We're in the same boat in NL: privatisation of railways hasn't worked since there is no real competition, but in case of telcos the improvement has been great... and no surprise either. Early on, the former state telco was forced to share the local loop with other phone companies and ISPs at a fixed fee, and the telecoms watchdog kept a close eye on them. As a result, there was real competition on a more or less level playing field, which quickly brought down prices and increased service levels. Competition seems to be working in the energy sector as well: the infrastructure is separated from the suppliers so you can buy electricity from whomever you want. (The surprise there is that people complain about having a free market, and can't seem to be bothered to select the best offer: they would prefer to pay a set price even if that price is higher than what they'd pay on the free market).
I'm a big fan of the free market, but I do realise that there are many situations where a market can not be free. And as the railroads have shown us, separating services from infrastructure and privatising only the services is not always enough to ensure a working market.
(For the Dutch eager to bitch and moan about today's crappy mobile telco service, I am old enough to remember that it wasn't uncommon for connecting a land line to take up to 15 months, and that had nothing to do with running cables; it was a purely administrative delay. And don;t get me started on their service department...
That depends. On the one hand, if you're kidnapped, your brain might react differently under duress and the system would reject your logon attempt (and hopefully the kidnappers know that!). On the other hand, somewhere in the authentication chain, your brain waves are converted into electronic signals and at that point they could be "skimmed" and replayed, so it doesn't replace 2 factor authentication.
Apparently there's adequate security on computers at gas stations and credit card companies. The point is that EV charging points do not have adequate protection, making them an obvious target. The same concern was voiced about smart meters / smart appliances, and experts claim that by switching a great many high power equipment (EV chargers, dryers, solar panel inverters) on and off in a certain coordinated way, one can seriously mess up the grid.
Managers and executives are always looking at successful companies (or reading books about them). That's part of their job: to keep up with developments in their professional field. And if something seems to be working well for one company, it makes a lot of sense to try it in another.
The difference is made by the quality of the manager. Bad ones will blindly copy something they think worked for another firm, then fail to recognise success or understand the reasons behind a failure. Sadly I've seen my share of those, but there are plenty of good managers too, who don't copy blindly. They understand key factors in the success of a particular way of doing things, know if these are also applicable in their own company, know how to implement change and to evaluate its effects. At a distance, it might seem all these managers are doing the same thing and can only hope to achieve success by accident, but that's not always the case.
The article points out such details: there are good reasons for Google to be doing this, and there may be good reasons why the same approach isn't going to work for someone else.
Maybe it was Ballmer pulling a "Jobs", overriding those product managers on a hunch that "mobile/touch is the future". The difference is that Microsoft's business, unlike Apple's, runs for a large part on pleasing businesses rather than just consumers. And of course Ballmer's vision is a bit murkier than Steve Job's was.
In some countries, threatening to sue someone is a real threat: settle, or spend the rest of your life and life savings in court. In other countries, even Single Mum being sued by MegaCorp, inc will be happy to let the case go to court, or more likely MegaCorp will think twice before filing a meritless case in the first place. Those latter countries understand that legal threats are still threats and in some cases warrant rules or fixes to a broken judicial system to protect the public against them. But all of that has nothing to do with a libertarian mindset.
We've been inventing and progressing plenty. What I'd like is for tech companies to return to tech. And by that I mean companies returning to the idea of creating great products designed with me in mind, enticing me to buy those products because they meet my needs, and profiting from being the best at that. When I buy a Blu-ray player or an e-book reader, I expect devices designed to play my Blu-rays and let me read e-books, not devices that are designed to keep me from watching media from another region, or force me to watch Disney ads and previews, or make me buy Amazon e-books and lock me out of other stores, or do other stuff that is clearly not in my best interest. When I buy a device or a service, I like the company to profit from that sale, not from vendor lock in or from selling my personal data.
How about having a couple of 50% wider seats (2-3-2 instead of 3-5-3) for large passengers, and charge them 50% extra for it? Hell, as a regular-sized person I'd pay 50% on top of the economy fare for that extra comfort; the current economy-plus that most airlines offer is a joke, and business class fares are out of the question for me.
I agree that not everything can be framed in terms of profit, and besides, there's such a thing as market failure, so in certain cases we certainly need government funds and/or oversight.
