Make no mistake, a completely deregulated market will result in corporations running roughshod over the consumer. The Libertarian ideal of a totally free market where competition cures all ills simply does not account for real-world factors like barrier to entry. If no new players are able to enter a market due to prohibitive cost (like, say, the pharmaceutical industry), competition only exists among established players who can simply collude to fuck the consumer up the ass, since they know that there won't be any hot-shot upstarts with new ideas like "not gouging your customers" entering the market to steal a piece of the pie
Except CA never fully deregulated the electric industry - they capped prices to consumers and let supply prices rise to demand - where each supplier essentially got the price for the last KW - so they had every incentive to choke the pipe and drive up prices. CA, in added bit of stupidity, mandated that the electric companies (not the producers of electricity) had to meet demand no matter the cost (which they could not recover). They were forces to pay market rates and could not control demand via blackouts. No wonder they went bankrupt.
The politicians promised lower electric prices and lined up to support deregulation - funny how the father of deregulation demanded a paternity test once he found out what he had spawned. Once again the invisible hand hit politicians with a clue by four; and once again they failed to get a clue.
..is about minimising your fixed costs while maximising your variable returns.
Ok - IANAE (economist) and IANAPM (postman) - but this is probably a reasonable simplification.
With the postal service, fixed costs are about delivering a single item, where as high variable returns come from large packages. With the decline of letters and such (due to e-mail etc), and the concurrent increase in parcels (due to online shopping) - how could they not make better returns.
If a postal service is making losses and is in decline (as a number are in Europe), I would suggest that they should stop looking at environmental factors, start modernising their organizations and provide a service that complements the needs of their 21st century customer.
Well, a bit too much simplification. Profit is about minimizing total costs while maximizing revenue.
Fixed vs variable comes in when you decide wether to continue an operatoin or shut it down - i.e if continuing to operate loses less money than shuting down (i.e. my revenue covers my variable costs and some of my fixed) it makes more snese operate assuming you see profits at some point in the future. This is why airlines keep operating even when they are losing money - they lose less than if they stopped flying do to the high fixed costs of the airplanes. OTOH, if your variable costs are high and fixed are low, you cease operating when business is bad and start back when it is good - such as seasonal service operations like say an ice cream stand.
The marginal cost of delivering one more letter from the post office to the house is small - so any increase in volume is generally good. The advantage the post office has is they run a fixed, predictable route - so they can deliver the odd package to your house for less than other services who need to make a special trip that they can't reliably plan for in advance (which is why home dleivery is more expensive); the USPS is driving by your door already whether or not they stop. If you aren't home and teh package requires a second delivery to get a signature they are going to be back tomorrow anywhy so the marginal cost of taht second stop is small. They can still reduce costs by cutting Saturday delivery since they have no real servcie guarantee so stopping a run saves gas / vehicle wear and tear and payroll (assuming they don't have to pay the carrier the same salary) while not reducing revenue (they still get the letter to deliver two days later) raising their profitability.
While improving servcie would be nice, they really don't have to since no one can compete with them for the day to day delivery of non-speed sensitive materials.
...to deny claims. That's what they do. Insurance companies aren't in business to pay for people's losses, they're in business not to pay for people's losses, because the less they pay out, the greater profit they make. The portrayal in The Incredibles was just about dead-on. So getting them to fork over is often like trying to squeeze blood from a stone even at the best of times.
Nope - insurance companies goals (whether for profit or mutual) are to generate enough income to cover losses and make a profit or provide a rebate to the members. they can pay over 100% of their premiums in claims provided they properly manage their investments.
Insurance comapnies have many sophisticated financial instrumnets to stay solvent - which is why they higher a lot of really smart finance types.
talk about a terrible way to do business. Those "working" papers could save your neck as well as hang it depending on the lawsuit in question. Course the company I work for will always make an attempt to make it right before proceeding with any kind of litigation. In situations like these should a suit come to discovery we'll need every piece of information we can get our hands on. With todays patent minefield I don't think this is a bad stance to take at all.
