Students should be learning the foundations of math without interference from devices that help them perform the math. For the same reason, calculators were normally banned during my school years until students started doing trigonometry and calculus. This was intended to force them to learn the concepts of the math rather than relying on a machine. Want to see what happens when students start using calculators? Take a look at today's teenagers working a cash register who can't even count change back to you properly. I don't see computers as improving this situation at all.
Yeah, I think this is one of the greatest problems we face today. Too many teachers don't bother to teach the fundamentals any more, because it's easier to teach the abstraction and they don't have to listen to the kids complaining about it being too hard like they did when they had to learn multiplication tables. It really sickens me when I hear of people like Rosie O'Donnel saying "nobody should have to learn math any more" and of teachers who wholeheartedly agree.
The thing is, this isn't just a problem in formal education. A lot of things are becoming more abstracted these days, and people who should know better often take the path of expedience and only bother to learn the abstraction. How many "web developers" out there know how to drag-and-drop in Visual Interdev, but couldn't tell you the first thing about HTML syntax or HTTP authentication? How many MCSEs can only do something as long as there's a GUI widget for it and nobody asks them to explain what else it may affect? How many auto mechanics are left who can do anything but run a computer diagnostic and do what the shop manual says? Even McDonald's has abstracted away the process of cooking hamburgers to the point that nobody behind the line knows how to do it without having a chime to tell them when to take the patties off the grill.
Of course, the real problem is that most things are increasing in complexity to the point that these abstractions are necessary, and the increase in complexity is what's driving progress. The complexity and abstractions are only going to increase as long as we as a species choose technological innovation as our holy grail.
Computers should be used as a tool to teach math, not as a tool to teach Computers. Teachers today treat Computers like they are mysterious and spend too much time teaching "Computers" instead of using Computers to teach everything else.
Good point. I think a large part of the problem is that most teachers and school administrators are old enough to remember the days before computers became ubiquitous, and never got past the 80's-era treatment of computers as a novelty. This is easy for many of us to forget, as most regular/. readers probably sit in front of a computer most of the workday or are young enough that computers have always been an integral part of daily life.
I think that computers should be integrated into education in a phased approach. In the grade-school years, basic computer skills should be taught alongside handwriting and vocabulary. This is where we teach children how to boot up and run programs, as well as mouse and keyboard technique.
Around middle school, when handwriting and vocabulary lessons are phased out in favor of reading comprehension and writing skills, so should basic computer skill classes be phased out, and the computer should become a tool to be used in the teaching of other areas. Instead of saying "close your science book and boot up your computer", we say "everybody run the program solar_system.exe and mouse around to see what planetary motion looks like and how gravitational forces affect it. Try changing the mass of the Earth and watch what happens to the orbits of other bodies."
There still is a place for computer-specific classes, but those should be largely high-school level electives, much like calculus, chemistry or bookkeeping. These basically would fall into two areas - applied computer usage (e.g. business productivity application usage) and intro-level computer science classes like programming and networking.
They do have Raph Koster on the SWG team though, which gives me some hope that it will be more than a pitiful collection of time sinks and anti-soloing code. Remember that Raph was instrumental in bringing UO to fruition. As an ex-player of UO, EQ, AC, AO and DAOC, I can honestly say that UO is the only one that I still occasionally think of rejoining (and I have done so twice, not to mention occasional forays into player shards). With luck, Raph's contribution will help make SWG everything that EQ is not.
Well, I don't have a photo-Visa, but I know how rarely store clerks bother to look at the signature on my credit card when I use it. Half the time, they swipe it and hand it back to me before the authorization even comes through. I would imagine they put about the same level of effort into looking at photos embedded on cards as they do the signature panel.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't bother implementing authentication schemes like signatures and photographs, but as long as the humanoid who is tasked with enforcing the authentication has no incentive to take it seriously, we have to expect the failure rate to be pretty high. Saying that a photograph will solve a problem elsewhere in the authentication process ignores the gaping holes that exist in the way these things are implemented in the real world.
Hmmph. I seem to have jumped to an unwarranted conclusion. I found allkindsofsites that back up your assertions. I did find a Tenessee state site that indicates there is a provision for the state to maintain children's fingerprints, but it is solely at the discretion of the parents, and there is another page on the site indicating that any such prints held by the state are to be kept in a separate file to be purged once a year of prints belonging to people who have turned 18.
