Banks creating money is a consequence of the fractional reserve banking system. That is, banks are not required to keep your money sitting around in a vault waiting for you to pick it up. Rather, they are only required to keep a small fraction of it in reserve. However, the ability of banks to print money is limited by the amounts they take in from deposits and other capital raising activities, and there are still reserve and capital requirements that banks have to follow. It is not just left completely up to the marketplace to decide how to behave.
When you consider mandatory line sharing on cable modems, I think we need to consider the risk side as well as the reward. Cable companies are going to have to spend billions to upgrade cable plant to support broadband services. A number of ISP's want to be able to piggyback on this capital investment by essentially spending incremental capital to deploy services. If cable modems flop or are superseeded by new technologies, these ISP's simply cancel their wholesale line orders and the cable company is left holding the bag on its multi-billion capital investment. The only fair way to have mandated line sharing is to force the ISP's who want to take advantage of it to put their own capital at risk on the network buildout. In fact, I'm confident that if an ISP went to a cable company and said, "I'll split the cost of upgrading your plant for cable modems if you let me buy wholesale service at a nicely discounted rate", I think you'd find plenty of takers, particularly in today's tight capital markets.
Re:Pegging currency to the dollar can cause proble
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PayPal Goes Public
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All banks create money. It is the nature of a fractional reserve banking system. Consider. If I deposit $500 in a bank, and the bank has to keep 20% of its deposits on hand as reserves in order to cover withdrawls, then the bank can loan $400 out. A person comes in and borrows $400. Voila! The bank just printed $400 new dollars. I have $500 in my account and now someone else has $400 in his hand. If he deposits the $400 in a bank, the process is repeated.
As for PayPal dollars, when PayPal puts $10 in your account, the probably just record a liability for it on their balance sheet. If you have money sitting in your PayPal account, then you are an unsecured creditor, whether it be the free $10 you got or $1000 you deposited with them. This is exactly how it works with a regular bank. One big exception is that if a regular bank fails, your deposit is likely insured by the US government up to a sum of $100,000, while PayPal does not (I think) have FDIC insurance because to date is has not operated as a bank.
Re:I can only use paypal for $940 more
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PayPal Goes Public
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I have not given PayPal my bank account info and I have no intention of doing so. I do not see any legitimate purpose to this and I think there is serious risk of having my account drained. The don't need it, period.
Having said that, I've transferred payments of over $1500 at a time on PayPal without any problems. I don't know why I don't have a quota, or at least one much higher than you, but perhaps it is because I have a very old account.
Everybody seems to be reaming PayPal. I love it. I'm not a huge Ebay'er but I've bought some stuff recently and let me tell you if an guy on an auction says he won't take Paypal (or escrow for high value items) I won't buy from him. It is that simple. All my friends use it as well. We settle up dinner tabs, fantasy football fees, etc. I've never had a problem. Of course, I'm only beaming payment off my credit card, not trying to use Paypal as a bank. If you want to hold big bank balances at PayPal, that's not something I would recommend.
As for being first, some would say slashdot owes much of its success to the same thing. Ebay is great. Paypal is great. Slashdot is great. I love them all.
If you want to leave it to the market, why not also leave it up to the market to determine the correct level and rate of broadband deployment? Overinvestment in capital can be a bad thing as the decline of many of the fiber optic companies will attest. If broadband is really a "good thing" for consumers and business, then the market will find a way to make it happen. Being "behind Canada" or any other such reason is not a sufficient reason to set up a public policy in favor of increasing the rate of broadband rollout. Just as with analog high definition television, it could be that those who move first actually end up moving wrong and that a slower pace of deployment could actually end up being better and more efficient. How much money has been destroyed and how much consumer pain caused through the rollout of DSL by companies with poor business plans?
Given this topics has long since died, I doubt you'll see this, but a lot of what you hated, I liked. Dune is impossible to make sense of in a film, so why try? The almost surreal Lynch version is freakier than the real Dune ever dreamed of being. Things like the deformed navigators (who were just humans with really blue eyes in the book) really upped the ante and you'll have to admit that the sf channel miniseries borrowed as heavily from Lynch as Herbert in this and many other regards.
