They can bring in a large-looking number of jobs to an area and make a politician look good for a limited amount of time, then the companies bail and often the taxpayers got very little for their money.
For what money? Did Texas actually give Amazon money, or did they simply not collect the taxes that they would not have received if Amazon open up shop there in the first place? Amazon likely paid a metric buttload in payroll taxes, and their employees certainly into the local treasury. So I'll give you the opportunity to clarify your point: in what way did Amazon remove money from the Texas economy?
If my state had unemployed citizens, and a company offered to give them taxable income, I would tend to see that as a good thing.
I told them "um, I'm not going to fill this out" and the snotty girl behind the counter said "well, I guess your not getting a hair cut here then
The third option is to flat-out lie. I don't see any legal or moral obligation to give them correct information. Address? "6394 8th Street, Tampa, FL" or "between homes". Phone? "I don't have one." Email? "I can't get personal email at work." Name? "Fred Chalmers." My wife said she has a hard time keeping a straight face when I'm telling the clerk at Toys-R-Us that we're Swedish and not legally allowed to give out that information.
‘I must stress to avoid all ambiguity, under no circumstance is it possible to "confess by iPhone".’
The guy is STATING THE OBVIOUS because the app has been sensationalized, hello!/. is better than this!
I don't think it's that obvious, and I bet there's not a programmer on Slashdot who didn't immediately start thinking of counterexamples. "What if I'm an astronaut and my spaceship is about to burn up on re-entry and I want to confess? What if I'm that guy in 127 hours and I need to confess before the gangrene sits in. What if I was on my way to the confessional when I got trapped in a blizzard and need to call one in?"
"Under no circumstances"? This guy doesn't write unit tests for a living.
And you honestly don't seem to get economics. What you've described is the natural order of any industry: young upstarts come in and disrupt the older establishments by outcompeting on price or quality. The biggest difference here is that the barrier to entry is so low. I bet a lot of smart auto mechanics have had great ideas for a faster or cheaper or safer or more economical car, but don't have access to the capital to built it. The investment required to build a new game is almost zero by comparison, usually at most the cost of buying an SDK for the desired target platform. If you can make it a web-based game, you can write it in Notepad / Text Editor / Emacs / Vim, upload it to a free PHP host, throw on some Google Ads, and start making a trickle of pennies for no monetary investment at all.
If my kid writes an iPhone game after school, what economic or moral obligation to they have to release it for a price you'd consider fair and non-destructive? You claim that these games are sold at artificially low prices, then complain that they should be sold for artificially high prices. How about we let the market decide what the proper price for a video game is?
Will a third plug reassure you or make you warier? Either way: I like it, too, and run it on any of my family's or friends' machines described as "too slow".
Except then if that caught on in a useful way, some ass would pop up and not follow the norm, so that their massive downloads seemed faster than everyone else because they were still asking for the same priority as VoIP, while everyone else was voluntarily taking the slow lane.
This really isn't all that hard. Make three traffic queues: the normal one that everyone uses by default, a high-priority queue with low bandwidth, and a low-priority queue with high bandwidth. Let that Skype call get near-real-time performance, up to 64Kbps.
Of course, most of this is academic because you can't easily shape inbound traffic, and the received:sent ratio for most home users is pretty darn high.
Ditto everything you said. That's made especially ridiculous by the fact that the project owns their own domain, darcs.net, and could have just as easily used http://darcs.net/doesnotexist and configured their server to make sure it always returned a 404. Basically, they were using an undocumented third-party web service that returned 404s in response to a request and counting on the perpetual existence of that service. That's just goofy.
I love it when government passes laws adding new regulations to solve problems created by government rather than just fixing their initial mistakes.
I'm a registered Libertarian, but I'm fully behind the government passing regulations to keep an oligarchical industry from screwing up the entire economy. In my opinion, this is the government "just fixing their initial mistakes".
Do you not realize that broadband bits cost 20-40 times less than commercial bandwidth, precisely because it's shared 20-40 times?
I'm a former ISP network admin, and I still have a telco CO access badge so I could get in to work on our DSL equipment. Yeah, I know (and support) the concept of an ISP overselling access.
That said, I don't care. I know that I can't run at full limit 24/7 every day of the year. I get that. No ISP on the planet could financially sustain the infrastructure for every one of their clients operating like that. But if my ISP is oversold 20:1, then on average I should be able to get full throughput for 72 minutes a day. I'm using almost no bandwidth at all most of the time, and when it comes time to download a song or watch a Youtube video, I want to be able to watch it.