Our working papers were irrelevant once our final report was drafted - it contained all the data and facts needed to support our assessments - we weren't patenting ideas or worried about us being sued for something we did; rather we wanted to prevent disclosure of customer information we gathered during our work. We did not want some random note to wind up on 60 minutes and be blwon out of porportion or taken out of context.
Sure - we did operational and safety audits of large industrial firms - if every statement employees made and everything we observed was available as raw data our udits would be ineffective since nobody would be willing to say anything or let us observe operations. We didn't hide things but wanted to mae sure what we said were problems really were and our assessments were backed by facts that supported our conclusions.
So, lemmie get this straight...this technology is bad because it hinders your attempts to lie in court?
Personally I've had nightly snapshots made of my work and home machines for several years. It's saved my ass on more than one occasion and never once have I thought that one day I might need to lie in court and get screwed over it.
Who said anything about lying in court - what I was talking about was how a draft document or working papers could have statements in them that could look very bad if taken out of context or be wrong after further review. The work we did allowed us broad access to all aspects of various companies operations - and our final reports were very carefully vetted to ensure they were accurate and the issues raised were substantive and backed by facts. My notes from inspections, however, were just that - notes on what I saw and thought happened which I used to reconstruct events - an dthe conlcusions form those sessions were often different from my back of the envelope assessment.
Have i been saved by auto backups - yes, but I want to kbow when and what is set for auto backup so I can ensure it is appropriate.
Anyone familiar with ISO9001? To get the creditation you cannot bin/destroy a document ever under any circumstances. The only reason you may want to destroy something is due to dishonesty and if you are going down that route I want nothing to do with you or your company. This is why many large businesses demand ISO9001 complience in their sub-contractors.
My experiences with ISO certs in the 9xxx range wer ethat they were audits of procedures and never really got into how well th eprocedures were followed or the outcomes generated - i.e. a lot of smoke and mirrors that meant nothing but that you got a neat symbol to put on your letterhead. hell., most people don't even know what ISO stands for in English (;et alone French).
There are many valid reasons to destroy documents other than dishonesty.
Amazing that a Good Thing gets turned into a big-brother or privacy issue just because it's Microsoft. Shadow copy has saved my ass twice in the past year and the more it's available, the better. If employees are worried about the boss checking up on them, then maybe they should just do their job.
Actually, I'd be more worried about what can be discovered in a lawsuit - the raw ruminations of some employee could be very damaging - whether or not they were correct. This makes it harder to destroy working papers. In the old days, we kept all our working papers on a disk and then destroyed the disk along with our hard copy working papers - that way no one had to worry about what could be dredged up in a lawsuit.
How is outsourcing any different from sub contracting within your own country in this respect?
Target desirability - an attack on India's outsourcing centers would cause much more damage to India's economic infrastructure than attack on one in the US or UK if only because it would be more likely to cause companies to move their operations elsewhere; making India's a much more inviting target.
The usability is almost there.. I give it until version 11, and if HP and Dell get behind it like they say they are, you can validate the 'Vista-killer' remark, no matter how stupid it is.. There will finally be two real alternatives for Intel desk/laptops: Leopard and SLED.
While they may be alternatives, what really matters is what programs run on the desktop.
For business, Office's lock will be hard to overcome unless OpenOffice or something else is made to work seamlessly with Office; then there are specialty programs that only run on Windows and maybe the Mac. For home users Linux has the basics - browser/office suite/IM but lacks games as well as iTunes.
While these barriers can be overcome it won't be easy and simply be an alternative is not enough.
You do not give up that right. My opinion is that your rights are protected stronger precisely because it's a government institution, which is squarely under the jurisdiction of the Constitution.
Which prevents "unreasonable" search and seizures - a school may search you but they must have a good reason to do so; and if they have a police officer on duty he or she probably would do the search assuming they have probable cause to do so. If a reacher hears you talk about doing something illegal then a search is not unreasonable.
BTW - a consent to search is often a condition for entering government property; military bases did random searches of cars on a regular basis - they key was to really do random (such as every car whose tag ended in an odd number or a letter or every 5th car), not targeted, searches or search everyone.
