First, can I assume that you agree that spending less than you earn, and doing it for a long time are both very important aspects of financial independence?
If so, then I absolutely agree with you that there's risk involved with investing. But there's also risk involved with not investing. If you spend less than you earn, what do you do with the difference? If you simply stick it in a safe and do nothing with it, the risk associated with this "strategy" is inflation. Your purchasing power will decline at roughly 3% per year. In other words, you lose when you do absolutely nothing. If you put it into a savings account that earns 0.5% per year, you still lose to inflation, but just not as much.
It's a dramatic oversimplification to say that you can just "invest". Realistically that means building a well diversified portfolio, and maintaining it. But there's only so much I can put into/.'s 120 character sig limit.
To a certain extent, specs define the parameters around communication. That's why interoperability works: conform with the spec and you can communicate... except when you can't because the spec was built but never implemented, and the spec designers introduced bugs that they would have caught if they'd tried to implement it. Or maybe the spec designers had a specific idea of how things were going to be and didn't anticipate a particular application and it's needs.
If you accept the premise that specs enable communication, I would ask you this: where is the spec for English? And wherein does it describe things like "fo-shizzle" and "off the hizzle"? Or any other dynamic aspect of language that shows up everywhere in the world. Many people communicate without having a written spec for how that communication is going to work. More over, "fo-shizzle" (et al) is well understood by many people outside of the culture that created it despite it's never having been incorporated into an English language spec. Defining a spec for English is really pointless. The language changes and develops for the specific needs of the people using it.
It strikes me that the same is true with technology specs. If you don't define them, people will make incremental improvements to stuff without having to worry about hearing, "Hey! That's out of spec!" Put another way, specs are the antithesis of incremental change by individuals who need those changes. Specs are cathedral, not bazaar.
Are there spec success stories? Sure: IP. On the other hand how long have we been trying to get greater acceptance of IP6? And why do we want IP6 at all? Because no one is willing to incrementally change IP4.
Put another way: specs are a form of governance. They're the central group saying "thou shalt". That's fine if (and only if) that central group knows every possible implication of every decision that they make. Linus seems to be trying to avoid that. He seems to have faith that a diverse group of people will do a better job of figuring out what works best over time than he alone, or this particular set of kernel devs, could devise today.
There is one caveat: Symantec counts only those security flaws that have been confirmed by the vendor. According to security monitoring company Secunia, there are 19 security issues that Microsoft still has to deal with for Internet Explorer, while there are only three for Firefox.
Interesting methodology. That means that the browser vendor is in complete control of the vulnerability counts. This is NOT the kind of reporting of vulnerabilities that I think should be encouraged. I'd rather see vulnerability reports that encourage full disclosure. This creates an incentive for the vendor to hide vulnerabilities. I think that's bad.
How about this: a report that identifies the vulnerabilities associated with a vendor, and not a product. In other words, after the initial public announcement of a vulnerability, we report how long it took the vendor to release a patch. Lower scores are better.
These are newcomers. Shouldn't that give us some pause as to how much we should rely on them? Yes they've been well studied. But compare AES with DES. It's been around forever and the only weakness that we know of is keylength. Do we really have enough exposure to the "new guys" to put confidence in them to switch everything to them?
A house, even with a loan, is not a liability. It's an asset. The loan against the house is the liability. Add the value of the house to the debt of the loan and what's left over is your equity.
This is significant. The day that you buy the house, the loan value and the asset value equal zero. Your net worth has not changed. But from that day forward, when you pay your mortgage, you are building equity: a form of savings. Is it as liquid as cash in a bank? No, of course not. But it's savings none the less. That's a very good thing.
Even better is to build an emergency fund in a nice stable money market account that has 3-6 months worth of living expenses in it. The average savings rate in this country is 0%. If you build an emergency fund, you're ahead of most US citizens.
Maybe not. But having something saved to fall back on becomes very useful in the event of the unexpected. Ask anyone who's ever been laid off.
