Sorry, but that is a completely false argument. They *DO* pay for email now--we *ALL* pay for it. It's just that the costs are disguised and mixed in with various other aspects of our access charges. There is no such thing as free email.
The problem is that SMTP makes no pretense of tracking the costs. In combination with the low absolute cost of email, that has allowed the development of an email system that can (so far) survive with worthless scumbag freeloaders spamming the bloody heck out of it with untold millions of worthless scam messages. Heck, I'm sure the spammers have passed McDonald's hamburger counter by now.
Anyway and as I already noted, there is no reason to drop SMTP email. For people who insist on "free", they can keep right on using it and dealing with their wonderful spam. However, as more and more people choose to use email with rational economics, that will increase the spamming pressure on the SMTP system--and that will probably push it beneath the survivable level.
One more aspect is that with a prepaid email system and rational economics, regular people sending small amounts of email will have almost no money invested in the system. As long as their incoming and outgoing email stay roughly in balance, things will cancel out and they will probably never pay anything. This is *NOT* the case for mass spammers. *ANY* real cost multiplied by the millions is death to spam.
Spam is an economic problem and requires an economic solution.
This story focuses on one side of it, but the amount of profit is *NOT* the problem as long as the spammers think they can divide by zero as far as the costs are concerned. Email is not and never has been free, but by designing SMTP to pretend email is free, spam is the inevitable result. If the spammer thinks another 10 million spams cost nothing, but will possibly find one more sucker to send in $39.95, then the RoI looks infinite. BROKEN economic model!
The only option that will solve the spam problem is a sound economic approach that puts a non-zero cost on each email message. I think that could be done by requiring prepaid postage. I don't know about you, but I would certainly opt in for a system that was absolutely guaranteed not to get any mass-of-stinkage spam. (This could be done transparently and compatibly with the existing SMTP email system.)
Once you have a real economic model, then you can add all the bells and whistles, and actually I have nothing against legitimate advertising from legitimate companies--as long as I control the flow and especially if I can target what I receive. In particular, I'd like a system that would let advertisers bid for my time. Something like "I'll accept a small amount of advertising email, and I'm interested in these products. What's it worth to you to reach me?" By small in this context, I'd be measuring it in terms of time, say 15 minutes per day where each worthwhile ad will probably take 1 minute to read.
The email service provider would have some of my personal information to help "market" my valuable time. However, it would be strongly in their interest to carefully safeguard my anonymity, since leaking my personal information would destroy their own value. Also, since they would be getting a percentage of the take, it would of course be in their interest to maximize the advertising-related revenue I'd receive for those few ads.
However, none of this is possible without a REAL economic model underlying email.
Actually, I considered it quite likely that some destructive Bushevikian nitwit would offer some non-constructive anti-liberal kneejerk reaction like that--and I should not have forgotten that Jefferson was in France and did not write the actual words of the Constitution. Of course, if he had been available he certainly would have been asked to contribute directly, and he certainly did make plenty of indirect contributions. Except for your assinine and diversive rudeness I would apologize for not taking the time to doublecheck the chronology. However, it does not actually matter to my constructive point about the goal of that clause of the Constitution and its perversion by your buddies.
So what I should have said (in order to maximize the affront to wannabe twits like you) is "If the authors of the Constitution were writing it today, based on the liberal principles of such liberal thinkers as Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, they would have been more clear about the meaning of 'limited time' in that clause."
So do you actually have anything to say about the substance? Just in case you have a reading deficiency, too, let me restate it more plainly. The goal of the clause was clear enough: to promote continuing progress, not eternal and maximized profit.
The whole point of IP law is to prevent such tragic innovations and creativity. Remember:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts...
Wait a minute, something's wrong here. How about:
The best laid plans of mice and men...
Yeah, that's more like it.
The founders sure had a lot of clever ideas that have been completely forgotten along the way, and usually for the sake of making a buck. Actually, pretty pointless to worry about it, but I think if he were writing the Constitution now, Jefferson would have explicitly specified that "limited time" did not mean "forever or as long as we can milk two more cents out of the original creativity, whichever comes first." After careful reflection, he probably would have said that software patents should last about 6 months. Remember that the goal was to *ENCOURAGE* creativity, not to create an ironclad system to stifle it.
