"Eliminating unlimited data plans is a logical step in maximizing profits."
That's funny, because for me it's the next step in reducing my expenses. I am not one of those people who downloads gigs worth of stuff per month on my phone. In fact, my lifetime download on my iPhone is right around 950MB. That's for 2 1/2 years worth of using it to check email constantly, surf the web whenever I want and do some occasional Youtube viewing. With AT&T's new plan I can cut my data plan cost in half.
Well, as irritated as I am at these outfits for their marketing drivel and false advertising, I tend to agree. But that's because I have some idea about what "bandwidth" means to me. I may pull down four or five hundred megs a month, so I'm out of your league but still I'm nowhere near my current cap of 10 Gb. I'm not sure what services are consuming so much bandwidth for so many people. Youtube, obviously, video services in general. Do some people spend all their time watching streaming video and download songs? I listen to streaming audio now and then using Google Listen on my Android phone, and tether my laptop occasionally, but I still don't burn through the kinds of bandwidth some people do
I think the problem here is one of perception. A lot of people (I'm going to go out on a limb here and say, "most people") don't have the slightest idea how to equate their phone usage with data consumption. They really don't. Consequently an "unlimited plan" gives them a sense of security that they're not going to get screwed by going over some arbitrary limit. The cell phone companies should understand that: they've spent a couple of decades training us to watch our minutes lest we get huge overage charges, but at least people understand how to account for minutes used. T-Mobile's approach (last I bothered to check on it) was to set up a "hard" limit of ten gigs and then switch off 3G and run you back to Edge speeds if you go over it. That way you don't lose connectivity (very important) and don't get a huge overage bill (also important.)
Verizon and AT&T want to go to tiered billing for the sole purpose of extracting the last penny from their customer's wallets. It's not about making a profit, it's about squeezing your customers as hard as you possibly can, and if your marketing people can dissemble sufficiently well, leave said customers feeling like they're getting a great deal. And if, because said customers don't understand what they're buying, the company makes some bucks on overage charges.... well, hell, that's just gravy.
"Verizon has always seen their customers purely as a source of profit"
SHOCKING INSIGHT. You do realize that Verizon is a business, right?
Go eat a bag of dicks, op.
You missed the point. They are also a communications service provider, offering services that more and more Americans are depending upon (landline use is falling in favor of cellular technology.) Furthermore, any communications company which simply goes about its business with no concern for the customer whatsoever is just begging for more regulation (why, for example, do you think that AT&T was even granted the original "universal coverage" monopoly? It's because that monopoly was in exchange for some serious regulation. The Feds were too smart back then to trust a major corporation very far at all.) Verizon is really pushing the matter: so, for example, are Sprint and AT&T. Operating in a businesslike fashion does not, intrinsically, include milking customers for every last dime just because you can. That's sociopathic behavior on the part of their respective corporate leadership. Period.
For the past year or so, I've had T-Mobile (which is nothing more than Deutsche Telekom, Germany's phone company) and I've been very happy with their plan, their service, and their billing practices (no stupidass extra charges for services my phone doesn't even support, no SMS spam, nothing.) Gotta figure the Germans would know how to run a complex operation efficiently. My understanding of their 3G data policy is that after ten gigs a month they shunt you down to Edge network speeds until your next billing date, although such policies change all the time. Not that it matters much to me: even with a little tethering on my laptop I've never pulled down more than 800 mb or so in a month (yes, I keep track of that.)
So long as the big boys keep screwing customers over providers like T-Mobile will keep taking them away. Look, there's an ongoing and increasing demand for mobile bandwidth, and these outfits either need to provide us with a service that supports the equipment they are selling to us, stop selling that hardware, or lose business. As of right now, I consider T-Mobile to be the most competitive and generally rational of the national cell phone companies. I've never been on Verizon (although I know some that are, and not one is happy with them) but AT&T and Sprint can stick it. Both pissed me off to the point where I switched, so if shafting your customer base is what your "shocking insight" is all about, it just goes to show that you don't know very much about how a real business operates. Verizon, Sprint and AT&T (well, ok... SBC) are not businesses, they are extortion rings. Not that they're much different from the rest of corporate America, that's true enough.
Even if it does get them killed, every last one of the bunch stuck in traffic went there knowing they could get blocked in by other people. Who says the PhD types couldn't contribute to some amateurs getting killed? There's a storm that can put a toothpick through an oak tree: everyone running towards it is responsible for their own consequences.
Well, clearly the PHD's just need to call "dibs" on the tornados, blocking the "amateurs" from chasing.
They should call "shotgun". And if the amateurs get in the way, they can always use that shotgun.
From the news reports, it is clear that tornadoes actually swerve towards trailer parks... I'm still waiting for the scientists to explain this phenomenom.
When large numbers of beer bellies accumulate in a relatively small area, their sheer mass induces a gravitational anomaly that attracts inclement weather.
There are companies that exist now whose sole purpose in life is to pull together peoples' personal information from disparate sources, combine that information into astonishingly detailed profiles of just about anyone in the United States, and sell that information to interested parties (collection agencies/repo men for example).