I'll assume the summary leaves out the crucial word "free" in there. If so, that's pretty damn clever. I just wonder how/if MS will get the music cartels to agree to it, other than wholescale bombing of their headquarters' into submission by the Windows Air Force.
Forget that, how will they enforce it? Violate the DMCA and try decrypting the songs? Hack Apple's servers for information?
Power. MS is a pretty big gorilla who can put a lot of weight behind DRM. In addition, to gives the music companies a real viable competitor to oTunes; so if Apple won't play ball they'll simply use MS' bat to neat them into submission. In addition, it gives them access to MS to get them to add DRM features right into the OS to prevent piracy. Why not play nice with a major player in computing, especially since they have the cash to take you on if they chose to; such as by buying rights to songs and or a studio.
grammar error was on a protesters sign (they were protesting against a factory closing):
"Get government off are backs."
No doubt they blamed everyone else but themselves for their low skill job leaving town.
What amazes me is that people fail to proofread before they send in resumes or college applications - the word processor's built in checkers miss may common mistakes; and if they can't be troubled to ensure the one piece of paper they send in to convince me to hire or let them into school, well then I won't waste my time since there are plenty of other applicants who do take the time to craft a well written resume or application.
In general, yes because as a species we are wired to reproduce; beauty is one signal that the other person is healthy and will be able to produce healthy offspring. We seek signs that a prospective mate will help be able to reproduce and provide desirable traits in our children. Beauty is one part of that; and what is attractive in a male to a female is different than what a man finds attractive in a female; a good bit of that is driven by the economic factors in a relationship (and I mean fundamental principles not money). A women is investing at least 9 months in giving birth plus generally shoulders much of the child rearing burden; an man needs about an hour and he's done - why do you think signals that say "will commit" and "can provide" are valuable to women?
And before someone goes off on a rant (hope springs eternal on/.) I am speaking in broad terms that apply across our species and not to specific relationships; which have other factors as well; but even then the underlying economic forces are at work.
Beauty is a broad concept. And appeals to us in many different ways.
Yes, but in humans there are some standard things that imply beauty which can be traced to health and reproductive ability. Amongst them are symmetry and body fat.
The scary thing about stock tip spam ("XXXXX set to rocket on Wednesday!!!") is that presumably enough suckers buy it that it really does increase in price.
What's so scary - this trick is as old as the stock market. Before email it was fax and phone tools - classic boiler room operations. All that has happened is email has become one more way to reach suckers; a very cheap way at that.
I suspect that the spammers or their contacts buy stock just before sending out the spam, wait for the price to be artificially inflated by thousands of idiots who think they've accidentally received a valuable tip intended for someone else buying it all up, then sell shortly before the rise they promised happens (as this is when the fools realise that they've been tricked and start cutting their losses).
It's called pump and dump' and there truly is one born every minute. As one of my econ professors put it, the first thing to ask when you find a hundred dollar bill is "why me?"
Viral marketting works because people see and exchange videos etc. If You drive them to a pay link then most will just pass on the vid.
If it allows downloading, then people will d/l and post or email teh vid outside of Lulu - which means real popular vids may get viewed without the author getting paid by lulu.
I think Googles "we'll give you a cut of teh add revenue" is a smarter move since it incorporates the "payment" to Google (page views of ads) in viewing the vid, and it rewards popular vids becasue they drive viewing ads and thus money to Google; while not requiring money from either party - iploader or viewer.
Not even the big corps can avoid infringing. They may be able to work around the infringement was the lawsuit arrives, but can you image the cost and time it takes? Big guys usually don't take just a few days to make a few fixes, release, and distribute the fixes. It is going to sting both small and big developers.
Except that the big corps have their own portfolio of patents. You want to sue IBM for infringemnet? No problem, they'll dust of their patents and find the 100 or so that you are infringing with your software. Can you say "Settle and cross license?"
As for ofshoring work - that's fine, except you'll have to forgo the US market unless you want to be sued along with your customers; and you should ptobably avoid countries with similar patent systems to the US.