By the way, there's a nice short story describing your scenario, where robots and AI increasingly replace humans at work. Marx' old question suddenly becomes relevant: who owns the means of production? A few megacorps employing the few last workers and supplying the rest of the redundant population with decent (but basic) food, shelter and entertainment (in exchange for taking contraceptives, perhaps)... or are the means of production and the proceeds owned collectively, with each citizen just doing whatever they please.
How do you expect to solve the world's problems, if your solution isn't profitable or even feasible? Assessing that is what those people are good at.
By the way, no profits mean can still be successful but you'll have to go after government cash. Which is fine, but if there's profit (or mutual benefit) to be had by all parties involved, there's a much greater chance of success.
Good that you mention aspiration. Today, our brightest kids are thinking about the career to pursue, and are faced with the following choice: coast through law school and get a job that pays well and is well-respected (I meant by regular folks, not us). Grab a masters in business school and be a high earning manager or hot shot consultant. Or slog your way through a masters in tech, which is generally far more difficult and often takes longer as well, after which you'll have a job that earns you little respect and pay to match (that's not a coincidence, by the way). The find out that companies mostly offer only sucky career progression, often having no way up except going into middle management, where you end up at a level which your buddy who went to business school got right out of the gate, more or less. What the hell kind of choice is that?
Back when I was deciding which uni to go to (in the late 80s), people already said you'd have to be mad to pick a career in tech, and since then things haven't improved any. I went anyway, as I prefer to do the things I love doing.
A hell of a lot... provided you get the right kind of CEO and VC, some of them are good thinkers. Good ideas are only a small part of innovation; implementing those ideas, scaling up, and fitting the idea with the culture around it (or the other way around, in other words selling the idea) comes next, and that is where a lot of start-ups fail, even though their ideas are first rate. These people know more about the markets (and its problems) than techies, and are used to think in terms of money and organisations, useful stuff if you already want to explore the feasibility and implementation of your ideas. You wouldn't want only CEOs and VCs though.
The issue I have with this is not the qualifications in general of CEOs and VCs for this sort of gathering. It is that they are part of the problem: paying techies on a decent pay scale, offering viable career paths, getting more tech savvy people into management... this stuff always comes up when companies discuss attracting more tech workers, but when they look at the bottom line they always ditch this in favour of outsourcing more stuff to India, and a few years later they're left wondering why there are so few actually capable techs left, and why so many of their projects fail. It can be incredibly hard for people to think outside the box, the danger is that the wrong kind of ideas get generated. More immigrant worker visas for example, they'll love that sort of thing.
The case could certainly be made, but the case has to be made first, then evaluated and decided upon. Unless the upstream providers have something in their contract about a case like this, they cannot by law just disconnect Cyberbunker, and getting the courts to act will take a little time.
The real question is: what authority did the police have when they attempted entry? If they are just going to execute a search warrant, they can break down the door but they are not authorized (or equipped) to blow it up. They are certainly not authorized to just cut off power or comms to a place of business in case of an ordinary house search. That however could change now that they are involved in a large (and most certainly illegal) DDOS attack. It is not certain when they'll go offline, but this could well spell the end of Cyberbunker, and if they are proven to be behind this attack, some people will be facing criminal charges and jail time as well.
I doubt very much that "authorities have made several attempts to enter". A quick search turns up no references to any such attempt except on the Cyberbunker site. That picture doesn't show SWAT but ordinary riot police, used to evict squatters or quell riots, or (in rare cases) when doing large scale house searches where real crowd control trouble is expected (like in gypsy / Roma campsites). They have no reason to be here... perhaps they where on exercise or got sent to the wrong address. Authorities have made several requests for search warrants, and some of those were turned down. The rest appears to be just bluster from Cyberbunker.
That is not a SWAT team, those guys would be better armed and a little more bullet proof. This is just Dutch police in riot gear, of which these woven bamboo shields are a standard component. According to an ME (riot police) buddy, the bamboo shields are pretty good, lighter than the more common plastic shields, and more flexible, meaning they are better at deflecting thrown objects. The only disadvantage is that they do not stand up well to stab weapons, which has not really been an issue until a group of squatters defended themselves with iron pipes with large spikes capable of puncturing these shields.