PS: If you want to pick on stillsuits, pick on the whole concept of them.
Back in the 1970's the same global warming scaremongers were telling us that a new global ice age was coming. Now it is global warming. The prescription is the same though: immediate radical new government regulations, a reduction in industry, expensive new pollution control requirements, and forcing people to live lifestyles they haven't voluntarily chosen. And of course the sky is falling and if we don't do something NOW, we'll be in serious trouble.
Well, the global temperature did rise about 1 degree - in the first half of the century. The temperature of the earth and the surface climate have radically changed many times in the past, and without any any artificial greenhouse emmissions from humans. The effect of the sun's radition, volcanos, etc have long had an effect on the earth. There may also be long term cycles we know nothing about.
There is some evidence for the earth's warming, but the evidence is far from clean and many observations (such as (corrected) satellite data and weather balloons) show no warming. Most of the climate change predictions are based on computer models. Given our inability to forecast weather accurately at any interval, I doubt very much the computers can handle the much greater complexities of climate change. Certainly more research is warranted and we may yet find some links to human activity that need to be addressed.
But "Global warming" as such as is a political program not science. WHen the New York Times famously said "Blame global warming for the blizzard" (notwithstanding the huge number of major weather events throughtout human history) it has to make you wonder. I honestly believe that if the temperature and precipitation came in right at normal every day, we'd be told that this was a catastrophe caused by global warming and "robbing the earth of its critical climate diversity needed to support its fragile ecology".
There may be good reasons to cut emmissions of lots of chemicals, quite apart from global warming. But the use of hysteria and scaremongering to sell a political agenda is wrong IMO. Let's be honest about what we really want and debate these issues through the normal political process, not as another moral crusade. We've already got too many of those.
I just got done watching the Dune miniseries that I had bought on DVD. Terrible. I mean, it was all I could do to watch the first episode, then I had to take a two week break to psyche myself up to see the next two. I mean, I suppose it is no worse than any other TV sf, but to hype it up as this wonderful reinterpretation of Dune is ridiculous. David Lynch's masterpiece (better than the book, IMO) already did Dune right the first time. There was no need for the first miniseries, much less the sequel. The first series was cheeseball enough.
The free lancers have essentially destroyed the free lance industry as far as major publications go. As a result of this lawsuit, major newspapers and the like now do not sign these types of free lance deals. Instead, they demand that the author assign copyright to the paper. In light of an inability of to forsee future technologies, this is a very prudent move on their part. As a newspaper or magazine publisher, I would certainly have to reconsider doing business using traditional means given this ruling. In the long run, the free lancers might have done themselves a great disservice with this lawsuit.
It looks like the argument is that since ancient Chinese texts can't be fully reproduced in Unicode, that the standard is flawed. I disagree. There is already a four byte character set out there - UCS-4 I believe, which is ISO something or other - that will easily handle all characters as necessary. This set can be used for replicating all XX,000 old school Chinese characters. Thinks of it as the SGML of character sets. But for common applications, XML (ie, Unicode) will continue to do just nicely.
The Bells have a lot of money and employ a lot of people in this country. As a result they have a lot of clout on Capitol Hill. Rep. Tauzin is basically owned lock, stock, and barrel by the RBOCs. But he's not the problem.
The problem is the state PUC's and the FCC which have refused to enforced the competitive provisions of the Telecom Act at the same time they've approved all these RBOC mergers. When it came time for SBC to buy Ameritech, local competitors, consumer groups, and others told the Illinois Commerce Commission that this was a boondoggle destined to lead to poor service and higher prices for consumers. But the ICC approved the merger anyway, as did all other regulators. When SBC fired all the techs and suddenly it could take months to get a phone installed, the regulators were shocked - shocked, mind you - by the state of affairs. Too bad they're the ones who caused it.
Another regulatory boondoggle was reciprocal compensation. The Bells have long made a huge chunk of their money - about $18 billion worth every year last I checked - by charging long distance carries extremely high rates far in excess of actual costs in order to interconnect with their networks. These are called "access charges". In times past, upwards of 40% of the cost of a long distance call actually got kicked back to the RBOC, something few people were aware of.
