Tim Wu's new book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires," is relevant and worth looking at here - if nothing else, read the salon.com review:
Wu, a prominent champion of net neutrality, proposes what he calls "a Separation Principle for the information economy." He wants to see "those who develop information, those who own the network infrastructure on which it travels, and those who control the tools or venues of access... kept apart from one another." He also wants the government to "keep its distance and not intervene in the market to favor any technology, network monopoly, or integration of the major functions of an information industry."
I'm sure the book is more nuanced than this, but IMHO allowing competitors to control access to each others' content is simply bound to fail, converging at a point advantageous to those who own the toll booths, and bad for almost everybody else and the economy and culture as a whole.
Indeed. Why would anyone bother sneaking a bomb through airport security when malls, stadiums, high school graduations, and even the airport security line are such easy and terrifying targets.
I don't know, you tell me, why have they done exactly that? Devoting so much of our defenses to airplanes is obviously an unbalanced approach that will only leave everything else relatively unprotected, right? And yet terrorists keep trying to attack airplanes, countering our air defenses with attacks that are increasingly stealthy - and increasingly ineffective. Why are they doing that?
Also, China is showing itself to be a much larger threat than the USSR ever was.
That statement makes no sense to me. We came to the brink of nuclear war a time or two. Nothing is a "much larger" threat than that.
In the late 90's, as the cold war was truly over, I started to hear all this adversarial talk about China. Then suddenly terrorism was suddenly the big thing and nobody talked about a Chinese military threat for about 8 years. Now that's getting old, and coincidentally we're getting all worked up about China again.
It seems to me there's simply a certain cultural appetite for fear an aggression, which must be fed one way or another.
The problem is that while he does indeed have money, he also has X-ray specs which allow for him to have an unfair advantage over the other players.
To emphasize this point, here are quotes from an article last year on this same story:
Loopholes in market rules give high-speed investors an early glance at how others are trading... some of those orders were most likely routed to a collection of high-frequency traders for just 30 milliseconds -- 0.03 seconds -- in what are known as flash orders. While markets are supposed to ensure transparency by showing orders to everyone simultaneously, a loophole in regulations allows marketplaces like Nasdaq to show traders some orders ahead of everyone else in exchange for a fee.
Sounds like plain old insider trading to me. Maybe worse, since it's the market-maker who's taking kickbacks.
In my experience, FPS was almost dead from banality 10 years ago. There's only so many ways you can flog a dead horse, and improving the graphics isn't it.
FPS won't go away, just like soccer and poker don't go away. The rules and equipment don't need perpetual novelty; it comes from the people playing.
"Personally I think there is probably a "team" of 1-3 people sniggering to and congratulating themselves. "
No, I don't think this is the kid sitting at home ala "War Games," and here is why (from the article):
And Iran's anti-worm effort may have had another setback. In Tehran, men on motorcycles attacked two leading nuclear scientists on their way to work. Using magnetic bombs, the motorcyclists pulled alongside their cars and attached the devices.
One scientist was wounded and the other killed. Confirmed reports say that the murdered scientist was in charge of dealing with the Stuxnet virus at the nuclear plants.
Wow, you know they're serious when the cyberattack is coordinated with targeted assassinations.
Mods, you rated this +5, but do you really believe it? Do you really not read reviews of products at amazon or newegg, or reviews of movies at IMDB? You don't ever access wikipedia? Do you asssume all free software is junk?
Ah yes, the "analog loophole." I do have lots of NTSC hardware, including a hardware MPEG2 encoder, but for now it's less work to copy 4 episodes at a time from DVD. The quality is also much better from a dvd copy of course, although that hardly matters for treadmill viewing.
I upgraded to a faster Internet plan specifically to increase the quality of streaming and am very happy with the picture quality.
However, a big part of the reason I signed up for Netflix was to copy shows onto the iPod my wife and I use at the gym. DVDs can be copied to it, but watch instantly shows cannot.
Netflix is transitioning more toward a streaming company, but I hope they don't neglect their dvd market as well.
I have noticed Netflix has fewer and fewer of the DVD's I want to watch; I have more in Saved than in my Queue. Am I the only one, or is netflix slowing down on DVDs?
But look at what netflix is charging (even after their recent rate increase) - $7.99 for the streaming-only plan. Isn't Apple's service $1 for every single episode? (They're going to get blown away unless the reconsider that.)