How do they connect with the land line? By some magic? No - they are basically subscribers to a PSTN network and paid its operator for their subscription. Obviously PSTN operator's charges are calculated to cover all its expenses, including this fee. Therefore everything is already paid, albeit indirectly! FCC wants more money.
They pay a fixed percentage of their interstate and international call revenue - which theirsuscribers USF covers (they keep any excess). While the FCC wants more money (which they readily admit) it's not like the USF is part of the leased line charges;since that would not represent interstate or international xall revenue for teh carriers. It would make no sense for them to claim otherwise since that would just increase their payout when they could keep all the revenue.
I actually agreed with what you were saying until the criticism of "what they've done to our economy."
From all indicators that I have seen, that's the one thing they have done pretty well with. This administration came into office with a recession inherited from the previous administration, and turned it around into a strong economy.
Unemployment is low, inflation is low, new home construction is up, the markets are healthy. What's wrong with the economy?
I do take issue with their out-of-control spending, but the economy is fine.
While the current economy is reasonably robust, the rate of spending is unsustainable and doing long term damage to our economy.
Once foriegners decide to stop buying our treasury notes we will be in trouble.
Does the FCC have the authority to levy taxes? Isn't the FCC an executive agency? Have we stopped even pretending that we have a constitutional government?
It is not a tax - it is a fee - look at what your bill says. There is no real difference but the name does count becsue agencies can charge fees - and most do.
VOIP has been getting a free ride since they can connect with the landline but have avoided the fee - I'd like to see them junk the fee but that won't happen. It's a good thing that Repiblicans are for less government and working on important issues like banning gay marriage instead of worrying about what they've done to our economy. Where is Goldwater when the Republicans really need him.
From a personal perspective, VOIP is still cheaper since I have a phone in Eiurope and the US and all calls are local.
The problem is, is that this seems like a few bad apples ruining it for everyone else.
That depends on what you view as bad - people have differences of opinion on many topics - that, coupled with strong opinions or POVs can result in repeated editing to remove the opposite opinion. With a Wiki, a view is a snapshot in time - you don't realize what's been cut unless you look at the revision histrory; I doubt many people do that when using it as a reference; as a result the get the "latest" viewpoint. The revison history can be a powerful tool to help understand opposite sides of an argument which is an oft overlooked strength of a Wiki - it's not a fixed article but rather the result of a series of "discussions" on what should be in.
In addition, one person's humor is another's vandalism.
While technical skills are important, the ability to work in groups, follow orders, and eventually lead groups are what will advance a career. Communications skills are a key component as well. Unless you want to stay a programmer / admin forever, and always be at risk for being replaced by a newer / cheaper model as your skills decay (or are perceived to no longer be up with the latest or simply too expensive); people skills are what will advance your career.
Ok, I'll bite. Yes, she was brain dead. Yes, she wasn't going to recover.
Yet why should she be killed when there were people who were willing to take care of her? This has nothing to do with science, since science cannot answer ethical questions. It had to do with law (who controls another human being since there were no written instructions from her). It had to do with whether we are the kind of people who will dispose of the inconvenient, whether we will choose death over life. It wasn't about Teri, since she couldn't possibly care. It was about us.
The question is who has teh right to decide to continue care? If a child is born that can only survive on life support - should the parents be forced to put the baby on life support if they chose not to do so? Does teh state pay, or should only babies born into financial mens be given the choice? Or should the baby be allowed to live on its own until it dies based on the parents wishes?
Is it then not God's choice when to take the baby?
As for the TS case, people discovered a good PR venue - they could advance their cause by "fighting" for a nice, white, middle class woman that would make the evening news; rather than fighting to spend that money providing basic health care for inner city, poor children to lower the infant mortality rate. The case wasn't about us, it was about getting publicity for a cause; and I found that disgusting.
The important question is... Will you come to the defense of Mike Hunt? Mike Hunt is clearly in need of help right now, and only the actions of truly altruistic individuals like yourself can make bare the facts of this obviously hairy situation.
