A number of people were convicted and jailed for illegally manipulating the CA power market. Not to mention that one of the main companies involves was involved in massive accounting and securities fraud. None of that makes up for the billions lost by taxpayers and businesses.
It take a very particular sort of free market hardliner to look at a situation where crooks were blatantly breaking the rules, and come to the conclusion that less regulation was needed.
Enron was a very special case that went beyond CA.
In general, the companies looked at CA's rules and determined they could increase prices by limiting supply - and after the fact CA cried foul when they discovered what happened. Had CA not written the rules that way, it never would have happened. They could have allowed the distribution companies to buy long term contracts that locked in prices, but didn't. They could have allowed prices to consumers to rise - but that would have cost some politicians there job and we can't have that. They could have built more transmission lines to keep supply in line with demand - but no one wants a power line in their backyard.
That, of course, does not address the politicians key mistake - setting rules that would obviously drive up prices, while promising lower prices and capping the price consumers were charged. Of course, when things don't turn out as they expect, they find a scapegoat - and evil corporations are much preferred to stupid politicians by legislatures when it comes to the blame game.
Had the power companies been a little less greedy, or smarter in how they traded, they may never had been in trouble and still made huge profits.
Basically, CA is arguing it is criminal to cut back production to drive up prices - if you truly believe that, there are many other companies that are engaging in criminal conduct. Even individuals might, because if you worked 80 hours instead of 40 there's be less demand for employees and you could be paid less.
The bottom line is CA botched deregulation, and the politicians went looking for ways to shift the blame.
Savings and Loan: Ugh, I don't even need to recap this one.
A few bad actors decided tehy were super bankers and tried to make a lot of money - what should have happened is to let the go under and not bail them out - and let deposit insurance pay off teh depositers.
Phone Service; Payphone prices have doubled, my phone bills are now ridiculous and often miscalculated, and the bill has tripled.
Once cross subsidation was removed, telco's couldn't keep consumer bills low by jacking up others. Deregulation ended that shell game.
Power: I live in California. 'Nuff said.
Deregulation not only ended the shell game of cross-subsidies; CA added a twist by deciding supply and demand didn't really work. They forced the utility (the distributer, not the generator) to buy power at market prices but not to recover the higher costs. Without the demand reducing effects of rising prices, people kept using electricty while the cost to the utilities to provide it skyrocketed. Why did it skyrocket? CA's legislature (notice how the father of dereg in CA denies paternity today?)forced utilities to buy all the power at the marginal cost of the last more expensive KW.
CA is like two small islnds - with limited transmission capablity in an out. Once those lines were full, prices rose as more expensive plants in state went online. Great for the producers - they sell cheap power at premium rates.
In the end, CA got what it deserved.
Politicians promised to cut rates and prevented companies from locking in prices via long term contracts for power to keep costs reasonable.
Green groups got to hurt the big bad power companies by deregulating them. Ever try to build a plant or line in CA?
Consumers got price cuts - but no caps on use to keep asupply costs in line with revenue.
When it all fell aprt - politicians ran for cover, the greens forgot they supported the bill, and the taxpayer will get the bill.
Politicians went after wholesellers becuse thy had the gall to look at CA's rules and used them to get the highest price for their power.
The real sad thing is that a Cal econimist explianed thgis before derqulation - but everyone was too busy trying to protect their interests to listen.
That's where the problem lies, and why your parent poster stated that capitalism needs some level of governmental regulation to be successful. Or would it be better if Standard Oil and AT&T hadn't been split up?
he closest thing to anarchy i can think of is extremely tribal societies with very little law enforcement,
I would not classify a tribal society as anarchist - they may not have our view of order (gov't supplied police for protection, written laws, etc.) but they provide the same through tribal relationships and mores - if one of their members commits an anti-social act, they take care of it within their societies rules. Different then us, but the same net effect - a group of people banded together to ensure group and individual survival.
Re:Ah. You tried to get into mensa....
on
MSN Sponsors Mensa
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Being gifted is a terrible weight to carry for a child, because it shows and constantly expose you to jealous behaviors and sarcasms from other kids, their parents, not to speak of teachers. You spend years in schools trying to offer the smallest surface of yourself to the view of others - unsuccessfully, in general.