Well, the RBOC's figured they'd gouge their new competitors - dubbed the CLEC's for competitive local exchange carrier - the same way by charging similarly outrageous interconnection fees of nearly $0.01/minute. This scheme was called reciprocal compensation and represents money that must be paid to the local carrier that terminates a call (since we don't pay to receive phone calls) by the carrier that originated it. The Bells figured since they had 100% of the market, they'd get 100% of the terminating traffic and would rake it in.
Unfortunatley for them, the CLEC's were smarter than the LD companies and signed up huge numbers of ISP's. Suddenly the RBOC's were paying $2 billion per year to competitors. They didn't like this one bit so they just decided to stop paying. The CLEC's were forced to sue, and more than five years after the Telecom Act, the RBOC's still are trying to get out of paying. And they finally found someone who will help them out. The FCC has basically adopted a plan that will end reciprocal compensation - but only for ISP traffic, the only kind CLEC's really benefited from - after a two year transition period.
Meanwhile, the states are starting to let the Bells into the long distance market, despite their continued poor customer service, anti-competitive behaviors (the recipcomp thing is only the tip of the iceberg), and the fact taht they continue to own 95% of the local market.
And lest you think the CLEC's get off scot free, think again. The poorly thought out regulatory scheme led them to start gaming the system by signing up huge numbers of ISP customers without even trying to break into the business or residential market. You could have a nice business just doing recipcomp only. Why beat the street trying to sign up hard customers when the ISP's are easy. I hear some of these companies even split the recipcomp money with the ISP's, leading to a nice little cash cow for all. (Most of the CLEC's you've heard of - the ones that are publicly traded - don't fall into this category. They serve other customers in addition to ISPs).
The only ray of hope we have is that the FCC has initiated a rulemaking procedures to review all forms of intercarrier compensation. Hopefully this will result in the FCC turning off the $18 billion access charge spigot to the RBOC's. But I doubt it. The Bells have too much clout.
To really reform telecom we need the following. Don't hold your breath.
1. Cost based access charges, or even no access charges in areas where the Bells are in the LD market.
2. Break up the Bells to separate their network assets (the wholesale side) from the customer assets (the retail side).
3. Real and substantial penalities to companies that engage in anti-competitive behavior. (Say hundreds of millions of dollars in fines, plus no long distance for you).
4. Real and substantial penalities for companies that aren't meeting their customer service committments in non-competitive markets such as residential local service. (Say hundreds of millions of dollars + no LD for you).
5. An end to any acquisitions by RBOC's until after the local market has achieved full competition.
Win the battle, lose the war. Only now winning the battle is all free lancers have left. The publishing industry has learned its lesson and is moving away from free lance style article licensing big time. Instead, authors have to sign over _all_ rights to their creations as works for hire and assign copyright to the people publishing it. Ultimately, I think you'll find they lose more than they gain out of this, no matter what happens.
First off, MS Access is not a true multi-user database as anybody who has tried to use it as such as probably discovered. It also has mega-trouble scaling about 1 GB. I'm not familiar with free software databases so I can't comment.
But what are the key selling points of Oracle?
1. Highly scalable architecture. Terabytes of disk, hundreds of transactions per second. Oracle can do it.
2. Clustering. Oracle Parallel Server provides true failover capability.
3. Replication. Another data distribution/failover/backup approach.
4. Tools.
5. Large # of apps designed to run with Oracle.
6. "Value added" add-ons such as Oracle Forms, the geospatial option, etc.
7. All out Java integration
8. Interfaces to most other databases, support for remote queries and dblinks.
9. Ability to back up database while it is run.
10. Very portable.
11. General lack of bogosities compared to the competition.
12. Market share --> confidence in them being there for the future.
13. Support.
The knocks on Oracle have always been its high price - try buying Oracle for even a basic Sun E-450. It can run upwards of $300,000 - and the relatively DBA intensive nature of it.
For anyone who plans to develop highly scalable systems, I highly recommend studying the Oracle architecture. It is a textbook on how to do large scale computing. And for those used to the traditional Unix client/server computing paradigm, it can be quite an eye-opener.