Yeah; the "Fingerprint Your Child" programs run by local police departments are a good example of this. Once they get a child's prints, they go straight into the federal database, never to be removed.
Unfortunately, every year or two some investigative reporter on Dateline shows us hidden-camera footage of Best Buy clerks gleefully accepting Citibank Photo Visa cards from a balding white guy despite the Visa cards in question having pictures of dreadlocked rastafarians and 80-year old Chinese women on them. How is moving the picture from the credit card to the POS terminal going to make a $5.50/hour cashier care enough to look at it before hitting the enter key?
Metering brings a host of other problems to the table. Consider my setup. My cable comes out of the wall and goes into a 3-way splitter. One out goes to the modem, one goes straight to the TV, and one goes through the digital converter and then the VCR before going to the TV's second input. I'll assume that the cable modem fees remain a flat monthly rate.
Now then. I only use my cable box when I'm watching a channel that requires me to go through it (premium and digital-only channels). The rest of the time, I just use my TV's tuner. I also sometimes will record from the cable box's feed while watching a different channel on the straight-to-TV feed. How does the cable company meter this without pulling an RIAA-esque scheme requiring me to use only Comcast-approved tuners to watch their content? Does the cable industry get right of refusal over new video hardware so that they can protect their metering scheme?
On the flip side, what happens if the cable box is left on while the TV is off? Does Comcast get to charge me hourly HBO fees because I leave my box turned on while I'm at work?
It wouldn't surprise me if they were doing just that. Just like with the Business Software Alliance's radio spots, if the language is vaguely threatening enough (Did you know stealing cable is ILLEGAL? If convicted, YOU could be IMPRISONED for a period of 10 YEARS!) some percentage of recipients are going to beg Comcast/Cox/AT&T to take their money if it will make the threatening mailings stop. Considering the cost of bulk mailing, it probably isn't hard to write up a business justification for such a campaign.
Yeah; that bugs me too. When I called Comcast about it last year, they told me "there are boxes with digital outs, but they cost more so we don't offer them". So tell me again why HBO presents most new content in Dolby Digital 5.1? Is anybody on the planet actually getting 5.1 sound from their "Presented in Dolby Digital 5.1" cable programming?
I kinda like the fact that TV shows are being released on DVD. I just picked up the first Season of Law & Order cheap and LOVED it: no commercials and no scheduling.
Don't forget the third sweet feature: no syndication edits. It's not as big of a problem with recent shows (yet), but older shows get mangled horribly before they're let out on the airwaves these days. It's not at all uncommon for shows originally shot in the days of 4 commercial breaks/hour, each 2 minutes long, to be crammed into a schedule consisting of 6 breaks/hour, 3 minutes/break.
The problem is not a lack of information; it's a lack of resources to analyze what information we already have in a timely fashion. Once the Trade Center attacks happened, we knew very quickly who did it, how they went about it, where their funds came from and what they did in the months and days leading up to the attacks. All of this information was either already in the hands of the authorities or theirs for the asking; they simply didn't know where to look until something happened.
Having more information about the terrorists' activities and movements prior to 9/11 wouldn't have made any difference then, and it won't make any difference in the prevention of future attacks. What we need to focus on is the improvement of analysis and prediction capabilities to allow the authorities to identify those pieces of the reams of data we already collect that deserve their attention.
Most of us already have this; it's called a cellphone. Why do you think so much noise was made in certain quarters about the cellular triangulation capabilities mandated by those "911" laws?
I used to have a couple of the Infocom originals for the PC. I remember Suspended came in a box with a plastic face mask and included a gameboard-quality (i.e. heavy, laminated stock) map of the complex with plastic tokens for all of the robots to help you keep track of where everybody was. For all I know, that stuff might still be in the closet at my dad's house. I really need to organize an expedition to see if any of it survived. I wonder what copies of the New Zork Times/Status Line would go for these days (I see nothing on eBay)...
By picking the lock, you are willfully circumventing a mechanism put in place to restrict access. If Reuters had hacked the authentication to get the document, your analogy would hold. However, since there was no authentication in place, Reuters had no way even of knowing that the document was intended to be kept private. Web content is public by default.