Being gifted is not a curse - failing to develop socially is. I know plenty of really smart people who were popular - mainly because being smart did not define them. They played sports, were into music, one did pyrotechnics effects for plays - all things that *were* of interest to others. They're all nice, well rounded people who happen to be smart - and are fun to be around because discussions center on things besides IQ and tests.
Yea, nobody wanted to be around the kid that bragged about a 100 on a test - and the really smart ones figured it out and developed other interests as well.
You think that it'll get better in college ? Nope, wrong. In adulthood ? Nope. Wherever you go, you are surrounded by the same poisoned atmosphere when people realize you think faster than they do. When you're that bright, you soon understand what it was to be suspect of witchcraft.
I don't know about your experiences, but my college experiences didn't involve poisoned atmospheres for bright people. My roommate, for example, was brilliant - nearly a 4.0 in Mech Eng / Nuke Eng, aced tests by simply reading 100 pages of a textbook the night before an exam, yet he was very well liked and respected member of my fraternity. Why? Because his intelligence did not define him. He had great social skills, and if you needed help in a course he'd take the time to explain things until you understood them.
Look at this thread : full of hatred against those folks, because they dare claim they're smart. Would they have claimed any other talent such as music or painting, there would be applauses of joy, but logical intelligence must be hidden.
No, the "hatred" is toward folks who seem to think intelligence is somehow valuable or makes someone better than another. IQ isn't a skill, nor is it particularly valuable - what is worth recognition is what you do with it.
We've all met bright people that exude the impression that because you're "not as bright" or didn't get as high a test score that you're not in their league. Any wonder people treat them like they're an ass?
You could replace Mensa with "people who think that living in a high rent zip code form closed social club" and you'd get many of the same responses. And you know what - many of the people who would meet that criteria are nice people who are well liked, and a few are pompous asses who think they're disliked because of where they live; never realizing that they would be pompous assess and treated as such no matter where they are.
Being gifted is a curse most of the time.
No, the curse is thinking being gifted is something you think others really care about.
2.) The payment barrier still sucks, i.e.: No valid micropayment system exists (STILL) and people who read their news ont he web generally don't want a subscription to every resource they use. If there were a reasonable micropayment system in place, where content poroviders could charge you a few cents to read an article or access certian content, without hassle to the end-user, this type of thing could work.
Actually, there are solutions such as Lexus / Nexus and Dow Jones that aggregate content from multiple sources. While they are expensives, perhaps if tehy offered a small subset of popular media at a fixed monthly fee you could get access to a wide range of publications, plus they could pay the publications a fee based on on line usage. The problem is that online sources want to capture readers so the get the entire revenue stream (ads plus subscription).
DJ is ad-free (beacuse it is a paid service) - would people be willing to pay less if content included ads? That's the paper model applied online.
If you think you need to worry because someone else's product looks like yours, you have a problem. This means your whole sales concept is based on a look. I would be far more worried about a product that has more functionnalities, or cheaper.
It's called trade dressage, as I recall. Companies own the design, and can stop others from producing exact copies. IANAL, so there's no doubt a lot of factors that determine infringement (or what ever it's called).
Are you calling D&D players spys? Yet the TFA says "The game indicates a weak personality", not a very desirable spy attribute.
Actually, that's a good trait in a spy and a bad trait in an itteligence officer (which is what I think you mean) or person with access to senstive materials. Why?
An intelligence officer (i.e. a professinal who recruits and runs agents for their government) wants to get somene they can control in order to gain information. A wek personality would be someone who is easier to convince and influnece to do what you want. People who feel they aren't getting recognition they deserve or have rich fantasy lifes where they are soem sort of important person would be fertile grounds for recruitment.
First of all - what type of CS degree - was it math / science or was it more engineering?
What do you like to do? More importantly, what would you like to do?
Once you answer those questions, find out what degrees / experience people have and look into getting the same.
An MBA is a good fit, as it lets you move into different directions than a CIS degree alone - it can be the stepping stone to consulting , finance, management (although you'll do little CIS work).
If you do get an MBA, go for a good school - there's the top tier:
Harvard Chicago Northwestern Wharton MIT NY U Columbia Stanford
a very strong second tier / regional schools (about 25 total), and then the rest.