You can couch a non-saving lifestyle in whatever platitudes you like. But saving is generally considered to be a virtue for a very good reason: if tragedy strikes, you don't suddenly demand that the state (e.g. the funding of your fellow citizens) come bail you out.
This pricing scheme is not likely to work out well for the music industry. It ignores the long tail. From the wired article:
An analysis of the sales data and trends from these services and others like them shows that the emerging digital entertainment economy is going to be radically different from today's mass market. If the 20th century entertainment industry was about hits, the 21st will be equally about misses.
If you're the music industry, and you give a discount to the misses, you're going to end up making less money. The number of sales of millions misses outranks the number of sales of the top 20 hits.
Of course, this could be their goal: to make iTunes less profitable and drive them out of business, then swoop in and offer a different service... Or maybe they want to make iTunes less profitible in order to drive music consumers back to purcashing CDs... ???
</conspiracy_theory>
This reminds me of a quote from Coupling. I don't remember the exact quote but it went something like, "Of course you know what we're thinking. We make it easy for you by only thinking of one thing. And do we get any appreciation?"
Why is universal wifi a problem when it's provided by a private company, but a Good Thing (TM) when it's provided by municipalities and paid for with tax dollars?
The DMCA doesn't exist because the private sector can create law.
I rather think it does.
Well, unfortunately, that is an unconvincing argument. You have to provide some points in order to support that argument, or refute my points. What you've provided is an assertion. It's not an argument. I think that I've demonstrated a point, and that point is that the private sector doesn't create laws. To which you've responded with the equivalent "nuh-uh".
Here's the point that I think I've made and that I think you should focus on: the private sector does not create laws, the government does. All of the problems that you complain about originating from the private sector only occured because the government failed in their responsibility.
Explain to me *HOW* you think it is that the private sector created the DMCA or extended copyright to the abomination that it is or created the patriot act or... fill in whatever law you like. Explain to me which company's president cast a vote in the house or the senate. Explain to me which CEO signed the bill into law. As I recall every one of those things was done by an elected official of the government.
<hyptohetical>If there were no government, exactly how would the private sector have created the DMCA? If there were no government, exactly how could a private firm have extended copyright? </hypothetical>
The reality is that the ills that you complain about the private sector are really the ills of the government. If you disbelieve that then help me understand: put forth an argument that refutes it.
Or you live near their facilities, or your parents did, or you live downstream or downwind,...
These are the classic "negative externalities", and they have nothing to do with government interference... except for being the motivation for it.
Already been addressed by Coase. What you're suggesting is called "Pigouvian taxes". (No really, that's what they're called. If I had to contrive a word like that, I'd never be able to come up with something so odd... anyway) Pigouvian taxes are very frequently ineffective - which is to say that they don't do a good job of taking into account all of the costs, and end up picking the one that the least number of people want.
You're talking about the path to the present day. I'm simply describing the present day. And in the present day the private sector is the problem.
No. I'm talking about what caused the problem in the first place. And saying that we shouldn't repeat that problem again. If we do, then we should very likely expect similar results. If I grant you that an improperly regulated private sector is the problem, then sending more regulatory power to the government, which caused the problem in the first place, is going to make it worse.
The fact is, right now, the individuals who are right now making the decisions that are right now leading to the suppression of free speech are people who are working in the private rather than the public sector.
No they're not. The DMCA doesn't exist because the private sector can create law. The DMCA exists because the government created it. The never-ending copyright does not exist because the private sector wanted it. It exists because a set of elected officials gave it to them.
Corruption doesn't come "with government" or "with the private sector", it comes with power and control. And right now, the people with that power and control are not, except at the very top, the people in government.
I agree with the first sentence. I disagree with the 2nd. The government is the one exercising the power and control. They've done this by pimping it to the private sector. They're able to pimp it to the private sector because everytime you turn around, someone else is describing some power that we should take away from an individual and give to the government. The solution is to stop handing over so much power to the government.