ChoicePoint. And they got caught selling information to criminals (and I don't mean just the corporate type) as well as suffering some severe security breaches. Not a good thing at all, and when I heard about that it made me question the validity of their business and whether it's worth the risk to society.
This is despite the fact that data mining as a discipline is still relatively young. Since data mining is such a profitable discipline, it is almost guaranteed to develop at a much faster pace than our ability to obfuscate our personal identity.
The problem here is that when you accumulate too much of just about anything it becomes dangerous. Put a hundred tons of TNT in a warehouse... sooner or later someone is going to get hurt. The same thing happens when you collect terabyte after terabyte of personal data and store it away. Yes, it's valuable... but just as we have restrictions on how explosives can be transported and stored, we need some serious regulation of how and why corporations can store personal data, and when they must, by law, divest themselves of it. Unfortunately, governments (specifically I'm talking about mine, the United States Federal Government) view these giant private data stores as a way to perform data mining that would be illegal as hell if they were to try and do it themselves. So there's little motivation on the part of our lawmakers to try and do anything about this issue.
Good point. The real question is: why would developed countries deliberately strip themselves of manufacturing capability in order to transfer their wealth to developing countries for the dubious benefit of poorly-made products and the loss of domestic jobs?
Developed countries gain high quality goods at a low price in the interim. You didn't think everything made in China was barely useable crap did you? Not to put too fine a point on it, the "tarriff" brigade are being very short sighted about the whole situation, eventually when developing countries reach a developed economic state, who do you think you'll sell your goods to?
If you truly believe that a. we'll still be making anything worth selling to anyone when China has finished with us and b. that China will have the slightest interest in buying anything from us other than raw materials, you are seriously fooling yourself. China is operating very much along the Japanese model of predatory trade practices, only they're much larger and can hit us on more fronts simultaneously. Wake up and smell the coffee: there's been a trade war going on between China and the U.S. for a long time, and we're really starting to feel the effects now. Truth is... they're winning.
When China (and Japan before it) and now a number of other Asian countries first began industrializing, yes they were shipping crap. And yes, they got better. My point is that we simply looked at the price of the goods they were selling us and no further. We sold our own manufacturers down the river, and that's the truth: every American who was once employed manufacturing goods should look to himself when he complains bitterly that his company shipped his job overseas. Not everything can be laid at the feet of bloodsucking CEOs. Fact is, we failed to learn the lesson Japan tried to teach us: we should have taken a step back, looked at who we had to thank for all those shiny toys, and maybe we'd have seen their trade policies for what they were: predatory. Japan was never a trading partner with the U.S., any more than China is. They want to own whatever segment of industry they decide to go after. Parity is not part of their equation.
Truthfully, we did much the same (very successfully for a long time) of course, but I don't see any reason to just bend over and take it, which is exactly what we've been doing to date. Yankee ingenuity? Ha. Where's that get up and go spirit we used to have... we seem to have just lost the will to compete. Not that our government has been doing us any favors there: forgetting tariffs for the moment, the state of the United States patent system is laughable, and our various governments put up many roadblocks that our foreign competitors don't have to deal with. Thanks again, Congress, you've been helpful. Not.
And I didn't say we could win a trade war because of what we'd done in the past: I don't know why you insist in misinterpreting everything I said. You're one of these black and white types, I can see that. There's a huge difference between starting a trade war, and trying to prevent the total elimination of your own domestic manufacturing. It's nothing more than China's government does, for that matter. Why you can't see that there's a middle ground here is beyond me. Unless you feel that we should be so afraid of China's retaliation that any such attempt would be too dangerous... well, if that's the case, then we've already lost any possible "trade war."
Sure we lose some of the jobs in a specific industry but we gain more jobs and more wealth overall.
You are seriously understating the seriousness of the issue.
I agreed with most of your post but it was the last line I choked on. You're not applying the same logic to us that you're applying to the {insert favorite developing nation here}. We are not gaining more jobs and wealth overall, we are losing them... hemorrhaging them in fact. Where, if not from the manufacture and sale of finished goods to other countries, do you think America's wealth came from? Trees? Our middle class expanded as we became the foremost industrial combine on the planet: now that we've decided to give that up our middle class is shrinking, our economy is destabilizing and our standard of living is falling. Please explain to me, in bite-sized terms, how transferring our manufacturing to China is of even short-term benefit to us. Sure, we get cheap smartphones and big-screen television sets... but at what cost? You can't measure the damage that's been done to us by the retail price of an electronic toy at Best Buy.
There are really only two ways to become wealthy as a nation in this world: build and sell finished goods, or sell your natural resources to other nations. The latter only lasts as long as your mines and oil wells hold out, the former lasts as long as you make the effort to maintain your infrastructure and production capabilities.
