Yes and no. Those companies still have assets - just not very liquid ones. I don't want this to be a simple matter of assets-liabilities - because it needs to take into account the huge liability Uncle Sam is taking on after the buyout to clean things up. Basically, the liabilities on these companies are understated because they're being managed in such a way as to make the stockholders the most money and not in such a way as to prevent a depression.
Now, in general companies aren't charities and shouldn't be run as charities. However, I don't think it is too much to put some kind of limit on greed. When private citizens can cause this kind of economic damange, either one of two things happen:
1. We regulate to prevent this kind of damange from happening in the future. 2. We allow companies to hold this power, but punish those who misuse it.
I think the solution is some combination of 1 and 2. We do need to reign some things in, but we don't want a command economy so at some point you need to give CEOs a bit of a leash - with an understanding that if they leave a mess on the neighbors lawn they'll have to clean it up and spend 15 years in the doghouse.
If all you did was insure the mortgages, that would be the same as a bailout. Now suddenly those risky loans have zero risk, because you essentially just turned them into T-bills.
Don't get me wrong - I understand the need for relief for the consumers who hold these loans (within reason - they were idiots as well but you can aruge they were misled). What kind of people get conned by con artists? Often, they are greedy people (or sometimes vulnerable people). The senile elderly man who has no family who was misled about loan terms for his modest home is one thing, but the middle-aged couple who wanted to own a McMansion is another.
In any case, consumers are served by the bailouts. Now the government holds their loans, and can adjust the payment terms in a manner that is in the public interest. Essentially it is the consumers that are being bailed out, but indirectly while keeping the structure of these huge corporations intact. Taxpayers are going to pay out big money no matter what - that was a foregone conclusion when we got into this mess. The important thing isn't to save taxpayer money, but to minimize the losses to the average American, while punishing those responsible in such a way as to prevent a repeat of the problems and adjusting regulations where appropriate.
Again, don't get me wrong. I dislike socialism - but not as much as I dislike fascism which is what we're fixing here. The guys who ran these companies (and the complicit regulators) need to be on the hook for the consequences of their mismanagement. Putting a bunch of stock and insurance analysts out of work doesn't really help accomplish this. The economy needs reputable insurance companies - so rather than destroy an otherwise functioning corporation, why not just fix it - it will save taxpayers money in the long run.
All the little stockholders at AIG are getting the shaft.
Uh, I think that was a foregone conclusion when they hired inept management.
It was essential that every stockholder in AIG lose virtually everything they invested. Otherwise it becomes profitable to mismanage your company and let Uncle Sam buy you out.
I think that some of these resuces were necessary for the good of the greater economy. Sure, they shouldn't be necessary, but regulators messed up and now for the sake of not collapsing into a depression we need to clean up.
If I were in charge the only thing I'd do differently when doing bailouts like these would be:
1. Company is 100% taken over. 2. Stock is declared void. Stockholders get a 1-time eminent domain payment of (value of company assets)-(cost to taxpayers for bailout)/(# shares outstanding). Frankly the stockholders should be happy they don't end up owing money which is what the math certainly will work out to. 3. Corporate officers arrested and face heavy criminal penalties. Costing the taxpayers billions of dollars needs to be made a serious crime. It is certainly worse than robbing the corner store. 4. Government runs company in such a way to preserve the general economy. 5. Eventually company is either dissolved or IPO'ed - with all proceeds going to taxpayers.
If this were how bailouts worked you wouldn't see too many executives asking for them.
Don't get me wrong - the preference is in general to let companies just go bankrupt and not interfere. But, if interference is needed for the greater good than this is how it should be done.
The thing that frustrates me with all kinds of publicly-funded research (whether via grants or directly from government institutions) is the lack of access to data.
Some lab will spend $10k generating a data point. Then they won't spend $1.95 to put that data somewhere on a website but instead will turn it over to some commercial entity who will charge $14.95 for every person who downloads one copy of that datapoint.
Now, if a government lab operates without taxpayer funding but instead charges use fees to the industry it supports in exchange for data, I can see the legitimacy of that model. It doesn't cost the public anything, and those who need the info pay for it.
However, in most cases the taxpayers foot the whole bill, but they can't access the data.
Now, some argue that the average taxpayer has no interest in some scholarly article on physical chemistry or whatever. That isn't the point. Open access benefits the public indirectly, and it is also benefitical to scientists who wouldn't mind keeping up on published work but who aren't affiliated with a university that has a bazillion dollars for journal subscriptions. The average scientist working in industry almost never keeps up with published science (to the loss of scientists everywhere) because they aren't going to fork out for subscriptions and most industrial labs won't pay for any but the most essential journals for their field.
It is such a waste when we have millions to spend on research, but the cost to set up a website to publish the results is considered excessive. I'm sure that for less than what the NIH pays in grants for page costs they could set up and operate their own peer-reviewed online publication system (available to scientists and professionals of all disciplines). The value of that would be enormous.