Just to take this one step further, imagine that the employee hides the earnings report by stuffing it under some leaves in a public park. It still is not a crime for a journalist to grab the file from under the leaves, even if he went to the park with the specific intent of searching for confidential information hidden there. It is up to the owner of the information to recognize that he is putting it in a public place and therefore has no expectation of privacy or secrecy WRT anything he leaves there.
I wouldn't call it hacking (in the criminal sense) to access these files; same goes for Access database files left in the IIS webroot and order_details.txt files left lying around by poorly written shopping carts. The internet is a public forum in which there is no expectation of privacy or secrecy by default. If privacy or secrecy are required, it is common knowledge that it is up to the "owner" of the information to see that it is secured. IMO, when content on a webserver is at issue, the only way a user knows that that content is restricted is if the webserver requires authentication in order to access it. The authentication prompt is roughly analagous to a "No Trespassing" sign on private property - if you dont have the sign you can tell somebody to get off your property, but you can't have them arrested for being there in the first place unless they're committing some other crime (vandalism, etc.)
If you have Page Rank and/or the Category button enabled in the Toolbar, it definitely "phones home" to Google WRT which sites you hit. This is explained during setup (IIRC), and in the options page where you can change enable/disable these features. Check out Google's Toolbar Privacy Policy for more info. on this.
There are many feasible and widely available alternatives at present. I'm not so sure that the search engine landscape will remain that way though. As you say, a lot of people consider Google's technology to be the best in the industry, even to the point that we're seeing other search engines like Yahoo front-ending Google for some of their searches. The thing is, if this trend continues, they will achieve the same power over the internet search engine market that Microsoft holds over the desktop OS market. It doesn't matter if there are 2,000 different search engines if 95% of searches go through Google, either directly or indirectly via Yahoo et. al. - Google will have the power to help or harm the internet presence of other companies at will, by changing its algorithms. We'd all like to think that Google would never abuse such power, but there's a big difference between playing nicely in a competitive market and playing nicely in a market one already owns.
True, but Google is rapidly becoming the de facto standard for a lot of people, to the point that "google" is frequently used as a generic verb. If this keeps up, at some point they will achieve monopoly power even though numerous competitors exist, just like Microsoft with desktop operating systems.
In fact, the preliminary injunction pretty much argues that Google already has this monopoly power. For example, look at these quotes:
"...page ranking... has become the identifiable measure of credibility"
"Google, as the provider of a ranking system upon which the internet community relies, must apply the system in a manner that is not arbitrary, nor aimed at restraint of trade"
My feeling is that SearchKing is a little early to the party. Give it a couple of years and they might have a case though.
I don't see any difference in the processing time for my local delivery person.
But that's only one small piece of the sortation that is required to provide end-to-end postal delivery service. The postal system is a hierarchical structure of large regional sortation/distribution facilities and local post offices, with an intermediate level or two (e.g. primary post office for a city/large neighborhood/whatever). Mail entering the system gets sorted at each level on its way up to a regional facility (sorry for the lack of correct terminology - it's been a few years since I worked with direct mail people). At the regional facility, it is sorted in order to route it to the correct peer-level facility, and then it gets sorted again at every level on the way down to the destination local post office. The mail carrier who owns the route to which the destination address belongs has his workload increased according to the volume on his route, but he is merely the last step of a huge sortation and distribution system.
There's a lot of data available at here, including audited quarterly and annual financial statements and Revenue, Pieces and Weight reports, which provide statistics for revenue, total weight and number of pieces for every class and subclass of mail. Someone with the time and interest should be able to put together an interesting analysis of the situation based on this data. Unfortunately, I am not that person, so you're on your own.
However, I will engage in a bit of largely unsubstantiated conjecture. Take a look at the discussion in this part (pdf) of the 2001 annual report. Note how they point out that 1.7 million new addresses were introduced over the year, and go on to mention costs associated with servicing these new addresses ($600 million a year for new facility space alone). They also mention that falling volume makes it more difficult to meet the costs of the increasing network of addresses. This suggests that at current volume, USPS costs are predominately fixed costs, meaning that volume increases have a net positive effect on profitability.
Overall, what I get from this is that the fixed costs largely derive from the size of the network of deliverable addresses, and regular first-class mail and bulk mail each contribute more or less equally towards those fixed costs relative to volume. This means that no side is subsidizing the other; it's really a symbiotic relationship in which costs are reduced for all sides by the existence of a shared delivery network.
