Theories about supply and demand look good on paper but in the real world, the law is much simpler: get as much cash as you can anyway you can. Unlike natural laws, there are many ways to artificially bend the laws of supply of demand in such a way that serve self-interested parties. Take OPEC for example. It's a group nations working cooperatively to maximize profits for the member nations by either creating artificial scarcity or oversupply.
Oil is a little different than bandwidth in that it is a very tangible good. You get mechanical devices to pump the stuff out of the ground, pipe it down to a ship, get it to an oil refinery, and distribute the stuff. OPEC may be able to influence the market somewhat, but when capital is tied very closely to physical product, the laws of supply and demand become harder to control and manipulate.
But look at what happens when you try to apply the law of supply and demand to a much more intangible good like electricity. Electrons can very easily be "hidden" and then magically reappear practically at the flip of a few powerline circuits. It instantaneously can be shuttled over great distances from one place to another at little or no cost. And this makes it a market ripe for manipulation and scamming a la Enron. They took OPEC one step further by creating an entire artificial markets to sell electricity.
Enron was also about to create an artificial market for Internet bandwidth. Just like electricity, you can play a lot of games with the "supply" of bandwidth and play a lot of bullshit games with the actual cost of the good. I definitely don't trust corporations to set the price of bandwidth.
It's extrememly difficult to place a cost on bandwidth especially when the corporations that control bandwidth have their fingers in many different other communication services. Basically, companies will charge whatever they can get away with, the "true" cost of bandwidth be damned.
And that's precisely the problem. When utility company's first started out, they were entirely unregulated and they were the only game in town. They charged whatever they could get away with until government stepped in and allowed them to charge just enough but still make a handsome profit.
The Internet is not much different. Though we have more than one ISP to choose from, there are only a small group of players who control access to the Internet's backbone. It wouldn't be much of a trick for them to fix bandwidth prices and make a killing.
So to answer the question "what are the true costs of bandwidth", I'd say, "However much gouging the average consumer can accept. The public be damned."
The only thing that leads me to believe this guy is for real is that no company would actually hire this moron to do astroturfing. His persona is that of a shallow, uneducated douchebag. That's not the kind of person I'd want pitching my $5,000 machine.
Ever plunk down a few bucks for some cool gadget even though you knew would just end up as an unused paperweight in your desk drawer? That's exactly what this segway deal is if you happen to have a few extra thousand dollars laying around.
This machine is for some attention starved numbnut with a few thousand bucks laying around so that he can tool around his neigborhood for a few weeks and amaze his friends. Once the novely wears off and he realizes that a skateboard is more practical (shit, a $400 repair bill to replace the broken gyro???) for getting around town, it'll end up right next to his pushmower in the garage.
Sure it was super cool when it first came out. But now that's it's been a year since we've all seen it, most of realize the segway for what it is: an over-hyped machine with little practical application.
Interesting point about this program expanding into the nursing profession. You hear a lot how nurses are in short supply. Have you heard of a push on the part of the health care industry to push this through?
What's the big deal?
on
Droning On
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Didn't they just recently invent a drone that could serve as President of the United States?
The geeks don't pay one red cent in union dues but here's the AFL-CIO, an international organization made up of union members, going to bat for their apolitical asses.
And this despite the fact there is constant union bashing going in these/. forums. It's a real shame that unions are probably one of the most misunderstood disparaged institutions in a America because they have done the most to raise the standard of living not just for union members, but for working people everywhere.
Do you like vacations? Sick time? Overtime? Family Medical Leave? Pension funds? Health coverage?
All this and other good work benefits are all thanks to working people who stood up, spoke out, and demanded better compensation for their hard work. Sadly, as the strength of unions decline, we see a correpsonding decline in all of these benefits.
And geeks, don't be foolish enough to believe it can't happen to you because you're smart or your job is somehow different that "blue collar" jobs. That's just elitist bullshit. There's no doubt your own self-interest is best served by joining with others who share your concerns. Get political and get engaged!
This organization is getting sued, too
on
Dow vs. Parody
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
It ain't easy doing battle with the big boys.
This owners of this web site, www.slaverready.com is also getting sued. Not for the content of the site but because the logo on the site supposedly infringes on Labor Ready's logo. What a bunch of BS.
You may not be able to fight city hall but you can't fight corporations without getting crushed.
The four ingredients to a good education are a pencils, paper, books, and a teacher. The technologies that developed minds like Einstein, Shakespear, or Thomas Jefferson are good enough for my kid. Great thinkers have one thing in common: they all have been trained and are practiced in giving extraordinary meaning to funny little squiggles on pieces of paper.