And how does having an EULA prevent this? Is that really going to stop somebody from distributing a version of Firefox with malware in it when they aren't stoped by the already-binding license file and numerous laws that make distribution of malware illegal in the first place?
It is illegal to distribute firefox without a license. That license is conferred by the license file. The EULA really doesn't matter much - in fact you never need to accept it to create and distribute some malware (since you don't need to run it to do that).
EULAs are fairly silly from a legal perspective - they don't actually license you to do anything. A license is used to give somebody permission to do something they couldn't already do. For example, copyright law forbids people in general from distributing creative works. A license like the GPL or MPL gives you persmission to do this anyway under particular circumstances. They're just as binding in files as they are on-screen - since you need to accept some kind of license to distribute the files at all (except under fair use). EULAs aren't targeted at distributors - they're targeted at users. However, users don't actually need a license to do anything at all, since no law forbids people from using software they have in their possession.
Creating a derivitive work is not prohibited by the copyright laws. DISTRIBUTING a derivative work is.
Copyright restricts the rights of individuals to distribute creative works. It has nothing to do with how individuals use those works when they aren't copying them. Copying for personal use is a gray area - it tends to fall under fair use.
Hmm - they don't seem to hesitate much when the issue is a news reporter refusing to testify about sources. It seems like this kind of discretion is reserved for corrupt C-level officers...
Oddly enough that is pretty-much considered the best way to set up raid-5 on linux (software raid at least). Just google for the various howtos.
I guess linux software raid isn't for the faint of heart. It works well, however. In theory it is more recoverable than hardware raid, although hardware raid has the clear advantage of being able to do battery-backed cache which might have eliminated some of the causes for my lvm failures.
Or we consumers can just file class action lawsuits. Last time I checked in a democracy the people were in charge...
There is a reason that phone companies get hit with class action suits rather frequently - these kinds of predatory practices are too common.
And no, it isn't OK to just say "well, if you don't like the boilerplate contracts then just don't use a cell phone, use the internet, own a car, rent a car, own a house, rent a house, use a credit card, mail something via a private delivery company, use a computer program, or do any of 4000 other things that use such agreements."
If I sign on a contract saying that I agree to sell myself into slavery for $1000 that doesn't make it legal. Believe it or not I actually had one person in this thread say that this should in fact be legal.:)
Oh well, I guess that's what I get for voting libertarian... Are there any political parties out there that believe in neither fascism, massive redistribution of wealth, nor legalization of slavery?
Yes - well, I'm fine with allowing people to pay more for more service. What I'm against is network providers allowing users to easily run up tabs of $500 on a service that has cost them $100 per month for the last 48 months - let alone $20k.
If the person went online using their phone and was temporarily blocked while a message asked them to confirm that they want to incur charges of $20/MB or whatever and an estimate that this would cost them up to $x/hour (based on the bandwidth of the service) and then asking them how much of a cost limit they'd like to set, then I wouldn't mind if a user typed in "go ahead and charge me $20k" and that happened.
The problem is that phone providers make it WAY to easy to be charged fees. It is like having pay-to-call phone numbers that charge $10/minute, or the carribean area code scams a number of years ago.
I'm all for market solutions, but only if the costs are completely transparent. And transparent doesn't mean a line in a contract saying "the company may charge you other charges for services not listed here - call for details".
I wonder how many people get burned every year by an unexpected $50 charge on a cell phone bill. Sounds like a recipe for a class action lawsuit. And I'm not normally a big proponent of litigation.
The only issue with this is oversubscription. This would let ISPs oversell their bandwidth by a factor of 10 million and throttle down anybody not just browsing the web. Sure, it wouldn't impose any "bandwidth caps" per customer - but if the overall service is oversold then deprioritizing traffic is effectively capping it.
What they should do is just be honest about bandwidth. Sell service based on peak rate and then some kind of volume-related metric such as GB per day/month/hour/whatever. You could then pay for what you want to have. Rates should be required to be linear within some range and be unbundled to prevent ISPs from just setting the rates such that nobody would want to buy anything other than web-only service. So your typical $15/month DSL plan might turn into $5/month for the 756kbps bandwidth and $10/month for 10GB transferred - or maybe there would be some baseline service charge just for having service at all (which includes no bandwidth) since that is a real cost. Then you could pay more to either up your burst rate or your total bandwidth use.
The important thing is giving consumers some choice.
Well, what good would reading their contracts do? They could sign predatory contract from provider A, or predatory contract from provider B. If they want service there isn't much point in reading the fine print, since these hassles are the cost of doing business.
On the other hand, there is no reason we consumers can't put companies through the ringer legally and politicially and make that the cost of writing one-sided agreements. If it is fair to impose one-sided contracts on your customers, then it is fair to tie companies up in perpetual class-action lawsuits. Personally I'd rather just see some orderly consumer-friendly business practices and proceed in cooperation and not wasteful litigation.