And things like surreptitiously suppressing access to a critical website are among the results of these decisions.
I still don't understand how, when a telco does this, it's as bad as when a government does this. When a government does this, your only solution is to leave the country. When a telco does this, you simply leave that telco. The latter seems dramatically simpler to accomplish. How are these two things anything alike?
The reason the threat from the private sector is so high is the government provides the private sector with artificial monopolies
That is, IMHO, reason to be angry with the government. They have divested their power to someone else in exchange for soft money. The corruption here comes from the government when they did that.
If I try to expose an abuse or a mistake by the private sector those protections are much weaker or nonexistent, and in some areas (ironically, areas most relevant to free speech), I can be arrested, sued into perpetual bankruptcy, or if applicable deported.
And here's where we get to negative externalities, isn't it? Most of the time, a mistake that a private corporation makes only impacts you because you're in a customer or employee relationship with them. You can easily change both of those situations. But of course, not all of those mistakes can be handled by such direct interactions. To which I say, Coase.
Most of the examples I've seen lately of people being screwed by Pres/Rep/Sen/Hizonner so-and-so in order to restrict their freedom of speech have been initiated by the private sector using the courts as "hired coercive force"
And these examples are just more examples of the corruption that comes with government, not the private sector. The government is the one pimping away their responsibilities. If we could get less government involvement, then companies would be forced to serve their customers instead of trying bribe away some of the government's power. Remove the government and the private sector is left with only one way to retain any power: by serving their customers. Add more of the government, and you see companies less concerned with serving their customer and more concerned with wresting that power.
IMHO, your complaints shouldn't be with the private sector. They should be with the fact that the government has taken away your ability to regulate the private sector. The government has placed itself in the position of regulating the private sector and then abandoned the job. Now, when you'd like to be able to do it again, you can't. Because it's easy to raise taxes. Taxes that are used to generate laws that are used to prop up federally subsidized monopolies. It no longer matters what the consumer wants. What matters is what laws you can buy from the politicians.
IMHO, the problem here is that those who promised to regulate the private sector when they took that job away from you have stepped down. And that problem falls squarly on the shoulders of the government.
But that's just my $.02. You're welcome to disagree.
the biggest current threat to our freedom of speech comes from the private sector.
This is something that I'd really like to understand. I currently don't. One of the advantages that I see to the private sector is that you only voluntarily participate in it. No one forces me to use Microsoft Windows. Even though Microsoft has achieved (by every measure that seems sensible to me) monopoly status, I'm not forced to use it. In fact, I don't use it despite the monopoly status. But when a rule is implemented by a government, I have very little personal ability to redress that issue. When Microsoft does something that screws me, I can easily redress that by not paying them for future services. When {President,Represenative,Senator,Judge} So-and-so does something that screws me, I'm just screwed.
Can you give me some examples of the private sector's removal of my rights?
So, you're retort to my argument is that it's wrong because I'm a Libertarian?
Do you know what ad hominem arguments are? Personally, I don't think it's a particularly useful form of argument, but then there's the 1st amendment. You're allowed to express yourself however you see fit. I won't try to stop you.
I totally missed this part of your post. I should have commented on it in my first reply.
If the ISP (in this case, the telco) is allowed to restrict access to websites on any criteria it wants, that actually gives it MORE power than the government - which is at least nominally answerable to the public.
ISP's are a in a competitive landscape. There are *TONS* of them. They *must* answer to the demands of their customers or they're going to lose customers. Compared to the private sector, the government is not even close when it comes to being answerable to the public. It's trivially easy to switch ISPs. It's next to impossible to change a law or regulation.
I agree that telco's are not as competitive as ISP's, but that's mostly as a result of governmental regulation of that industry. City governments have granted telcos local monopoly power. Lack of competition in that industry results in that industry being less responsive. In other words, the fact that telcos tend to be less customer responsive comes from... the government.