Some of the rest are good, other medicore. Look at the employment / salary numbers - some schools have over half their class still unemployed 3 months after graduation.
Businessweek and US News do rankings, as does Ginaicial Times (amongst others). Take them with a grain of salt, but you can see some very definite patterns. While an HBS / Chicago / Northwestern MBA may not be that much better (in pure learning terms) that one from Ohio State or Ga Tech, the 'name' schools will open a lot more doors for you.
A nuke submariner recieves a smaller dose that an airline flight crew or a Navy pilot - though paradoxically he wears a dosimeter while aviators don't.
There is a reason for that. The sky can't suddenly develop a crack or leak and expose him to deadly doses of radiation in minutes.
Well, the dosimeter is used to measure chronic doses primarily. This ensures you stay within the allowable annual / quarterly dose limits. A flight crew may actually exceed those, depending on the number and types of flights. But since they aren't radiation workers, they don't meet the guidelines for monitoring.
And if the reactor suddenly cracked and started spewing radiation, you've got worse things to worry about other than rad doses.
I know it sounds weird, but when I was at University of Missouri-Rolla, I did some work at the nuclear reactor on campus. There is far less radiation inside the reactor building (not inside the reactor core itself) than there is outside on the hockey puck (a big concrete circle in the middle of campus).
Not really - reactors emit very little radiation beyond the reactor vessel / primary containment; amd teh secondary is an effective shield from natural radiation.
A nuke submariner recieves a smaller dose that an airline flight crew or a Navy pilot - though paradoxically he wears a dosimeter while aviators don't.
Well, the military fires people on a regular basis - for officers, two fail to promotes and your out (unless you have made 04 where you're assured 20 years of service)
Enlisted memebrs can be refused re-enlistment as well.
Sorry. One of the problems I has as a student of aeronautical engineering was keeping track of units. Aero Eng used US units (mainly because of the vast store of data that is all in US units) while everyone else in engineering and hard science used SI.
Not to mention the metric and English tools I have to have to work on US and German cars...
These social engineering attacks that Mitnick has built a career warning people about seem more relevant to situations were the cracker has some very specific goal in mind regarding a specific organization - dedicated industrial spies who want specific information from a particular company, etc. While I'm sure that sort of threat is a concern for many companies, I don't think it's typical of how and why computers usually get hacked into.
People go to people becasue that is where the information is - an dthey can explain and make sense of data, and steer you down the right path. Computers, while they have lots of data, don't generally provide the othe rrelevant parts, and you have to search for what you want without knowing where it is. It's a lot better to get someone who has the info you need and get them to provide it.
It's not that hard, all it takes is some persistence, a willingness to listen and knowing what questions to ask. I did some market research for a company looking to develop a new manaufacturing product. So waht do you do? Look for potenial competitors using the Thomas regisetr. Call them up and ask for info on their product (or google their website and look). Then call and ask specific questions - especially of engineers, who usually don't get calls like that and are more than happy to answer questins about their work. Trade shows are great as well. The best part is there is no real reason to lie - I'd explain what we planned to do and people would still give us reams of info. Their cusomers are good sources of info as well. If you can find a company that specializes in used equipment, they can be a gold mine - I had one lay out the entire industry, what drives prices and demand, strength and weaknesses of the major players, and profit margins. And like I said, I never pretended to be in their company, a tech, etc. - I simply called up, said we were developing X, and asked them about their products that do the same thing. Smart companies use their engineers to work trade shows - of course, you have to give to receive, but carefull giving can yield surprising results.
I don't know how many people will do it, but I just received an email from the Honorable Mr. Nacumbo with detailed directions how to do it so that I can help him get his late uncle's fortune before the government takes it.
Call me a troll if you must, but there used to be mechanisms to keep corporations in check. Back in the Golden Age before RR, we had these things called "regulations" that determined what corporations could do when their best interests clashed with those of the societies in which they operated. And there were even politicians who supported and extended those "regulations" when new abuses appeared on the horizon. Let's see, what were those guys called? I can't quite remember, it's been so long...OH YEAH! They were called "Democrats"!
Sorry to burst your bubble, but those regulations ultimately helped entrenched corporate interests, with any help for individuals merely a necessary by - product for government asisstance in keeping the status quo.