I could tell you if I have a non-compete agreement with my employer, except that I'm under non-disclosure. Actually I don't know if I'm allowed to disclose the fact that I can't disclose anything. Hope the boss doesn't read/.
Absolutely the power companies lobbied heavily to get the deal passed. But legislatures need to make sure that they just don't give in to industry or environmentalists or anyone else pushing a one-sided agenda.
France gets 70% of its electricity from nuclear. Try building a nuclear power plant in California sometime. The inability to build new capacity in California of any type is a very big problem.
The politicians are trying to blame the free market to cover for their own problems. They forcibly separated generation from distribution, de-regulated pricing on the supply side, enacted regulation that made it virtually impossible to build new capacity, and maintained strict control over retail rates. A recipe for disaster.
Look at what has happened to natural gas in the Midwest. My gas bill was over $400 this month because the price has quadrupled. But I don't have to worry about running out of gas. Supply and demand balances everything out. If gas rates were frozen at old low levels, no one would conserve - voluntarily - and we'd have rolling service interruptions too.
Put the blame 100% on the California legislature for passing this botchwork law.
DirecTV vastly overcompresses most of its channels. They look like complete garbage on the XBR400. Pay per view movies and some other channels get better bandwidth and you can really see the difference.
... that an Ask Slashdot is totally relevant to me. I've also got a 36" Sony XBR 400 and am looking for the sound system to match. I'm willing to spend a little bit more, say $2500, so if anybody has a little big higher priced suggestion, don't be afraid to let me know.
For the record, my copy of Princess Mononoke from express.com arrived - not shipped, but arrived - today. Express.com did have severe delivery problems on anime for a while but has been much improved in the last month or so.
OT: Be sure to check out the Lain lunch box. It is the entire four disc Lain set in an actual lunch box case (you do get the keepcases for each individual disc inside). The lunch box itself kicks ass. The only problem: The keep case for ones of my discs is empty and I have to return it!
YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEHAAAAAAAAAWWWW!!!
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Deja.com Vu!
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Well, its not that big a deal, but it is nice to know that Usenet archiving is back front and center meaning there is (hopefully) less danger of it getting totally nuked. Now if we could only get all the early posts back online....
This ruling is a major, major win for Bush. In fact, it is the absolute best possible outcome for him. Some people will doubtless say that he did not win the case on the merits. True enough. However, if he had won completely, it could have really come back to haunt him.
How?
Well, there are a few lawsuits by Gore's supporters attempting to throw out absentee ballots that heavily favored Bush. A SCOTUS ruling that basically said to enforce the letter of the law as of election day might have provided cover to the Florida supremes to throw out all those ballots on technicalities. Now the Florida court is somewhat left back to its own devices. In that case, having first ruled against a "hyper technical" interpretation of the law to extend the deadline for Gore, they would be hard pressed to adopt that standard in throwing out absentee ballots.
Additionally, by overturning and remanding the case, Bush is the public opinion winner, which is what this was really all about in the first place since the actual outcome of the vote would not have been changed. Bush won the certification either way.
But most importantly, this ruling results in a delay of the challenge lawsuit ruling. Time is the enemy. If Bush is able to run out the clock to December 12, he's pretty much in, IMO. Even if the courts somehow try to appoint an alternate slate of electors after that date, I'm guessing the House would say Bush's are the real ones because they were certified as of the deadline. Even a one day delay in starting any recounts could be fatal to Gore's case.
Of course Gore only has to win one of the innumerable lawsuits he and his supporters have filed, so don't count him out yet.
Palm Beach County _did_ finish its recounts at 7pm. They were not included because the Secretary of State of Florida did not accept the partial recounts submitted at 5pm. However, Gore did not pick up enough votes in any case to get the win.
Georg C. F. Greve is a longtime GNU supporter. I doubt he'd be involved in something designed to undermine the FSF in the US.
What could be very useful about the FSF Europe is creating a legal entity there that an accept tax free donations from EU citizens. I don't know the European tax laws, but the US generally prohibits claiming tax deductions for contributions to foreign charities. Now the legal system could be very different in Europe, especially in light of its emphasis on state support for charitable activities versus the private contributions in the US. (I just read an article someplace about how in Germany some arts organizations had no clue how to go about raising private funds for support).