No one is seriously saying that ISPs should build out a 1:1 bandwidth setup so that all customers can download at their paid level 100% of the time. That would be ridiculous. But if I'm paying for 3Mbps, I should be able to get it at least some of the time.
P.S. As it happens, I'm pretty sure I actually could download at full speed 24/7. My ISP is awesome. I'd get pretty irate if I could only consistently get 10% of my rated speed, though.
Fair game, so long as legit, verified data of the same kind is available on anyone and everyone
Screw that. How about this instead: we don't log everything I do, and we don't log everything you do, and we don't log everything the police do, and we all go about our merry way until someone is explicitly accused of wrongdoing and a judge orders their data collected. If the TSA wanted to implement anal probes in routine screening, the correct response is not "OK, but we get to probe you back!"
What the heck gives you the right to see ANYTHING they are doing, aside from normal regulatory compliance?
The exact same thing that gives them the "right" to see anything I'm doing; either the legal theory works both ways or not at all. Good for the goose, good for the gander, after all. Plus, you ignored his qualifier of "for possible future breach of public trust investigations", as in the data should be retained so that I can investigate them should the legal need ever arise, just as the corporations want the ability to investigate me if they get bored on some Tuesday.
Substitute accountant for ISP and you could make the same argument, including most of the "clever criminals can outsmart law enforcement" argument.
Substitute telco for accountant and your argument evaporates. Tinfoil hat theories aside, the phone company only tracks your connections to their system and not the content or usage of those connections. They're not required to track who you actually spoke to ("hey, Mom, the kids want to talk to you" maps to "client opens a connection to thepiratebay.org") or the amount of traffic the connection actually generates (number of transmitted voice packets maps to number of content packets).
Once I've called a number and established a connection, the telco doesn't know (or care) whether I'm jabbering a mile a minute to Becky in Accounting or if I've been put on hold for 45 minutes with Tom in Support. Neither do I expect my ISP to log that after I connected to them I exchanged 1,753,064 bytes with slashdot.org.
A single Slashdot window open and all the Ajaxy crap uses 100% of a CPU continuously.
...on your system. Ubuntu 10.10 + Chrome 8 = less than 1% CPU as I type this.
I don't doubt that you're seeing something different, but it sounds more like an issue with your particular OS + browser combo than a systemic problem.
It is *incredibly* slow and heavy for no good reasonIt is *incredibly* slow and heavy for no good reason
I disagree completely. I like that I can load a page and skim just the highlights, then click articles to drill down into parts of the conversation that look interesting. In my opinion,/. gets it much more right than most other websites.
Yes. Did they freak out when they learned that there's more than one Linux distro? And if so, what do they think about Windows Phone 7, which has little to do with Windows?
For me, it's for the same reason I switched from XFree86 to X.org pretty quickly: most of the real talent has already made the leap. By all accounts, there were a lot of potential XF86/OOo developers who really wanted to contribute but who were turned away by the primary "owners". When X.org/LibreOffice came along, those devs suddenly had a welcome home for their efforts. Sure, it's inevitable that a few solid, experienced devs will stick with the original project, for a while at least, but there's a much larger wave of patches and updates washing into the upstarts.
There is a huge difference between a Dodge owner and a Citroen/Audi/BMW owner. In education, driving skill, and literacy.
One of the smartest guys I know drives a Dodge pickup every day. He was a dentist for a while until his friends convinced him to get his MD. He did a plastic surgery residency and practiced for a little while, but decided he wanted to be an ENT and went through that residency, too. Now he mainly does ENT stuff, but regularly flies his plane to another state where he has a plastics practice. His weekend car is a 944, but he still drives the pickup to work.
Thought for the day: generalizations usually make you look dumb.
Re:I agree, how could they be at 4 anyway?
on
The Matrix Re-Reloaded
·
· Score: 4, Funny
My personal theory was that the machines won a long time ago, felt bad about killing all the humans, so created a bunch of programs to mimic them for study.
Slashdot Mirror
Will it be when the debt to gdp ratio reaches over 100% (it's currently 97%) meaning we have about as much debt as product.
What's magical about that number? When I bought my house, my debt:income ratio was well over 1:1 for several years.
They can bring in a large-looking number of jobs to an area and make a politician look good for a limited amount of time, then the companies bail and often the taxpayers got very little for their money.