I refer you to:
The Theory of Economic Regulation by some guy named Stigler (He taught Law and Economics at some small midwestern school)
They accept so much for IDs that anyone with access to a badge making machine could create a fake one for a gov't agency and probably get through. Not a good idea since if caught you'd be arrested, but I doubt someone intent on havoc would worry about that.
Three mile island, by comparison, did release quite a bit of radiation into the nearboy Middletown area, and came within half an hour of rendering half of Pennsylvania uninhabitable for the next 20,000 years - $155,000 fine.
Actually, it did neither.
Is the FCC being unreasonable? Sure, but they get tons of letters from people who write their Congressional reps, unlike most other regulatory agencies.
One proble I see is Apple has never been one for losing money on hardware to sell a subscription service (not that I tink that is a wrong strategy) and getting people to buy a $300 TiVo box would be a hard sell.
For bette ror worse, peopl will ocmpare them to $50 VCRs and think - $300 Why? Plus $12 a month? No way.
That makes it hard to get th market share needed to sustain it in the long run. Sure, TiVo does a lot more, but you need to convince the average consumer, not a/.'er. TiVo's recently were in the $50 neighborhood at Best Buy, which brings them to the impulse price.
TiVo is not exactly a household name, and I don't see Apple changing it's business model to sell them. After all, we don't see cheap 40G iPods to sell iTunes.
OTOH, Apple could want some critical technology and buy TiVo to get it, then kill the service. Jobs is pretty ruthless with things he didn't invent, witness the newton, and some he did. Is TiVo NeXT?
OTOOH, Appple has some great hardware engineers, and maybe they could come up with a TiVo Shuffle.
Slashdot Mirror
The best music and software tends to be funded by culture, not money.
So I guess that leaves Mozart and Handel out of the best category.
Sure, there're artists who never make money and produce great art, but there's alot that's driven by money and recognition that's great as well.
A number of people were convicted and jailed for illegally manipulating the CA power market. Not to mention that one of the main companies involves was involved in massive accounting and securities fraud. None of that makes up for the billions lost by taxpayers and businesses.
It take a very particular sort of free market hardliner to look at a situation where crooks were blatantly breaking the rules, and come to the conclusion that less regulation was needed.
Enron was a very special case that went beyond CA.
In general, the companies looked at CA's rules and determined they could increase prices by limiting supply - and after the fact CA cried foul when they discovered what happened. Had CA not written the rules that way, it never would have happened. They could have allowed the distribution companies to buy long term contracts that locked in prices, but didn't. They could have allowed prices to consumers to rise - but that would have cost some politicians there job and we can't have that. They could have built more transmission lines to keep supply in line with demand - but no one wants a power line in their backyard.
That, of course, does not address the politicians key mistake - setting rules that would obviously drive up prices, while promising lower prices and capping the price consumers were charged. Of course, when things don't turn out as they expect, they find a scapegoat - and evil corporations are much preferred to stupid politicians by legislatures when it comes to the blame game.
Had the power companies been a little less greedy, or smarter in how they traded, they may never had been in trouble and still made huge profits.
Basically, CA is arguing it is criminal to cut back production to drive up prices - if you truly believe that, there are many other companies that are engaging in criminal conduct. Even individuals might, because if you worked 80 hours instead of 40 there's be less demand for employees and you could be paid less.
The bottom line is CA botched deregulation, and the politicians went looking for ways to shift the blame.
Savings and Loan: Ugh, I don't even need to recap this one.
A few bad actors decided tehy were super bankers and tried to make a lot of money - what should have happened is to let the go under and not bail them out - and let deposit insurance pay off teh depositers.
Phone Service; Payphone prices have doubled, my phone bills are now ridiculous and often miscalculated, and the bill has tripled.
Once cross subsidation was removed, telco's couldn't keep consumer bills low by jacking up others. Deregulation ended that shell game.
Power: I live in California. 'Nuff said.
Deregulation not only ended the shell game of cross-subsidies; CA added a twist by deciding supply and demand didn't really work. They forced the utility (the distributer, not the generator) to buy power at market prices but not to recover the higher costs. Without the demand reducing effects of rising prices, people kept using electricty while the cost to the utilities to provide it skyrocketed. Why did it skyrocket? CA's legislature (notice how the father of dereg in CA denies paternity today?)forced utilities to buy all the power at the marginal cost of the last more expensive KW.
