Gee, margin "plunged" from 46.4% to 42.2%. It sounds like their profits have dropped from really, really obscene to just really, really obscene.
It also tells me that this metric is based on an old business model in which people changed their phone far less often.
I'd be interested to see a statistic which broke down how much the iPhone subsidy was costing them, vs how much additional revenue they were getting from new subscribers and data plans.
As with anything, there's lies, damned lies, and statistics... in this case, it's a specific metric which has fallen, but I bet overall they're still coming out ahead.
I have a hard time viewing this as anything other than how the sales numbers are being presented to make it look like the subsidy (they chose to give) is costing them money, while on the other hand they're raking it in from contracts. Smells like Hollywood accounting that says that they've lost huge money on the most popular movies ever created.
How is this Apple's fault? The carrier needs to buy the phones from Apple, and they have a cost.
In order to get people to sign up for contracts, they give you the handset at a cheaper price, but you have them locked into a 2 year (or whatever contract).
If Microsoft (or anybody else) came out with the new Super Duper Happy Fun Phone that everyone suddenly wanted... they'd be in the exact same boat. Because most people aren't going to pay the full cost of a new phone outright. Phones have always been expensive.
Subsidizing the phone cost is a loss leader, which is exactly what is happening. However, over the next two years, how much profits are they going to make by gouging people for the wireless service/bandwidth they've signed up for? I bet it far outstrips the cost of the phones... it just happens that a lot of people are moving to those kinds of phones right now.
The problem is that the carriers have been unwilling to invest in their own infrastructure to keep up with growth, and now they're whining that the device that people want to have costs more than they can afford in one shot.
I fail to see why Apple (or any phone manufacturer) needs to come down on the price in order to ensure the carriers make money. They can raise the price they sell the phones for, or let another company do it and lose out on the potential business.
If the carriers are giving too much of a subsidy... well, that's kinda their problem, isn't it? Apple never told them to give it away.
I'm betting the latest, shiniest phones from Microsoft, Samsung, Nokia, and pretty much everyone else are pretty damned spendy. If you give away expensive things, that's what happens.
You know what is MORE of a douche. Taking the only handicap stall in the bathroom, when 20 other stalls are available.
If the first stall I find without a floater is the handicap stall, I must confess, I'm taking the clean one... sometimes public washrooms are just plain nasty and the immediate reaction is to look for another stall.
I'm just not going in there if it looks like that.
The handicap spots I kind of understand, I don't park in those ever, but I can understand people being frustrated having to park a block away when there's not just one or two handicap spots going unused.
Try getting a quadraplegic in an electric wheel chair out of a van in the winter when some asshole decided it would be more convenient if he took the handicap space.
I have done this, and it's hugely difficult. An electric wheel chair weighs something like 250-300 pounds, so getting one unstuck is a hell of a job.
So, in my experience, parking in the disabled spot when you're not supposed to is being a douche. Right up there with the people who park in the no parking zone in front of stores so they can wait for their spouse to run in quickly... nobody else cares, and you're blocking traffic.
You have to keep in mind that it's not "high risk" but rather "perceived high risk". Less people die on the job in Iraq than in manhattan rush hour
And yet, a friend who actually did IT work in Afghanistan told me about the frequent rocket attacks and people who were killed relatively close to where he was. One guy less than 100 feet away from him -- he said he got to the point that if he heard the sirens, he'd hit the deck even if he was in the latrine; shit washes off, dead doesn't.
Not saying the risk is extraordinarily high, but to hear the stories him and his friends tell of being there, I'm not sure you could pay me enough. Some of these places are still being fired on pretty regularly.
It could also be that Iraq and Afghanistan are very different situations (they likely are), but Kandahar sounded like it would have sucked hugely... and there was no option to go off the base, that was for the guys with guns and armored vehicles. So it was two years on a military base.
He made great money, but he's pretty sure he'd never do that again.
Yeah, lets' just do away with all of those pesky laws and regulations... that's gonna make the world a better place, and nobody would ever abuse it.
Look, if complying with the laws where you do business is too much of a hardship, then you really shouldn't be in business.
If your notional startup needs to collect personal information, and is incapable of protecting it, best to thin them out now before they become big enough for a breech to cause widespread problems. The world doesn't owe them a successful company.