The bottom line is that what the telco was doing in this case was every bit as effective as "government censorship".
I'm sorry but I'm forced to disagree. If I'm a customer of that telco, I simply switch and get my internet from the local cableco. Problem solved. Compare this with what I'd have to do if the government decided to restrict access to that site to all citizens. I'd either have to break the law and risk going to jail or move to a different country.
IMHO, the word "censorship" has a negative connotation specifically because of how bad it is when a government chooses to exercise it. When a private corporation in a competitive market does this kind of thing, the solution is simple: switch to a competitor. I don't see how those two impacts are even remotely close to each other.
The issue isn't "what's the definition of censorship". It's "should a public utility have the right to suppress opposing points of view".
First, when I say I'm opposed to censorship, it means that I'm opposed to the exercise of government power to restrict expression. Any other (non-government) restriction of expression is not something that merits the negative connotation of the word "censorship". Usually non-government restriction of expression is simply a contract dispute. Which is much easier to resolve than the exercise of government power.
Second, I absolutely believe that the telco should have whatever rights they wish on the infrastructure that they own. It's theirs. They own it. They can do whatever it is they want on it, including blocking certain traffic. However, when they sell that service to a customer, they have obliged themselves to provide a service. Failure to do so is breach of contract.
If the telco starts randomly blocking out different internet sites, and there's nothing in the contract (terms of service) that says they can do that, then the customers have a legitimate grievance. Generally the easiest way for a customer to settle the grievance is to simply switch to a competitor. If a competitor is not available, then they can sue.
The end result of this is that it very much *does* matter what the definition of censorship is before I'm going to say whether or not I think it's ok.
Like I said, you're welcome to use the word however you want. But don't be surprised if most of the rest of us who use it differently say that it has a different meaning.
Ultimately this is an argument about the meaning of a word. I say it means one thing and you disagree. But not only do you disagree, you think I should agree with your definition which I don't. In fact, I suspect (without proof) that most people when they say "censorship" really only mean government censorship. But if that's not what you mean, that's OK with me. I, on the other hand, will continue to use the word in the way that I understand it.
Yes it is. You can argue that this is censorship that the Telco has the right to impose (and in fact you seem to be making that argument) but it is in fact censorship.
Now, of course, you're welcome to call it censorship if you like, but if you're going to freely redefine words in whatever way you want, then it censorship isn't much different than calling it a blue volkswagon. You're free to call it a blue volkswagon if you like too. That's not what the rest of us mean when we say "blue volkswagon" in exactly the same way it's not what the rest of us mean when we say "censorship".
No. It's not reasonable for them to restrict access to web pages during contract negotiations. But (as has been previously mentioned) this is not censorship. The issue here may very well be breach of contract. If I were a customer of this ISP and I was arbitrarily blocked from any website by ISP policy, I would be looking at my Terms of Service to determine when and where it said they could do that. If it wasn't there, I'd be demanding my money back for every day that they were in breach of the agreement which I paid for. And then there's always small claims court.
But, this is not censorship. This is a service that you pay for and you expect to be delivered to you. Additionally, the union has absolutely no expectation of delivery to customers of that telco. If they did, then services like safeaccess couldn't exist. Every pornographer in the world could run around and demand that parents allow thier children to view porn.
Is this unreasonable? Yes. And it will likely cost them (lost customers, time fighting with annoyed customers, small claims court).
Yes, but what you're missing (and the point of the broken window falacy) is that you're not seeing something in the equation. And that is where that money might have trickled down to if it hadn't been forced to be spent on fixing the date. If the date needs to be fixed, those companies have to spend money to fix the date. If they don't have to fix the date, they have both a working date mechanism and the money that they didn't have to spend to fix it. That money might have been spent on something else, but we'll never see it because it was spent reparing something that should have worked. The entire economy is that much poorer because it was forced to fix something that was already working.
Think of it another way. If breaking things that are already working is beneficial to society, we should all become terrorists. We should destroy as much as we possibly can because it will (in the end) make us richer.