Most contracts also have a provision for when the contract is in conflict with the relevant laws of the jurisdiction as to how to deal with those. Often times things are in the contract which are only enforceable in certain circumstances.
Well, then, we have a simple solution.
We pass a law that states that certain predatory business practices are completely illegal - much as we've done with slavery. Then folks who value rules over people can devote their energy to sticking it to megacorporations as much as they currently stick it to some guy just trying to make ends meet with a $20k phone bill.
I'm fairly libertarian, but contracts only ought to be enforcable to the degree that they represent the negotiation of two parties - not to the degree that they were written by a company lawyer and mass produced for 8 million customers to sign. Do you think that I could get phone service ANYWHERE if I wanted to actually negotiate my own contract? Even if I offered the phone company a million dollars a month for my plan I doubt they'd want to bother dealing with me.
Contracts are supposed to be a "meeting of the minds". That implies there being more than one mind present when the contract is written, and when it is signed.
I'm not convinced that the current system would operate if there were a total crash of the radar system.
We've to date only had long crashes involving stuff like flight plan management which doesn't directly affect planes already in the sky. I'm sure there have been short radar outages, but if the problem is local to a region and only lasts a few minutes the impact isn't too bad (route planes around the area when possible, and the situation doesn't change much in a few minutes).
If the system went down completely for a few hours, I can't see ATC controllers using paper strips and stopwatches and calculators trying to figure out where every plane is in realtime and keeping them on course. They barely manage with the computers.
Still, I'm all for having contingency plans. Perhaps at all times the system should maintain an emergency abort plan that is communicated to individual planes - if the system goes down and contact is lost all planes being executing the plan, which diverts all aircraft to airports capable of servicing them in a way that causes the least congestion without regard to intended destination. So, instead of having a line of 300 planes landing at O'Hare you have 10 planes at 30 more obscure airports. Get everybody on the ground. TCAS can still handle emergencies, and of course typical separation practices already have a huge safety margin built in (it isn't like two planes within 3 miles of each other are guaranteed to crash - that is just the distance with radar error necessary to guarantee a non-crash).
The system really needs to be failure-proof. If there is a complete failure, lots of people could die. We're already there most likely. Sooner or later it will happen with the current overloaded system, and when it does those thousands of guys manning the radios won't be able to prevent the inevitable though they'll do their best and probably get much of the traffic down.
When I was hit with one of those crazy charges (at a much lower scale) the "customer service" rep had the gall to tell me that I should just call in to check my bill a few times a month to stay on top of these sorts of things. They could have upsold me to a more expensive plan if I had caught the problem in realtime and then eliminted the usage charges. Uh, yeah - that sounds practical. If every industry worked like that I'd need to micromanage about 100 accounts just to keep track of what predatory utility service is trying to tack on an extra $200 this week.
Most people find out when they get the bill - at which point not only is it considered non-negotiable, but you're probably halfway or more into your next billing cycle where you might be facing more of the same.
The issue is that if they wanted service they had to agree to a boilerplate contract with one-sided terms. Now, they could have chosen what company to sign a one-sided contract with, but pretty much every phone company has contracts designed to stick it to the customer.
I have a simple solution. Pass laws regulating these kinds of predatory practices. Then cell phone companies will have the "freedom" to choose whether they want to do business in the USA, and when they feel like they've been run-over by the law we can talk about how they had taken on legal obligations by doing business here and why they shouldn't be outraged when they are enforced. The interest of consumers in general outweighs the interest of a cartel of corporations. Sure, that doesn't mean government should wield a hammer to regulate every aspect of our lives, but enforcing terms like allowing customers to set a limit on charges to block expensive services seems pretty reasonable to me.
Consider that some people have circumstances which make the children's phones a near-necessity for safety/etc reasons. And they're not a significant expense on most plans - provided you don't stray into one of those billing traps designed to run up your bill.
In general I tend to be a stick-by-your-word sort of guy. And in the end I ended up paying the bill. However, I don't think that I received $500 worth of service for those charges (another "unlimited" plan that would have eliminated those charges would cost less than that for a year or two of service).
Cell phones are an industry with only a handful of providers, and the ones with significant coverage are even fewer. These kinds of natural near-monopolies should not have the freedom to dictate terms at will in a boilerplate contract. Did I truly have the freedom to negotiate a contract for a cell phone at the same rates with the same coverage but with a built-in limit to prevent these kinds of charges?
I'm sorry - stick-it-to-you charges should not be part of a valid business model.
Ok - I signed a cell phone contract. I know that it gives the phone company the right to:
1. Charge me huge fees for non-routine items like data transfer - especially outside of a coverage area. And it might not be obvious if I'm outside that coverage area.
2. Require binding arbitration of any disputes.
3. Require me to keep secret any settlement or judgment I get against the phone company so that others don't realize that they can win in court.