I'd like to see that in court... an EULA can't violate the law, and if it's against the law for them to share your data with the US, they can't change the EULA to say you waive your legal protections.
I would hope that something like that would basically get pursued as a willful violation of this, and lead to a fairly epic smackdown.
Of course, since with the Patriot Act that the US has given themselves the right to demand data from US owned companies... so I can see it being possible for an organization to be left with the choice of whether to violate US or EU laws; you couldn't be in compliance with both.
It's also why it's illegal to give certain kinds of data to US-owned organizations in some countries... anything in the government of Canada can't be handled by a US owned company, because they could be required to hand over the information.
It tries to claim jurisdiction over any company that handles the personal data of EU subjects. How exactly do they intend to enforce this over companies that have no physical presence within the EU?
If they target the region, that's having a business there under their jurisdiction. I assume there's a google.fr and a facebook.de... that pretty much makes you covered under their laws.
And, let's face it... the USA is extraditing people who committed no crime in their own country and SOPA would have allowed their law to be extra-territorial. Oh, and of course getting the embassies to help push their copyright agenda in other countries.
At least with this, it's telling companies that if they want to do business in the EU, there are legal obligations to safeguard data... unlike meddling in the laws of other countries, which is just being dicks.
This is the first I'm reading the link fro the last Slashdot story Seriously...
"Those who count on quote 'Hollywood' for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who's going to stand up for them when their job is at stake. Don't ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don't pay any attention to me when my job is at stake,"
I didn't think any of these guys went so far as to acknowledge that they've been bought and paid for. Usually they try to couch it in nicer terms, but this pretty much says if you're gonna take the bribe, you gotta do what they tell you.
Holy crap, does that sound illegal. Not that they'd over pass laws that actually limit the money from the lobbyists... that's too big of a chunk of their income.
And people wonder why everyone thinks politicians are corrupt.
Oh, I strongly believe that the fact that corporations have been guilted into being somewhat socially responsible is a good thing, and that we want it to continue.
But many organizations will then turn around and continue with a business as usual attitude... either by polluting or buying heinous laws/exemptions that allow them to continue to act like a bunch of pricks.
I'm not so naive as to think that it all has to be the sincere gesture... but I don't think it always offsets all of the bad things they do either. As with so many things, it's not a strictly either or scenario -- but some of the stuff in the middle gets a little gray.
Oh it gains users, they just don't know they're using BSD. BSD license instead of GPL means its an anti-social community, where you don't have to contribute back, which is why its much smaller and weaker than the GPL community.
Depends on who you ask.
To some, the BSD people are giving you more freedom with their software than the GPL does... I'm free to build a commercial application using BSD software and not have to release my proprietary changes. In much the same way, Apache has provided a vast library of code which can be used in the same way -- you don't need to give your changes back.
There is arguments for both licenses... but having worked on commercial software which used the Berkeley DB, it is sometimes nice to have things which are less restrictive. It allows you to build something
Sometimes there's weird philosophical stuff like hating the idea of helping others.
BSD isn't about hating the idea of helping others... it just doesn't confer on your benefactors the need to do the same thing.
I think GPL has its place, and I think the permissive licenses like Apache and BSD have their place... because the permissive ones provide the ability to snag some high quality, open implementations without needing to sign up for the entire philosophical treatise that GPL advocates insist on. Not everybody wants that... and if people want to, they should be able to release code which has no such strings attached.
However, it should be noted that VirtualBSD is more a technology demonstrator than a fully fledged distribution, therefore is squarely aimed at people that heard about FreeBSD but have never tried it
That's too bad.. the aging FreeBSD VM that I've had for a few years now won't cleanly upgrade from the old and creaky FreeBSD 7.1 I have on it now.
I was hoping for something that was all ready to go.
Guess I'll have to dedicate some time to slog through either an upgrade or a reinstall. Or, just stop using it altogether.
Or, because I cynically believe that it's a largely marketing/PR stunt when companies do this. There may be some organizations for which this is a shared values thing... but I suspect just as many do it to keep up the company image, not out of any genuine altruism.
I have no cognitive dissonance whatsoever about the fact the corporations are, pretty much by definition, almost entirely motivated by profits -- and if a little marketing helps that out, well, that's the cost of doing business.
Oil companies have had so much bad press and PR over the years they pretty much have no choice but to be seen to be responsible corporate citizens... that doesn't mean I see it as a sincere gesture.