It's false. In the end, the more that we are required to fix things that had previously been working, the poorer we all are. Some of us (the fixers) may be richer, but that's only at the expense of the rest of us who are poorer.
I'm not suggesting that the wifi provider should be the one to blame. I'm suggesting that the guy who was snooping around some other guys house knew that he was doing something wrong and that he should have been arrested.
People around here seem to think that if you leave your wifi open that you're intentionally inviting someone to connect to it. Ok, if this guy thought that he was invited to join the wifi network, he wouldn't have run when someone came to ask what he was doing. In exactly the same way that if he's in a grocery store (which he's invited to enter) he doesn't run when the proprieter comes up to ask "May I help you?"
But no, the guy hid and ran. He wasn't there because he thought he was invited. He, in fact, knew that he wasn't invited and ran before getting caught. He should have been arrested because his behavior indicates that he knew he was going somewhere that he wasn't welcome.
Slashdot Mirror
First, can I assume that you agree that spending less than you earn, and doing it for a long time are both very important aspects of financial independence?
/.'s 120 character sig limit.
If so, then I absolutely agree with you that there's risk involved with investing. But there's also risk involved with not investing. If you spend less than you earn, what do you do with the difference? If you simply stick it in a safe and do nothing with it, the risk associated with this "strategy" is inflation. Your purchasing power will decline at roughly 3% per year. In other words, you lose when you do absolutely nothing. If you put it into a savings account that earns 0.5% per year, you still lose to inflation, but just not as much.
It's a dramatic oversimplification to say that you can just "invest". Realistically that means building a well diversified portfolio, and maintaining it. But there's only so much I can put into
To a certain extent, specs define the parameters around communication. That's why interoperability works: conform with the spec and you can communicate... except when you can't because the spec was built but never implemented, and the spec designers introduced bugs that they would have caught if they'd tried to implement it. Or maybe the spec designers had a specific idea of how things were going to be and didn't anticipate a particular application and it's needs.
If you accept the premise that specs enable communication, I would ask you this: where is the spec for English? And wherein does it describe things like "fo-shizzle" and "off the hizzle"? Or any other dynamic aspect of language that shows up everywhere in the world. Many people communicate without having a written spec for how that communication is going to work. More over, "fo-shizzle" (et al) is well understood by many people outside of the culture that created it despite it's never having been incorporated into an English language spec. Defining a spec for English is really pointless. The language changes and develops for the specific needs of the people using it.
It strikes me that the same is true with technology specs. If you don't define them, people will make incremental improvements to stuff without having to worry about hearing, "Hey! That's out of spec!" Put another way, specs are the antithesis of incremental change by individuals who need those changes. Specs are cathedral, not bazaar.
Are there spec success stories? Sure: IP. On the other hand how long have we been trying to get greater acceptance of IP6? And why do we want IP6 at all? Because no one is willing to incrementally change IP4.
Put another way: specs are a form of governance. They're the central group saying "thou shalt". That's fine if (and only if) that central group knows every possible implication of every decision that they make. Linus seems to be trying to avoid that. He seems to have faith that a diverse group of people will do a better job of figuring out what works best over time than he alone, or this particular set of kernel devs, could devise today.
Of course, I could be wrong.
How about this: a report that identifies the vulnerabilities associated with a vendor, and not a product. In other words, after the initial public announcement of a vulnerability, we report how long it took the vendor to release a patch. Lower scores are better.
Anybody think that'll work? If not, why not?
These are newcomers. Shouldn't that give us some pause as to how much we should rely on them? Yes they've been well studied. But compare AES with DES. It's been around forever and the only weakness that we know of is keylength. Do we really have enough exposure to the "new guys" to put confidence in them to switch everything to them?