CA is like two small islnds - with limited transmission capablity in an out. Once those lines were full, prices rose as more expensive plants in state went online. Great for the producers - they sell cheap power at premium rates.
In the end, CA got what it deserved.
Politicians promised to cut rates and prevented companies from locking in prices via long term contracts for power to keep costs reasonable.
Green groups got to hurt the big bad power companies by deregulating them. Ever try to build a plant or line in CA?
Consumers got price cuts - but no caps on use to keep asupply costs in line with revenue.
When it all fell aprt - politicians ran for cover, the greens forgot they supported the bill, and the taxpayer will get the bill.
Politicians went after wholesellers becuse thy had the gall to look at CA's rules and used them to get the highest price for their power.
The real sad thing is that a Cal econimist explianed thgis before derqulation - but everyone was too busy trying to protect their interests to listen.
That's where the problem lies, and why your parent poster stated that capitalism needs some level of governmental regulation to be successful. Or would it be better if Standard Oil and AT&T hadn't been split up?
Yes
he closest thing to anarchy i can think of is extremely tribal societies with very little law enforcement,
I would not classify a tribal society as anarchist - they may not have our view of order (gov't supplied police for protection, written laws, etc.) but they provide the same through tribal relationships and mores - if one of their members commits an anti-social act, they take care of it within their societies rules. Different then us, but the same net effect - a group of people banded together to ensure group and individual survival.
Being gifted is a terrible weight to carry for a child, because it shows and constantly expose you to jealous behaviors and sarcasms from other kids, their parents, not to speak of teachers. You spend years in schools trying to offer the smallest surface of yourself to the view of others - unsuccessfully, in general.
Being gifted is not a curse - failing to develop socially is. I know plenty of really smart people who were popular - mainly because being smart did not define them. They played sports, were into music, one did pyrotechnics effects for plays - all things that *were* of interest to others. They're all nice, well rounded people who happen to be smart - and are fun to be around because discussions center on things besides IQ and tests.
Yea, nobody wanted to be around the kid that bragged about a 100 on a test - and the really smart ones figured it out and developed other interests as well.
You think that it'll get better in college ? Nope, wrong. In adulthood ? Nope. Wherever you go, you are surrounded by the same poisoned atmosphere when people realize you think faster than they do. When you're that bright, you soon understand what it was to be suspect of witchcraft.
I don't know about your experiences, but my college experiences didn't involve poisoned atmospheres for bright people. My roommate, for example, was brilliant - nearly a 4.0 in Mech Eng / Nuke Eng, aced tests by simply reading 100 pages of a textbook the night before an exam, yet he was very well liked and respected member of my fraternity. Why? Because his intelligence did not define him. He had great social skills, and if you needed help in a course he'd take the time to explain things until you understood them.
Look at this thread : full of hatred against those folks, because they dare claim they're smart. Would they have claimed any other talent such as music or painting, there would be applauses of joy, but logical intelligence must be hidden.
No, the "hatred" is toward folks who seem to think intelligence is somehow valuable or makes someone better than another. IQ isn't a skill, nor is it particularly valuable - what is worth recognition is what you do with it.
We've all met bright people that exude the impression that because you're "not as bright" or didn't get as high a test score that you're not in their league. Any wonder people treat them like they're an ass?
You could replace Mensa with "people who think that living in a high rent zip code form closed social club" and you'd get many of the same responses. And you know what - many of the people who would meet that criteria are nice people who are well liked, and a few are pompous asses who think they're disliked because of where they live; never realizing that they would be pompous assess and treated as such no matter where they are.
Being gifted is a curse most of the time.
No, the curse is thinking being gifted is something you think others really care about.
2.) The payment barrier still sucks, i.e.: No valid micropayment system exists (STILL) and people who read their news ont he web generally don't want a subscription to every resource they use. If there were a reasonable micropayment system in place, where content poroviders could charge you a few cents to read an article or access certian content, without hassle to the end-user, this type of thing could work.
