, we were still shocked that a NYC landmark went down with 6000 people in it (later revised to 3000).
Thankfully, much of the bill has a sunset. If you ask me, all bills should have a sunset. It forces us to renew the debate and see if the bill is still popular. It would also help us get some of the dumber laws off the books.
Slashdot Mirror
It's already here.
A less bitter way to put it is that most companies would rather take on less risk, even if it means spending more money in the long term. You can't lose money if you don't spend it. And the longer you put off spending it, the longer you haven't had to assume the risk of losing it. They wouldn't call it being "short sighted"; they'd call it being "risk adverse" or simply "smart".
Think of it this way: They make a smaller initial investment, hoping to increase revenue. If revenue actually increases (i.e. the project succeeds), they'll have the money to make additional investments because revenue increased. They may spend more in the long run, but that's the trade off with assuming less risk. If revenue doesn't increase (i.e. the project failed), then they just lose their initial investement and aren't in debt from making some big initial investment.
Also, let's not forget that power companies aren't driven to be overly efficient. They face little competition at best and are complete monopolies at worst. If they start turning too much of a profit, they'll be rewarded with their regulated rates being decreased.
Geeks love that "cult French scifi flick". Geeks buy new toys. Profit.
I can't explain the chick flick and substandard action movie. Rich chicks and rich dicks?
My wife is 9 months pregnant, due to pop any day now. This is our first, so we've been shopping for day care centers. It seems all they want to tell us about is how everything is desanitized constantly. Shoes are not worn into the rooms. Hands are washed immediately after entering the room. Surfaces are sprayed down every few minutes. Each toy is desanitized immediately after a kid puts it down.
I came out of the first tour and said to my wife, "it was great and the only concern I have is that it's too damn clean. My boy's going to need some dirt and filth." Not only are they hampering the kids' natural defenses, but they're also evolving the next uber-germ.
If you want choice in broadband, stop supporting "free" city-sponsored wireless deployments. Wireless is our best hope for having more than 1 or 2 last-mile providers. Wireless opens up the last-mile to allow anyone with a tower in your area to provide service instead of having to bury cables to your house first. The cost of entry for a new service provider is much, much less.
When cities deploy free wireless through tax payer dollars, they've removed any chance of private service providers being able to turn a profit. How can you compete with something that's free? So, where we could have had multiple or even many wireless providers, we have one: the city government.
Wireless for last-mile is still an emerging technology and it's not ready yet, but it's going to stop dead in its tracks if we keep getting excited every time another city brings the 'net to the masses. If you leave the opportunity for service providers to make money, we'll see them driving the technology and the competition. Wireless will evolve into a viable and cheap last mile solution.
Who pays a toll when there's another road you can take?
Pearl Jam tried in the early 90s and ended up canceling most of their tour. They sued and lost. But the internet has changed the playing field. Maybe another band could make a go of it now.
Also, what happened to venues selling tickets directly? They should be in the best position as they're in the same region as the ticket buyers. It seems with all the skinning that ticketmaster does, there's got to be room for a venue to increase their profit margin by selling direct.
What do you mean "supposedly?" Are we still working the conspiracy theories to explain how Bush could have possibly been elected? Twice? After all, it's obvious that no right-thinking, sane person could have voted for him, let alone half the country?
Here's some reality for you: half the country didn't vote for him because they agreed with him 100%. Half the country voted for him because they liked him better than the other choices. Ain't reprentative democracy grand?
So stop it with the conspiracy theories already. I'm sure there was some ballet stuffing and other irregularities, but there was no vast conspiracy! The only vast anything is a misconception that democracy can be perfect and any lack of perfection is due to corruption. Any government is at least a little corrupt. What makes democracy better is it lends itself to transparency and the ability to change leadership peacefully. In other words, we can see significant corruption and deal with it without calling up the militia.
GM is certainly cutting back amid collapsing SUV sales due largely to increased gas prices. While I'm in favor of an energy tax that reflects the energy source's impact on the environment (driving us to cleaner, efficient sources), gas taxes are simply not popular and unlikely to stick around. Ask California. If we can't increase gas taxes, what's the point of an energy tax? Our best hope today really is that the gov't gets out of the way and stops propping up artificially low energy prices either through subsidies or foreign policy.
Correction: When a company makes secrets other than their own accessible over the internet, they are considered pirates.
In the middle, you have the companies that make only their own secrets freely accessible over the internet. These companies are usually respected and easy to work with.
what could possibly be better than that?
Transparent backgrounds. *grin*
what is to stop, say an Irish company from doing the same and selling a similiar product to Wal-mart for less.
The Irish people.
He arranged a Denial of Service attack. Think of his "fellow students" as zombies and him as a script kiddie, then pretend you're the admin or legit user of this site. Now tell me you wouldn't be a wee bit perturbed. This is akin to willfull destruction of property and saying he's only guilt of refreshing a browser is like saying a car thief is only guilt of moving your car.
A felony is a bit harsh though. Perhaps there were significant damages involved. Or the cops are out of control.
Capitalism doesn't call for an unregulated market. Unregulated is anarchy. Anarchy is bad. Capitalism does best with a lightly regulated market.
With capitalism, you must have regulation to make sure everyone is playing fair. Which also means you need regulation to remove monopolies where possible or simply control them where not possible (e.g. public utilities, limited spectrum).
What if our subdivision decided to set up it's own WiFi network?
So you'll need an infrastructure right? A router, a couple access points, some way to manage access, etc. Next you'll probably want someone to run it, unless you feel like having 499 house holds call you ever time they can't get their email. Finally, you'll need a bill collector to make sure everyone's paying in to cover the monthly fees and denying access when they don't.
Congratulations. You've just become a service provider.