For what money? Did Texas actually give Amazon money, or did they simply not collect the taxes that they would not have received if Amazon open up shop there in the first place? Amazon likely paid a metric buttload in payroll taxes, and their employees certainly into the local treasury. So I'll give you the opportunity to clarify your point: in what way did Amazon remove money from the Texas economy?
If my state had unemployed citizens, and a company offered to give them taxable income, I would tend to see that as a good thing.
I told them "um, I'm not going to fill this out" and the snotty girl behind the counter said "well, I guess your not getting a hair cut here then
The third option is to flat-out lie. I don't see any legal or moral obligation to give them correct information. Address? "6394 8th Street, Tampa, FL" or "between homes". Phone? "I don't have one." Email? "I can't get personal email at work." Name? "Fred Chalmers." My wife said she has a hard time keeping a straight face when I'm telling the clerk at Toys-R-Us that we're Swedish and not legally allowed to give out that information.
‘I must stress to avoid all ambiguity, under no circumstance is it possible to "confess by iPhone".’
The guy is STATING THE OBVIOUS because the app has been sensationalized, hello! /. is better than this!
I don't think it's that obvious, and I bet there's not a programmer on Slashdot who didn't immediately start thinking of counterexamples. "What if I'm an astronaut and my spaceship is about to burn up on re-entry and I want to confess? What if I'm that guy in 127 hours and I need to confess before the gangrene sits in. What if I was on my way to the confessional when I got trapped in a blizzard and need to call one in?"
"Under no circumstances"? This guy doesn't write unit tests for a living.
The app helps you figure out what your sins are, and can keep track of what you've previously confessed.
Best. Facebook app. Ever. [pops some popcorn and starts reading].
They're very wide bytes.
And you honestly don't seem to get economics. What you've described is the natural order of any industry: young upstarts come in and disrupt the older establishments by outcompeting on price or quality. The biggest difference here is that the barrier to entry is so low. I bet a lot of smart auto mechanics have had great ideas for a faster or cheaper or safer or more economical car, but don't have access to the capital to built it. The investment required to build a new game is almost zero by comparison, usually at most the cost of buying an SDK for the desired target platform. If you can make it a web-based game, you can write it in Notepad / Text Editor / Emacs / Vim, upload it to a free PHP host, throw on some Google Ads, and start making a trickle of pennies for no monetary investment at all.
If my kid writes an iPhone game after school, what economic or moral obligation to they have to release it for a price you'd consider fair and non-destructive? You claim that these games are sold at artificially low prices, then complain that they should be sold for artificially high prices. How about we let the market decide what the proper price for a video game is?
Will a third plug reassure you or make you warier? Either way: I like it, too, and run it on any of my family's or friends' machines described as "too slow".
Except then if that caught on in a useful way, some ass would pop up and not follow the norm, so that their massive downloads seemed faster than everyone else because they were still asking for the same priority as VoIP, while everyone else was voluntarily taking the slow lane.
This really isn't all that hard. Make three traffic queues: the normal one that everyone uses by default, a high-priority queue with low bandwidth, and a low-priority queue with high bandwidth. Let that Skype call get near-real-time performance, up to 64Kbps.
Of course, most of this is academic because you can't easily shape inbound traffic, and the received:sent ratio for most home users is pretty darn high.
Many modern ethical theories allow for you to put more moral consideration towards friends, family, etc.
That's mighty fucking generous of them. Do they also allow me the quaint value of wanting to help my neighbors, too?
Ditto everything you said. That's made especially ridiculous by the fact that the project owns their own domain, darcs.net, and could have just as easily used http://darcs.net/doesnotexist and configured their server to make sure it always returned a 404. Basically, they were using an undocumented third-party web service that returned 404s in response to a request and counting on the perpetual existence of that service. That's just goofy.
I love it when government passes laws adding new regulations to solve problems created by government rather than just fixing their initial mistakes.
I'm a registered Libertarian, but I'm fully behind the government passing regulations to keep an oligarchical industry from screwing up the entire economy. In my opinion, this is the government "just fixing their initial mistakes".
Do you not realize that broadband bits cost 20-40 times less than commercial bandwidth, precisely because it's shared 20-40 times?
I'm a former ISP network admin, and I still have a telco CO access badge so I could get in to work on our DSL equipment. Yeah, I know (and support) the concept of an ISP overselling access.