That doesn't make any of that legal. I never "agreed" with anybody on those terms. I just signed them because otherwise I can't use a cell phone (or just about any other convenience of modern life). If the agreement said that if I got too far behind on my payments they could take me into slavery I'd probably still have signed it - knowing full well what it meant.
Big corporations basically lie about being interested in customer service. Consumers basically lie about agreeing to the terms of service. Courts end up trying to find the middle ground. Not all contracts ought to be enforcable.
So? If they are it's their own fault. They claimed that they both read and understood all the nuances of the contract when they accepted it. They have no excuse for being surprised by the financial repercussions.
Should people be free to enter in to ANY kind of contract? Suppose the contract stated that if you didn't pay your bill on time you would become indentured to the phone company until such time as you paid the bill? If you're in really hard straits should you be able to sell yourself into slavery?
Boilerplate contracts are generally enforcable, but courts have discretion to determine the fairness of any such contract. This is for good reason - they don't represent a meeting of the minds, but rather a deal in which one side has far more bargaining power than the other. When every phone provider in the country has onerous terms your only option is to not own a phone.
Go ahead and try to live without a credit card, phone, cell phone, internet, or anything else that requires signing a boilerplate contract with one-sided terms. Sure, you can still live that way, but why would you want to? You can't even go to the hospital without signing a boilerplate contract. In some cases you can be treated as if you had implied consent to a contract if you were treated while unable to make decisions.
Look - I'm fairly libertarian - more so than most. However, consumer protection laws are very necessary in this day and age when just about every cost-effective industry is an oligopoly.
It isn't even a matter of clauses buried in fine print. The problem is that this is "standard practice" and it is anti-consumer. Even if the first line in the agreement was 48 point and said "note that when you use your phone internationally you could end up being assessed charges far in excess of normal" it wouldn't be fair. It should simply not be possible to use a phone in a way that could run up that kind of a bill. If nothing else phone providers should be required to allow their customers to set a monthly limit on their spending - if the provider somehow lets the consumer go over the limit without express consent from the account owner they end up eating the cost.
And I don't want to hear about how roaming billing cycles are too slow to allow that kind of realtime assessment of charges. If they can route a 32kbps digital phone call from my home to a point halfway around the world such that it only takes 2 seconds for the phone to start ringing and there are no gaps in the audio, then they can send a 10-byte estimate of the cost of the call per minute and do a database lookup.
Ok, I've been burned by a child on a phone plan not understanding the limits of an "unlimited" text messaging plan and running up a $500 bill. I ended up paying it because I didn't want to mount a full scale protest at the phone company headquarters, which is probably what it would take to remove the bill.
The fact is that phone companies make it WAY to easy to run up HUGE bills. It isn't like you have any choice - every company does it.
When you're about to do something to raise your bill by an order of magnitude somebody should get your consent. And I'm talking at-the-moment for a specific action consent - not a line in a 10 page contract. Even if you read the line it isn't fair to allow companies to enforce it.
Imagine if every auto shop in town had a huge sign in bold print stating that per shop policy they reserve the right to bill you up to 100X the quoted rate if they end up feeling the need to do more work than was originally quoted. Would that make the practice fair? Disclosure isn't enough.
Why is it bad if I write a virtually any program that runs as root and directly accesses hardware from userspace without using kernel drivers, but for some reason we seem to accept this as the right way to do things with X11?
You shouldn't need to be root to launch an X server. The server should just contact video drivers in the kernel in much the same way it might access a file via the filesystem layer. Why do we need a million independant projects that all create drivers for video hardware? Why not just have one in the kernel - which after all is intended to be a device abstraction layer?
And no, that doesn't mean the window manager needs to run in kernel space like in windows. I'm taking about hardware abstraction only, with the obvious support for OpenGL-like features to improve performance.
Moreover, if I were concerned about people with the resources to detect residual data on a zereoed hard drive, I certainly wouldn't trust cryptography. If the crypto system is ever defeated chances are whoever has your drive could recover almost everything on it even without resorting to scanning/tunneling electron microscopes and all that.
Multiple writes with random data is the only way to be REALLY sure. If you don't anticipate government-scale attackers then a simple zeroing is sufficient - and/dev/zero is a whole lot faster than/dev/urandom on most systems.
I think that the one thing we can count on is whether the Democrats or the Republicans win, we'll see more power concentrated in the Federal government. Sure, they'll vary on some niche issues, but either way money talks.
Keep in mind that Clinton did far more to erode many Democratic pet issues like abortion and welfare than any Republican in recent history. Bush on the other hand has done more to promote big governemnt than any liberal democrat in recent history. Both sides pay lip service to party planks, but if they actually "solve" those problems then voters might not need them anymore...
