The problem is that there are only a handful of these companies and competition is tight; they all have to use such deceptive practices because of competition. As soon as one company does it, the others all have to if they want to compete with them.
Suppose your business is the next one the government decides it needs to regulate?
Deceptive practices reduce consumer trust for every company in that market. I myself would have gotten a cell phone a lot sooner if I wasn't so leery of these shady tactics -- and that's a loss to both me and my provider.
The difference is that the ISP business is considered a competitive market. Utilities are considered natural monopolies that must 1) be monopolistic in order to run efficiently 2) then be subject to public regulation so that they don't engage in monopolistic-pricing.
If you don't like AOL charging an extra $5 a month or any other those other requirements you listed out, then you shouldn't use it. No one is forcing you to use them since there are plenty of alternatives in a competitive market. So, I don't see why you should be able to compel them to do anything you don't personally like other than by choosing not to use them.
They're not running out and arresting these people for showing up in the database, just potentially investigating them. While I agree with the privacy goal, it would be logically impossible to investigate only people that were proven guilty. You're simply gonna hafta investigate some false leads before you can press charges against someone (and then, the evidence against that person will become public).
I imagine (I have no credentials at all) that the problem is that HIV attacks the immune system -- a virus that just attacked HIV would eventually wipe itself out as the immune system grew stronger.
Rumsfeld was not Reagan's SecDef. He was a "special envoy" from the Pentagon to Hussein. more info (with video!) here.
What happend in Abu Ghraib is totally, totally beyond the pale and it simply boggles the mind on so many levels. It makes me feel physically ill. The idea that there's stuff going to come out soon that's much worse is just impossible to deal with.
All the stuff about Rumsfeld's dealings with Saddam aside, this was made possible because he personally and systematically removed every possible safeguard on the system. The ICGC was rejected, the Army's own regulations on the subject were thrown out. The Geneva-freaking-conventions were to be disregarded because this was "a new kind of war" or whatever awful press conference P.R. slogan newspeak bullshit. Well, now we couldn't make ourselves look worse if we hired a PR firm to try and do it for us. The kind of mindless arrogance that does this... makes you feel all tough and swaggery or whatever in the short term but these things will have real, objective consequences and this handed a tremendous propaganda victory to anti-American forces everywhere.
WWI was a bit exceptional in that the conscripted men of both sides realized the whole war was pointless bullshit. There were "unofficial truces" of all kinds -- for instance, technically they were supposed to shoot at each other's medics but these orders were univerally ignored by the soldiers on the ground.
Far more elaborate than that, in certain areas the soldiers would learn to stage whole mock battles, one side would "attack", drive forward shooting into the air and whatnot, and then the other side would "counterattack", all miraculously failing to hit one and other. Artillery was often used in intentionally obvious patterns, i.e. it would hit in the same place the same time every day so the other side would learn to avoid it.
The top brass of course did everything they could to stop these sorts of things, even the most innocent because it humanized the enemy. Another uniqueness of WWI that contributed was that opposing forces were stationed only yards away from each other for long periods of time, which made dehumanization very difficult.
Now of course, we're miles away from one and other when we're killing each other so this sort of thing isn't possible anymore. War is stupid. Anyone who takes pleasure in having other people fight a war for them because it's like a football game for them should have their teeth kicked in.
If you think this isn't possible, what's changed between now and the alien and sedition act of before?
The Freedom of Information Act. Don't forget the guy at the memory hole was able to get a hold of a couple hundred photos of the arrival of casualties from Iraq which the White House had banned simply because he had bothered to put in a FOIA request. The W.H. banned all press access to these ceremonies, and only one or two pictures had surfaced publicly. He scooped most of the major media on it.
here ya go. I was off a bit, the number is actually $3.5 billion a year. The article notes that this is "good news for the music industry". People spend $40 billion on SMS a year.
In a world where people spend $3.2 Billion on ring tones a year (*10% of the global music market*) I don't think this is gonna happen. The iPod-mini shows that the average user has preferences totally intagible to geeks. I'm sure 99%+ don't have even the vaguest perception of what OS is running on their phone. Linux is not going to be a consumer-pushed movement in this market.
Funny how another article in the NYT says "The US is losing dominance in the sciences". Keep it up, Bush team! Soon we'll be living in that conservative, backwards anti-scientific paradise in no time!
That's way less than they anticipated. Only 5 million out of 100 knocked me flat.
100 miliion is the maximum possible number of redemptions; that's the number of winning labels they printed. You'd have to expect every single winning label to be redeemed to reach that number.
Apple expected of the 100 million winning labels, about 30% would ultimately be redeemed, or 30 million. 5 million compared to that isn't good, but it's better than compared to 100 million. I blame Pepsi's rather lackluster promotion efforts in part (a brief, off-handed mention in a commercial that ran once during the superbowl).
The PEAR DB package has a function called quoteSmart() that does something like this. It's what I use (and PEAR DB is a great database abstraction tool, by the way.)
It's not about what the audience wants, it's what movie studio executives want, and what they want is a quick, pitchable idea coming from already-successful people.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that there are only a handful of these companies and competition is tight; they all have to use such deceptive practices because of competition. As soon as one company does it, the others all have to if they want to compete with them.