Are you attempting to rationalize and explain your own computer game playing. The *obvious* answer is that the problem is the miserable depressing life that should be constructively addressed, not run away from.
Actually, the interesting problem underlying all of these problems with computer games starts from something we'd all agree with: Everyone agrees that time is the most precious resource, and everyone wants more time. So if time is so valuable, why are computer games so popular? Computer games simply kill time in a painless fashion.
Write computer game.
Game is popular, many people kill lots of valuable time.
"Fiasco?" Twenty-five million people establishing their first freely elected government in history is a "fiasco" now?
Thank you for making my point about the low value of "truth".
As regards your off-topic content, it is unclear whether you are mumbling about Iraq or Afghanistan, though my original was clearly referring to Iraq. I remind you that my focus is on the increasing irrelevance of scientific truth.
In this particular case, the "truth" when Wolfowitz planned the anti-Saddam war was that there there were no WMDs. That was just the politically convenient justification for Dubya's essentially unprovoked invasion of a rather annoying, but basically harmless country. Of course, as a good little Bushevik, you'd prefer to forget all about that silly history stuff, right? Thank you again for making my point. (But are you actually worth a Foe slot?)
Anyway, I simply see it as a cost-benefit thing, which is quite relevant to Wolfie's proposed new role as a banker. Iraq consumed many American lives and lots of American dollars. I think the extra Iraqi deaths should be counted, too (but that's debatable--even though he wasn't doing much killing lately, it's quite possible that Saddam could have gone out with a messy bang at any time).
That's the debit side that Wolfie should have been considering as the main planner of the invasion. The asset side is still *ZERO*, but none of the likely outcomes look very likely to be very "profitable" for America or liable to offset America's investment. Civil war is still quite likely, but a "freely elected" fanatical Islamic state allied with Iran could be worse. A new Iraqi dictator is also quite plausible. We won't actually find out until after our troops leave--but the meter will continue ticking until then. Ignoring truth is often expensive.
Truth? We should have a contest between the dead people and the Busheviks to see who cares less.
Yeah, we know you're in a hurry to post quickly, but the result is an entire thread with your hurried spelling mistake (not copied above).
Anyway, the counterexample in the article is easy enough to explain, in that the counter-placebo actively prevents some secondary effect, where it is the secondary effect that is closer to the true cause of the perceived pain reduction. The the morphine or the original placebo are just acting somewhere higher in the chain. Given how little we know about the nature of the mind (including our perception of pain), the results are not nearly as suprising as they proclaim.
The whole topic of "truth" just seems so passe these days. Faith-based politicians aren't going to worry about any of it, anyway. They don't need or want better science or more facts--they already know what they believe, and they're going to structure the world around their beliefs, no matter how crazy. The whole notion of truth is under attack.
So many examples, it's hard to know where to start. The two that are on my mind right now are the new UN ambassador who is pledged to destroying the UN, and appointing the master planner of the Iraq fiasco to the World Bank.
Unless it actually sucks signal out of neighboring informational bodies, it can't be negative.
Interesting way to put it, but I guess that you could say disinformation does that by displacing valid information in the more informed bodies. The "soul" of propaganda is supposed to be the big lie, repeated over and over. "We have always been at war with..."
Lesson of usenet--Value? What value?
on
Metcalfe's Law Refuted
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Consider the usenet as a kind of asynchronous network. Consider the participants as nodes that connect and disconnect at random. Now consider the result. The value has *NOT* increased along with the number of nodes. Instead, the SNR became very small, and my belief is that the current SNR is negative, at least on average. There is still some good information to be found in pockets, but there is plenty of misinformation, too, and *LOTS* of noise.
I think the decisive factor is that the fanatical propagators of misinformation must be aware (at some level) that they are fighting against reality--but their response is to shout louder and more frequently, simply repeating their misinformation. Are they hoping that lies repeated enough times will somehow become true? Or they just hope to bury the truth they hate?