For example, take our erstwhile ally, Japan. Japan didn't just compete with us, they decimated a number of key manufacturing sectors of the U.S. economy. And that was one tiny island nation. China, on the other hand, is a vast operation that is hitting us on every front, from cell phones to machine guns, and our government has simply failed to protect us from that onslaught in any significant way. I'm sorry, but the idea that trade barriers are obsolete or inherently wrong is a morally bankrupt position to take, because it means that you are placing the welfare of other countries above your own, other people above your own.
There's a word for people who think like that. But I won't use it here.
I hope you are trolling and, if so, good job. If not, then I don't think you realize that your "proposal" is more extreme than even the most fanatical left wing crazies would dare make these days. Imposing tariffs so that the products make in third world countries which are imported in the USA match the price of those produced in the USA? You do realize that such tariffs would bring instant death to the economies of dozens of developing countries, and that the only reason for the incredible rise in standard of living of ordinary workers in China in the last three decades was due to the fact that they are able to produce and export goods more cheaply than those in the countries who import them? Why else would developed countries import third world goods if by law they cost the same as those locally produced?
Good point. The real question is: why would developed countries deliberately strip themselves of manufacturing capability in order to transfer their wealth to developing countries for the dubious benefit of poorly-made products and the loss of domestic jobs? What you are really saying is that those developing economies are totally dependent upon the United States, and that we have some obligation to maintain what is, effectively, a very costly form of foreign aid. A form that is rapidly destroying our own economy, standard of living, and way of life. We've already borrowed and given away trillions of dollars in aid to other nations, forgiven untold amounts of war debt, and now you believe that it is wrong for us to raise a few trade barriers to protect what little we have left?
Ruby users, on the other hand, are usually quite ignorant of other technologies. It becomes the old when-all-you-have-is-a-hammer scenario. They try to build large systems using Ruby (see Twitter), which then subsequently perform like utter shit (see Twitter), and finally prove to be unusable (see Twitter).
I disagree. I think a better example of your scenario would be Twitter.
Where did the founding fathers mention Glocks? I'd like to know. They didn't mention health care, and they didn't mention Glocks. Fucking activist judges are just creating rights out of nothing.
The basic design of the Constitution is to protect citizen's rights without enumerating and thus limiting them while simultaneously being very specific about what the government can and cannot do. To the Founder's, a firearm was a firearm... no need to be specific because by not being specific they didn't limit us to any particular class of weapon. Indeed, the idea really was to keep We the People at some level of parity with government, so that government would have to respect its citizens. They gave us all the tools to keep our government under our control: education, freedom of the press, weapons... it's not their fault that we've lost the handles.
Personally, I would "interpret" the Second Amendment as meaning, "Whatever weapons Government can use against us, we can have to use against Government." Now, if that bothers you, start lobbying for a Constitutional Amendment that will enumerate the classes of weapons that private citizens can own.
Some people lack critical thinking skills, some people lack conviction, and some people believe that rights should be limited. Doesn't make any of 'em right.
Yes, and some people don't care if rights are being limited (or eliminated) as long as it's rights they they, personally, don't happen to care about. Now, the danger in that kind of thinking is that, sooner or later, the government will infringe on something that is important to them. For example, I don't smoke... never have, never will. Cigarette smoke makes me ill. But at the same time, I was always against the punitive taxation and other anti-smoking social-engineering tactics employed by government. Why? Well, because I understand that if government is allowed to step on one group ("for their own good", of course), even one that I don't like or that is unpopular... well, sooner or later they'll come after me for something I like to do.
The best solution is to push back, hard, whenever some government busybody wants to grab some power that he doesn't need but wants just because he can get it. Sometimes there are good reasons for an extension of government authority... most times there isn't. In either case, they should be forced to justify themselves to us, and not just with pretty words or repeated use of "terrorism" or "child pornography." Another example: the seat belt law in my State. When it was first signed into law some years ago, it was noted by various political media that the State reserved the right to make this a primary violation (initially you could only be ticketed for not wearing your seatbelt if you were pulled over for some unrelated reason.) When asked about that, our then-Governor said words to the effect of "oh, don't worry, we'd never do that." Well, if that's the case why is it in the law at all? Now, of course, it's a primary offense, and apparently makes for a whole lot of additional ticket revenue.
For starters it doesn't mention how the militia should be regulated, what constitutes Arms or where they have the right to keep and bear them.
I'm sure that the Founders, every last one of them, would be surprised, nay, appalled, that you don't understand something so obvious, so basic to their mindset. To their way of thinking, there was no need to be so specific and they would be disappointed in many of their descendants for failing to grasp that. Look, in Revolutionary times the militia was We The People, not some professional standing army, and they kept those arms in their homes. The concept of gun control would be anathema to anyone who survived the Revolutionary War: firearms were and are a fundamental means of assuring personal freedom, and one which they would not give up lightly. They felt strongly enough about that to enshrine it in the Second Amendment.
Attempting to "reinvent" the Constitution by ignoring the environment in which it was written, and further denying that we haven't really progressed all that much since it was written, is ultimately self-defeating. Look around you: our government is overreaching itself, more and more, day by day... only a humanoid ostrich would state categorically that we'll never find ourselves in need of protection from that government. Regardless, the Founders knew exactly what they were doing, and if we, as a society, feel that some portions of the Supreme Law of our Land are no longer desireable or applicable, then let us Amend it according to the process contained within itself. This continual chipping away at it, illegal law by illegal law, does not serve us well.