Teaching people how to think isn't going to come through a CRT with pretty pictures or entertaining or "engaging" content. I think part of the weakness of filmstrips, computers and other such educational technologies is that they are TOO visual and they spoonfeed information to students. By trying to make learning "easy", we're actually bypassing the exercise needed to develop a mind.
Learning takes a lot of struggle and hard work. There are no shortcuts, no matter how brilliant you are. Symbols and abstraction are the raw material of the human mind. The good news is that the technologies needed to deliver the goods are cheap and effective. If we got rid of all the computers tomorrow (and other non-essential technologies) and focused more attention on these 4 raw materials, we'd see a marked improvement in the educational system.
So a "cult" creates a press release to announce they've cloned a human and it becomes news? I'll wait for an indendent DNA test, thank you. What are the editors on/. thinking?
I just installed Kazaa Lite so I could trade legal documents with my attorney and it has fantastic ad blocking software. I see almost zero ads on the NY Times.
<shameless_plug><no_affiliation>I also have Pop-Up Stopper Pro. It's the best $20 I ever spent.</no_affiliation></shameless_plug&g t; Thanks to these two pieces of software, I'm virtually ad free.
However, I'm very concerned for my son who will be born this Februrary. He won't have the same opportunities as me. I'm sure that in his lifetime the corporations will convince the government that daily, mandartory brain programmings are required to induce good consumer citizenship. It'll all be part of a healthy, well-balanced psychological profile. "MUST...BUY...GOODS beep! beep!"
I'm afraid killing people takes precendence over informing them. The Pentagon reports that wi-fi networks interfere with their radar and further rollout of the technology must be curtailed. Read this article.
In the New York Times article about this story, Kanada has a team of researchers who have been working on this for five years. This undertaking is very sizable in both expense and effort. But when should we end the pursuit of finding pi to the nth digit? If pi is infinite, does this mean the amount of resources needed to calculate pi as accurately as possible is also infinite?
So who sets the limits? Why didn't Kanada just let his computer algorithm run for another year or even just another few minutes to get an even more accurate number? Who decided 1.2 trillion digits was enough and why?
It's just intersting to note that the measurement objective reality is always hampered by subjective, practical matters. And it might also prove that it is impossible for man to ever know the universe---it's just too damn expensive! I'm sure someone out there has thought about this before.
So you are telling me that if the workers in your company walked out of the "factory" floor tomorrow, they could replace you? Baloney. The company needs to pump out its product NOW. If you held them hostage by withholding your coding labor, you could get just about anything you wanted.
What you geeks don't understand that if you had the balls to go on strike you could bring your respective employer to its f***ing knees for weeks. You could get any kind of a raise and any kind of benefits you wanted. You guys can't be replaced! I just don't think geeks have the courage to take what you can get. And if you aren't into taking what you can get, then you deserve to get shit on.
Call this post a troll if you like but it is the truth.
The common thread here is that being a member of a large institution is bad. Whether it be a member of a labor union, a worker in a corporation, a worshipper in an institutional church, or a member of a political party. There just seems to be huge distrust of large organizational structures.
The problem, however, is that there is little doubt about the control and influence these large institutional organizations have over our life.
Unfortunately, labor unions are as weak as they've been in 75 years. Corporations have never been stronger. A couple more kicks to the head (at least in the US, at least) and the labor movement will be down and out for good.
This is not good for white collar workers or blue collar workers. Unions used to add powerful checks and balances to the economy by helping to fight and curb corporate greed. But now, across the board, we are seeing wage stagnation, cuts in benefits, cuts in health coverage, loss of decent pension plans, etc. All the gains that labor unions brought to the American worker are now quickly eroding.
I'm not saying geeks need to run out and join a union (good luck because you'll probably get fired anyway). But I think we should all be at least a little more understanding about how unions have positively influenced our work lives whether we are members or not.
Folks, there is a vast conspiracy out there to get your money. Believe it or not, there are people out there willing to do anything to get it. They will lie, they will cheat, they will steal, and the government is unwilling to stop them. In fact, the government will often help them do it as long as these greedy folks come up with some lame excuse coupled with an army of lobbyists and some money to spread around.
The conspiracy has one simple, ultimate goal: to transfer as much money from your pocket into theirs. They have the will and organized money to make it happen and there is very little you or anyone else will be able to do about it.