A house, even with a loan, is not a liability. It's an asset. The loan against the house is the liability. Add the value of the house to the debt of the loan and what's left over is your equity. This is significant. The day that you buy the house, the loan value and the asset value equal zero. Your net worth has not changed. But from that day forward, when you pay your mortgage, you are building equity: a form of savings. Is it as liquid as cash in a bank? No, of course not. But it's savings none the less. That's a very good thing. Even better is to build an emergency fund in a nice stable money market account that has 3-6 months worth of living expenses in it. The average savings rate in this country is 0%. If you build an emergency fund, you're ahead of most US citizens.
You can couch a non-saving lifestyle in whatever platitudes you like. But saving is generally considered to be a virtue for a very good reason: if tragedy strikes, you don't suddenly demand that the state (e.g. the funding of your fellow citizens) come bail you out.
Of course, this could be their goal: to make iTunes less profitable and drive them out of business, then swoop in and offer a different service... Or maybe they want to make iTunes less profitible in order to drive music consumers back to purcashing CDs... ??? </conspiracy_theory>
This reminds me of a quote from Coupling. I don't remember the exact quote but it went something like, "Of course you know what we're thinking. We make it easy for you by only thinking of one thing. And do we get any appreciation?"
He didn't say it was false. He said it was unsubstantiated.
Why is universal wifi a problem when it's provided by a private company, but a Good Thing (TM) when it's provided by municipalities and paid for with tax dollars?
Here's the point that I think I've made and that I think you should focus on: the private sector does not create laws, the government does. All of the problems that you complain about originating from the private sector only occured because the government failed in their responsibility.
Explain to me *HOW* you think it is that the private sector created the DMCA or extended copyright to the abomination that it is or created the patriot act or ... fill in whatever law you like. Explain to me which company's president cast a vote in the house or the senate. Explain to me which CEO signed the bill into law. As I recall every one of those things was done by an elected official of the government.
<hyptohetical>If there were no government, exactly how would the private sector have created the DMCA? If there were no government, exactly how could a private firm have extended copyright? </hypothetical>
The reality is that the ills that you complain about the private sector are really the ills of the government. If you disbelieve that then help me understand: put forth an argument that refutes it.
IMHO, your complaints shouldn't be with the private sector. They should be with the fact that the government has taken away your ability to regulate the private sector. The government has placed itself in the position of regulating the private sector and then abandoned the job. Now, when you'd like to be able to do it again, you can't. Because it's easy to raise taxes. Taxes that are used to generate laws that are used to prop up federally subsidized monopolies. It no longer matters what the consumer wants. What matters is what laws you can buy from the politicians.
IMHO, the problem here is that those who promised to regulate the private sector when they took that job away from you have stepped down. And that problem falls squarly on the shoulders of the government.
But that's just my $.02. You're welcome to disagree.
Can you give me some examples of the private sector's removal of my rights?
So, you're retort to my argument is that it's wrong because I'm a Libertarian?
Do you know what ad hominem arguments are? Personally, I don't think it's a particularly useful form of argument, but then there's the 1st amendment. You're allowed to express yourself however you see fit. I won't try to stop you.
I agree that telco's are not as competitive as ISP's, but that's mostly as a result of governmental regulation of that industry. City governments have granted telcos local monopoly power. Lack of competition in that industry results in that industry being less responsive. In other words, the fact that telcos tend to be less customer responsive comes from... the government.
I'm sorry but I'm forced to disagree. If I'm a customer of that telco, I simply switch and get my internet from the local cableco. Problem solved. Compare this with what I'd have to do if the government decided to restrict access to that site to all citizens. I'd either have to break the law and risk going to jail or move to a different country.IMHO, the word "censorship" has a negative connotation specifically because of how bad it is when a government chooses to exercise it. When a private corporation in a competitive market does this kind of thing, the solution is simple: switch to a competitor. I don't see how those two impacts are even remotely close to each other.