How the fuck is that vague? What part of SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED do people not understand?!?!?!
No kidding. The Founders were about as vague as a kiloton of TNT. They knew exactly what they wanted to say, and said it well. The Constitution was not meant to be "interpreted". It was meant to be applied.
And sure, while technology makes things easier to do, it almost feels like they're blaming the lack of technology for not being able to properly teach the students.
Our school system has spent the past several decades blaming everything but itself for the large-scale failure that it has become. This is just an extension of that philosophy, you're correct in that I think. And when their students continue to fail, they'll find some other reason to explain away their poor performance (the school's that is, not the students.) "If we'd only be able to spend the money to buy Macs with bigger screens and more memory, we just know we'd have seen more improvement." Which is horse-hockey, of course... as Lazarus Long once said, "A school is a log with a teacher on one end and a student on the other." Most of what we learn in school point-blank does not require a computer. It does, however, need teachers who can motivate and inspire. A high-end Macbook is not going to replace quality teaching, and that's a fact.
The reality is that students should be exposed to a wide variety of computers, technologies and operating systems because that, and only that, will prepare them for what they'll have to face once they graduate (assuming they graduate that is.) Besides, if the goal truly is to prepare students for the real world, WIndows would be a much better choice than the non-corporate Mac since 99% of those kids will be using some version of Windows when they get their first real job. Regardless, school is supposed to expand minds, not limit them! Cripes, this imbecile might as well have said that we're only going to teach English in our school because, well, it's clearly the best language for everyone on the entire planet so there's no point in taking French or Spanish or anything like that.
This guy needs to be fired, fast, before he does any more damage.
Yes you are. You connected a fairly powerful radio transceiver to your computer and (for some unaccountable reason) expect it to be treated as if it were a bunch of cables coming out of an Ethernet switch. Dude, it's a transmitter, and it broadcasts, and if you have any expectation that the world will respect your privacy when you're broadcasting data beyond the confines of your own home, well, you're not too bright. Doesn't matter if we're talking a WAP or just a regular Internet connection... if you put something out on the wires the possibility always exists that someone will use that information in ways that you might regret. Take steps. Don't expect the law to help you because it cannot.
I didn't give Google anything. They sent a van to my street and took it, without my consent or permission.
Whine whine whine. They shouldn't need your consent or permission, any more than you need the consent of your local radio station to listen to some music. You gave that data to Google (and anyone else passing by your home) by turning on your access point. It's that simple. If you don't like that, don't turn the thing on. You're just torqued because you didn't realize what your little Linksys box was doing. Well, that's your fault, nobody elses.
Likewise, you don't expect people to be arbitrarily scanning for wireless data.
Actually, I do expect people to be arbitrarily scanning for wireless data. ECHELON aside, radio scanners have been publicly available for many years in Australia.
Likewise, you don't expect people to be arbitrarily scanning for wireless data.
Perhaps you don't, in which case I would expect you to be regularly checking your bank accounts and frequently changing your passwords. On the other hand, I, and many like me, fully expect people to attempt to intercept and decrypt our wireless communications, if for no other reason than to use our internet access without our consent. Consequently, we take steps to make such efforts fruitless. In other words, you may not want "people" to be arbitrarily scanning your wireless data, but you damned well should expect them to be. That applies to any Internet-based communication regardless of whether it's wireless or not, so I think you're a little off base here.
Frankly, Google's activities here maybe illegal in many places, but that doesn't mean such laws make any sense whatsoever. I mean, people don't seem to realize that they are putting radio transmitters in their homes and offices, and connecting them to their computer systems! That means they are broadcasting potentially confidential information, and really have no right to expect that it might not be picked up by someone else's receiver. Period. If you can't handle that fact, just give it up and use a few CAT-6 runs instead. Would you put a high-gain microphone and FM transmitter in your office, and then complain that your neighbors heard you talking to your mistress? Sheesh.
And it wasn't as if Google was running around with WEP/WPA crackers in their trucks: they were just picking up heartbeat signals. This whole thing is truly ridiculous, almost Biblically so. The reality is that there are a lot of people who resent Google for one reason or another, and in this case Google happened to record some information that certain government officials would very much like to get their hands on (probably because they don't realize how worthless it really is, and that they could easily acquire it themselves.)
Slashdot Mirror
"Eliminating unlimited data plans is a logical step in maximizing profits."
That's funny, because for me it's the next step in reducing my expenses. I am not one of those people who downloads gigs worth of stuff per month on my phone. In fact, my lifetime download on my iPhone is right around 950MB. That's for 2 1/2 years worth of using it to check email constantly, surf the web whenever I want and do some occasional Youtube viewing. With AT&T's new plan I can cut my data plan cost in half.