$7.99 is the same price as Hulu plus, which doesn't have any movies and still has commercials.
Come to think of it, I bet Netflix will introduce ads with this deal... I sure hope not, but I have a bad feeling. It's Disney after all. They make you watch ads at the start of DVD's, for pete's sake.
I can't see any webmail solution being rich enough to replace Outlook. For example, Cached Exchange Mode (i.e. offline mode that actually works like it should) is extremely useful, and I can't see how webmail could provide that.
Let's say country A sends a battleship to country B to shell it from offshore. So country B mounts a response, firing a missile at the battleship, which uses CIWS against the missile.
Is that use of CIWS "offensive" or "defensive"? It's clearly subjective: at the level of the ship itself, it's defensive, but in the larger picture it's supporting the offense.
IBM's success with Java pretty much proves that it was Sun's management of java rather than Java itself that was the problem.
Yes, McNealy's argument is precisely that Sun's management of Java was wrong (i.e. failing to capitalize on it) and the situation with IBM is Exhibit A: Sun made all the investment, and IBM reaped all the profits.
Are you arguing that Sun should have just done what IBM did, i.e. wait for somebody else to come along and give away a technology they could use to make money with services? (That's largely true of IBM in the case of linux too, although IBM has invested a little bit there).
Look, we all hate Oracle and Microsoft, but let's face it, they're charging money for proprietary software and making a good living at it. (That doesn't mean Sun could have survived by demanding lots of money for Java, but then again, what Sun did do didn't work either).
Speaking of China, can you imagine the moaning and conspiracy theories if it were a Chinese satellite that "went rogue" and did this? Cable TV would be full of talking heads calling it an act of war and calling for retaliation, and slashdotters would be offering the counter-theory that, no, this just shows how inept they are. But in fact this rogue satellite is Made in the USA. Stuff happens.
True, I can't imagine getting any sort of bundling discount if your work environment and personal environment are on different carriers. Still I hope the phones support that configuration (two SIM cards). Unfortunately that sounds like the sort of flexibility that will be available everywhere else BUT the US. Somehow we alone have failed to separate owning a handset from activating it on a given network.
I can see where somebody who works for themselves wouldn't want to buy two separate plans, but then they have less need to keep things strictly separate anyway. But two virtual phones sharing one number doesn't make much sense either, since you wouldn't know which one should take a particular call.
I think the best solution would be a new service option for these phones, where you just pay an extra $5/mo to get a second number on the same device. Just as the better ISPs allow you to get a second IP address for a reasonable fee.
You bought two iPhones plus the Focus in the space of two years? An iPhone is $400 if you haven't served out your two-year sentence, isn't it? Then about $100/mo for service. I'm just curious how much all that cost?
If it were a small number of highly explosive devices, they'd disarm.
Maybe, maybe not.
You know in the movies where the bomb disposal guy has to decide whether to cut the red wire or the black wire before the timer gets to 0:00? That never happens in real life. In Iraq, for example, where this kind of thing is a daily problem, they rarely try to handle or move the explosives. Option 1 is to blow it up.
If that were true, we would still be using armies of laborers instead of tractors. Automation has already displaced the vast majority of labor in agriculture. In 1850 farmers were 64% of the US labor force; now they're just a couple percent, even though the US is still a net exporter of food. Why would that process stop now?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure the book is more nuanced than this, but IMHO allowing competitors to control access to each others' content is simply bound to fail, converging at a point advantageous to those who own the toll booths, and bad for almost everybody else and the economy and culture as a whole.
I don't know, you tell me, why have they done exactly that? Devoting so much of our defenses to airplanes is obviously an unbalanced approach that will only leave everything else relatively unprotected, right? And yet terrorists keep trying to attack airplanes, countering our air defenses with attacks that are increasingly stealthy - and increasingly ineffective. Why are they doing that?
That statement makes no sense to me. We came to the brink of nuclear war a time or two. Nothing is a "much larger" threat than that.
In the late 90's, as the cold war was truly over, I started to hear all this adversarial talk about China. Then suddenly terrorism was suddenly the big thing and nobody talked about a Chinese military threat for about 8 years. Now that's getting old, and coincidentally we're getting all worked up about China again.
It seems to me there's simply a certain cultural appetite for fear an aggression, which must be fed one way or another.
Thanks, I am glad to hear that.