Actually, there are solutions such as Lexus / Nexus and Dow Jones that aggregate content from multiple sources. While they are expensives, perhaps if tehy offered a small subset of popular media at a fixed monthly fee you could get access to a wide range of publications, plus they could pay the publications a fee based on on line usage. The problem is that online sources want to capture readers so the get the entire revenue stream (ads plus subscription).
DJ is ad-free (beacuse it is a paid service) - would people be willing to pay less if content included ads? That's the paper model applied online.
If you think you need to worry because someone else's product looks like yours, you have a problem. This means your whole sales concept is based on a look. I would be far more worried about a product that has more functionnalities, or cheaper.
It's called trade dressage, as I recall. Companies own the design, and can stop others from producing exact copies. IANAL, so there's no doubt a lot of factors that determine infringement (or what ever it's called).
Are you calling D&D players spys? Yet the TFA says "The game indicates a weak personality", not a very desirable spy attribute.
Actually, that's a good trait in a spy and a bad trait in an itteligence officer (which is what I think you mean) or person with access to senstive materials. Why?
An intelligence officer (i.e. a professinal who recruits and runs agents for their government) wants to get somene they can control in order to gain information. A wek personality would be someone who is easier to convince and influnece to do what you want. People who feel they aren't getting recognition they deserve or have rich fantasy lifes where they are soem sort of important person would be fertile grounds for recruitment.
"Who the hell is Harvey Mudd and whats so special about Irvine?"
Harcort's brother.
First of all - what type of CS degree - was it math / science or was it more engineering?
Y U
What do you like to do? More importantly, what would you like to do?
Once you answer those questions, find out what degrees / experience people have and look into getting the same.
An MBA is a good fit, as it lets you move into different directions than a CIS degree alone - it can be the stepping stone to consulting , finance, management (although you'll do little CIS work).
If you do get an MBA, go for a good school - there's the top tier:
Harvard
Chicago
Northwestern
Wharton
MIT
N
Columbia
Stanford
a very strong second tier / regional schools (about 25 total),
and then the rest.
Some of the rest are good, other medicore. Look at the employment / salary numbers - some schools have over half their class still unemployed 3 months after graduation.
Businessweek and US News do rankings, as does Ginaicial Times (amongst others). Take them with a grain of salt, but you can see some very definite patterns. While an HBS / Chicago / Northwestern MBA may not be that much better (in pure learning terms) that one from Ohio State or Ga Tech, the 'name' schools will open a lot more doors for you.
A nuke submariner recieves a smaller dose that an airline flight crew or a Navy pilot - though paradoxically he wears a dosimeter while aviators don't.
There is a reason for that. The sky can't suddenly develop a crack or leak and expose him to deadly doses of radiation in minutes.
Well, the dosimeter is used to measure chronic doses primarily. This ensures you stay within the allowable annual / quarterly dose limits. A flight crew may actually exceed those, depending on the number and types of flights. But since they aren't radiation workers, they don't meet the guidelines for monitoring.
And if the reactor suddenly cracked and started spewing radiation, you've got worse things to worry about other than rad doses.
I know it sounds weird, but when I was at University of Missouri-Rolla, I did some work at the nuclear reactor on campus. There is far less radiation inside the reactor building (not inside the reactor core itself) than there is outside on the hockey puck (a big concrete circle in the middle of campus).
Not really - reactors emit very little radiation beyond the reactor vessel / primary containment; amd teh secondary is an effective shield from natural radiation.
A nuke submariner recieves a smaller dose that an airline flight crew or a Navy pilot - though paradoxically he wears a dosimeter while aviators don't.
Stop loss prevents voluntary, not involuntary, seperations.
Unless you work for;
* military
Yes, its real hard to get sacked there.
Well, the military fires people on a regular basis - for officers, two fail to promotes and your out (unless you have made 04 where you're assured 20 years of service)
Enlisted memebrs can be refused re-enlistment as well.
Sorry. One of the problems I has as a student of aeronautical engineering was keeping track of units. Aero Eng used US units (mainly because of the vast store of data that is all in US units) while everyone else in engineering and hard science used SI.
Not to mention the metric and English tools I have to have to work on US and German cars...
Sure - open up your phones calculator, subtract 32 and multiply the results by 5/9ths.
Or to do it on your head - subract the accerleration of gravity and take 1/2 of the result - a good quick and dirty.