Not sure if it's about money printing, but a lot of companies seem to favour growth by acquisition rather than natural growth. Don't expand, just buy something. Companies like Facebook might overspend a lot if they are desperate to grow into one of their weak areas (i.e. Mobile), but even companies lacking cash seem to go for a scattershot approach: snap up a bunch of crap in hopes of finding a winner. In case the app purchased by Yahoo, there's no way that app is worth that kind of dough unless it comes with some ultra-rare talent or important IP. Neither is the case here.
This sound to me like a politician getting wind of some new hyped gadget, who:
1) sees a chance to jump on the bandwagon with a proposal to ban gadget x while doing a, and get some free public face time.
2) feeds the need to meddle in our crap
3) both.
How about we start working on a fix after we find there actually is a problem. Yeah, yeah, I know, the old "closing the barn door after the horse has fled" argument or whatever. So at the very least: conduct a few studies first.
A regular watch in the modern age is mostly an ornament: pretty but pointless, as you can get the right time pretty much anytime from any number of sources. Your phone, for one. With that said, I love quality watches too...
A smart watch on the other hand is functional: you wear it mostly because of the useful functions it provides, much like the (fugly) calculator and database watches of the 80s. Still, such a watch does not have to be ugly, it can be nice-looking and well made.
The average kid might lack the smarts or the interest to do these projects, but there are plenty of individuals in those age groups who are able to come up with stuff like this, design it, then build and program it. It won't following engineering standards, be bug free, and might not even work very well in general, but that's not the point of this competition.
If I were them I'd stay away from VCs, who'll want far too big a say in the venture in exchange for their funding. In contrast, getting 200k quid in the right hands with no strings attached could do a hell of a lot more for innovation. But perhaps they'll spend their share on hookers and blow, which is fine as well.
The point of this prize is not to further science or innovation, but to promote engineering by celebrating notable engineering achievements and contributors to those achievements. Seems like a worthy undertaking to me. I just wished not every sciency non-Nobel prize would be referred to as the "Nobel prize for xyz"
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We're in the same boat in NL: privatisation of railways hasn't worked since there is no real competition, but in case of telcos the improvement has been great... and no surprise either. Early on, the former state telco was forced to share the local loop with other phone companies and ISPs at a fixed fee, and the telecoms watchdog kept a close eye on them. As a result, there was real competition on a more or less level playing field, which quickly brought down prices and increased service levels. Competition seems to be working in the energy sector as well: the infrastructure is separated from the suppliers so you can buy electricity from whomever you want. (The surprise there is that people complain about having a free market, and can't seem to be bothered to select the best offer: they would prefer to pay a set price even if that price is higher than what they'd pay on the free market).
I'm a big fan of the free market, but I do realise that there are many situations where a market can not be free. And as the railroads have shown us, separating services from infrastructure and privatising only the services is not always enough to ensure a working market.
(For the Dutch eager to bitch and moan about today's crappy mobile telco service, I am old enough to remember that it wasn't uncommon for connecting a land line to take up to 15 months, and that had nothing to do with running cables; it was a purely administrative delay. And don;t get me started on their service department...
That depends. On the one hand, if you're kidnapped, your brain might react differently under duress and the system would reject your logon attempt (and hopefully the kidnappers know that!). On the other hand, somewhere in the authentication chain, your brain waves are converted into electronic signals and at that point they could be "skimmed" and replayed, so it doesn't replace 2 factor authentication.
Apparently there's adequate security on computers at gas stations and credit card companies. The point is that EV charging points do not have adequate protection, making them an obvious target. The same concern was voiced about smart meters / smart appliances, and experts claim that by switching a great many high power equipment (EV chargers, dryers, solar panel inverters) on and off in a certain coordinated way, one can seriously mess up the grid.
Managers and executives are always looking at successful companies (or reading books about them). That's part of their job: to keep up with developments in their professional field. And if something seems to be working well for one company, it makes a lot of sense to try it in another.
The difference is made by the quality of the manager. Bad ones will blindly copy something they think worked for another firm, then fail to recognise success or understand the reasons behind a failure. Sadly I've seen my share of those, but there are plenty of good managers too, who don't copy blindly. They understand key factors in the success of a particular way of doing things, know if these are also applicable in their own company, know how to implement change and to evaluate its effects. At a distance, it might seem all these managers are doing the same thing and can only hope to achieve success by accident, but that's not always the case.