Scarcely matters. The result is obvious, and the same phenomenon seems to be overtaking the WWW, too. Doesn't do a lot of good to connect to the network when all the sites are basically put on the same level by the constraints of HTML, but most of them are full of propaganda of various stripes.
No, there are only two cases, and you lose in both:
The game is fair. In that case, the house is the only winner in the long run.
The game is crooked. In that case, the only way to win is if you think you are a "better" crook--but in that case you also have to believe the winners are crooks and everyone knows the pros will always beat the amateurs.
Yes, that's only for gambling on games of chance, and it is true that many forms of gambling do include elements of skill. Limiting it to those situations, you can sort of win, though I insist that taking advantage of suckers is still a bad way to make a living, especially when so many of the suckers are just addicts.
However, even in that limited and immoral case, it still requires sufficient self-control to run away when confronted by a peer. Once the skills have been neutralized, the luck of the draw takes over again--and only the house wins.
Still no reason for Wikipedia to help with free publicity or links. The article should include some information about gambling addiction and appropriate links, not links to the gambling sites.
After thinking some more about the topic, one additional thought is to wonder what "blogging" has to do with this article. They just needed a better excuse than "online scam"? That's all this gambling is.
Second thought is that the Wikipedia article should not mention or link to any specific online poker or other online gambling site. That actually should be part of some sort of more general policy against commercial exploitation of Wikipedia, though this is an extreme case. The article does not make it clear enough that the people who offer online poker are selling nothing of value. They are simply robbing their "customers", and there is *NO* reason for Wikipedia to be helping with the robbery.
Well, I can't help but make the obvious observation that it's another example of sad greedy bastards trying to exploit other people's good will. Dare I say "intuititively obvious to the most casual observer". The online poker page itself is nothing but a obvious scam in search of more free advertising, and it should be permanently deleted from Wikipedia. The only point of gambling is that it's a tax for being bad at math, and all the repackaging is just various disguises for the essential exploitation of very simple behaviorism. Random reinforcement is the best, and most resistant to extinction.
Again I say "sad". I vote to delete--except that that's pointless, too. The people who want to sucker other people via online gambling are of course much more strongly motivated than people like I am. I'm just annoyed. They're dreaming of striking it rich, if only they can find enough suckers fast enough.
Anyway, the Wikipedia deletion process was too difficult to figure out.
Well, my basic reaction to this topic is that I haven't ever found a really good way to do this, but I wish there was one. Actually, I wish it was part of a more general system to sort and manage personal files, restructuring things and getting rid of the duplicates. This is actually an indirect side effect of the cancerous growth of HDDs. Sort and clean up? Why bother? Just copy the universe to the new machine. Who cares about wasting a few GB?
Closest thing to a helpful feature I've seen is the importing features of some programs. Unfortunately, that has mostly favored Microsoft. They have the most resources to devote to this, both in terms of making sure the competitors email can be imported into their system, and in terms of making sure that their OWN email can't be exported successfully to the other systems. (The last one is indirect these days, in terms of the file system. Yeah, you can export to one giant flat mess. At least that was the situation the last few times I tried to escape from Microsoft's clutches, but I'm really loathe to abandon my very complicated filing system.)
Farthest thing and least helpful was a shareware program that would eat the email when the trial period timed out. I don't remember the details except that I'll never voluntarily deal with blackmailers.
At least the moderators regarded it as a joke, but turning it around makes it sound less funny. If we managed to get out of Iraq one day early, that would support this research for over 35 years (using your figures).
You must be an American Bushevik. Typical small-minded and negative mindset. Let me give you a clue:
If you always sound like a negative twit, you'll get ignored a lot.
Excuse me, I just remembered that I have to wash my car, or do some laundry, or maybe my thumbs need twiddling. Whatever it is, it's a much better use of my time.
Unfortunately, I sort of agree with you, but that's why I emphasized giving *positive* publicity to their competitors. The problem is that even if you say "buy X because Y stinks", Y is still getting some publicity from it.
Really sad that so many consumers are so jerked about by lies. Actually, it's more than sad. It's downright tragic. Reality is *always* going to win out in the long term.