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Students should be learning the foundations of math without interference from devices that help them perform the math. For the same reason, calculators were normally banned during my school years until students started doing trigonometry and calculus. This was intended to force them to learn the concepts of the math rather than relying on a machine. Want to see what happens when students start using calculators? Take a look at today's teenagers working a cash register who can't even count change back to you properly. I don't see computers as improving this situation at all.
Yeah, I think this is one of the greatest problems we face today. Too many teachers don't bother to teach the fundamentals any more, because it's easier to teach the abstraction and they don't have to listen to the kids complaining about it being too hard like they did when they had to learn multiplication tables. It really sickens me when I hear of people like Rosie O'Donnel saying "nobody should have to learn math any more" and of teachers who wholeheartedly agree.
The thing is, this isn't just a problem in formal education. A lot of things are becoming more abstracted these days, and people who should know better often take the path of expedience and only bother to learn the abstraction. How many "web developers" out there know how to drag-and-drop in Visual Interdev, but couldn't tell you the first thing about HTML syntax or HTTP authentication? How many MCSEs can only do something as long as there's a GUI widget for it and nobody asks them to explain what else it may affect? How many auto mechanics are left who can do anything but run a computer diagnostic and do what the shop manual says? Even McDonald's has abstracted away the process of cooking hamburgers to the point that nobody behind the line knows how to do it without having a chime to tell them when to take the patties off the grill.
Of course, the real problem is that most things are increasing in complexity to the point that these abstractions are necessary, and the increase in complexity is what's driving progress. The complexity and abstractions are only going to increase as long as we as a species choose technological innovation as our holy grail.
Computers should be used as a tool to teach math, not as a tool to teach Computers. Teachers today treat Computers like they are mysterious and spend too much time teaching "Computers" instead of using Computers to teach everything else.
/. readers probably sit in front of a computer most of the workday or are young enough that computers have always been an integral part of daily life.
Good point. I think a large part of the problem is that most teachers and school administrators are old enough to remember the days before computers became ubiquitous, and never got past the 80's-era treatment of computers as a novelty. This is easy for many of us to forget, as most regular
I think that computers should be integrated into education in a phased approach. In the grade-school years, basic computer skills should be taught alongside handwriting and vocabulary. This is where we teach children how to boot up and run programs, as well as mouse and keyboard technique.
Around middle school, when handwriting and vocabulary lessons are phased out in favor of reading comprehension and writing skills, so should basic computer skill classes be phased out, and the computer should become a tool to be used in the teaching of other areas. Instead of saying "close your science book and boot up your computer", we say "everybody run the program solar_system.exe and mouse around to see what planetary motion looks like and how gravitational forces affect it. Try changing the mass of the Earth and watch what happens to the orbits of other bodies."
There still is a place for computer-specific classes, but those should be largely high-school level electives, much like calculus, chemistry or bookkeeping. These basically would fall into two areas - applied computer usage (e.g. business productivity application usage) and intro-level computer science classes like programming and networking.
They do have Raph Koster on the SWG team though, which gives me some hope that it will be more than a pitiful collection of time sinks and anti-soloing code. Remember that Raph was instrumental in bringing UO to fruition. As an ex-player of UO, EQ, AC, AO and DAOC, I can honestly say that UO is the only one that I still occasionally think of rejoining (and I have done so twice, not to mention occasional forays into player shards). With luck, Raph's contribution will help make SWG everything that EQ is not.
Well, I don't have a photo-Visa, but I know how rarely store clerks bother to look at the signature on my credit card when I use it. Half the time, they swipe it and hand it back to me before the authorization even comes through. I would imagine they put about the same level of effort into looking at photos embedded on cards as they do the signature panel.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't bother implementing authentication schemes like signatures and photographs, but as long as the humanoid who is tasked with enforcing the authentication has no incentive to take it seriously, we have to expect the failure rate to be pretty high. Saying that a photograph will solve a problem elsewhere in the authentication process ignores the gaping holes that exist in the way these things are implemented in the real world.
Hmmph. I seem to have jumped to an unwarranted conclusion. I found all kinds of sites that back up your assertions. I did find a Tenessee state site that indicates there is a provision for the state to maintain children's fingerprints, but it is solely at the discretion of the parents, and there is another page on the site indicating that any such prints held by the state are to be kept in a separate file to be purged once a year of prints belonging to people who have turned 18.