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Make no mistake, a completely deregulated market will result in corporations running roughshod over the consumer. The Libertarian ideal of a totally free market where competition cures all ills simply does not account for real-world factors like barrier to entry. If no new players are able to enter a market due to prohibitive cost (like, say, the pharmaceutical industry), competition only exists among established players who can simply collude to fuck the consumer up the ass, since they know that there won't be any hot-shot upstarts with new ideas like "not gouging your customers" entering the market to steal a piece of the pie
Except CA never fully deregulated the electric industry - they capped prices to consumers and let supply prices rise to demand - where each supplier essentially got the price for the last KW - so they had every incentive to choke the pipe and drive up prices. CA, in added bit of stupidity, mandated that the electric companies (not the producers of electricity) had to meet demand no matter the cost (which they could not recover). They were forces to pay market rates and could not control demand via blackouts. No wonder they went bankrupt.
The politicians promised lower electric prices and lined up to support deregulation - funny how the father of deregulation demanded a paternity test once he found out what he had spawned. Once again the invisible hand hit politicians with a clue by four; and once again they failed to get a clue.
..is about minimising your fixed costs while maximising your variable returns.
Ok - IANAE (economist) and IANAPM (postman) - but this is probably a reasonable simplification.
With the postal service, fixed costs are about delivering a single item, where as high variable returns come from large packages. With the decline of letters and such (due to e-mail etc), and the concurrent increase in parcels (due to online shopping) - how could they not make better returns.
If a postal service is making losses and is in decline (as a number are in Europe), I would suggest that they should stop looking at environmental factors, start modernising their organizations and provide a service that complements the needs of their 21st century customer.
Well, a bit too much simplification. Profit is about minimizing total costs while maximizing revenue.
Fixed vs variable comes in when you decide wether to continue an operatoin or shut it down - i.e if continuing to operate loses less money than shuting down (i.e. my revenue covers my variable costs and some of my fixed) it makes more snese operate assuming you see profits at some point in the future. This is why airlines keep operating even when they are losing money - they lose less than if they stopped flying do to the high fixed costs of the airplanes. OTOH, if your variable costs are high and fixed are low, you cease operating when business is bad and start back when it is good - such as seasonal service operations like say an ice cream stand.
The marginal cost of delivering one more letter from the post office to the house is small - so any increase in volume is generally good. The advantage the post office has is they run a fixed, predictable route - so they can deliver the odd package to your house for less than other services who need to make a special trip that they can't reliably plan for in advance (which is why home dleivery is more expensive); the USPS is driving by your door already whether or not they stop. If you aren't home and teh package requires a second delivery to get a signature they are going to be back tomorrow anywhy so the marginal cost of taht second stop is small. They can still reduce costs by cutting Saturday delivery since they have no real servcie guarantee so stopping a run saves gas / vehicle wear and tear and payroll (assuming they don't have to pay the carrier the same salary) while not reducing revenue (they still get the letter to deliver two days later) raising their profitability.
While improving servcie would be nice, they really don't have to since no one can compete with them for the day to day delivery of non-speed sensitive materials.
Of course, now I have over simplified...
...to deny claims. That's what they do. Insurance companies aren't in business to pay for people's losses, they're in business not to pay for people's losses, because the less they pay out, the greater profit they make. The portrayal in The Incredibles was just about dead-on. So getting them to fork over is often like trying to squeeze blood from a stone even at the best of times.
Nope - insurance companies goals (whether for profit or mutual) are to generate enough income to cover losses and make a profit or provide a rebate to the members. they can pay over 100% of their premiums in claims provided they properly manage their investments.
Insurance comapnies have many sophisticated financial instrumnets to stay solvent - which is why they higher a lot of really smart finance types.
talk about a terrible way to do business. Those "working" papers could save your neck as well as hang it depending on the lawsuit in question. Course the company I work for will always make an attempt to make it right before proceeding with any kind of litigation. In situations like these should a suit come to discovery we'll need every piece of information we can get our hands on. With todays patent minefield I don't think this is a bad stance to take at all.
Our working papers were irrelevant once our final report was drafted - it contained all the data and facts needed to support our assessments - we weren't patenting ideas or worried about us being sued for something we did; rather we wanted to prevent disclosure of customer information we gathered during our work. We did not want some random note to wind up on 60 minutes and be blwon out of porportion or taken out of context.