I can't help but think that rampant greed is a huge factor in pretty much all cell companies here in the US.
Um, rampant corporate greed is pretty much the American Dream... there are people on Slashdot (and in US politics) who will claim that corporate profits is the most noble thing in the world.
Why should the cell companies be any different? It's all about maximizing profits, shareholder value, and executive bonuses... not necessarily in that order.
If they could charge you a million dollars per month, they would.
And just think, these are entities with "free speech" and other rights like natural people... aint that grand? They can spend some of those profits to buy lawmakers to ensure they get more profits.
If you want to understand why it costs more in the US, the answer is "because they can".
My gym charges about $650 per year or $20 for a day. Some have a $10 for an hour fee.
I think if you read the articles listed a little more closely, this is more like they sold you the gym membership for $650 and said you kept that rate forever... and then for all new people, it's a $10/hour fee, with even higher fees if you come too often.
This is not a case in which they could still opt for the $650/year price... that option is no longer available to new members, they're stuck at the more expensive price now being offered. So they're going to pay a lot more for the same service you're getting.
They're no longer offering a $30/month unlimited... they're offering $30/month for 300MB. And you can't convince AT&T to sell it to you for the old price.
And, the way they're going, soon they'll be selling you 100MB for $30/month... at this rate, we can all expect to be using dialup in another 5 years.;-)
If you're able to estimate that you'd use 2.81GB a month doing this, why would you ever elect to have a 300MB plan. You can get 30GB for $30.00 a month, which would keep your annual cost around $360.00 a year excluding taxes and other fees - same as the unlimited plan.
Actually, I think the point is they won't give you a $30 unlimited plan any more.
Judging by the link in TFS... you can get 3GB (not 30GB) for $30/month.. and you can get $5GB for $50 (I'm going on smart phones here). And, it says you'll be automatically charged for any overages.
So it sounds like people who had the old $30/month for unlimited can get way more for less money than someone newly signing up now. So those people are paying the same monthly fee for unlimited which any new customer is going to pay for 300MB... so 1/10th the data for the exact same price. If I was paying 10x the price for something as the guy across the street, I'd be feeling ripped off.
This is more about the perception (or fact) that the company is jacking up the price for the same service over time... quite possibly just to make more money without needing to invest in more infrastructure.
This, unfortunately, is how these things have been trending... the cable/cell phone companies have been flogging their "newer bigger faster" networks, but in the process they also seem to be becoming more restrictive and expensive.
When AT&T asserts their new plans offer "great value" for their customers, it seems that the truth of that is that these new plans offer great profits. In fact, the entire 4th link in the summary is someone arguing that AT&T's new prices is essentially price gouging.
Instead of the cost of data going down over time, it's going up... largely because now they're trying to sell the same data to a lot more people, and also because they haven't expanded their capacity to keep up with their marketing of it.
The photos are way to grainey to get anywhere past the "if you squint your eyes and tilt your head" stage. The book "There's Somebody Else on the Moon" had way better photos.
Well, if the first picture with the big red circle is supposed to resemble anything more than that... well, then I remain unimpressed. I see a grainy blob on a grainy background, with what looks like digital noise, and not enough context to have the slightest idea of what that is or how big it's supposed to be.
I mean, "'What if we forget about the current theories about the non-existence of life on Venus, let's boldly suggest that the objects' morphological features would allow us to say that they are living,' he added." essentially says... let's ignore that I have no evidence, but just imagine there was life on Venus; it might look just like this blob right here, which could be practically anything.
I've seen more compelling evidence of Big Foot or Nessie.:-P
It looks exactly like a shadow when the camera does not have the contrast capability to provide detail in the dark areas.
Given the complete lack of photos in TFA, I'll stick with my description.
All it says is that "another news source reported that a Russian scientist claims to have found something".
There's absolutely nothing I've been able to find that allows one to reach any conclusions about the ability of the camera to register contrast. Because there are no pictures in the links.
What I'm a little wierded out by is that this difference is noticeable by the transit light-detection.
I'm a little weirded out by the fact that you have a starting point to come up with a rough calculation for that.:-P
I think the visibility in the transit light-detection I get a little more... it's an ever expanding ball of gas, no? So it's going to be blocking a lot more light on every pass. At least, I think.