You can make false claims that you are all powerful and can take your business elsewhere, but then you will all realize all businesses operate in this manner. They will all charge bullshit fees, they will invent reasons to charge you more bullshit fees, and they will all utilize contracts that lock you into them. They will all, in short, steal as much of your money that can get away with.
Welcome to the "free" market---free not as in fair, but free as in free to steal.
I've got a Windows XP system and a Jornada 728 which runs Hanheld PC 2000 OS (a buggy, rehashed version of Windows CE). Using the terminal server client, I can connect to my Windows machine through my wireless Type II PC card and operate it from my very thin client. The stylus is the mouse, just like the machine in this story. The only problem is the screen on the Jornada 728 is very short (about 240 pixels or so) and not wide (about 640 pixesl or so). I have to scroll around a lot. But what's really great about the Jornada is that it has a keyboard, too. I run any application on the PC through the Jornada. It's cool and I think this product will be a success. In fact, I'm writing this post on the Jornada over my wireless connection!
Your post doesn't come close to capturing just how truly awful the quality is. I just download King Kong for $1.99. Here's what I get:
At 100% size, the picture is 3" diagnoal on my 19" Trinitron monitor. It is getting played through Windows Media Player. When I zoom to full screen (though I can never eliminate the obnoxious Media Player skin border), the pixelation is so obvious as to make it unwatchable. The picture is dark and many of the details of the film are lost. Fiddling with the brightness and contrast controls do nothing to correct the problem. And movie buffs will certainly find the television dimension format completely unacceptable. I'd say the sound quality is about the equivalent of an MP3 at 96K, maybe less.
In short, the experience sucked. "I waited over an hour to download THIS CRAP!?" is the thought one comes away with. Even if you could hook this up to your living room television set, the picture would still be atrocious. No one in their right mind would ever use this service again.
I don't know what the industry is trying to do here but it certainly isn't to provide a viable consumer service. There's definitely something else on their agenda.
Husband: "Honey, I accidentally ripped a gaping hole in the side of the house and it might threaten the structural integrity of our home. It could collapse!"
Wife: "Great! Now we finally have that third door we've always hoped for. Now excuse me while I go vote for George Bush. We're going to need a lot more of that Iraqi oil to keep this place warm in the winter!"
...not for the hackers, but for the marketing of Linux. Imagine giving a presentation about Linux at your local school committee meeting. You can pull out a visually impressive 4' x 6' sketch of the kernel and say, "We know exactly what we're getting if we switch to Linux. We know every single line of code." Then while you hold up a small black box you say, "That isn't the case with other operating systems where we have no idea what we're getting and no way to fix any problems that crop up without spending even more money."
Also, a beautiful, visually appealing picture of the kernel can help non-techies understand that the kernel is a well-thought out piece of software engineering and not just some half-ass code pumped out by computer hippies and geeks with nothing better to do. Again, this can help further the cause of Linux with those in power who make purchasing decisions but have little technical expertise.
Before Coleco Vision, before Intellivision, even before the Atari 2600, there was the Coleco's Telstar Arcade. I remember many late nights spent in my jammies with this baby!
I just downloaded an incredible find on the net, The GNU C Programming Tutorial. It's well written and completely free. It just goes to prove that there are many people out there who use the net in the spirit it was intended to be used, they just aren't in your face like the porn and spam. I think if you were to compare the amount of sleaze to the amount of beneficial documents on the net, the good stuff would far outweigh the bad.
What exactly will the make illegal, here? If it's having a cell phone ring in a theater, would it be legal use a phone that vibrates instead of rings?
Equally strange would be banning the act of talking to someone via cell phone illegal? Hell, I could just stick my thumb in my ear and point my pinky at my mouth and start babbling loudly. That would be even more annoying than someone talking loudly into a cell phone? Should we make being annoying illegal, too?
Dumb law, dumb idea. I don't know why I'm even commenting on this.
Slashdot Mirror
Oil is a little different than bandwidth in that it is a very tangible good. You get mechanical devices to pump the stuff out of the ground, pipe it down to a ship, get it to an oil refinery, and distribute the stuff. OPEC may be able to influence the market somewhat, but when capital is tied very closely to physical product, the laws of supply and demand become harder to control and manipulate.
But look at what happens when you try to apply the law of supply and demand to a much more intangible good like electricity. Electrons can very easily be "hidden" and then magically reappear practically at the flip of a few powerline circuits. It instantaneously can be shuttled over great distances from one place to another at little or no cost. And this makes it a market ripe for manipulation and scamming a la Enron. They took OPEC one step further by creating an entire artificial markets to sell electricity.