Sure - we did operational and safety audits of large industrial firms - if every statement employees made and everything we observed was available as raw data our udits would be ineffective since nobody would be willing to say anything or let us observe operations. We didn't hide things but wanted to mae sure what we said were problems really were and our assessments were backed by facts that supported our conclusions.
So, lemmie get this straight...this technology is bad because it hinders your attempts to lie in court?
Personally I've had nightly snapshots made of my work and home machines for several years. It's saved my ass on more than one occasion and never once have I thought that one day I might need to lie in court and get screwed over it.
Who said anything about lying in court - what I was talking about was how a draft document or working papers could have statements in them that could look very bad if taken out of context or be wrong after further review. The work we did allowed us broad access to all aspects of various companies operations - and our final reports were very carefully vetted to ensure they were accurate and the issues raised were substantive and backed by facts. My notes from inspections, however, were just that - notes on what I saw and thought happened which I used to reconstruct events - an dthe conlcusions form those sessions were often different from my back of the envelope assessment.
Have i been saved by auto backups - yes, but I want to kbow when and what is set for auto backup so I can ensure it is appropriate.
Anyone familiar with ISO9001? To get the creditation you cannot bin/destroy a document ever under any circumstances. The only reason you may want to destroy something is due to dishonesty and if you are going down that route I want nothing to do with you or your company. This is why many large businesses demand ISO9001 complience in their sub-contractors.
My experiences with ISO certs in the 9xxx range wer ethat they were audits of procedures and never really got into how well th eprocedures were followed or the outcomes generated - i.e. a lot of smoke and mirrors that meant nothing but that you got a neat symbol to put on your letterhead. hell., most people don't even know what ISO stands for in English (;et alone French).
There are many valid reasons to destroy documents other than dishonesty.
Amazing that a Good Thing gets turned into a big-brother or privacy issue just because it's Microsoft. Shadow copy has saved my ass twice in the past year and the more it's available, the better. If employees are worried about the boss checking up on them, then maybe they should just do their job.
Actually, I'd be more worried about what can be discovered in a lawsuit - the raw ruminations of some employee could be very damaging - whether or not they were correct. This makes it harder to destroy working papers. In the old days, we kept all our working papers on a disk and then destroyed the disk along with our hard copy working papers - that way no one had to worry about what could be dredged up in a lawsuit.
How is outsourcing any different from sub contracting within your own country in this respect?
Target desirability - an attack on India's outsourcing centers would cause much more damage to India's economic infrastructure than attack on one in the US or UK if only because it would be more likely to cause companies to move their operations elsewhere; making India's a much more inviting target.
The usability is almost there.. I give it until version 11, and if HP and Dell get behind it like they say they are, you can validate the 'Vista-killer' remark, no matter how stupid it is.. There will finally be two real alternatives for Intel desk/laptops: Leopard and SLED.
While they may be alternatives, what really matters is what programs run on the desktop.
For business, Office's lock will be hard to overcome unless OpenOffice or something else is made to work seamlessly with Office; then there are specialty programs that only run on Windows and maybe the Mac.
For home users Linux has the basics - browser/office suite/IM but lacks games as well as iTunes.
While these barriers can be overcome it won't be easy and simply be an alternative is not enough.
Hmmm - I'd say closer to the CP than the CG since then the sail could help trim the ship.
A public school is a government institution.
You do not give up that right. My opinion is that your rights are protected stronger precisely because it's a government institution, which is squarely under the jurisdiction of the Constitution.
Which prevents "unreasonable" search and seizures - a school may search you but they must have a good reason to do so; and if they have a police officer on duty he or she probably would do the search assuming they have probable cause to do so. If a reacher hears you talk about doing something illegal then a search is not unreasonable.
BTW - a consent to search is often a condition for entering government property; military bases did random searches of cars on a regular basis - they key was to really do random (such as every car whose tag ended in an odd number or a letter or every 5th car), not targeted, searches or search everyone.