I'm not so worried about spyware. At least not the commercial type, since you can figure out their motivations. Actually, I think the best response there is not spyware blockers, but a commercial response. There should be an anti-spyware organization that gives negative publicity to the companies that benefit in any way from spyware, and positive publicity to their competitors. If they're doing it for money, then you hit them in the wallet and they'll wake up.
However, the think that really worries me is the intersection between P2P and black-hat-hacking skills. That's too much power in one place, and we already know that power corrupts. (The only redeeming point is that sometimes the corruption is pretty funny, like the Gannon/Guckert case.)
When you look at the relative costs of BushCo's other priorities, the amount of money involved here is incredibly trivial. I admit that the RoI from this specific kind research is unknown, but it's exactly the kind of research that can only be funded by a government--someone has to have a long-term perspective. There might be an enormous breakthrough here, but no private organization could speculate on that and spend even a few million dollars per year. However, if you take a really long term perspective--the way government is supposed to--then whatever you learn, even if it is small, will eventually accumulate to a large value.
Religious fanatics aren't interested, of course. They already know *EVERYTHING*. Meanwhile, BushCo is glad to exploit their deliberate and intentional ignorance for political advantage and personal profit. Sad.
Note: Insightful has to start from the truth. I don't care how nicely you write and how well you package your lies. They is no such thing as an "insightful falsehood".
You should fix your sig. You say the Department of Homeland Security started destroying our rights in 2001, but the DoHS doesn't go back to 2001. However, BushCo did start destroying our rights in that year--with a little help from his old friend, UBL.
All this deal does is put money in the fatcat's pockets. It has nothing to do with sound business decisions. Karl Rove probably penned the deal.
While that's true of a lot of deals, I don't think it's the big motivation in this specific case, and IBM is a relatively non-political company. Lots of metrics, though the obvious one is political donations--and to the best of my knowledge IBM does not donate to political parties or encourage employees in any way to donate. (I don't think it matters which way the big money goes--it is fundamentally harmful to the political system, and whichever side gets it, it produces a kind of political "arms race" as the other side tries to catch up. For example, Teddy Roosevelt and Ike were both strongly against political donations from companies.)
However, I also disagree that share price should be taken as the only metric of company success. Any single metric that becomes too dominant will imbalance things and have ultimately negative consequences. In this specific case, I think it's part of the general hollowing out of American industry and strengthening of Chinese industry--which mostly reminds me of what happened in America before the Civil War. The South became a militarily-strong, industrially-weak debtor.
From the more narrow perspective of IBM, my main concern is that this deal could weaken IBM's "empathy" for customers in lower-margin businesses. Unfortunately, the way the numbers work, most companies are average or below by any specific metric, which in this case means that most of IBM's corporate customers are involved in relatively low-margin businesses. IBM won't share that situation with them after this.
One more thing in the "other values" category. For example, one of IBM's other non-share-price values is "supporting diversity" by deliberately hiring many kinds of people. Well, I think that "supporting commodity computers" is also a value that was worth supporting and something that benefits a lot of people, even if the profits are slim. However, in IBM's specific case, all of the high-margin businesses depend on computers, so there's a strong and direct benefit from that support...
Funny, but *YOU* are the one who brought Karl Rove into it, though the tin hat crowd thinks so, too. I myself haven't seen any plausible evidence, and I really don't think Rove is that stupid. Actually, the touch about getting the intermediary recipient of the faked memos to burn the "originals" was the kind of diabolical cunning Rove is so often accused of. Whoever did fake the memos surely took precautions to make them untraceable, but getting rid of the physical evidence did eliminate any possibility of an error or oversight in those precautions.
Ah, I see you've managed to divert me from the actual issues. You Busheviks are *SO* good at that. Also the projection thing. Accusing the other side of evading the "real" topic, when you're fixated on Dan Rather--and the "real" topic is supposed to be bloggers. Were you the original troll who brought Dan Rather into the topic in the first place?
Still, there's room for squabbling about the deeper issues, I suppose.
Projection, projection. Accuse the *OTHER* side of being irrational and fanatical. Do you feel better yet? Are you masterbating to the belief that you've convinced someone, *ANYONE*, of anything?