Well, as irritated as I am at these outfits for their marketing drivel and false advertising, I tend to agree. But that's because I have some idea about what "bandwidth" means to me. I may pull down four or five hundred megs a month, so I'm out of your league but still I'm nowhere near my current cap of 10 Gb. I'm not sure what services are consuming so much bandwidth for so many people. Youtube, obviously, video services in general. Do some people spend all their time watching streaming video and download songs? I listen to streaming audio now and then using Google Listen on my Android phone, and tether my laptop occasionally, but I still don't burn through the kinds of bandwidth some people do
.... well, hell, that's just gravy.
I think the problem here is one of perception. A lot of people (I'm going to go out on a limb here and say, "most people") don't have the slightest idea how to equate their phone usage with data consumption. They really don't. Consequently an "unlimited plan" gives them a sense of security that they're not going to get screwed by going over some arbitrary limit. The cell phone companies should understand that: they've spent a couple of decades training us to watch our minutes lest we get huge overage charges, but at least people understand how to account for minutes used. T-Mobile's approach (last I bothered to check on it) was to set up a "hard" limit of ten gigs and then switch off 3G and run you back to Edge speeds if you go over it. That way you don't lose connectivity (very important) and don't get a huge overage bill (also important.)
Verizon and AT&T want to go to tiered billing for the sole purpose of extracting the last penny from their customer's wallets. It's not about making a profit, it's about squeezing your customers as hard as you possibly can, and if your marketing people can dissemble sufficiently well, leave said customers feeling like they're getting a great deal. And if, because said customers don't understand what they're buying, the company makes some bucks on overage charges
Weasels.
"Verizon has always seen their customers purely as a source of profit"
SHOCKING INSIGHT. You do realize that Verizon is a business, right?
Go eat a bag of dicks, op.
You missed the point. They are also a communications service provider, offering services that more and more Americans are depending upon (landline use is falling in favor of cellular technology.) Furthermore, any communications company which simply goes about its business with no concern for the customer whatsoever is just begging for more regulation (why, for example, do you think that AT&T was even granted the original "universal coverage" monopoly? It's because that monopoly was in exchange for some serious regulation. The Feds were too smart back then to trust a major corporation very far at all.) Verizon is really pushing the matter: so, for example, are Sprint and AT&T. Operating in a businesslike fashion does not, intrinsically, include milking customers for every last dime just because you can. That's sociopathic behavior on the part of their respective corporate leadership. Period.
... SBC) are not businesses, they are extortion rings. Not that they're much different from the rest of corporate America, that's true enough.
For the past year or so, I've had T-Mobile (which is nothing more than Deutsche Telekom, Germany's phone company) and I've been very happy with their plan, their service, and their billing practices (no stupidass extra charges for services my phone doesn't even support, no SMS spam, nothing.) Gotta figure the Germans would know how to run a complex operation efficiently. My understanding of their 3G data policy is that after ten gigs a month they shunt you down to Edge network speeds until your next billing date, although such policies change all the time. Not that it matters much to me: even with a little tethering on my laptop I've never pulled down more than 800 mb or so in a month (yes, I keep track of that.)
So long as the big boys keep screwing customers over providers like T-Mobile will keep taking them away. Look, there's an ongoing and increasing demand for mobile bandwidth, and these outfits either need to provide us with a service that supports the equipment they are selling to us, stop selling that hardware, or lose business. As of right now, I consider T-Mobile to be the most competitive and generally rational of the national cell phone companies. I've never been on Verizon (although I know some that are, and not one is happy with them) but AT&T and Sprint can stick it. Both pissed me off to the point where I switched, so if shafting your customer base is what your "shocking insight" is all about, it just goes to show that you don't know very much about how a real business operates. Verizon, Sprint and AT&T (well, ok
Even if it does get them killed, every last one of the bunch stuck in traffic went there knowing they could get blocked in by other people. Who says the PhD types couldn't contribute to some amateurs getting killed? There's a storm that can put a toothpick through an oak tree: everyone running towards it is responsible for their own consequences.
Well, clearly the PHD's just need to call "dibs" on the tornados, blocking the "amateurs" from chasing.
They should call "shotgun". And if the amateurs get in the way, they can always use that shotgun.
How much torque can you get from a state-of-the-art rank armature?
I don't know ... but if your armature is rank, you probably have a hygiene problem.
From the news reports, it is clear that tornadoes actually swerve towards trailer parks... I'm still waiting for the scientists to explain this phenomenom.
When large numbers of beer bellies accumulate in a relatively small area, their sheer mass induces a gravitational anomaly that attracts inclement weather.
There are companies that exist now whose sole purpose in life is to pull together peoples' personal information from disparate sources, combine that information into astonishingly detailed profiles of just about anyone in the United States, and sell that information to interested parties (collection agencies/repo men for example).
ChoicePoint. And they got caught selling information to criminals (and I don't mean just the corporate type) as well as suffering some severe security breaches. Not a good thing at all, and when I heard about that it made me question the validity of their business and whether it's worth the risk to society.
This is despite the fact that data mining as a discipline is still relatively young. Since data mining is such a profitable discipline, it is almost guaranteed to develop at a much faster pace than our ability to obfuscate our personal identity.