Slashdot Mirror
Banks creating money is a consequence of the fractional reserve banking system. That is, banks are not required to keep your money sitting around in a vault waiting for you to pick it up. Rather, they are only required to keep a small fraction of it in reserve. However, the ability of banks to print money is limited by the amounts they take in from deposits and other capital raising activities, and there are still reserve and capital requirements that banks have to follow. It is not just left completely up to the marketplace to decide how to behave.
When you consider mandatory line sharing on cable modems, I think we need to consider the risk side as well as the reward. Cable companies are going to have to spend billions to upgrade cable plant to support broadband services. A number of ISP's want to be able to piggyback on this capital investment by essentially spending incremental capital to deploy services. If cable modems flop or are superseeded by new technologies, these ISP's simply cancel their wholesale line orders and the cable company is left holding the bag on its multi-billion capital investment. The only fair way to have mandated line sharing is to force the ISP's who want to take advantage of it to put their own capital at risk on the network buildout. In fact, I'm confident that if an ISP went to a cable company and said, "I'll split the cost of upgrading your plant for cable modems if you let me buy wholesale service at a nicely discounted rate", I think you'd find plenty of takers, particularly in today's tight capital markets.
All banks create money. It is the nature of a fractional reserve banking system. Consider. If I deposit $500 in a bank, and the bank has to keep 20% of its deposits on hand as reserves in order to cover withdrawls, then the bank can loan $400 out. A person comes in and borrows $400. Voila! The bank just printed $400 new dollars. I have $500 in my account and now someone else has $400 in his hand. If he deposits the $400 in a bank, the process is repeated.
As for PayPal dollars, when PayPal puts $10 in your account, the probably just record a liability for it on their balance sheet. If you have money sitting in your PayPal account, then you are an unsecured creditor, whether it be the free $10 you got or $1000 you deposited with them. This is exactly how it works with a regular bank. One big exception is that if a regular bank fails, your deposit is likely insured by the US government up to a sum of $100,000, while PayPal does not (I think) have FDIC insurance because to date is has not operated as a bank.
I have not given PayPal my bank account info and I have no intention of doing so. I do not see any legitimate purpose to this and I think there is serious risk of having my account drained. The don't need it, period.
Having said that, I've transferred payments of over $1500 at a time on PayPal without any problems. I don't know why I don't have a quota, or at least one much higher than you, but perhaps it is because I have a very old account.
Everybody seems to be reaming PayPal. I love it. I'm not a huge Ebay'er but I've bought some stuff recently and let me tell you if an guy on an auction says he won't take Paypal (or escrow for high value items) I won't buy from him. It is that simple. All my friends use it as well. We settle up dinner tabs, fantasy football fees, etc. I've never had a problem. Of course, I'm only beaming payment off my credit card, not trying to use Paypal as a bank. If you want to hold big bank balances at PayPal, that's not something I would recommend.
As for being first, some would say slashdot owes much of its success to the same thing. Ebay is great. Paypal is great. Slashdot is great. I love them all.
If you want to leave it to the market, why not also leave it up to the market to determine the correct level and rate of broadband deployment? Overinvestment in capital can be a bad thing as the decline of many of the fiber optic companies will attest. If broadband is really a "good thing" for consumers and business, then the market will find a way to make it happen. Being "behind Canada" or any other such reason is not a sufficient reason to set up a public policy in favor of increasing the rate of broadband rollout. Just as with analog high definition television, it could be that those who move first actually end up moving wrong and that a slower pace of deployment could actually end up being better and more efficient. How much money has been destroyed and how much consumer pain caused through the rollout of DSL by companies with poor business plans?
Given this topics has long since died, I doubt you'll see this, but a lot of what you hated, I liked. Dune is impossible to make sense of in a film, so why try? The almost surreal Lynch version is freakier than the real Dune ever dreamed of being. Things like the deformed navigators (who were just humans with really blue eyes in the book) really upped the ante and you'll have to admit that the sf channel miniseries borrowed as heavily from Lynch as Herbert in this and many other regards.