Slashdot Mirror
Yes and no. Those companies still have assets - just not very liquid ones. I don't want this to be a simple matter of assets-liabilities - because it needs to take into account the huge liability Uncle Sam is taking on after the buyout to clean things up. Basically, the liabilities on these companies are understated because they're being managed in such a way as to make the stockholders the most money and not in such a way as to prevent a depression.
Now, in general companies aren't charities and shouldn't be run as charities. However, I don't think it is too much to put some kind of limit on greed. When private citizens can cause this kind of economic damange, either one of two things happen:
1. We regulate to prevent this kind of damange from happening in the future.
2. We allow companies to hold this power, but punish those who misuse it.
I think the solution is some combination of 1 and 2. We do need to reign some things in, but we don't want a command economy so at some point you need to give CEOs a bit of a leash - with an understanding that if they leave a mess on the neighbors lawn they'll have to clean it up and spend 15 years in the doghouse.
If all you did was insure the mortgages, that would be the same as a bailout. Now suddenly those risky loans have zero risk, because you essentially just turned them into T-bills.
Don't get me wrong - I understand the need for relief for the consumers who hold these loans (within reason - they were idiots as well but you can aruge they were misled). What kind of people get conned by con artists? Often, they are greedy people (or sometimes vulnerable people). The senile elderly man who has no family who was misled about loan terms for his modest home is one thing, but the middle-aged couple who wanted to own a McMansion is another.
In any case, consumers are served by the bailouts. Now the government holds their loans, and can adjust the payment terms in a manner that is in the public interest. Essentially it is the consumers that are being bailed out, but indirectly while keeping the structure of these huge corporations intact. Taxpayers are going to pay out big money no matter what - that was a foregone conclusion when we got into this mess. The important thing isn't to save taxpayer money, but to minimize the losses to the average American, while punishing those responsible in such a way as to prevent a repeat of the problems and adjusting regulations where appropriate.
Again, don't get me wrong. I dislike socialism - but not as much as I dislike fascism which is what we're fixing here. The guys who ran these companies (and the complicit regulators) need to be on the hook for the consequences of their mismanagement. Putting a bunch of stock and insurance analysts out of work doesn't really help accomplish this. The economy needs reputable insurance companies - so rather than destroy an otherwise functioning corporation, why not just fix it - it will save taxpayers money in the long run.
All the little stockholders at AIG are getting the shaft.
Uh, I think that was a foregone conclusion when they hired inept management.
It was essential that every stockholder in AIG lose virtually everything they invested. Otherwise it becomes profitable to mismanage your company and let Uncle Sam buy you out.
I think that some of these resuces were necessary for the good of the greater economy. Sure, they shouldn't be necessary, but regulators messed up and now for the sake of not collapsing into a depression we need to clean up.
If I were in charge the only thing I'd do differently when doing bailouts like these would be:
1. Company is 100% taken over.
2. Stock is declared void. Stockholders get a 1-time eminent domain payment of (value of company assets)-(cost to taxpayers for bailout)/(# shares outstanding). Frankly the stockholders should be happy they don't end up owing money which is what the math certainly will work out to.
3. Corporate officers arrested and face heavy criminal penalties. Costing the taxpayers billions of dollars needs to be made a serious crime. It is certainly worse than robbing the corner store.
4. Government runs company in such a way to preserve the general economy.
5. Eventually company is either dissolved or IPO'ed - with all proceeds going to taxpayers.
If this were how bailouts worked you wouldn't see too many executives asking for them.
Don't get me wrong - the preference is in general to let companies just go bankrupt and not interfere. But, if interference is needed for the greater good than this is how it should be done.
The thing that frustrates me with all kinds of publicly-funded research (whether via grants or directly from government institutions) is the lack of access to data.
Some lab will spend $10k generating a data point. Then they won't spend $1.95 to put that data somewhere on a website but instead will turn it over to some commercial entity who will charge $14.95 for every person who downloads one copy of that datapoint.
Now, if a government lab operates without taxpayer funding but instead charges use fees to the industry it supports in exchange for data, I can see the legitimacy of that model. It doesn't cost the public anything, and those who need the info pay for it.
However, in most cases the taxpayers foot the whole bill, but they can't access the data.
Now, some argue that the average taxpayer has no interest in some scholarly article on physical chemistry or whatever. That isn't the point. Open access benefits the public indirectly, and it is also benefitical to scientists who wouldn't mind keeping up on published work but who aren't affiliated with a university that has a bazillion dollars for journal subscriptions. The average scientist working in industry almost never keeps up with published science (to the loss of scientists everywhere) because they aren't going to fork out for subscriptions and most industrial labs won't pay for any but the most essential journals for their field.
It is such a waste when we have millions to spend on research, but the cost to set up a website to publish the results is considered excessive. I'm sure that for less than what the NIH pays in grants for page costs they could set up and operate their own peer-reviewed online publication system (available to scientists and professionals of all disciplines). The value of that would be enormous.