Thanks for pointing out my erroneous assumption.
Yeah; the "Fingerprint Your Child" programs run by local police departments are a good example of this. Once they get a child's prints, they go straight into the federal database, never to be removed.
Unfortunately, every year or two some investigative reporter on Dateline shows us hidden-camera footage of Best Buy clerks gleefully accepting Citibank Photo Visa cards from a balding white guy despite the Visa cards in question having pictures of dreadlocked rastafarians and 80-year old Chinese women on them. How is moving the picture from the credit card to the POS terminal going to make a $5.50/hour cashier care enough to look at it before hitting the enter key?
Metering brings a host of other problems to the table. Consider my setup. My cable comes out of the wall and goes into a 3-way splitter. One out goes to the modem, one goes straight to the TV, and one goes through the digital converter and then the VCR before going to the TV's second input. I'll assume that the cable modem fees remain a flat monthly rate.
Now then. I only use my cable box when I'm watching a channel that requires me to go through it (premium and digital-only channels). The rest of the time, I just use my TV's tuner. I also sometimes will record from the cable box's feed while watching a different channel on the straight-to-TV feed. How does the cable company meter this without pulling an RIAA-esque scheme requiring me to use only Comcast-approved tuners to watch their content? Does the cable industry get right of refusal over new video hardware so that they can protect their metering scheme?
On the flip side, what happens if the cable box is left on while the TV is off? Does Comcast get to charge me hourly HBO fees because I leave my box turned on while I'm at work?
It wouldn't surprise me if they were doing just that. Just like with the Business Software Alliance's radio spots, if the language is vaguely threatening enough (Did you know stealing cable is ILLEGAL? If convicted, YOU could be IMPRISONED for a period of 10 YEARS!) some percentage of recipients are going to beg Comcast/Cox/AT&T to take their money if it will make the threatening mailings stop. Considering the cost of bulk mailing, it probably isn't hard to write up a business justification for such a campaign.
Yeah; that bugs me too. When I called Comcast about it last year, they told me "there are boxes with digital outs, but they cost more so we don't offer them". So tell me again why HBO presents most new content in Dolby Digital 5.1? Is anybody on the planet actually getting 5.1 sound from their "Presented in Dolby Digital 5.1" cable programming?
I kinda like the fact that TV shows are being released on DVD. I just picked up the first Season of Law & Order cheap and LOVED it: no commercials and no scheduling.
Don't forget the third sweet feature: no syndication edits. It's not as big of a problem with recent shows (yet), but older shows get mangled horribly before they're let out on the airwaves these days. It's not at all uncommon for shows originally shot in the days of 4 commercial breaks/hour, each 2 minutes long, to be crammed into a schedule consisting of 6 breaks/hour, 3 minutes/break.
The problem is not a lack of information; it's a lack of resources to analyze what information we already have in a timely fashion. Once the Trade Center attacks happened, we knew very quickly who did it, how they went about it, where their funds came from and what they did in the months and days leading up to the attacks. All of this information was either already in the hands of the authorities or theirs for the asking; they simply didn't know where to look until something happened.
Having more information about the terrorists' activities and movements prior to 9/11 wouldn't have made any difference then, and it won't make any difference in the prevention of future attacks. What we need to focus on is the improvement of analysis and prediction capabilities to allow the authorities to identify those pieces of the reams of data we already collect that deserve their attention.
Most of us already have this; it's called a cellphone. Why do you think so much noise was made in certain quarters about the cellular triangulation capabilities mandated by those "911" laws?
Mine only has three, and the Amazon listing confirms that this is the correct number. Are you talking about a non-Region 1 set by any chance?
Major Stryker?
I used to have a couple of the Infocom originals for the PC. I remember Suspended came in a box with a plastic face mask and included a gameboard-quality (i.e. heavy, laminated stock) map of the complex with plastic tokens for all of the robots to help you keep track of where everybody was. For all I know, that stuff might still be in the closet at my dad's house. I really need to organize an expedition to see if any of it survived. I wonder what copies of the New Zork Times/Status Line would go for these days (I see nothing on eBay)...
By picking the lock, you are willfully circumventing a mechanism put in place to restrict access. If Reuters had hacked the authentication to get the document, your analogy would hold. However, since there was no authentication in place, Reuters had no way even of knowing that the document was intended to be kept private. Web content is public by default.