The problem here is that when you accumulate too much of just about anything it becomes dangerous. Put a hundred tons of TNT in a warehouse ... sooner or later someone is going to get hurt. The same thing happens when you collect terabyte after terabyte of personal data and store it away. Yes, it's valuable ... but just as we have restrictions on how explosives can be transported and stored, we need some serious regulation of how and why corporations can store personal data, and when they must, by law, divest themselves of it. Unfortunately, governments (specifically I'm talking about mine, the United States Federal Government) view these giant private data stores as a way to perform data mining that would be illegal as hell if they were to try and do it themselves. So there's little motivation on the part of our lawmakers to try and do anything about this issue.
t's called spin casting [wikipedia.org].
I thought it was called spin forming. Regardless, I'll take a liquid lunch over a liquid mirror any day.
Good point. The real question is: why would developed countries deliberately strip themselves of manufacturing capability in order to transfer their wealth to developing countries for the dubious benefit of poorly-made products and the loss of domestic jobs?
Developed countries gain high quality goods at a low price in the interim. You didn't think everything made in China was barely useable crap did you? Not to put too fine a point on it, the "tarriff" brigade are being very short sighted about the whole situation, eventually when developing countries reach a developed economic state, who do you think you'll sell your goods to?
If you truly believe that a. we'll still be making anything worth selling to anyone when China has finished with us and b. that China will have the slightest interest in buying anything from us other than raw materials, you are seriously fooling yourself. China is operating very much along the Japanese model of predatory trade practices, only they're much larger and can hit us on more fronts simultaneously. Wake up and smell the coffee: there's been a trade war going on between China and the U.S. for a long time, and we're really starting to feel the effects now. Truth is ... they're winning.
The "poorly-made" meme seems out of date.
-1 Missed Point.
... we seem to have just lost the will to compete. Not that our government has been doing us any favors there: forgetting tariffs for the moment, the state of the United States patent system is laughable, and our various governments put up many roadblocks that our foreign competitors don't have to deal with. Thanks again, Congress, you've been helpful. Not.
... well, if that's the case, then we've already lost any possible "trade war."
When China (and Japan before it) and now a number of other Asian countries first began industrializing, yes they were shipping crap. And yes, they got better. My point is that we simply looked at the price of the goods they were selling us and no further. We sold our own manufacturers down the river, and that's the truth: every American who was once employed manufacturing goods should look to himself when he complains bitterly that his company shipped his job overseas. Not everything can be laid at the feet of bloodsucking CEOs. Fact is, we failed to learn the lesson Japan tried to teach us: we should have taken a step back, looked at who we had to thank for all those shiny toys, and maybe we'd have seen their trade policies for what they were: predatory. Japan was never a trading partner with the U.S., any more than China is. They want to own whatever segment of industry they decide to go after. Parity is not part of their equation.
Truthfully, we did much the same (very successfully for a long time) of course, but I don't see any reason to just bend over and take it, which is exactly what we've been doing to date. Yankee ingenuity? Ha. Where's that get up and go spirit we used to have
And I didn't say we could win a trade war because of what we'd done in the past: I don't know why you insist in misinterpreting everything I said. You're one of these black and white types, I can see that. There's a huge difference between starting a trade war, and trying to prevent the total elimination of your own domestic manufacturing. It's nothing more than China's government does, for that matter. Why you can't see that there's a middle ground here is beyond me. Unless you feel that we should be so afraid of China's retaliation that any such attempt would be too dangerous
without falling foul of relevant laws regarding false advertising.
I agree. And while they may be within the letter of such laws, they are certainly not within the spirit.
The big ISPs started out as lying dogs, and they're still lying dogs.
Sure we lose some of the jobs in a specific industry but we gain more jobs and more wealth overall.
You are seriously understating the seriousness of the issue.
... hemorrhaging them in fact. Where, if not from the manufacture and sale of finished goods to other countries, do you think America's wealth came from? Trees? Our middle class expanded as we became the foremost industrial combine on the planet: now that we've decided to give that up our middle class is shrinking, our economy is destabilizing and our standard of living is falling. Please explain to me, in bite-sized terms, how transferring our manufacturing to China is of even short-term benefit to us. Sure, we get cheap smartphones and big-screen television sets ... but at what cost? You can't measure the damage that's been done to us by the retail price of an electronic toy at Best Buy.
I agreed with most of your post but it was the last line I choked on. You're not applying the same logic to us that you're applying to the {insert favorite developing nation here}. We are not gaining more jobs and wealth overall, we are losing them
There are really only two ways to become wealthy as a nation in this world: build and sell finished goods, or sell your natural resources to other nations. The latter only lasts as long as your mines and oil wells hold out, the former lasts as long as you make the effort to maintain your infrastructure and production capabilities.