And how does having an EULA prevent this? Is that really going to stop somebody from distributing a version of Firefox with malware in it when they aren't stoped by the already-binding license file and numerous laws that make distribution of malware illegal in the first place?
It is illegal to distribute firefox without a license. That license is conferred by the license file. The EULA really doesn't matter much - in fact you never need to accept it to create and distribute some malware (since you don't need to run it to do that).
EULAs are fairly silly from a legal perspective - they don't actually license you to do anything. A license is used to give somebody permission to do something they couldn't already do. For example, copyright law forbids people in general from distributing creative works. A license like the GPL or MPL gives you persmission to do this anyway under particular circumstances. They're just as binding in files as they are on-screen - since you need to accept some kind of license to distribute the files at all (except under fair use). EULAs aren't targeted at distributors - they're targeted at users. However, users don't actually need a license to do anything at all, since no law forbids people from using software they have in their possession.
Creating a derivitive work is not prohibited by the copyright laws. DISTRIBUTING a derivative work is.
Copyright restricts the rights of individuals to distribute creative works. It has nothing to do with how individuals use those works when they aren't copying them. Copying for personal use is a gray area - it tends to fall under fair use.
Hmm - they don't seem to hesitate much when the issue is a news reporter refusing to testify about sources. It seems like this kind of discretion is reserved for corrupt C-level officers...
If the virus signatures were distributed in a way that minimized server resource conosumption the frequent updates might not be a problem.
The trick is to only transmit changes - not the whole database.
You could even have realtime updates - clients register with a server and get a call-back when a new definition is available.
:)
Oddly enough that is pretty-much considered the best way to set up raid-5 on linux (software raid at least). Just google for the various howtos.
I guess linux software raid isn't for the faint of heart. It works well, however. In theory it is more recoverable than hardware raid, although hardware raid has the clear advantage of being able to do battery-backed cache which might have eliminated some of the causes for my lvm failures.
Or we consumers can just file class action lawsuits. Last time I checked in a democracy the people were in charge...
There is a reason that phone companies get hit with class action suits rather frequently - these kinds of predatory practices are too common.
And no, it isn't OK to just say "well, if you don't like the boilerplate contracts then just don't use a cell phone, use the internet, own a car, rent a car, own a house, rent a house, use a credit card, mail something via a private delivery company, use a computer program, or do any of 4000 other things that use such agreements."
If I sign on a contract saying that I agree to sell myself into slavery for $1000 that doesn't make it legal. Believe it or not I actually had one person in this thread say that this should in fact be legal. :)
Oh well, I guess that's what I get for voting libertarian... Are there any political parties out there that believe in neither fascism, massive redistribution of wealth, nor legalization of slavery?
Yes - well, I'm fine with allowing people to pay more for more service. What I'm against is network providers allowing users to easily run up tabs of $500 on a service that has cost them $100 per month for the last 48 months - let alone $20k.
If the person went online using their phone and was temporarily blocked while a message asked them to confirm that they want to incur charges of $20/MB or whatever and an estimate that this would cost them up to $x/hour (based on the bandwidth of the service) and then asking them how much of a cost limit they'd like to set, then I wouldn't mind if a user typed in "go ahead and charge me $20k" and that happened.
The problem is that phone providers make it WAY to easy to be charged fees. It is like having pay-to-call phone numbers that charge $10/minute, or the carribean area code scams a number of years ago.
I'm all for market solutions, but only if the costs are completely transparent. And transparent doesn't mean a line in a contract saying "the company may charge you other charges for services not listed here - call for details".
I wonder how many people get burned every year by an unexpected $50 charge on a cell phone bill. Sounds like a recipe for a class action lawsuit. And I'm not normally a big proponent of litigation.
The only issue with this is oversubscription. This would let ISPs oversell their bandwidth by a factor of 10 million and throttle down anybody not just browsing the web. Sure, it wouldn't impose any "bandwidth caps" per customer - but if the overall service is oversold then deprioritizing traffic is effectively capping it.
What they should do is just be honest about bandwidth. Sell service based on peak rate and then some kind of volume-related metric such as GB per day/month/hour/whatever. You could then pay for what you want to have. Rates should be required to be linear within some range and be unbundled to prevent ISPs from just setting the rates such that nobody would want to buy anything other than web-only service. So your typical $15/month DSL plan might turn into $5/month for the 756kbps bandwidth and $10/month for 10GB transferred - or maybe there would be some baseline service charge just for having service at all (which includes no bandwidth) since that is a real cost. Then you could pay more to either up your burst rate or your total bandwidth use.
The important thing is giving consumers some choice.
Well, what good would reading their contracts do? They could sign predatory contract from provider A, or predatory contract from provider B. If they want service there isn't much point in reading the fine print, since these hassles are the cost of doing business.