Suppose your business is the next one the government decides it needs to regulate?
Deceptive practices reduce consumer trust for every company in that market. I myself would have gotten a cell phone a lot sooner if I wasn't so leery of these shady tactics -- and that's a loss to both me and my provider.
Capital punishment is always wrong. Worm authors should get life in prison.
If you don't like AOL charging an extra $5 a month or any other those other requirements you listed out, then you shouldn't use it. No one is forcing you to use them since there are plenty of alternatives in a competitive market. So, I don't see why you should be able to compel them to do anything you don't personally like other than by choosing not to use them.
I'm not suggesting that makes an ounce of sense, but it's certainly not chump change here.
They're not running out and arresting these people for showing up in the database, just potentially investigating them. While I agree with the privacy goal, it would be logically impossible to investigate only people that were proven guilty. You're simply gonna hafta investigate some false leads before you can press charges against someone (and then, the evidence against that person will become public).
The legal system? The biggest problem with spam now is that it s very difficult to track the sender down and hold them legally accountable.
You may be thinking of the Stanford Prison Experiment
I imagine (I have no credentials at all) that the problem is that HIV attacks the immune system -- a virus that just attacked HIV would eventually wipe itself out as the immune system grew stronger.
Erm, I've upgraded a lot of times and I've never had anything overwritten in /usr/local
Nope, check the robots.txt. Everything except for the google news bot is banned.
A reflective tin foil hat...
What happend in Abu Ghraib is totally, totally beyond the pale and it simply boggles the mind on so many levels. It makes me feel physically ill. The idea that there's stuff going to come out soon that's much worse is just impossible to deal with.
All the stuff about Rumsfeld's dealings with Saddam aside, this was made possible because he personally and systematically removed every possible safeguard on the system. The ICGC was rejected, the Army's own regulations on the subject were thrown out. The Geneva-freaking-conventions were to be disregarded because this was "a new kind of war" or whatever awful press conference P.R. slogan newspeak bullshit. Well, now we couldn't make ourselves look worse if we hired a PR firm to try and do it for us. The kind of mindless arrogance that does this... makes you feel all tough and swaggery or whatever in the short term but these things will have real, objective consequences and this handed a tremendous propaganda victory to anti-American forces everywhere.
Far more elaborate than that, in certain areas the soldiers would learn to stage whole mock battles, one side would "attack", drive forward shooting into the air and whatnot, and then the other side would "counterattack", all miraculously failing to hit one and other. Artillery was often used in intentionally obvious patterns, i.e. it would hit in the same place the same time every day so the other side would learn to avoid it.
The top brass of course did everything they could to stop these sorts of things, even the most innocent because it humanized the enemy. Another uniqueness of WWI that contributed was that opposing forces were stationed only yards away from each other for long periods of time, which made dehumanization very difficult.
Now of course, we're miles away from one and other when we're killing each other so this sort of thing isn't possible anymore. War is stupid. Anyone who takes pleasure in having other people fight a war for them because it's like a football game for them should have their teeth kicked in.
The Freedom of Information Act. Don't forget the guy at the memory hole was able to get a hold of a couple hundred photos of the arrival of casualties from Iraq which the White House had banned simply because he had bothered to put in a FOIA request. The W.H. banned all press access to these ceremonies, and only one or two pictures had surfaced publicly. He scooped most of the major media on it.
here ya go. I was off a bit, the number is actually $3.5 billion a year. The article notes that this is "good news for the music industry". People spend $40 billion on SMS a year.
In a world where people spend $3.2 Billion on ring tones a year (*10% of the global music market*) I don't think this is gonna happen. The iPod-mini shows that the average user has preferences totally intagible to geeks. I'm sure 99%+ don't have even the vaguest perception of what OS is running on their phone. Linux is not going to be a consumer-pushed movement in this market.
Funny how another article in the NYT says "The US is losing dominance in the sciences". Keep it up, Bush team! Soon we'll be living in that conservative, backwards anti-scientific paradise in no time!
It's called the existential fallacy.
100 miliion is the maximum possible number of redemptions; that's the number of winning labels they printed. You'd have to expect every single winning label to be redeemed to reach that number.
Apple expected of the 100 million winning labels, about 30% would ultimately be redeemed, or 30 million. 5 million compared to that isn't good, but it's better than compared to 100 million. I blame Pepsi's rather lackluster promotion efforts in part (a brief, off-handed mention in a commercial that ran once during the superbowl).
$var = (int) $var;
when you know you want an integer only. if you really want
if (!is_numeric($var)) die("Unsafe value");
Security is easy, can be done in only an extra line of code. And it helps you debug!
The PEAR DB package has a function called quoteSmart() that does something like this. It's what I use (and PEAR DB is a great database abstraction tool, by the way.)
Not only that, it applies to chip speed not storage space which is what this spintronics thing is about.
It's not about what the audience wants, it's what movie studio executives want, and what they want is a quick, pitchable idea coming from already-successful people.
Simple: (applies to anyone else as well) Apply for and send in an absentee ballot. Those are always paper, aren't they?