PS: If you want to pick on stillsuits, pick on the whole concept of them.
Back in the 1970's the same global warming scaremongers were telling us that a new global ice age was coming. Now it is global warming. The prescription is the same though: immediate radical new government regulations, a reduction in industry, expensive new pollution control requirements, and forcing people to live lifestyles they haven't voluntarily chosen. And of course the sky is falling and if we don't do something NOW, we'll be in serious trouble.
Well, the global temperature did rise about 1 degree - in the first half of the century. The temperature of the earth and the surface climate have radically changed many times in the past, and without any any artificial greenhouse emmissions from humans. The effect of the sun's radition, volcanos, etc have long had an effect on the earth. There may also be long term cycles we know nothing about.
There is some evidence for the earth's warming, but the evidence is far from clean and many observations (such as (corrected) satellite data and weather balloons) show no warming. Most of the climate change predictions are based on computer models. Given our inability to forecast weather accurately at any interval, I doubt very much the computers can handle the much greater complexities of climate change. Certainly more research is warranted and we may yet find some links to human activity that need to be addressed.
But "Global warming" as such as is a political program not science. WHen the New York Times famously said "Blame global warming for the blizzard" (notwithstanding the huge number of major weather events throughtout human history) it has to make you wonder. I honestly believe that if the temperature and precipitation came in right at normal every day, we'd be told that this was a catastrophe caused by global warming and "robbing the earth of its critical climate diversity needed to support its fragile ecology".
There may be good reasons to cut emmissions of lots of chemicals, quite apart from global warming. But the use of hysteria and scaremongering to sell a political agenda is wrong IMO. Let's be honest about what we really want and debate these issues through the normal political process, not as another moral crusade. We've already got too many of those.
I just got done watching the Dune miniseries that I had bought on DVD. Terrible. I mean, it was all I could do to watch the first episode, then I had to take a two week break to psyche myself up to see the next two. I mean, I suppose it is no worse than any other TV sf, but to hype it up as this wonderful reinterpretation of Dune is ridiculous. David Lynch's masterpiece (better than the book, IMO) already did Dune right the first time. There was no need for the first miniseries, much less the sequel. The first series was cheeseball enough.
The free lancers have essentially destroyed the free lance industry as far as major publications go. As a result of this lawsuit, major newspapers and the like now do not sign these types of free lance deals. Instead, they demand that the author assign copyright to the paper. In light of an inability of to forsee future technologies, this is a very prudent move on their part. As a newspaper or magazine publisher, I would certainly have to reconsider doing business using traditional means given this ruling. In the long run, the free lancers might have done themselves a great disservice with this lawsuit.
It looks like the argument is that since ancient Chinese texts can't be fully reproduced in Unicode, that the standard is flawed. I disagree. There is already a four byte character set out there - UCS-4 I believe, which is ISO something or other - that will easily handle all characters as necessary. This set can be used for replicating all XX,000 old school Chinese characters. Thinks of it as the SGML of character sets. But for common applications, XML (ie, Unicode) will continue to do just nicely.
The Bells have a lot of money and employ a lot of people in this country. As a result they have a lot of clout on Capitol Hill. Rep. Tauzin is basically owned lock, stock, and barrel by the RBOCs. But he's not the problem.
The problem is the state PUC's and the FCC which have refused to enforced the competitive provisions of the Telecom Act at the same time they've approved all these RBOC mergers. When it came time for SBC to buy Ameritech, local competitors, consumer groups, and others told the Illinois Commerce Commission that this was a boondoggle destined to lead to poor service and higher prices for consumers. But the ICC approved the merger anyway, as did all other regulators. When SBC fired all the techs and suddenly it could take months to get a phone installed, the regulators were shocked - shocked, mind you - by the state of affairs. Too bad they're the ones who caused it.
Another regulatory boondoggle was reciprocal compensation. The Bells have long made a huge chunk of their money - about $18 billion worth every year last I checked - by charging long distance carries extremely high rates far in excess of actual costs in order to interconnect with their networks. These are called "access charges". In times past, upwards of 40% of the cost of a long distance call actually got kicked back to the RBOC, something few people were aware of.