I'll assume the summary leaves out the crucial word "free" in there. If so, that's pretty damn clever. I just wonder how/if MS will get the music cartels to agree to it, other than wholescale bombing of their headquarters' into submission by the Windows Air Force.
Forget that, how will they enforce it?
Violate the DMCA and try decrypting the songs?
Hack Apple's servers for information?
Power. MS is a pretty big gorilla who can put a lot of weight behind DRM. In addition, to gives the music companies a real viable competitor to oTunes; so if Apple won't play ball they'll simply use MS' bat to neat them into submission. In addition, it gives them access to MS to get them to add DRM features right into the OS to prevent piracy. Why not play nice with a major player in computing, especially since they have the cash to take you on if they chose to; such as by buying rights to songs and or a studio.
It's all about power, which leads to money.
grammar error was on a protesters sign (they were protesting against a factory closing):
"Get government off are backs."
No doubt they blamed everyone else but themselves for their low skill job leaving town.
What amazes me is that people fail to proofread before they send in resumes or college applications - the word processor's built in checkers miss may common mistakes; and if they can't be troubled to ensure the one piece of paper they send in to convince me to hire or let them into school, well then I won't waste my time since there are plenty of other applicants who do take the time to craft a well written resume or application.
Does human beauty always allude to sex?
/.) I am speaking in broad terms that apply across our species and not to specific relationships; which have other factors as well; but even then the underlying economic forces are at work.
In general, yes because as a species we are wired to reproduce; beauty is one signal that the other person is healthy and will be able to produce healthy offspring. We seek signs that a prospective mate will help be able to reproduce and provide desirable traits in our children. Beauty is one part of that; and what is attractive in a male to a female is different than what a man finds attractive in a female; a good bit of that is driven by the economic factors in a relationship (and I mean fundamental principles not money). A women is investing at least 9 months in giving birth plus generally shoulders much of the child rearing burden; an man needs about an hour and he's done - why do you think signals that say "will commit" and "can provide" are valuable to women?
And before someone goes off on a rant (hope springs eternal on
Beauty is a broad concept. And appeals to us in many different ways.
Yes, but in humans there are some standard things that imply beauty which can be traced to health and reproductive ability. Amongst them are symmetry and body fat.
The scary thing about stock tip spam ("XXXXX set to rocket on Wednesday!!!") is that presumably enough suckers buy it that it really does increase in price.
What's so scary - this trick is as old as the stock market. Before email it was fax and phone tools - classic boiler room operations. All that has happened is email has become one more way to reach suckers; a very cheap way at that.
I suspect that the spammers or their contacts buy stock just before sending out the spam, wait for the price to be artificially inflated by thousands of idiots who think they've accidentally received a valuable tip intended for someone else buying it all up, then sell shortly before the rise they promised happens (as this is when the fools realise that they've been tricked and start cutting their losses).
It's called pump and dump' and there truly is one born every minute. As one of my econ professors put it, the first thing to ask when you find a hundred dollar bill is "why me?"
It'll be interesting to see how it works.
Another question - how do you enforce creator rights - one of your popular downloads is a Star Trek vid.
Two issues I see:
Viral marketting works because people see and exchange videos etc. If You drive them to a pay link then most will just pass on the vid.
If it allows downloading, then people will d/l and post or email teh vid outside of Lulu - which means real popular vids may get viewed without the author getting paid by lulu.
I think Googles "we'll give you a cut of teh add revenue" is a smarter move since it incorporates the "payment" to Google (page views of ads) in viewing the vid, and it rewards popular vids becasue they drive viewing ads and thus money to Google; while not requiring money from either party - iploader or viewer.
Not even the big corps can avoid infringing. They may be able to work around the infringement was the lawsuit arrives, but can you image the cost and time it takes? Big guys usually don't take just a few days to make a few fixes, release, and distribute the fixes. It is going to sting both small and big developers.
Except that the big corps have their own portfolio of patents. You want to sue IBM for infringemnet? No problem, they'll dust of their patents and find the 100 or so that you are infringing with your software. Can you say "Settle and cross license?"
As for ofshoring work - that's fine, except you'll have to forgo the US market unless you want to be sued along with your customers; and you should ptobably avoid countries with similar patent systems to the US.