To emphasize this point, here are quotes from an article last year on this same story:
Sounds like plain old insider trading to me. Maybe worse, since it's the market-maker who's taking kickbacks.
But it proves once again, wealth is not about creating value, but owning it.
FPS won't go away, just like soccer and poker don't go away. The rules and equipment don't need perpetual novelty; it comes from the people playing.
No, I don't think this is the kid sitting at home ala "War Games," and here is why (from the article):
Wow, you know they're serious when the cyberattack is coordinated with targeted assassinations.
Mods, you rated this +5, but do you really believe it? Do you really not read reviews of products at amazon or newegg, or reviews of movies at IMDB? You don't ever access wikipedia? Do you asssume all free software is junk?
Ah yes, the "analog loophole." I do have lots of NTSC hardware, including a hardware MPEG2 encoder, but for now it's less work to copy 4 episodes at a time from DVD. The quality is also much better from a dvd copy of course, although that hardly matters for treadmill viewing.
However, a big part of the reason I signed up for Netflix was to copy shows onto the iPod my wife and I use at the gym. DVDs can be copied to it, but watch instantly shows cannot.
In that case I wouldn't mind, so long as bandwidth to the so-called cloud is sufficient.
I have noticed Netflix has fewer and fewer of the DVD's I want to watch; I have more in Saved than in my Queue. Am I the only one, or is netflix slowing down on DVDs?
$7.99 is the same price as Hulu plus, which doesn't have any movies and still has commercials.
Come to think of it, I bet Netflix will introduce ads with this deal... I sure hope not, but I have a bad feeling. It's Disney after all. They make you watch ads at the start of DVD's, for pete's sake.
I can't see any webmail solution being rich enough to replace Outlook. For example, Cached Exchange Mode (i.e. offline mode that actually works like it should) is extremely useful, and I can't see how webmail could provide that.
Is that use of CIWS "offensive" or "defensive"? It's clearly subjective: at the level of the ship itself, it's defensive, but in the larger picture it's supporting the offense.
Yes, McNealy's argument is precisely that Sun's management of Java was wrong (i.e. failing to capitalize on it) and the situation with IBM is Exhibit A: Sun made all the investment, and IBM reaped all the profits.
Are you arguing that Sun should have just done what IBM did, i.e. wait for somebody else to come along and give away a technology they could use to make money with services? (That's largely true of IBM in the case of linux too, although IBM has invested a little bit there).
Look, we all hate Oracle and Microsoft, but let's face it, they're charging money for proprietary software and making a good living at it. (That doesn't mean Sun could have survived by demanding lots of money for Java, but then again, what Sun did do didn't work either).
Speaking of China, can you imagine the moaning and conspiracy theories if it were a Chinese satellite that "went rogue" and did this? Cable TV would be full of talking heads calling it an act of war and calling for retaliation, and slashdotters would be offering the counter-theory that, no, this just shows how inept they are. But in fact this rogue satellite is Made in the USA. Stuff happens.
True, I can't imagine getting any sort of bundling discount if your work environment and personal environment are on different carriers. Still I hope the phones support that configuration (two SIM cards). Unfortunately that sounds like the sort of flexibility that will be available everywhere else BUT the US. Somehow we alone have failed to separate owning a handset from activating it on a given network.
I think the best solution would be a new service option for these phones, where you just pay an extra $5/mo to get a second number on the same device. Just as the better ISPs allow you to get a second IP address for a reasonable fee.
You bought two iPhones plus the Focus in the space of two years? An iPhone is $400 if you haven't served out your two-year sentence, isn't it? Then about $100/mo for service. I'm just curious how much all that cost?
Maybe, maybe not.
You know in the movies where the bomb disposal guy has to decide whether to cut the red wire or the black wire before the timer gets to 0:00? That never happens in real life. In Iraq, for example, where this kind of thing is a daily problem, they rarely try to handle or move the explosives. Option 1 is to blow it up.
Or send in the robots!
Are you an immigrant? That is no longer the norm in the US.
If that were true, we would still be using armies of laborers instead of tractors. Automation has already displaced the vast majority of labor in agriculture. In 1850 farmers were 64% of the US labor force; now they're just a couple percent, even though the US is still a net exporter of food. Why would that process stop now?
Huge year-to-year changes are more likely to result from changes to enforcement rather than changes to actual behavior.