For example, take our erstwhile ally, Japan. Japan didn't just compete with us, they decimated a number of key manufacturing sectors of the U.S. economy. And that was one tiny island nation. China, on the other hand, is a vast operation that is hitting us on every front, from cell phones to machine guns, and our government has simply failed to protect us from that onslaught in any significant way. I'm sorry, but the idea that trade barriers are obsolete or inherently wrong is a morally bankrupt position to take, because it means that you are placing the welfare of other countries above your own, other people above your own.
There's a word for people who think like that. But I won't use it here.
I hope you are trolling and, if so, good job. If not, then I don't think you realize that your "proposal" is more extreme than even the most fanatical left wing crazies would dare make these days. Imposing tariffs so that the products make in third world countries which are imported in the USA match the price of those produced in the USA? You do realize that such tariffs would bring instant death to the economies of dozens of developing countries, and that the only reason for the incredible rise in standard of living of ordinary workers in China in the last three decades was due to the fact that they are able to produce and export goods more cheaply than those in the countries who import them? Why else would developed countries import third world goods if by law they cost the same as those locally produced?
Good point. The real question is: why would developed countries deliberately strip themselves of manufacturing capability in order to transfer their wealth to developing countries for the dubious benefit of poorly-made products and the loss of domestic jobs? What you are really saying is that those developing economies are totally dependent upon the United States, and that we have some obligation to maintain what is, effectively, a very costly form of foreign aid. A form that is rapidly destroying our own economy, standard of living, and way of life. We've already borrowed and given away trillions of dollars in aid to other nations, forgiven untold amounts of war debt, and now you believe that it is wrong for us to raise a few trade barriers to protect what little we have left?
Seriously.
Ruby users, on the other hand, are usually quite ignorant of other technologies. It becomes the old when-all-you-have-is-a-hammer scenario. They try to build large systems using Ruby (see Twitter), which then subsequently perform like utter shit (see Twitter), and finally prove to be unusable (see Twitter).
I disagree. I think a better example of your scenario would be Twitter.
Where did the founding fathers mention Glocks? I'd like to know. They didn't mention health care, and they didn't mention Glocks. Fucking activist judges are just creating rights out of nothing.
The basic design of the Constitution is to protect citizen's rights without enumerating and thus limiting them while simultaneously being very specific about what the government can and cannot do. To the Founder's, a firearm was a firearm ... no need to be specific because by not being specific they didn't limit us to any particular class of weapon. Indeed, the idea really was to keep We the People at some level of parity with government, so that government would have to respect its citizens. They gave us all the tools to keep our government under our control: education, freedom of the press, weapons ... it's not their fault that we've lost the handles.
Personally, I would "interpret" the Second Amendment as meaning, "Whatever weapons Government can use against us, we can have to use against Government." Now, if that bothers you, start lobbying for a Constitutional Amendment that will enumerate the classes of weapons that private citizens can own.
Good luck with that.
Some people lack critical thinking skills, some people lack conviction, and some people believe that rights should be limited. Doesn't make any of 'em right.
Yes, and some people don't care if rights are being limited (or eliminated) as long as it's rights they they, personally, don't happen to care about. Now, the danger in that kind of thinking is that, sooner or later, the government will infringe on something that is important to them. For example, I don't smoke ... never have, never will. Cigarette smoke makes me ill. But at the same time, I was always against the punitive taxation and other anti-smoking social-engineering tactics employed by government. Why? Well, because I understand that if government is allowed to step on one group ("for their own good", of course), even one that I don't like or that is unpopular ... well, sooner or later they'll come after me for something I like to do.
... most times there isn't. In either case, they should be forced to justify themselves to us, and not just with pretty words or repeated use of "terrorism" or "child pornography." Another example: the seat belt law in my State. When it was first signed into law some years ago, it was noted by various political media that the State reserved the right to make this a primary violation (initially you could only be ticketed for not wearing your seatbelt if you were pulled over for some unrelated reason.) When asked about that, our then-Governor said words to the effect of "oh, don't worry, we'd never do that." Well, if that's the case why is it in the law at all? Now, of course, it's a primary offense, and apparently makes for a whole lot of additional ticket revenue.
The best solution is to push back, hard, whenever some government busybody wants to grab some power that he doesn't need but wants just because he can get it. Sometimes there are good reasons for an extension of government authority
For starters it doesn't mention how the militia should be regulated, what constitutes Arms or where they have the right to keep and bear them.
I'm sure that the Founders, every last one of them, would be surprised, nay, appalled, that you don't understand something so obvious, so basic to their mindset. To their way of thinking, there was no need to be so specific and they would be disappointed in many of their descendants for failing to grasp that. Look, in Revolutionary times the militia was We The People, not some professional standing army, and they kept those arms in their homes. The concept of gun control would be anathema to anyone who survived the Revolutionary War: firearms were and are a fundamental means of assuring personal freedom, and one which they would not give up lightly. They felt strongly enough about that to enshrine it in the Second Amendment.
... only a humanoid ostrich would state categorically that we'll never find ourselves in need of protection from that government. Regardless, the Founders knew exactly what they were doing, and if we, as a society, feel that some portions of the Supreme Law of our Land are no longer desireable or applicable, then let us Amend it according to the process contained within itself. This continual chipping away at it, illegal law by illegal law, does not serve us well.