I find this with astronomy... I can understand the concept, but when we get down to the numbers I just find myself drooling and unable to really grasp the scale. And, to be honest, I suspect the astronomers are no better at that, they're just more used to it and have worked out their own set of things to relate it to.
For context, thats about 1 large oil tanker every 5 seconds. Its a lot, but think how puny an oil tanker is compared to the size of the ocean, and then factor in that thats only surface area.
Yeah, and I think that's the part where the ability to actually envision this breaks down for me... intellectually I get what you're telling me. But my brain just sorta wobbles in trying to reconcile that.
I think you need to work with numbers like that a lot before you can internalize it and not get swamped by them... otherwise it sounds like "eleventy cagillion", it sounds cool, but doesn't really mean anything to me.:-P
Slashdot Mirror
It also tells me that this metric is based on an old business model in which people changed their phone far less often.
I'd be interested to see a statistic which broke down how much the iPhone subsidy was costing them, vs how much additional revenue they were getting from new subscribers and data plans.
As with anything, there's lies, damned lies, and statistics ... in this case, it's a specific metric which has fallen, but I bet overall they're still coming out ahead.
I have a hard time viewing this as anything other than how the sales numbers are being presented to make it look like the subsidy (they chose to give) is costing them money, while on the other hand they're raking it in from contracts. Smells like Hollywood accounting that says that they've lost huge money on the most popular movies ever created.
How is this Apple's fault? The carrier needs to buy the phones from Apple, and they have a cost.
In order to get people to sign up for contracts, they give you the handset at a cheaper price, but you have them locked into a 2 year (or whatever contract).
If Microsoft (or anybody else) came out with the new Super Duper Happy Fun Phone that everyone suddenly wanted ... they'd be in the exact same boat. Because most people aren't going to pay the full cost of a new phone outright. Phones have always been expensive.
Subsidizing the phone cost is a loss leader, which is exactly what is happening. However, over the next two years, how much profits are they going to make by gouging people for the wireless service/bandwidth they've signed up for? I bet it far outstrips the cost of the phones ... it just happens that a lot of people are moving to those kinds of phones right now.
The problem is that the carriers have been unwilling to invest in their own infrastructure to keep up with growth, and now they're whining that the device that people want to have costs more than they can afford in one shot.
I fail to see why Apple (or any phone manufacturer) needs to come down on the price in order to ensure the carriers make money. They can raise the price they sell the phones for, or let another company do it and lose out on the potential business.
If the carriers are giving too much of a subsidy ... well, that's kinda their problem, isn't it? Apple never told them to give it away.
I'm betting the latest, shiniest phones from Microsoft, Samsung, Nokia, and pretty much everyone else are pretty damned spendy. If you give away expensive things, that's what happens.
If the first stall I find without a floater is the handicap stall, I must confess, I'm taking the clean one ... sometimes public washrooms are just plain nasty and the immediate reaction is to look for another stall.
I'm just not going in there if it looks like that.
Try getting a quadraplegic in an electric wheel chair out of a van in the winter when some asshole decided it would be more convenient if he took the handicap space.
I have done this, and it's hugely difficult. An electric wheel chair weighs something like 250-300 pounds, so getting one unstuck is a hell of a job.
So, in my experience, parking in the disabled spot when you're not supposed to is being a douche. Right up there with the people who park in the no parking zone in front of stores so they can wait for their spouse to run in quickly ... nobody else cares, and you're blocking traffic.
And yet, a friend who actually did IT work in Afghanistan told me about the frequent rocket attacks and people who were killed relatively close to where he was. One guy less than 100 feet away from him -- he said he got to the point that if he heard the sirens, he'd hit the deck even if he was in the latrine; shit washes off, dead doesn't.
Not saying the risk is extraordinarily high, but to hear the stories him and his friends tell of being there, I'm not sure you could pay me enough. Some of these places are still being fired on pretty regularly.
It could also be that Iraq and Afghanistan are very different situations (they likely are), but Kandahar sounded like it would have sucked hugely ... and there was no option to go off the base, that was for the guys with guns and armored vehicles. So it was two years on a military base.
He made great money, but he's pretty sure he'd never do that again.
Yeah, lets' just do away with all of those pesky laws and regulations ... that's gonna make the world a better place, and nobody would ever abuse it.