Well, the RBOC's figured they'd gouge their new competitors - dubbed the CLEC's for competitive local exchange carrier - the same way by charging similarly outrageous interconnection fees of nearly $0.01/minute. This scheme was called reciprocal compensation and represents money that must be paid to the local carrier that terminates a call (since we don't pay to receive phone calls) by the carrier that originated it. The Bells figured since they had 100% of the market, they'd get 100% of the terminating traffic and would rake it in.
Unfortunatley for them, the CLEC's were smarter than the LD companies and signed up huge numbers of ISP's. Suddenly the RBOC's were paying $2 billion per year to competitors. They didn't like this one bit so they just decided to stop paying. The CLEC's were forced to sue, and more than five years after the Telecom Act, the RBOC's still are trying to get out of paying. And they finally found someone who will help them out. The FCC has basically adopted a plan that will end reciprocal compensation - but only for ISP traffic, the only kind CLEC's really benefited from - after a two year transition period.
Meanwhile, the states are starting to let the Bells into the long distance market, despite their continued poor customer service, anti-competitive behaviors (the recipcomp thing is only the tip of the iceberg), and the fact taht they continue to own 95% of the local market.
And lest you think the CLEC's get off scot free, think again. The poorly thought out regulatory scheme led them to start gaming the system by signing up huge numbers of ISP customers without even trying to break into the business or residential market. You could have a nice business just doing recipcomp only. Why beat the street trying to sign up hard customers when the ISP's are easy. I hear some of these companies even split the recipcomp money with the ISP's, leading to a nice little cash cow for all. (Most of the CLEC's you've heard of - the ones that are publicly traded - don't fall into this category. They serve other customers in addition to ISPs).
The only ray of hope we have is that the FCC has initiated a rulemaking procedures to review all forms of intercarrier compensation. Hopefully this will result in the FCC turning off the $18 billion access charge spigot to the RBOC's. But I doubt it. The Bells have too much clout.
To really reform telecom we need the following. Don't hold your breath.
1. Cost based access charges, or even no access charges in areas where the Bells are in the LD market.
2. Break up the Bells to separate their network assets (the wholesale side) from the customer assets (the retail side).
3. Real and substantial penalities to companies that engage in anti-competitive behavior. (Say hundreds of millions of dollars in fines, plus no long distance for you).
4. Real and substantial penalities for companies that aren't meeting their customer service committments in non-competitive markets such as residential local service. (Say hundreds of millions of dollars + no LD for you).
5. An end to any acquisitions by RBOC's until after the local market has achieved full competition.
Win the battle, lose the war. Only now winning the battle is all free lancers have left. The publishing industry has learned its lesson and is moving away from free lance style article licensing big time. Instead, authors have to sign over _all_ rights to their creations as works for hire and assign copyright to the people publishing it. Ultimately, I think you'll find they lose more than they gain out of this, no matter what happens.
First off, MS Access is not a true multi-user database as anybody who has tried to use it as such as probably discovered. It also has mega-trouble scaling about 1 GB. I'm not familiar with free software databases so I can't comment.
But what are the key selling points of Oracle?
1. Highly scalable architecture. Terabytes of disk, hundreds of transactions per second. Oracle can do it.
2. Clustering. Oracle Parallel Server provides true failover capability.
3. Replication. Another data distribution/failover/backup approach.
4. Tools.
5. Large # of apps designed to run with Oracle.
6. "Value added" add-ons such as Oracle Forms, the geospatial option, etc.
7. All out Java integration
8. Interfaces to most other databases, support for remote queries and dblinks.
9. Ability to back up database while it is run.
10. Very portable.
11. General lack of bogosities compared to the competition.
12. Market share --> confidence in them being there for the future.
13. Support.
The knocks on Oracle have always been its high price - try buying Oracle for even a basic Sun E-450. It can run upwards of $300,000 - and the relatively DBA intensive nature of it.
For anyone who plans to develop highly scalable systems, I highly recommend studying the Oracle architecture. It is a textbook on how to do large scale computing. And for those used to the traditional Unix client/server computing paradigm, it can be quite an eye-opener.