Enron was also about to create an artificial market for Internet bandwidth. Just like electricity, you can play a lot of games with the "supply" of bandwidth and play a lot of bullshit games with the actual cost of the good. I definitely don't trust corporations to set the price of bandwidth.
It's extrememly difficult to place a cost on bandwidth especially when the corporations that control bandwidth have their fingers in many different other communication services. Basically, companies will charge whatever they can get away with, the "true" cost of bandwidth be damned.
And that's precisely the problem. When utility company's first started out, they were entirely unregulated and they were the only game in town. They charged whatever they could get away with until government stepped in and allowed them to charge just enough but still make a handsome profit.
The Internet is not much different. Though we have more than one ISP to choose from, there are only a small group of players who control access to the Internet's backbone. It wouldn't be much of a trick for them to fix bandwidth prices and make a killing.
So to answer the question "what are the true costs of bandwidth", I'd say, "However much gouging the average consumer can accept. The public be damned."
The only thing that leads me to believe this guy is for real is that no company would actually hire this moron to do astroturfing. His persona is that of a shallow, uneducated douchebag. That's not the kind of person I'd want pitching my $5,000 machine.
This machine is for some attention starved numbnut with a few thousand bucks laying around so that he can tool around his neigborhood for a few weeks and amaze his friends. Once the novely wears off and he realizes that a skateboard is more practical (shit, a $400 repair bill to replace the broken gyro???) for getting around town, it'll end up right next to his pushmower in the garage.
Sure it was super cool when it first came out. But now that's it's been a year since we've all seen it, most of realize the segway for what it is: an over-hyped machine with little practical application.
Interesting point about this program expanding into the nursing profession. You hear a lot how nurses are in short supply. Have you heard of a push on the part of the health care industry to push this through?
Didn't they just recently invent a drone that could serve as President of the United States?
And this despite the fact there is constant union bashing going in these
Do you like vacations?
Sick time?
Overtime?
Family Medical Leave?
Pension funds?
Health coverage?
All this and other good work benefits are all thanks to working people who stood up, spoke out, and demanded better compensation for their hard work. Sadly, as the strength of unions decline, we see a correpsonding decline in all of these benefits.
And geeks, don't be foolish enough to believe it can't happen to you because you're smart or your job is somehow different that "blue collar" jobs. That's just elitist bullshit. There's no doubt your own self-interest is best served by joining with others who share your concerns. Get political and get engaged!
This owners of this web site, www.slaverready.com is also getting sued. Not for the content of the site but because the logo on the site supposedly infringes on Labor Ready's logo. What a bunch of BS.
You may not be able to fight city hall but you can't fight corporations without getting crushed.
Teaching people how to think isn't going to come through a CRT with pretty pictures or entertaining or "engaging" content. I think part of the weakness of filmstrips, computers and other such educational technologies is that they are TOO visual and they spoonfeed information to students. By trying to make learning "easy", we're actually bypassing the exercise needed to develop a mind.
Learning takes a lot of struggle and hard work. There are no shortcuts, no matter how brilliant you are. Symbols and abstraction are the raw material of the human mind. The good news is that the technologies needed to deliver the goods are cheap and effective. If we got rid of all the computers tomorrow (and other non-essential technologies) and focused more attention on these 4 raw materials, we'd see a marked improvement in the educational system.
<shameless_plug><no_affiliation>I also have Pop-Up Stopper Pro. It's the best $20 I ever spent.</no_affiliation></shameless_plug&g t; Thanks to these two pieces of software, I'm virtually ad free.
However, I'm very concerned for my son who will be born this Februrary. He won't have the same opportunities as me. I'm sure that in his lifetime the corporations will convince the government that daily, mandartory brain programmings are required to induce good consumer citizenship. It'll all be part of a healthy, well-balanced psychological profile. "MUST...BUY...GOODS beep! beep!"
I'm afraid killing people takes precendence over informing them. The Pentagon reports that wi-fi networks interfere with their radar and further rollout of the technology must be curtailed. Read this article.
So who sets the limits? Why didn't Kanada just let his computer algorithm run for another year or even just another few minutes to get an even more accurate number? Who decided 1.2 trillion digits was enough and why?
It's just intersting to note that the measurement objective reality is always hampered by subjective, practical matters. And it might also prove that it is impossible for man to ever know the universe---it's just too damn expensive! I'm sure someone out there has thought about this before.
So you are telling me that if the workers in your company walked out of the "factory" floor tomorrow, they could replace you? Baloney. The company needs to pump out its product NOW. If you held them hostage by withholding your coding labor, you could get just about anything you wanted.