That said, I don't care. I know that I can't run at full limit 24/7 every day of the year. I get that. No ISP on the planet could financially sustain the infrastructure for every one of their clients operating like that. But if my ISP is oversold 20:1, then on average I should be able to get full throughput for 72 minutes a day. I'm using almost no bandwidth at all most of the time, and when it comes time to download a song or watch a Youtube video, I want to be able to watch it.
No one is seriously saying that ISPs should build out a 1:1 bandwidth setup so that all customers can download at their paid level 100% of the time. That would be ridiculous. But if I'm paying for 3Mbps, I should be able to get it at least some of the time.
P.S. As it happens, I'm pretty sure I actually could download at full speed 24/7. My ISP is awesome. I'd get pretty irate if I could only consistently get 10% of my rated speed, though.
Fair game, so long as legit, verified data of the same kind is available on anyone and everyone
Screw that. How about this instead: we don't log everything I do, and we don't log everything you do, and we don't log everything the police do, and we all go about our merry way until someone is explicitly accused of wrongdoing and a judge orders their data collected. If the TSA wanted to implement anal probes in routine screening, the correct response is not "OK, but we get to probe you back!"
What the heck gives you the right to see ANYTHING they are doing, aside from normal regulatory compliance?
The exact same thing that gives them the "right" to see anything I'm doing; either the legal theory works both ways or not at all. Good for the goose, good for the gander, after all. Plus, you ignored his qualifier of "for possible future breach of public trust investigations", as in the data should be retained so that I can investigate them should the legal need ever arise, just as the corporations want the ability to investigate me if they get bored on some Tuesday.
Substitute accountant for ISP and you could make the same argument, including most of the "clever criminals can outsmart law enforcement" argument.
Substitute telco for accountant and your argument evaporates. Tinfoil hat theories aside, the phone company only tracks your connections to their system and not the content or usage of those connections. They're not required to track who you actually spoke to ("hey, Mom, the kids want to talk to you" maps to "client opens a connection to thepiratebay.org") or the amount of traffic the connection actually generates (number of transmitted voice packets maps to number of content packets).
Once I've called a number and established a connection, the telco doesn't know (or care) whether I'm jabbering a mile a minute to Becky in Accounting or if I've been put on hold for 45 minutes with Tom in Support. Neither do I expect my ISP to log that after I connected to them I exchanged 1,753,064 bytes with slashdot.org.
A single Slashdot window open and all the Ajaxy crap uses 100% of a CPU continuously.
...on your system. Ubuntu 10.10 + Chrome 8 = less than 1% CPU as I type this.
I don't doubt that you're seeing something different, but it sounds more like an issue with your particular OS + browser combo than a systemic problem.
It is *incredibly* slow and heavy for no good reasonIt is *incredibly* slow and heavy for no good reason
I disagree completely. I like that I can load a page and skim just the highlights, then click articles to drill down into parts of the conversation that look interesting. In my opinion, /. gets it much more right than most other websites.
But please default to normal-sized fonts. Thanks.
Do you blame them?
Yes. Did they freak out when they learned that there's more than one Linux distro? And if so, what do they think about Windows Phone 7, which has little to do with Windows?
Here's an honest question: Why?
For me, it's for the same reason I switched from XFree86 to X.org pretty quickly: most of the real talent has already made the leap. By all accounts, there were a lot of potential XF86/OOo developers who really wanted to contribute but who were turned away by the primary "owners". When X.org/LibreOffice came along, those devs suddenly had a welcome home for their efforts. Sure, it's inevitable that a few solid, experienced devs will stick with the original project, for a while at least, but there's a much larger wave of patches and updates washing into the upstarts.
There is a huge difference between a Dodge owner and a Citroen/Audi/BMW owner. In education, driving skill, and literacy.
One of the smartest guys I know drives a Dodge pickup every day. He was a dentist for a while until his friends convinced him to get his MD. He did a plastic surgery residency and practiced for a little while, but decided he wanted to be an ENT and went through that residency, too. Now he mainly does ENT stuff, but regularly flies his plane to another state where he has a plastics practice. His weekend car is a 944, but he still drives the pickup to work.
Thought for the day: generalizations usually make you look dumb.
My personal theory was that the machines won a long time ago, felt bad about killing all the humans, so created a bunch of programs to mimic them for study.
That would nicely explain the acting.
The rule creates uncertainty for Verizon in almost exactly the same way an armed jogger creates uncertainty for a would-be rapist.
we'll have a big vector of flags
No. There will be a /htmlcaps.xml in the root of every website, enumerating the features necessary to render it.
/takes a bow
Try the veal! Tip your waitress!