On the other hand, there is no reason we consumers can't put companies through the ringer legally and politicially and make that the cost of writing one-sided agreements. If it is fair to impose one-sided contracts on your customers, then it is fair to tie companies up in perpetual class-action lawsuits. Personally I'd rather just see some orderly consumer-friendly business practices and proceed in cooperation and not wasteful litigation.
Most contracts also have a provision for when the contract is in conflict with the relevant laws of the jurisdiction as to how to deal with those. Often times things are in the contract which are only enforceable in certain circumstances.
Well, then, we have a simple solution.
We pass a law that states that certain predatory business practices are completely illegal - much as we've done with slavery. Then folks who value rules over people can devote their energy to sticking it to megacorporations as much as they currently stick it to some guy just trying to make ends meet with a $20k phone bill.
I'm fairly libertarian, but contracts only ought to be enforcable to the degree that they represent the negotiation of two parties - not to the degree that they were written by a company lawyer and mass produced for 8 million customers to sign. Do you think that I could get phone service ANYWHERE if I wanted to actually negotiate my own contract? Even if I offered the phone company a million dollars a month for my plan I doubt they'd want to bother dealing with me.
Contracts are supposed to be a "meeting of the minds". That implies there being more than one mind present when the contract is written, and when it is signed.
I'm not convinced that the current system would operate if there were a total crash of the radar system.
We've to date only had long crashes involving stuff like flight plan management which doesn't directly affect planes already in the sky. I'm sure there have been short radar outages, but if the problem is local to a region and only lasts a few minutes the impact isn't too bad (route planes around the area when possible, and the situation doesn't change much in a few minutes).
If the system went down completely for a few hours, I can't see ATC controllers using paper strips and stopwatches and calculators trying to figure out where every plane is in realtime and keeping them on course. They barely manage with the computers.
Still, I'm all for having contingency plans. Perhaps at all times the system should maintain an emergency abort plan that is communicated to individual planes - if the system goes down and contact is lost all planes being executing the plan, which diverts all aircraft to airports capable of servicing them in a way that causes the least congestion without regard to intended destination. So, instead of having a line of 300 planes landing at O'Hare you have 10 planes at 30 more obscure airports. Get everybody on the ground. TCAS can still handle emergencies, and of course typical separation practices already have a huge safety margin built in (it isn't like two planes within 3 miles of each other are guaranteed to crash - that is just the distance with radar error necessary to guarantee a non-crash).
The system really needs to be failure-proof. If there is a complete failure, lots of people could die. We're already there most likely. Sooner or later it will happen with the current overloaded system, and when it does those thousands of guys manning the radios won't be able to prevent the inevitable though they'll do their best and probably get much of the traffic down.
When I was hit with one of those crazy charges (at a much lower scale) the "customer service" rep had the gall to tell me that I should just call in to check my bill a few times a month to stay on top of these sorts of things. They could have upsold me to a more expensive plan if I had caught the problem in realtime and then eliminted the usage charges. Uh, yeah - that sounds practical. If every industry worked like that I'd need to micromanage about 100 accounts just to keep track of what predatory utility service is trying to tack on an extra $200 this week.
Most people find out when they get the bill - at which point not only is it considered non-negotiable, but you're probably halfway or more into your next billing cycle where you might be facing more of the same.
The issue is that if they wanted service they had to agree to a boilerplate contract with one-sided terms. Now, they could have chosen what company to sign a one-sided contract with, but pretty much every phone company has contracts designed to stick it to the customer.
I have a simple solution. Pass laws regulating these kinds of predatory practices. Then cell phone companies will have the "freedom" to choose whether they want to do business in the USA, and when they feel like they've been run-over by the law we can talk about how they had taken on legal obligations by doing business here and why they shouldn't be outraged when they are enforced. The interest of consumers in general outweighs the interest of a cartel of corporations. Sure, that doesn't mean government should wield a hammer to regulate every aspect of our lives, but enforcing terms like allowing customers to set a limit on charges to block expensive services seems pretty reasonable to me.
Consider that some people have circumstances which make the children's phones a near-necessity for safety/etc reasons. And they're not a significant expense on most plans - provided you don't stray into one of those billing traps designed to run up your bill.
In general I tend to be a stick-by-your-word sort of guy. And in the end I ended up paying the bill. However, I don't think that I received $500 worth of service for those charges (another "unlimited" plan that would have eliminated those charges would cost less than that for a year or two of service).
Cell phones are an industry with only a handful of providers, and the ones with significant coverage are even fewer. These kinds of natural near-monopolies should not have the freedom to dictate terms at will in a boilerplate contract. Did I truly have the freedom to negotiate a contract for a cell phone at the same rates with the same coverage but with a built-in limit to prevent these kinds of charges?
I'm sorry - stick-it-to-you charges should not be part of a valid business model.
Ok - I signed a cell phone contract. I know that it gives the phone company the right to:
1. Charge me huge fees for non-routine items like data transfer - especially outside of a coverage area. And it might not be obvious if I'm outside that coverage area.