Or are you going to quit running away from the real issues?
Didn't think so, and no sense in reminding you of them again.
Speaking for myself, I would simply prefer that truth be honored, not denigrated, ridiculed, buried, and otherwise abused. Just too bad for America that reality is very truth-based and *very* persistent, and the piper will be paid. Sooner or later, the piper is always paid.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that SMTP makes no pretense of tracking the costs. In combination with the low absolute cost of email, that has allowed the development of an email system that can (so far) survive with worthless scumbag freeloaders spamming the bloody heck out of it with untold millions of worthless scam messages. Heck, I'm sure the spammers have passed McDonald's hamburger counter by now.
Anyway and as I already noted, there is no reason to drop SMTP email. For people who insist on "free", they can keep right on using it and dealing with their wonderful spam. However, as more and more people choose to use email with rational economics, that will increase the spamming pressure on the SMTP system--and that will probably push it beneath the survivable level.
One more aspect is that with a prepaid email system and rational economics, regular people sending small amounts of email will have almost no money invested in the system. As long as their incoming and outgoing email stay roughly in balance, things will cancel out and they will probably never pay anything. This is *NOT* the case for mass spammers. *ANY* real cost multiplied by the millions is death to spam.
Spam is an economic problem and requires an economic solution.
This story focuses on one side of it, but the amount of profit is *NOT* the problem as long as the spammers think they can divide by zero as far as the costs are concerned. Email is not and never has been free, but by designing SMTP to pretend email is free, spam is the inevitable result. If the spammer thinks another 10 million spams cost nothing, but will possibly find one more sucker to send in $39.95, then the RoI looks infinite. BROKEN economic model!
The only option that will solve the spam problem is a sound economic approach that puts a non-zero cost on each email message. I think that could be done by requiring prepaid postage. I don't know about you, but I would certainly opt in for a system that was absolutely guaranteed not to get any mass-of-stinkage spam. (This could be done transparently and compatibly with the existing SMTP email system.)
Once you have a real economic model, then you can add all the bells and whistles, and actually I have nothing against legitimate advertising from legitimate companies--as long as I control the flow and especially if I can target what I receive. In particular, I'd like a system that would let advertisers bid for my time. Something like "I'll accept a small amount of advertising email, and I'm interested in these products. What's it worth to you to reach me?" By small in this context, I'd be measuring it in terms of time, say 15 minutes per day where each worthwhile ad will probably take 1 minute to read.
The email service provider would have some of my personal information to help "market" my valuable time. However, it would be strongly in their interest to carefully safeguard my anonymity, since leaking my personal information would destroy their own value. Also, since they would be getting a percentage of the take, it would of course be in their interest to maximize the advertising-related revenue I'd receive for those few ads.
However, none of this is possible without a REAL economic model underlying email.
So what I should have said (in order to maximize the affront to wannabe twits like you) is "If the authors of the Constitution were writing it today, based on the liberal principles of such liberal thinkers as Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, they would have been more clear about the meaning of 'limited time' in that clause."
So do you actually have anything to say about the substance? Just in case you have a reading deficiency, too, let me restate it more plainly. The goal of the clause was clear enough: to promote continuing progress, not eternal and maximized profit.
The founders sure had a lot of clever ideas that have been completely forgotten along the way, and usually for the sake of making a buck. Actually, pretty pointless to worry about it, but I think if he were writing the Constitution now, Jefferson would have explicitly specified that "limited time" did not mean "forever or as long as we can milk two more cents out of the original creativity, whichever comes first." After careful reflection, he probably would have said that software patents should last about 6 months. Remember that the goal was to *ENCOURAGE* creativity, not to create an ironclad system to stifle it.
Are you attempting to rationalize and explain your own computer game playing. The *obvious* answer is that the problem is the miserable depressing life that should be constructively addressed, not run away from.
- Write computer game.
- Game is popular, many people kill lots of valuable time.
- Profit!
Something is wrong with this picture.I need relief! How do you spell relief? By *NOT* spelling SCOX, even with the E. Aren't they delisted yet?