Just to take this one step further, imagine that the employee hides the earnings report by stuffing it under some leaves in a public park. It still is not a crime for a journalist to grab the file from under the leaves, even if he went to the park with the specific intent of searching for confidential information hidden there. It is up to the owner of the information to recognize that he is putting it in a public place and therefore has no expectation of privacy or secrecy WRT anything he leaves there.
I wouldn't call it hacking (in the criminal sense) to access these files; same goes for Access database files left in the IIS webroot and order_details.txt files left lying around by poorly written shopping carts. The internet is a public forum in which there is no expectation of privacy or secrecy by default. If privacy or secrecy are required, it is common knowledge that it is up to the "owner" of the information to see that it is secured. IMO, when content on a webserver is at issue, the only way a user knows that that content is restricted is if the webserver requires authentication in order to access it. The authentication prompt is roughly analagous to a "No Trespassing" sign on private property - if you dont have the sign you can tell somebody to get off your property, but you can't have them arrested for being there in the first place unless they're committing some other crime (vandalism, etc.)
If you have Page Rank and/or the Category button enabled in the Toolbar, it definitely "phones home" to Google WRT which sites you hit. This is explained during setup (IIRC), and in the options page where you can change enable/disable these features. Check out Google's Toolbar Privacy Policy for more info. on this.
But then why not just leave the ban in effect and force people to use the existing credit-card-activated air phones?
There are many feasible and widely available alternatives at present. I'm not so sure that the search engine landscape will remain that way though. As you say, a lot of people consider Google's technology to be the best in the industry, even to the point that we're seeing other search engines like Yahoo front-ending Google for some of their searches. The thing is, if this trend continues, they will achieve the same power over the internet search engine market that Microsoft holds over the desktop OS market. It doesn't matter if there are 2,000 different search engines if 95% of searches go through Google, either directly or indirectly via Yahoo et. al. - Google will have the power to help or harm the internet presence of other companies at will, by changing its algorithms. We'd all like to think that Google would never abuse such power, but there's a big difference between playing nicely in a competitive market and playing nicely in a market one already owns.
In fact, the preliminary injunction pretty much argues that Google already has this monopoly power. For example, look at these quotes:
"...page ranking ... has become the identifiable measure of credibility"
"Google, as the provider of a ranking system upon which the internet community relies, must apply the system in a manner that is not arbitrary, nor aimed at restraint of trade"
My feeling is that SearchKing is a little early to the party. Give it a couple of years and they might have a case though.
I don't see any difference in the processing time for my local delivery person.
But that's only one small piece of the sortation that is required to provide end-to-end postal delivery service. The postal system is a hierarchical structure of large regional sortation/distribution facilities and local post offices, with an intermediate level or two (e.g. primary post office for a city/large neighborhood/whatever). Mail entering the system gets sorted at each level on its way up to a regional facility (sorry for the lack of correct terminology - it's been a few years since I worked with direct mail people). At the regional facility, it is sorted in order to route it to the correct peer-level facility, and then it gets sorted again at every level on the way down to the destination local post office. The mail carrier who owns the route to which the destination address belongs has his workload increased according to the volume on his route, but he is merely the last step of a huge sortation and distribution system.
There's a lot of data available at here, including audited quarterly and annual financial statements and Revenue, Pieces and Weight reports, which provide statistics for revenue, total weight and number of pieces for every class and subclass of mail. Someone with the time and interest should be able to put together an interesting analysis of the situation based on this data. Unfortunately, I am not that person, so you're on your own.
However, I will engage in a bit of largely unsubstantiated conjecture. Take a look at the discussion in this part (pdf) of the 2001 annual report. Note how they point out that 1.7 million new addresses were introduced over the year, and go on to mention costs associated with servicing these new addresses ($600 million a year for new facility space alone). They also mention that falling volume makes it more difficult to meet the costs of the increasing network of addresses. This suggests that at current volume, USPS costs are predominately fixed costs, meaning that volume increases have a net positive effect on profitability.
Overall, what I get from this is that the fixed costs largely derive from the size of the network of deliverable addresses, and regular first-class mail and bulk mail each contribute more or less equally towards those fixed costs relative to volume. This means that no side is subsidizing the other; it's really a symbiotic relationship in which costs are reduced for all sides by the existence of a shared delivery network.