2. Require binding arbitration of any disputes.
3. Require me to keep secret any settlement or judgment I get against the phone company so that others don't realize that they can win in court.
That doesn't make any of that legal. I never "agreed" with anybody on those terms. I just signed them because otherwise I can't use a cell phone (or just about any other convenience of modern life). If the agreement said that if I got too far behind on my payments they could take me into slavery I'd probably still have signed it - knowing full well what it meant.
Big corporations basically lie about being interested in customer service. Consumers basically lie about agreeing to the terms of service. Courts end up trying to find the middle ground. Not all contracts ought to be enforcable.
So? If they are it's their own fault. They claimed that they both read and understood all the nuances of the contract when they accepted it. They have no excuse for being surprised by the financial repercussions.
Should people be free to enter in to ANY kind of contract? Suppose the contract stated that if you didn't pay your bill on time you would become indentured to the phone company until such time as you paid the bill? If you're in really hard straits should you be able to sell yourself into slavery?
Boilerplate contracts are generally enforcable, but courts have discretion to determine the fairness of any such contract. This is for good reason - they don't represent a meeting of the minds, but rather a deal in which one side has far more bargaining power than the other. When every phone provider in the country has onerous terms your only option is to not own a phone.
Go ahead and try to live without a credit card, phone, cell phone, internet, or anything else that requires signing a boilerplate contract with one-sided terms. Sure, you can still live that way, but why would you want to? You can't even go to the hospital without signing a boilerplate contract. In some cases you can be treated as if you had implied consent to a contract if you were treated while unable to make decisions.
Look - I'm fairly libertarian - more so than most. However, consumer protection laws are very necessary in this day and age when just about every cost-effective industry is an oligopoly.
It isn't even a matter of clauses buried in fine print. The problem is that this is "standard practice" and it is anti-consumer. Even if the first line in the agreement was 48 point and said "note that when you use your phone internationally you could end up being assessed charges far in excess of normal" it wouldn't be fair. It should simply not be possible to use a phone in a way that could run up that kind of a bill. If nothing else phone providers should be required to allow their customers to set a monthly limit on their spending - if the provider somehow lets the consumer go over the limit without express consent from the account owner they end up eating the cost.
And I don't want to hear about how roaming billing cycles are too slow to allow that kind of realtime assessment of charges. If they can route a 32kbps digital phone call from my home to a point halfway around the world such that it only takes 2 seconds for the phone to start ringing and there are no gaps in the audio, then they can send a 10-byte estimate of the cost of the call per minute and do a database lookup.
Ok, I've been burned by a child on a phone plan not understanding the limits of an "unlimited" text messaging plan and running up a $500 bill. I ended up paying it because I didn't want to mount a full scale protest at the phone company headquarters, which is probably what it would take to remove the bill.
The fact is that phone companies make it WAY to easy to run up HUGE bills. It isn't like you have any choice - every company does it.
When you're about to do something to raise your bill by an order of magnitude somebody should get your consent. And I'm talking at-the-moment for a specific action consent - not a line in a 10 page contract. Even if you read the line it isn't fair to allow companies to enforce it.
Imagine if every auto shop in town had a huge sign in bold print stating that per shop policy they reserve the right to bill you up to 100X the quoted rate if they end up feeling the need to do more work than was originally quoted. Would that make the practice fair? Disclosure isn't enough.
Speaking of kernel memory...
Why is it bad if I write a virtually any program that runs as root and directly accesses hardware from userspace without using kernel drivers, but for some reason we seem to accept this as the right way to do things with X11?
You shouldn't need to be root to launch an X server. The server should just contact video drivers in the kernel in much the same way it might access a file via the filesystem layer. Why do we need a million independant projects that all create drivers for video hardware? Why not just have one in the kernel - which after all is intended to be a device abstraction layer?
And no, that doesn't mean the window manager needs to run in kernel space like in windows. I'm taking about hardware abstraction only, with the obvious support for OpenGL-like features to improve performance.
Moreover, if I were concerned about people with the resources to detect residual data on a zereoed hard drive, I certainly wouldn't trust cryptography. If the crypto system is ever defeated chances are whoever has your drive could recover almost everything on it even without resorting to scanning/tunneling electron microscopes and all that.
Multiple writes with random data is the only way to be REALLY sure. If you don't anticipate government-scale attackers then a simple zeroing is sufficient - and /dev/zero is a whole lot faster than /dev/urandom on most systems.
I think that the one thing we can count on is whether the Democrats or the Republicans win, we'll see more power concentrated in the Federal government. Sure, they'll vary on some niche issues, but either way money talks.
Keep in mind that Clinton did far more to erode many Democratic pet issues like abortion and welfare than any Republican in recent history. Bush on the other hand has done more to promote big governemnt than any liberal democrat in recent history. Both sides pay lip service to party planks, but if they actually "solve" those problems then voters might not need them anymore...