Attempting to "reinvent" the Constitution by ignoring the environment in which it was written, and further denying that we haven't really progressed all that much since it was written, is ultimately self-defeating. Look around you: our government is overreaching itself, more and more, day by day
How the fuck is that vague? What part of SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED do people not understand?!?!?!
No kidding. The Founders were about as vague as a kiloton of TNT. They knew exactly what they wanted to say, and said it well. The Constitution was not meant to be "interpreted". It was meant to be applied.
Can anyone still read it? Isn't it written in latin? Don't you have to pay someone to interpret it for you?
Nah ... I think you're referring to my condominium association's bylaws. Damned if I can figure them out.
That said, I suspect a laptop would have made them even worse.
Oh, I don't know ... access to unlimited quantities of quality porn can have a positive effect on some people.
Hitler didn't have a laptop in school either, and look how he turned out. Clearly these laptops are necessary.
Well ... if nothing else you can say that he made his mark on the world.
And sure, while technology makes things easier to do, it almost feels like they're blaming the lack of technology for not being able to properly teach the students.
Our school system has spent the past several decades blaming everything but itself for the large-scale failure that it has become. This is just an extension of that philosophy, you're correct in that I think. And when their students continue to fail, they'll find some other reason to explain away their poor performance (the school's that is, not the students.) "If we'd only be able to spend the money to buy Macs with bigger screens and more memory, we just know we'd have seen more improvement." Which is horse-hockey, of course ... as Lazarus Long once said, "A school is a log with a teacher on one end and a student on the other." Most of what we learn in school point-blank does not require a computer. It does, however, need teachers who can motivate and inspire. A high-end Macbook is not going to replace quality teaching, and that's a fact.
The reality is that students should be exposed to a wide variety of computers, technologies and operating systems because that, and only that, will prepare them for what they'll have to face once they graduate (assuming they graduate that is.) Besides, if the goal truly is to prepare students for the real world, WIndows would be a much better choice than the non-corporate Mac since 99% of those kids will be using some version of Windows when they get their first real job. Regardless, school is supposed to expand minds, not limit them! Cripes, this imbecile might as well have said that we're only going to teach English in our school because, well, it's clearly the best language for everyone on the entire planet so there's no point in taking French or Spanish or anything like that.
This guy needs to be fired, fast, before he does any more damage.
I'm not actively broadcasting anything
Yes you are. You connected a fairly powerful radio transceiver to your computer and (for some unaccountable reason) expect it to be treated as if it were a bunch of cables coming out of an Ethernet switch. Dude, it's a transmitter, and it broadcasts, and if you have any expectation that the world will respect your privacy when you're broadcasting data beyond the confines of your own home, well, you're not too bright. Doesn't matter if we're talking a WAP or just a regular Internet connection ... if you put something out on the wires the possibility always exists that someone will use that information in ways that you might regret. Take steps. Don't expect the law to help you because it cannot.
I didn't give Google anything. They sent a van to my street and took it, without my consent or permission.
Whine whine whine. They shouldn't need your consent or permission, any more than you need the consent of your local radio station to listen to some music. You gave that data to Google (and anyone else passing by your home) by turning on your access point. It's that simple. If you don't like that, don't turn the thing on. You're just torqued because you didn't realize what your little Linksys box was doing. Well, that's your fault, nobody elses.
Yeah. They're called "laptop computers".
Likewise, you don't expect people to be arbitrarily scanning for wireless data.
Perhaps you don't, in which case I would expect you to be regularly checking your bank accounts and frequently changing your passwords. On the other hand, I, and many like me, fully expect people to attempt to intercept and decrypt our wireless communications, if for no other reason than to use our internet access without our consent. Consequently, we take steps to make such efforts fruitless. In other words, you may not want "people" to be arbitrarily scanning your wireless data, but you damned well should expect them to be. That applies to any Internet-based communication regardless of whether it's wireless or not, so I think you're a little off base here.
Frankly, Google's activities here maybe illegal in many places, but that doesn't mean such laws make any sense whatsoever. I mean, people don't seem to realize that they are putting radio transmitters in their homes and offices, and connecting them to their computer systems! That means they are broadcasting potentially confidential information, and really have no right to expect that it might not be picked up by someone else's receiver. Period. If you can't handle that fact, just give it up and use a few CAT-6 runs instead. Would you put a high-gain microphone and FM transmitter in your office, and then complain that your neighbors heard you talking to your mistress? Sheesh.
And it wasn't as if Google was running around with WEP/WPA crackers in their trucks: they were just picking up heartbeat signals. This whole thing is truly ridiculous, almost Biblically so. The reality is that there are a lot of people who resent Google for one reason or another, and in this case Google happened to record some information that certain government officials would very much like to get their hands on (probably because they don't realize how worthless it really is, and that they could easily acquire it themselves.)
You've come a long way, Microsoft, but you have much much further to go.
A pound of Swiss cheese by any other name is still a pound of Swiss cheese.