Call this post a troll if you like but it is the truth.
The problem, however, is that there is little doubt about the control and influence these large institutional organizations have over our life. Unfortunately, labor unions are as weak as they've been in 75 years. Corporations have never been stronger. A couple more kicks to the head (at least in the US, at least) and the labor movement will be down and out for good.
This is not good for white collar workers or blue collar workers. Unions used to add powerful checks and balances to the economy by helping to fight and curb corporate greed. But now, across the board, we are seeing wage stagnation, cuts in benefits, cuts in health coverage, loss of decent pension plans, etc. All the gains that labor unions brought to the American worker are now quickly eroding.
I'm not saying geeks need to run out and join a union (good luck because you'll probably get fired anyway). But I think we should all be at least a little more understanding about how unions have positively influenced our work lives whether we are members or not.
The conspiracy has one simple, ultimate goal: to transfer as much money from your pocket into theirs. They have the will and organized money to make it happen and there is very little you or anyone else will be able to do about it.
You can make false claims that you are all powerful and can take your business elsewhere, but then you will all realize all businesses operate in this manner. They will all charge bullshit fees, they will invent reasons to charge you more bullshit fees, and they will all utilize contracts that lock you into them. They will all, in short, steal as much of your money that can get away with.
Welcome to the "free" market---free not as in fair, but free as in free to steal.
I've got a Windows XP system and a Jornada 728 which runs Hanheld PC 2000 OS (a buggy, rehashed version of Windows CE). Using the terminal server client, I can connect to my Windows machine through my wireless Type II PC card and operate it from my very thin client. The stylus is the mouse, just like the machine in this story. The only problem is the screen on the Jornada 728 is very short (about 240 pixels or so) and not wide (about 640 pixesl or so). I have to scroll around a lot. But what's really great about the Jornada is that it has a keyboard, too. I run any application on the PC through the Jornada. It's cool and I think this product will be a success. In fact, I'm writing this post on the Jornada over my wireless connection!
At 100% size, the picture is 3" diagnoal on my 19" Trinitron monitor. It is getting played through Windows Media Player. When I zoom to full screen (though I can never eliminate the obnoxious Media Player skin border), the pixelation is so obvious as to make it unwatchable. The picture is dark and many of the details of the film are lost. Fiddling with the brightness and contrast controls do nothing to correct the problem. And movie buffs will certainly find the television dimension format completely unacceptable. I'd say the sound quality is about the equivalent of an MP3 at 96K, maybe less.
In short, the experience sucked. "I waited over an hour to download THIS CRAP!?" is the thought one comes away with. Even if you could hook this up to your living room television set, the picture would still be atrocious. No one in their right mind would ever use this service again.
I don't know what the industry is trying to do here but it certainly isn't to provide a viable consumer service. There's definitely something else on their agenda.
Wife: "Great! Now we finally have that third door we've always hoped for. Now excuse me while I go vote for George Bush. We're going to need a lot more of that Iraqi oil to keep this place warm in the winter!"
Ingredients for happy society:
Add: one ounce of capitalism, one ounce of socialism, a pinch of communism
Not everything in the world is black and white, especially when it comes to determining which "ism" makes the greatest number of people happy.
Also, a beautiful, visually appealing picture of the kernel can help non-techies understand that the kernel is a well-thought out piece of software engineering and not just some half-ass code pumped out by computer hippies and geeks with nothing better to do. Again, this can help further the cause of Linux with those in power who make purchasing decisions but have little technical expertise.
This is good work.
Before Coleco Vision, before Intellivision, even before the Atari 2600, there was the Coleco's Telstar Arcade. I remember many late nights spent in my jammies with this baby!
I just downloaded an incredible find on the net, The GNU C Programming Tutorial. It's well written and completely free. It just goes to prove that there are many people out there who use the net in the spirit it was intended to be used, they just aren't in your face like the porn and spam. I think if you were to compare the amount of sleaze to the amount of beneficial documents on the net, the good stuff would far outweigh the bad.
Equally strange would be banning the act of talking to someone via cell phone illegal? Hell, I could just stick my thumb in my ear and point my pinky at my mouth and start babbling loudly. That would be even more annoying than someone talking loudly into a cell phone? Should we make being annoying illegal, too?
Dumb law, dumb idea. I don't know why I'm even commenting on this.
Yup, our country is going right down the shitter. Wipe your asses goodbye. Welcome to America, Inc.