How do they connect with the land line? By some magic? No - they are basically subscribers to a PSTN network and paid its operator for their subscription. Obviously PSTN operator's charges are calculated to cover all its expenses, including this fee. Therefore everything is already paid, albeit indirectly! FCC wants more money.
They pay a fixed percentage of their interstate and international call revenue - which theirsuscribers USF covers (they keep any excess). While the FCC wants more money (which they readily admit) it's not like the USF is part of the leased line charges;since that would not represent interstate or international xall revenue for teh carriers. It would make no sense for them to claim otherwise since that would just increase their payout when they could keep all the revenue.
I actually agreed with what you were saying until the criticism of "what they've done to our economy."
From all indicators that I have seen, that's the one thing they have done pretty well with. This administration came into office with a recession inherited from the previous administration, and turned it around into a strong economy.
Unemployment is low, inflation is low, new home construction is up, the markets are healthy. What's wrong with the economy?
I do take issue with their out-of-control spending, but the economy is fine.
While the current economy is reasonably robust, the rate of spending is unsustainable and doing long term damage to our economy.
Once foriegners decide to stop buying our treasury notes we will be in trouble.
Does the FCC have the authority to levy taxes? Isn't the FCC an executive agency? Have we stopped even pretending that we have a constitutional government?
It is not a tax - it is a fee - look at what your bill says. There is no real difference but the name does count becsue agencies can charge fees - and most do.
VOIP has been getting a free ride since they can connect with the landline but have avoided the fee - I'd like to see them junk the fee but that won't happen. It's a good thing that Repiblicans are for less government and working on important issues like banning gay marriage instead of worrying about what they've done to our economy. Where is Goldwater when the Republicans really need him.
From a personal perspective, VOIP is still cheaper since I have a phone in Eiurope and the US and all calls are local.
The problem is, is that this seems like a few bad apples ruining it for everyone else.
That depends on what you view as bad - people have differences of opinion on many topics - that, coupled with strong opinions or POVs can result in repeated editing to remove the opposite opinion. With a Wiki, a view is a snapshot in time - you don't realize what's been cut unless you look at the revision histrory; I doubt many people do that when using it as a reference; as a result the get the "latest" viewpoint. The revison history can be a powerful tool to help understand opposite sides of an argument which is an oft overlooked strength of a Wiki - it's not a fixed article but rather the result of a series of "discussions" on what should be in.
In addition, one person's humor is another's vandalism.
While technical skills are important, the ability to work in groups, follow orders, and eventually lead groups are what will advance a career. Communications skills are a key component as well. Unless you want to stay a programmer / admin forever, and always be at risk for being replaced by a newer / cheaper model as your skills decay (or are perceived to no longer be up with the latest or simply too expensive); people skills are what will advance your career.
Ok, I'll bite. Yes, she was brain dead. Yes, she wasn't going to recover.
Yet why should she be killed when there were people who were willing to take care of her? This has nothing to do with science, since science cannot answer ethical questions. It had to do with law (who controls another human being since there were no written instructions from her). It had to do with whether we are the kind of people who will dispose of the inconvenient, whether we will choose death over life. It wasn't about Teri, since she couldn't possibly care. It was about us.
The question is who has teh right to decide to continue care? If a child is born that can only survive on life support - should the parents be forced to put the baby on life support if they chose not to do so? Does teh state pay, or should only babies born into financial mens be given the choice? Or should the baby be allowed to live on its own until it dies based on the parents wishes?
Is it then not God's choice when to take the baby?
As for the TS case, people discovered a good PR venue - they could advance their cause by "fighting" for a nice, white, middle class woman that would make the evening news; rather than fighting to spend that money providing basic health care for inner city, poor children to lower the infant mortality rate. The case wasn't about us, it was about getting publicity for a cause; and I found that disgusting.
The important question is... Will you come to the defense of Mike Hunt? Mike Hunt is clearly in need of help right now, and only the actions of truly altruistic individuals like yourself can make bare the facts of this obviously hairy situation.
My guess is Mike Hunt is about to be screwed.