As regards your off-topic content, it is unclear whether you are mumbling about Iraq or Afghanistan, though my original was clearly referring to Iraq. I remind you that my focus is on the increasing irrelevance of scientific truth.
In this particular case, the "truth" when Wolfowitz planned the anti-Saddam war was that there there were no WMDs. That was just the politically convenient justification for Dubya's essentially unprovoked invasion of a rather annoying, but basically harmless country. Of course, as a good little Bushevik, you'd prefer to forget all about that silly history stuff, right? Thank you again for making my point. (But are you actually worth a Foe slot?)
Anyway, I simply see it as a cost-benefit thing, which is quite relevant to Wolfie's proposed new role as a banker. Iraq consumed many American lives and lots of American dollars. I think the extra Iraqi deaths should be counted, too (but that's debatable--even though he wasn't doing much killing lately, it's quite possible that Saddam could have gone out with a messy bang at any time).
That's the debit side that Wolfie should have been considering as the main planner of the invasion. The asset side is still *ZERO*, but none of the likely outcomes look very likely to be very "profitable" for America or liable to offset America's investment. Civil war is still quite likely, but a "freely elected" fanatical Islamic state allied with Iran could be worse. A new Iraqi dictator is also quite plausible. We won't actually find out until after our troops leave--but the meter will continue ticking until then. Ignoring truth is often expensive.
Truth? We should have a contest between the dead people and the Busheviks to see who cares less.
Anyway, the counterexample in the article is easy enough to explain, in that the counter-placebo actively prevents some secondary effect, where it is the secondary effect that is closer to the true cause of the perceived pain reduction. The the morphine or the original placebo are just acting somewhere higher in the chain. Given how little we know about the nature of the mind (including our perception of pain), the results are not nearly as suprising as they proclaim.
The whole topic of "truth" just seems so passe these days. Faith-based politicians aren't going to worry about any of it, anyway. They don't need or want better science or more facts--they already know what they believe, and they're going to structure the world around their beliefs, no matter how crazy. The whole notion of truth is under attack.
So many examples, it's hard to know where to start. The two that are on my mind right now are the new UN ambassador who is pledged to destroying the UN, and appointing the master planner of the Iraq fiasco to the World Bank.
I think the decisive factor is that the fanatical propagators of misinformation must be aware (at some level) that they are fighting against reality--but their response is to shout louder and more frequently, simply repeating their misinformation. Are they hoping that lies repeated enough times will somehow become true? Or they just hope to bury the truth they hate?
Scarcely matters. The result is obvious, and the same phenomenon seems to be overtaking the WWW, too. Doesn't do a lot of good to connect to the network when all the sites are basically put on the same level by the constraints of HTML, but most of them are full of propaganda of various stripes.
-
The game is fair. In that case, the house is the only winner in the long run.
- The game is crooked. In that case, the only way to win is if you think you are a "better" crook--but in that case you also have to believe the winners are crooks and everyone knows the pros will always beat the amateurs.
Yes, that's only for gambling on games of chance, and it is true that many forms of gambling do include elements of skill. Limiting it to those situations, you can sort of win, though I insist that taking advantage of suckers is still a bad way to make a living, especially when so many of the suckers are just addicts.However, even in that limited and immoral case, it still requires sufficient self-control to run away when confronted by a peer. Once the skills have been neutralized, the luck of the draw takes over again--and only the house wins.
Still no reason for Wikipedia to help with free publicity or links. The article should include some information about gambling addiction and appropriate links, not links to the gambling sites.
Second thought is that the Wikipedia article should not mention or link to any specific online poker or other online gambling site. That actually should be part of some sort of more general policy against commercial exploitation of Wikipedia, though this is an extreme case. The article does not make it clear enough that the people who offer online poker are selling nothing of value. They are simply robbing their "customers", and there is *NO* reason for Wikipedia to be helping with the robbery.
Again I say "sad". I vote to delete--except that that's pointless, too. The people who want to sucker other people via online gambling are of course much more strongly motivated than people like I am. I'm just annoyed. They're dreaming of striking it rich, if only they can find enough suckers fast enough.