The article points out such details: there are good reasons for Google to be doing this, and there may be good reasons why the same approach isn't going to work for someone else.
Order the R2 discs, then just hit the Pirate Bay for copies you can watch.
Solution: ban small children from all flights. The rest of the passengers will thank you for it.
Maybe it was Ballmer pulling a "Jobs", overriding those product managers on a hunch that "mobile/touch is the future". The difference is that Microsoft's business, unlike Apple's, runs for a large part on pleasing businesses rather than just consumers. And of course Ballmer's vision is a bit murkier than Steve Job's was.
In some countries, threatening to sue someone is a real threat: settle, or spend the rest of your life and life savings in court. In other countries, even Single Mum being sued by MegaCorp, inc will be happy to let the case go to court, or more likely MegaCorp will think twice before filing a meritless case in the first place. Those latter countries understand that legal threats are still threats and in some cases warrant rules or fixes to a broken judicial system to protect the public against them. But all of that has nothing to do with a libertarian mindset.
We've been inventing and progressing plenty. What I'd like is for tech companies to return to tech. And by that I mean companies returning to the idea of creating great products designed with me in mind, enticing me to buy those products because they meet my needs, and profiting from being the best at that. When I buy a Blu-ray player or an e-book reader, I expect devices designed to play my Blu-rays and let me read e-books, not devices that are designed to keep me from watching media from another region, or force me to watch Disney ads and previews, or make me buy Amazon e-books and lock me out of other stores, or do other stuff that is clearly not in my best interest. When I buy a device or a service, I like the company to profit from that sale, not from vendor lock in or from selling my personal data.
How about having a couple of 50% wider seats (2-3-2 instead of 3-5-3) for large passengers, and charge them 50% extra for it? Hell, as a regular-sized person I'd pay 50% on top of the economy fare for that extra comfort; the current economy-plus that most airlines offer is a joke, and business class fares are out of the question for me.
Good luck hiding $800k up there...
The hard part is writing up specs that accurately reflect what is actually needed. Often, specs are ambiguous, incomplete or simply incorrect.
Where have you been the last 7 years?
Europe.
I agree that not everything can be framed in terms of profit, and besides, there's such a thing as market failure, so in certain cases we certainly need government funds and/or oversight.
By the way, there's a nice short story describing your scenario, where robots and AI increasingly replace humans at work. Marx' old question suddenly becomes relevant: who owns the means of production? A few megacorps employing the few last workers and supplying the rest of the redundant population with decent (but basic) food, shelter and entertainment (in exchange for taking contraceptives, perhaps)... or are the means of production and the proceeds owned collectively, with each citizen just doing whatever they please.
How do you expect to solve the world's problems, if your solution isn't profitable or even feasible? Assessing that is what those people are good at.
By the way, no profits mean can still be successful but you'll have to go after government cash. Which is fine, but if there's profit (or mutual benefit) to be had by all parties involved, there's a much greater chance of success.
Good that you mention aspiration. Today, our brightest kids are thinking about the career to pursue, and are faced with the following choice: coast through law school and get a job that pays well and is well-respected (I meant by regular folks, not us). Grab a masters in business school and be a high earning manager or hot shot consultant. Or slog your way through a masters in tech, which is generally far more difficult and often takes longer as well, after which you'll have a job that earns you little respect and pay to match (that's not a coincidence, by the way). The find out that companies mostly offer only sucky career progression, often having no way up except going into middle management, where you end up at a level which your buddy who went to business school got right out of the gate, more or less. What the hell kind of choice is that?
Back when I was deciding which uni to go to (in the late 80s), people already said you'd have to be mad to pick a career in tech, and since then things haven't improved any. I went anyway, as I prefer to do the things I love doing.
A hell of a lot... provided you get the right kind of CEO and VC, some of them are good thinkers. Good ideas are only a small part of innovation; implementing those ideas, scaling up, and fitting the idea with the culture around it (or the other way around, in other words selling the idea) comes next, and that is where a lot of start-ups fail, even though their ideas are first rate. These people know more about the markets (and its problems) than techies, and are used to think in terms of money and organisations, useful stuff if you already want to explore the feasibility and implementation of your ideas. You wouldn't want only CEOs and VCs though.