Look, if complying with the laws where you do business is too much of a hardship, then you really shouldn't be in business.
If your notional startup needs to collect personal information, and is incapable of protecting it, best to thin them out now before they become big enough for a breech to cause widespread problems. The world doesn't owe them a successful company.
If they're receiving and storing personal information, then they need to obey the law. Why should being a small company exempt you?
Google et al are directly gathering more personal information, and, as we've seen, they're getting more aggressive about it.
I'd like to see that in court ... an EULA can't violate the law, and if it's against the law for them to share your data with the US, they can't change the EULA to say you waive your legal protections.
I would hope that something like that would basically get pursued as a willful violation of this, and lead to a fairly epic smackdown.
Of course, since with the Patriot Act that the US has given themselves the right to demand data from US owned companies ... so I can see it being possible for an organization to be left with the choice of whether to violate US or EU laws; you couldn't be in compliance with both.
It's also why it's illegal to give certain kinds of data to US-owned organizations in some countries ... anything in the government of Canada can't be handled by a US owned company, because they could be required to hand over the information.
If they target the region, that's having a business there under their jurisdiction. I assume there's a google.fr and a facebook.de ... that pretty much makes you covered under their laws.
And, let's face it ... the USA is extraditing people who committed no crime in their own country and SOPA would have allowed their law to be extra-territorial. Oh, and of course getting the embassies to help push their copyright agenda in other countries.
At least with this, it's telling companies that if they want to do business in the EU, there are legal obligations to safeguard data ... unlike meddling in the laws of other countries, which is just being dicks.
That's just what they want you to believe. ;-)
This is the first I'm reading the link fro the last Slashdot story ...
Seriously
I didn't think any of these guys went so far as to acknowledge that they've been bought and paid for. Usually they try to couch it in nicer terms, but this pretty much says if you're gonna take the bribe, you gotta do what they tell you.
Holy crap, does that sound illegal. Not that they'd over pass laws that actually limit the money from the lobbyists ... that's too big of a chunk of their income.
And people wonder why everyone thinks politicians are corrupt.
Or merely suggest that it's more lucrative to go to the dark side? One guy does not a conspiracy make.
And, likewise, this can't disprove any such conspiracy either.
Oh, I strongly believe that the fact that corporations have been guilted into being somewhat socially responsible is a good thing, and that we want it to continue.
But many organizations will then turn around and continue with a business as usual attitude ... either by polluting or buying heinous laws/exemptions that allow them to continue to act like a bunch of pricks.
I'm not so naive as to think that it all has to be the sincere gesture ... but I don't think it always offsets all of the bad things they do either. As with so many things, it's not a strictly either or scenario -- but some of the stuff in the middle gets a little gray.
Doh! Incomplete sentences are annoying ...
Depends on who you ask.
To some, the BSD people are giving you more freedom with their software than the GPL does ... I'm free to build a commercial application using BSD software and not have to release my proprietary changes. In much the same way, Apache has provided a vast library of code which can be used in the same way -- you don't need to give your changes back.
There is arguments for both licenses ... but having worked on commercial software which used the Berkeley DB, it is sometimes nice to have things which are less restrictive. It allows you to build something
BSD isn't about hating the idea of helping others ... it just doesn't confer on your benefactors the need to do the same thing.
I think GPL has its place, and I think the permissive licenses like Apache and BSD have their place ... because the permissive ones provide the ability to snag some high quality, open implementations without needing to sign up for the entire philosophical treatise that GPL advocates insist on. Not everybody wants that ... and if people want to, they should be able to release code which has no such strings attached.
Thankfully, they do.
That's too bad .. the aging FreeBSD VM that I've had for a few years now won't cleanly upgrade from the old and creaky FreeBSD 7.1 I have on it now.
I was hoping for something that was all ready to go.
Guess I'll have to dedicate some time to slog through either an upgrade or a reinstall. Or, just stop using it altogether.
Or, because I cynically believe that it's a largely marketing/PR stunt when companies do this. There may be some organizations for which this is a shared values thing ... but I suspect just as many do it to keep up the company image, not out of any genuine altruism.
I have no cognitive dissonance whatsoever about the fact the corporations are, pretty much by definition, almost entirely motivated by profits -- and if a little marketing helps that out, well, that's the cost of doing business.