If it's law, it'll be made possible. It'll be engineered that way by the law abiding and in this case, anyone that wants to make money from VoIP falls into the "law abiding" category. I'm talking about service providers, equipment manufacturers, and software vendors. Given the choice of breaking the law and protecting what should be your right to privacy, you'll lose.
I think what you're referring to are those that don't care about making money. Call them the "VoIP underground." But its worse than that. As soon as they organize, the government has something to go after. Open source projects count as organized. You'll be left with getting your renegade VoIP software from some kiddy in an IRC channel. Who knows what'll worms/trojans/nastiness will be in that code? Or you can writing it yourself. These are the people the FBI will never be able to stop. A small population and not ideal for the FBI, but I gather they're willing take what they can get easily and work on these deviants later. (Of course they're deviants! Why else would they be hiding?)
Or the requirements fed to the engineers were wrong or grossly exagerated. Not suprising since we hadn't been there before and didn't really know what it was like on the surface.
So, they planned for the worst case environment on Mars and found things more hospitable. Lucky us.
I just don't get where you're coming from...
Is there too much corporate welfare? Yes. But is it just corporate? How about pandering and pork barreling in general? It's called corruption and happens anytime you have guys with $100k salaries making $billion decisions. It's our job to keep an eye on it, vote out the worst of it, and prosecute the disgusting cases (DeLay anyone?). Screaming "the sky is falling" ain't helping much is it? Except Slashdot calls you "insightful". Proud?
The world is getting smaller and the Internet and free trade are the reasons. We're getting to know the people on the other side of the world and there's less talk of "them" and more talk of "us." The more we know them and our cultures and economies intertwine, the less likely we'll want to kill them. That's right: free trade promotes peace. If our economy suffers and we lose some jobs, so be it. We've been fat dumb and happy long enough. Peace is worth it.
Christ, don't you want to help people in poor countries? You have two choices: keep giving them money or give them jobs. Wouldn't you rather be self-sufficient? Don't you think they feel the same way?
And as far as your misuse of the Patriot Act goes... Show me a systematic misuse of the "terrorist" label to prosecute non-violent protestors, and I'll show a free press correcting the system. Is it a good Act? No. Haven't you noticed an effort to tone it down or get rid of it? Ain't democracy fun? If the sky was falling as you suggest, it'd be here to stay.
In the meantime, the unemployment rate is low, the standard of living is high, we can still protest and dissent all we want (non-violently), and most people are happy. Where's your beef?
Finally, if you think the country's headed to 1984, shouldn't you be holding onto that gun? Plan A is the voting booth. Protest is Plan B. At some point, we'll be needing the guns.
Sure, 99.9% of us do nothing in our life of note and "they" don't need to bother. But if you're in the 0.1% that stands out and has a measurable affect on the world, then you better worry. "They" don't need to spy on all of us, just the few that matter.
Ok, so you're in the 99.9% and what do you care about the 0.1%? Ask yourself, where would we be without the deviants that thought up radical ideas like human rights, gravity, evolution, democracy, electricity, the automobile, the transistor. All of these things had a dramatic affect on history and shook society's foundation. Don't you think "they" would have preferred to maintain the status quo and not have their power threatened?
Next to "abortion", saying "global warming" is the quickest way to fire up a troll fest. What's sad is everyone's so busy arguing they've missed the point. On the left, you've got chicken little screaming the sky is falling. On the right, they've stuck their head in the sand.
Hey lefties: calm down, New York isn't going to be washed away tomorrow and screaming your head off about "catastrophic changes" just makes you come off as wack jobs.
Oh and you righties: tell me how you can have 6 billion people on a single planet without affecting it somehow? You haven't noticed we've cut down a couple trees, paved some highways, and shot some bunnies?
Sadly, instead of managing our impact on the planet, we've let the extremist sink us into a troll fest.
These are Xeons. I think they left out the word "consumption": ... eqivalent power consumption of nearly 15,000 PCs.
I think it's false to imply that if we find life in a Mars like place on Earth, then there must be life on Mars. After all, on Earth, life may have developed somewhere/sometime friendlier and adapted to these harsh conditions. Mars may not have a friendly place or had a friendly time.
Mars ain't the same as Earth and life ain't simple. For that matter, science ain't simple. But we're learning and that's cool.
Kind of like Old Europe is doing now, eh?
I agree with you, almost: the UN sucks because no one comes to it with global interests in mind, only national interests. It ain't just the US.
The UN should stick to what it's good at: talking. It is invaluable as a diplomatic meeting place, but only gets into trouble when it tries to do something. When you're talking, you're representing your nation. But when you're doing something, you have to work as a team to get anywhere. Nations might work together, but only so long as it doesn't interfere with their national goals, and that's where it all falls apart.
I used the word "popular" on purpose. I'd prefer to be able to say "good idea", but the reality is majority rules in democratic governments. If you want to protect minorities, or individual rights, you better get that done early. Don't count on it being added later.
I've flipped jobs more than I'd like to admit, but I usually land in telecom. Despite that these jobs are all in the same specialty and usually java development work, I still spend months trying to understand what's going on in a group meeting. Every worksite has it's own culture (e.g. terms, in jokes, personalities) and much of it has nothing to do with technology.
No one had to work to sell it. Congress fell over itself to pass it. Feingold was the only senator to vote against it. There was a bit more resistance in the house, but still passed with ease. As for the public, we just wanted to see "something" done. Remember, at the time of it's passage, we were still shocked that a NYC landmark went down with 6000 people in it (later revised to 3000).
Thankfully, much of the bill has a sunset. If you ask me, all bills should have a sunset. It forces us to renew the debate and see if the bill is still popular. It would also help us get some of the dumber laws off the books.