The issue I have with this is not the qualifications in general of CEOs and VCs for this sort of gathering. It is that they are part of the problem: paying techies on a decent pay scale, offering viable career paths, getting more tech savvy people into management... this stuff always comes up when companies discuss attracting more tech workers, but when they look at the bottom line they always ditch this in favour of outsourcing more stuff to India, and a few years later they're left wondering why there are so few actually capable techs left, and why so many of their projects fail. It can be incredibly hard for people to think outside the box, the danger is that the wrong kind of ideas get generated. More immigrant worker visas for example, they'll love that sort of thing.
The case could certainly be made, but the case has to be made first, then evaluated and decided upon. Unless the upstream providers have something in their contract about a case like this, they cannot by law just disconnect Cyberbunker, and getting the courts to act will take a little time.
The real question is: what authority did the police have when they attempted entry? If they are just going to execute a search warrant, they can break down the door but they are not authorized (or equipped) to blow it up. They are certainly not authorized to just cut off power or comms to a place of business in case of an ordinary house search. That however could change now that they are involved in a large (and most certainly illegal) DDOS attack. It is not certain when they'll go offline, but this could well spell the end of Cyberbunker, and if they are proven to be behind this attack, some people will be facing criminal charges and jail time as well.
I doubt very much that "authorities have made several attempts to enter". A quick search turns up no references to any such attempt except on the Cyberbunker site. That picture doesn't show SWAT but ordinary riot police, used to evict squatters or quell riots, or (in rare cases) when doing large scale house searches where real crowd control trouble is expected (like in gypsy / Roma campsites). They have no reason to be here... perhaps they where on exercise or got sent to the wrong address. Authorities have made several requests for search warrants, and some of those were turned down. The rest appears to be just bluster from Cyberbunker.
That is not a SWAT team, those guys would be better armed and a little more bullet proof. This is just Dutch police in riot gear, of which these woven bamboo shields are a standard component. According to an ME (riot police) buddy, the bamboo shields are pretty good, lighter than the more common plastic shields, and more flexible, meaning they are better at deflecting thrown objects. The only disadvantage is that they do not stand up well to stab weapons, which has not really been an issue until a group of squatters defended themselves with iron pipes with large spikes capable of puncturing these shields.
Not sure if it's about money printing, but a lot of companies seem to favour growth by acquisition rather than natural growth. Don't expand, just buy something. Companies like Facebook might overspend a lot if they are desperate to grow into one of their weak areas (i.e. Mobile), but even companies lacking cash seem to go for a scattershot approach: snap up a bunch of crap in hopes of finding a winner. In case the app purchased by Yahoo, there's no way that app is worth that kind of dough unless it comes with some ultra-rare talent or important IP. Neither is the case here.
This sound to me like a politician getting wind of some new hyped gadget, who:
1) sees a chance to jump on the bandwagon with a proposal to ban gadget x while doing a, and get some free public face time.
2) feeds the need to meddle in our crap
3) both.
How about we start working on a fix after we find there actually is a problem. Yeah, yeah, I know, the old "closing the barn door after the horse has fled" argument or whatever. So at the very least: conduct a few studies first.
A regular watch in the modern age is mostly an ornament: pretty but pointless, as you can get the right time pretty much anytime from any number of sources. Your phone, for one. With that said, I love quality watches too...
A smart watch on the other hand is functional: you wear it mostly because of the useful functions it provides, much like the (fugly) calculator and database watches of the 80s. Still, such a watch does not have to be ugly, it can be nice-looking and well made.
The average kid might lack the smarts or the interest to do these projects, but there are plenty of individuals in those age groups who are able to come up with stuff like this, design it, then build and program it. It won't following engineering standards, be bug free, and might not even work very well in general, but that's not the point of this competition.
If I were them I'd stay away from VCs, who'll want far too big a say in the venture in exchange for their funding. In contrast, getting 200k quid in the right hands with no strings attached could do a hell of a lot more for innovation. But perhaps they'll spend their share on hookers and blow, which is fine as well.
The point of this prize is not to further science or innovation, but to promote engineering by celebrating notable engineering achievements and contributors to those achievements. Seems like a worthy undertaking to me. I just wished not every sciency non-Nobel prize would be referred to as the "Nobel prize for xyz"