Oil companies have had so much bad press and PR over the years they pretty much have no choice but to be seen to be responsible corporate citizens ... that doesn't mean I see it as a sincere gesture.
Um, rampant corporate greed is pretty much the American Dream ... there are people on Slashdot (and in US politics) who will claim that corporate profits is the most noble thing in the world.
Why should the cell companies be any different? It's all about maximizing profits, shareholder value, and executive bonuses ... not necessarily in that order.
If they could charge you a million dollars per month, they would.
And just think, these are entities with "free speech" and other rights like natural people ... aint that grand? They can spend some of those profits to buy lawmakers to ensure they get more profits.
If you want to understand why it costs more in the US, the answer is "because they can".
I think if you read the articles listed a little more closely, this is more like they sold you the gym membership for $650 and said you kept that rate forever ... and then for all new people, it's a $10/hour fee, with even higher fees if you come too often.
This is not a case in which they could still opt for the $650/year price ... that option is no longer available to new members, they're stuck at the more expensive price now being offered. So they're going to pay a lot more for the same service you're getting.
They're no longer offering a $30/month unlimited ... they're offering $30/month for 300MB. And you can't convince AT&T to sell it to you for the old price.
And, the way they're going, soon they'll be selling you 100MB for $30/month ... at this rate, we can all expect to be using dialup in another 5 years. ;-)
Actually, I think the point is they won't give you a $30 unlimited plan any more.
Judging by the link in TFS ... you can get 3GB (not 30GB) for $30/month .. and you can get $5GB for $50 (I'm going on smart phones here). And, it says you'll be automatically charged for any overages.
So it sounds like people who had the old $30/month for unlimited can get way more for less money than someone newly signing up now. So those people are paying the same monthly fee for unlimited which any new customer is going to pay for 300MB ... so 1/10th the data for the exact same price. If I was paying 10x the price for something as the guy across the street, I'd be feeling ripped off.
This is more about the perception (or fact) that the company is jacking up the price for the same service over time ... quite possibly just to make more money without needing to invest in more infrastructure.
This, unfortunately, is how these things have been trending ... the cable/cell phone companies have been flogging their "newer bigger faster" networks, but in the process they also seem to be becoming more restrictive and expensive.
When AT&T asserts their new plans offer "great value" for their customers, it seems that the truth of that is that these new plans offer great profits. In fact, the entire 4th link in the summary is someone arguing that AT&T's new prices is essentially price gouging.
Instead of the cost of data going down over time, it's going up ... largely because now they're trying to sell the same data to a lot more people, and also because they haven't expanded their capacity to keep up with their marketing of it.
Well, if the first picture with the big red circle is supposed to resemble anything more than that ... well, then I remain unimpressed. I see a grainy blob on a grainy background, with what looks like digital noise, and not enough context to have the slightest idea of what that is or how big it's supposed to be.
I mean, "'What if we forget about the current theories about the non-existence of life on Venus, let's boldly suggest that the objects' morphological features would allow us to say that they are living,' he added." essentially says ... let's ignore that I have no evidence, but just imagine there was life on Venus; it might look just like this blob right here, which could be practically anything.
I've seen more compelling evidence of Big Foot or Nessie. :-P
Given the complete lack of photos in TFA, I'll stick with my description.
All it says is that "another news source reported that a Russian scientist claims to have found something".
There's absolutely nothing I've been able to find that allows one to reach any conclusions about the ability of the camera to register contrast. Because there are no pictures in the links.
So, black and flappy it is.
Usually, kinda black and flappy. :-P
I'm a little weirded out by the fact that you have a starting point to come up with a rough calculation for that. :-P
I think the visibility in the transit light-detection I get a little more ... it's an ever expanding ball of gas, no? So it's going to be blocking a lot more light on every pass. At least, I think.
I find this with astronomy ... I can understand the concept, but when we get down to the numbers I just find myself drooling and unable to really grasp the scale. And, to be honest, I suspect the astronomers are no better at that, they're just more used to it and have worked out their own set of things to relate it to.
Yeah, and I think that's the part where the ability to actually envision this breaks down for me ... intellectually I get what you're telling me. But my brain just sorta wobbles in trying to reconcile that.
I think you need to work with numbers like that a lot before you can internalize it and not get swamped by them ... otherwise it sounds like "eleventy cagillion", it sounds cool, but doesn't really mean anything to me. :-P