Second, I absolutely believe that the telco should have whatever rights they wish on the infrastructure that they own. It's theirs. They own it. They can do whatever it is they want on it, including blocking certain traffic. However, when they sell that service to a customer, they have obliged themselves to provide a service. Failure to do so is breach of contract. If the telco starts randomly blocking out different internet sites, and there's nothing in the contract (terms of service) that says they can do that, then the customers have a legitimate grievance. Generally the easiest way for a customer to settle the grievance is to simply switch to a competitor. If a competitor is not available, then they can sue.
The end result of this is that it very much *does* matter what the definition of censorship is before I'm going to say whether or not I think it's ok.
Like I said, you're welcome to use the word however you want. But don't be surprised if most of the rest of us who use it differently say that it has a different meaning.
Ultimately this is an argument about the meaning of a word. I say it means one thing and you disagree. But not only do you disagree, you think I should agree with your definition which I don't. In fact, I suspect (without proof) that most people when they say "censorship" really only mean government censorship. But if that's not what you mean, that's OK with me. I, on the other hand, will continue to use the word in the way that I understand it.
No, it's not. Censorship is the use of governmental power to control speech and other forms of human expression. The telco may be heavily regulated, but it isn't exercising government power when it does this.
Now, of course, you're welcome to call it censorship if you like, but if you're going to freely redefine words in whatever way you want, then it censorship isn't much different than calling it a blue volkswagon. You're free to call it a blue volkswagon if you like too. That's not what the rest of us mean when we say "blue volkswagon" in exactly the same way it's not what the rest of us mean when we say "censorship".
No. It's not reasonable for them to restrict access to web pages during contract negotiations. But (as has been previously mentioned) this is not censorship. The issue here may very well be breach of contract. If I were a customer of this ISP and I was arbitrarily blocked from any website by ISP policy, I would be looking at my Terms of Service to determine when and where it said they could do that. If it wasn't there, I'd be demanding my money back for every day that they were in breach of the agreement which I paid for. And then there's always small claims court.
But, this is not censorship. This is a service that you pay for and you expect to be delivered to you. Additionally, the union has absolutely no expectation of delivery to customers of that telco. If they did, then services like safeaccess couldn't exist. Every pornographer in the world could run around and demand that parents allow thier children to view porn.
Is this unreasonable? Yes. And it will likely cost them (lost customers, time fighting with annoyed customers, small claims court).
Yes, but what you're missing (and the point of the broken window falacy) is that you're not seeing something in the equation. And that is where that money might have trickled down to if it hadn't been forced to be spent on fixing the date. If the date needs to be fixed, those companies have to spend money to fix the date. If they don't have to fix the date, they have both a working date mechanism and the money that they didn't have to spend to fix it. That money might have been spent on something else, but we'll never see it because it was spent reparing something that should have worked. The entire economy is that much poorer because it was forced to fix something that was already working.
Think of it another way. If breaking things that are already working is beneficial to society, we should all become terrorists. We should destroy as much as we possibly can because it will (in the end) make us richer.
It's false. In the end, the more that we are required to fix things that had previously been working, the poorer we all are. Some of us (the fixers) may be richer, but that's only at the expense of the rest of us who are poorer.
- Shock and Awe: a constant pummeling of software bombs to beat the users into submission
...which I will take... wait... no I don't think I can take it. I'm pretty sure it's already been done.I'm not suggesting that the wifi provider should be the one to blame. I'm suggesting that the guy who was snooping around some other guys house knew that he was doing something wrong and that he should have been arrested.
People around here seem to think that if you leave your wifi open that you're intentionally inviting someone to connect to it. Ok, if this guy thought that he was invited to join the wifi network, he wouldn't have run when someone came to ask what he was doing. In exactly the same way that if he's in a grocery store (which he's invited to enter) he doesn't run when the proprieter comes up to ask "May I help you?"
But no, the guy hid and ran. He wasn't there because he thought he was invited. He, in fact, knew that he wasn't invited and ran before getting caught. He should have been arrested because his behavior indicates that he knew he was going somewhere that he wasn't welcome.