Anyway, the Wikipedia deletion process was too difficult to figure out.
Closest thing to a helpful feature I've seen is the importing features of some programs. Unfortunately, that has mostly favored Microsoft. They have the most resources to devote to this, both in terms of making sure the competitors email can be imported into their system, and in terms of making sure that their OWN email can't be exported successfully to the other systems. (The last one is indirect these days, in terms of the file system. Yeah, you can export to one giant flat mess. At least that was the situation the last few times I tried to escape from Microsoft's clutches, but I'm really loathe to abandon my very complicated filing system.)
Farthest thing and least helpful was a shareware program that would eat the email when the trial period timed out. I don't remember the details except that I'll never voluntarily deal with blackmailers.
Priorities, priorities.
If you always sound like a negative twit, you'll get ignored a lot.
Excuse me, I just remembered that I have to wash my car, or do some laundry, or maybe my thumbs need twiddling. Whatever it is, it's a much better use of my time.
Really sad that so many consumers are so jerked about by lies. Actually, it's more than sad. It's downright tragic. Reality is *always* going to win out in the long term.
c/the think/the thing/
However, the think that really worries me is the intersection between P2P and black-hat-hacking skills. That's too much power in one place, and we already know that power corrupts. (The only redeeming point is that sometimes the corruption is pretty funny, like the Gannon/Guckert case.)
When you look at the relative costs of BushCo's other priorities, the amount of money involved here is incredibly trivial. I admit that the RoI from this specific kind research is unknown, but it's exactly the kind of research that can only be funded by a government--someone has to have a long-term perspective. There might be an enormous breakthrough here, but no private organization could speculate on that and spend even a few million dollars per year. However, if you take a really long term perspective--the way government is supposed to--then whatever you learn, even if it is small, will eventually accumulate to a large value.
Religious fanatics aren't interested, of course. They already know *EVERYTHING*. Meanwhile, BushCo is glad to exploit their deliberate and intentional ignorance for political advantage and personal profit. Sad.
Note: Insightful has to start from the truth. I don't care how nicely you write and how well you package your lies. They is no such thing as an "insightful falsehood".
You should fix your sig. You say the Department of Homeland Security started destroying our rights in 2001, but the DoHS doesn't go back to 2001. However, BushCo did start destroying our rights in that year--with a little help from his old friend, UBL.
However, I also disagree that share price should be taken as the only metric of company success. Any single metric that becomes too dominant will imbalance things and have ultimately negative consequences. In this specific case, I think it's part of the general hollowing out of American industry and strengthening of Chinese industry--which mostly reminds me of what happened in America before the Civil War. The South became a militarily-strong, industrially-weak debtor.
From the more narrow perspective of IBM, my main concern is that this deal could weaken IBM's "empathy" for customers in lower-margin businesses. Unfortunately, the way the numbers work, most companies are average or below by any specific metric, which in this case means that most of IBM's corporate customers are involved in relatively low-margin businesses. IBM won't share that situation with them after this.
One more thing in the "other values" category. For example, one of IBM's other non-share-price values is "supporting diversity" by deliberately hiring many kinds of people. Well, I think that "supporting commodity computers" is also a value that was worth supporting and something that benefits a lot of people, even if the profits are slim. However, in IBM's specific case, all of the high-margin businesses depend on computers, so there's a strong and direct benefit from that support...
Ah, I see you've managed to divert me from the actual issues. You Busheviks are *SO* good at that. Also the projection thing. Accusing the other side of evading the "real" topic, when you're fixated on Dan Rather--and the "real" topic is supposed to be bloggers. Were you the original troll who brought Dan Rather into the topic in the first place?
Still, there's room for squabbling about the deeper issues, I suppose.
Truth.
That's the underlying issue. Remember?
Didn't think so.
Or are you going to quit running away from the real issues?
Didn't think so, and no sense in reminding you of them again.
Speaking for myself, I would simply prefer that truth be honored, not denigrated, ridiculed, buried, and otherwise abused. Just too bad for America that reality is very truth-based and *very* persistent, and the piper will be paid. Sooner or later, the piper is always paid.