These social engineering attacks that Mitnick has built a career warning people about seem more relevant to situations were the cracker has some very specific goal in mind regarding a specific organization - dedicated industrial spies who want specific information from a particular company, etc. While I'm sure that sort of threat is a concern for many companies, I don't think it's typical of how and why computers usually get hacked into.
People go to people becasue that is where the information is - an dthey can explain and make sense of data, and steer you down the right path. Computers, while they have lots of data, don't generally provide the othe rrelevant parts, and you have to search for what you want without knowing where it is. It's a lot better to get someone who has the info you need and get them to provide it.
It's not that hard, all it takes is some persistence, a willingness to listen and knowing what questions to ask. I did some market research for a company looking to develop a new manaufacturing product. So waht do you do? Look for potenial competitors using the Thomas regisetr. Call them up and ask for info on their product (or google their website and look). Then call and ask specific questions - especially of engineers, who usually don't get calls like that and are more than happy to answer questins about their work. Trade shows are great as well. The best part is there is no real reason to lie - I'd explain what we planned to do and people would still give us reams of info. Their cusomers are good sources of info as well. If you can find a company that specializes in used equipment, they can be a gold mine - I had one lay out the entire industry, what drives prices and demand, strength and weaknesses of the major players, and profit margins. And like I said, I never pretended to be in their company, a tech, etc. - I simply called up, said we were developing X, and asked them about their products that do the same thing. Smart companies use their engineers to work trade shows - of course, you have to give to receive, but carefull giving can yield surprising results.
I don't know how many people will do it, but I just received an email from the Honorable Mr. Nacumbo with detailed directions how to do it so that I can help him get his late uncle's fortune before the government takes it.
Call me a troll if you must, but there used to be mechanisms to keep corporations in check. Back in the Golden Age before RR, we had these things called "regulations" that determined what corporations could do when their best interests clashed with those of the societies in which they operated. And there were even politicians who supported and extended those "regulations" when new abuses appeared on the horizon. Let's see, what were those guys called? I can't quite remember, it's been so long...OH YEAH! They were called "Democrats"!
Sorry to burst your bubble, but those regulations ultimately helped entrenched corporate interests, with any help for individuals merely a necessary by - product for government asisstance in keeping the status quo.
I refer you to:
The Theory of Economic Regulation by some guy named Stigler (He taught Law and Economics at some small midwestern school)
Great. Here's hoping they fix the inaccuracies in the maps.
Will Spybot, Adaware and a decent AV detect compromises? Especially boted machines? Is ZA enough to block bots?
Or is there something else that will do the job?
One thing I dislike about such articles is they discuss the problem without generally offering solutions.
How complete was the solution set offered at the end of the article?
They accept so much for IDs that anyone with access to a badge making machine could create a fake one for a gov't agency and probably get through. Not a good idea since if caught you'd be arrested, but I doubt someone intent on havoc would worry about that.
Three mile island, by comparison, did release quite a bit of radiation into the nearboy Middletown area, and came within half an hour of rendering half of Pennsylvania uninhabitable for the next 20,000 years - $155,000 fine.
Actually, it did neither.
Is the FCC being unreasonable? Sure, but they get tons of letters from people who write their Congressional reps, unlike most other regulatory agencies.
One proble I see is Apple has never been one for losing money on hardware to sell a subscription service (not that I tink that is a wrong strategy) and getting people to buy a $300 TiVo box would be a hard sell.
/.'er. TiVo's recently were in the $50 neighborhood at Best Buy, which brings them to the impulse price.
For bette ror worse, peopl will ocmpare them to $50 VCRs and think - $300 Why? Plus $12 a month? No way.
That makes it hard to get th market share needed to sustain it in the long run. Sure, TiVo does a lot more, but you need to convince the average consumer, not a
TiVo is not exactly a household name, and I don't see Apple changing it's business model to sell them. After all, we don't see cheap 40G iPods to sell iTunes.
OTOH, Apple could want some critical technology and buy TiVo to get it, then kill the service. Jobs is pretty ruthless with things he didn't invent, witness the newton, and some he did. Is TiVo NeXT?
OTOOH, Appple has some great hardware engineers, and maybe they could come up with a TiVo Shuffle.