I could tell you if I have a non-compete agreement with my employer, except that I'm under non-disclosure. Actually I don't know if I'm allowed to disclose the fact that I can't disclose anything. Hope the boss doesn't read /.
Absolutely the power companies lobbied heavily to get the deal passed. But legislatures need to make sure that they just don't give in to industry or environmentalists or anyone else pushing a one-sided agenda.
France gets 70% of its electricity from nuclear. Try building a nuclear power plant in California sometime. The inability to build new capacity in California of any type is a very big problem.
The politicians are trying to blame the free market to cover for their own problems. They forcibly separated generation from distribution, de-regulated pricing on the supply side, enacted regulation that made it virtually impossible to build new capacity, and maintained strict control over retail rates. A recipe for disaster.
Look at what has happened to natural gas in the Midwest. My gas bill was over $400 this month because the price has quadrupled. But I don't have to worry about running out of gas. Supply and demand balances everything out. If gas rates were frozen at old low levels, no one would conserve - voluntarily - and we'd have rolling service interruptions too.
Put the blame 100% on the California legislature for passing this botchwork law.
DirecTV vastly overcompresses most of its channels. They look like complete garbage on the XBR400. Pay per view movies and some other channels get better bandwidth and you can really see the difference.
... that an Ask Slashdot is totally relevant to me. I've also got a 36" Sony XBR 400 and am looking for the sound system to match. I'm willing to spend a little bit more, say $2500, so if anybody has a little big higher priced suggestion, don't be afraid to let me know.
For the record, my copy of Princess Mononoke from express.com arrived - not shipped, but arrived - today. Express.com did have severe delivery problems on anime for a while but has been much improved in the last month or so.
OT: Be sure to check out the Lain lunch box. It is the entire four disc Lain set in an actual lunch box case (you do get the keepcases for each individual disc inside). The lunch box itself kicks ass. The only problem: The keep case for ones of my discs is empty and I have to return it!
Well, its not that big a deal, but it is nice to know that Usenet archiving is back front and center meaning there is (hopefully) less danger of it getting totally nuked. Now if we could only get all the early posts back online....
This ruling is a major, major win for Bush. In fact, it is the absolute best possible outcome for him. Some people will doubtless say that he did not win the case on the merits. True enough. However, if he had won completely, it could have really come back to haunt him.
How?
Well, there are a few lawsuits by Gore's supporters attempting to throw out absentee ballots that heavily favored Bush. A SCOTUS ruling that basically said to enforce the letter of the law as of election day might have provided cover to the Florida supremes to throw out all those ballots on technicalities. Now the Florida court is somewhat left back to its own devices. In that case, having first ruled against a "hyper technical" interpretation of the law to extend the deadline for Gore, they would be hard pressed to adopt that standard in throwing out absentee ballots.
Additionally, by overturning and remanding the case, Bush is the public opinion winner, which is what this was really all about in the first place since the actual outcome of the vote would not have been changed. Bush won the certification either way.
But most importantly, this ruling results in a delay of the challenge lawsuit ruling. Time is the enemy. If Bush is able to run out the clock to December 12, he's pretty much in, IMO. Even if the courts somehow try to appoint an alternate slate of electors after that date, I'm guessing the House would say Bush's are the real ones because they were certified as of the deadline. Even a one day delay in starting any recounts could be fatal to Gore's case.
Of course Gore only has to win one of the innumerable lawsuits he and his supporters have filed, so don't count him out yet.
Palm Beach County _did_ finish its recounts at 7pm. They were not included because the Secretary of State of Florida did not accept the partial recounts submitted at 5pm. However, Gore did not pick up enough votes in any case to get the win.
Georg C. F. Greve is a longtime GNU supporter. I doubt he'd be involved in something designed to undermine the FSF in the US.
What could be very useful about the FSF Europe is creating a legal entity there that an accept tax free donations from EU citizens. I don't know the European tax laws, but the US generally prohibits claiming tax deductions for contributions to foreign charities. Now the legal system could be very different in Europe, especially in light of its emphasis on state support for charitable activities versus the private contributions in the US. (I just read an article someplace about how in Germany some arts organizations had no clue how to go about raising private funds for support).