Part of the problem is there's network, and then there's network. Just because you operate the most extensive network of any single cell phone company doesn't mean you have the biggest area where your customers can place non-roaming calls.
For example, I have a phone with T-Mobile. T-Mobile has a pretty small network; however, you can roam on a lot of other networks, particularly Cellular One in my area, at no additional charge over your normal plan. So the effective network is bigger than their actual company network.
Other cell phone providers have bigger networks themselves, but don't partner with anyone, so their effective network may be smaller.
The activation fee covers the costs of acquiring a new customer. That's mostly the fee paid to whoever actually sells you the service - Radio Shack, mall kiosk, whatever. The also wrap advertising and other expenses in there.
As for both types of plans, I think if you asked, most companies would give you a lower rate IF you did it online AND already had a phone.
Exactly my point - you don't need guns to protect you from the government, because if you really have a case where you're at civil war with the government, you'll have a good portion of the military on your side as well as access to plenty of black-market firearms.
The handgun somebody keeps in their closet is pretty much pointless.
Am I the only one who sees how ridiculous the whole thing is?
No, the phone company thinks it's ridiculous too. They would much rather have you pay the $200 for the cell phone up-front than get the $200 from you over a period of 24 months or if you cancel. They would much rather have you pay a $50 or $100 activation fee than get that back over the course of 12-24 monthly payments. To a phone company, $360 now and $25/month is FAR better than $40/month with a termination fee.
It's the same reason you get 'huge' discounts for registering a domain name for 10 years - that's money in the bank for the registrar, and they'll make more money from you getting you to pay early than 'charging you more' annually.
The problem is, if I tell you that to get my cell phone plan, you have to pay me $240 for a phone and a $120 activation fee (to cover the costs of acquiring you as a customer) and I'll give you service for $25 month, you won't sign up with me. You'll go to the company that charges $40/month, with a 'free' phone and 'free' activation.
Well, maybe YOU wouldn't, but most people will pay $40/month for cell service. Most people will not pay $360 for cell service. Most people don't HAVE $360 to pay up-front for cell service. The cell companies are only giving people what they want.
What really angers me about the 'need firearms to protect us from the government' people is that they don't understand what they are really saying. "We need guns so the government doesn't take away our rights" they say.
That's saying that you don't have to comply with the will over the democratically elected government. It's saying that if you don't like the law, yu're going to become a terrorist. That you would rather just become a terrorist than elect people who are going to protect your rights in the first place.
The people who scream bloody murder about the government taking away the guns they need to protect their rights from the government tend to the VERY SAME PEOPLE who ELECT OFFICIALS WHO TAKE AWAY YOUR RIGHTS!
How many times have you heard someone say "We need guns to protect our rights!" and then say "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear!"
How about instead of letting people say "Elect me, and I won't take away your guns!", you elect people who say "Elect me, and I'll repeal the Patriot Act!"
People who argue that they need guns to protect their rights from the government are just gun nuts. The 'protect us from the government' argument is a red herring. If their RIGHTS were really what is important to them, they'd vote for people who wanted to protect their rights instead of people who wanted to protect their guns.
But that's not what happens. Search you without a warrant? Listen in to your phone calls? Arrest and detain you, even if you're a US citizen, without access to courts or a lawyer? Torture people? Sure, we'll reelect that guy, as long as he promises we can keep our guns!
Using the right to bear arms to protect your rights is useless if you're willing to trade away all your other rights just to keep your gun. Then what are you protecting?
The US Army does not have enough tanks to cover the contry. If it actually came down to it, you would not have a tank in your neighborhood, but your friendly local cop at your door. And him I can defend against.
You'll have a 500 lb bomb dropped from 20,000 feet.
It should be no shock that D.C. is still one of the most violent cities in the U.S. (#2 or #3, the last I checked). The murder rate drops by a factor of 10 when you cross the Potomac River into Virginia (still in metropolitan Washington; it gets even lower further away) where there is no gun ban.
What are you trying to say?
It seems like you are trying to say that the crime rate would be lower if nobody had guns. If that is what you are trying to say, either you are intentionally putting forth a bad argument, or you're stupid.
We have two sets of data: Data when it was legal to own handguns on both sides of the river, and data when it was legal to own a gun on only the low-crime side of the river.
The high-crime side of the river had high crime in both circumstances. At best, with the data you're using in your argument, you can argue that taking away legal handguns didn't make a difference.
That's the big problem with the gun debate. There are very few people involved capable of a rational argument. They know what side they are on, and emotionally, irrationally argue in support of their position, summarily dismissing any information that does not help their cause, while seizing on any bit that seems to support it, no matter how flawed.
It says something of the grandparent's personal character that when he sees a gun he thinks, "that's for killing" as opposed to "that's for safeguarding."
You're right, it shows he's smarter than the average person, because he's able to understand that an object can have more than one function.
By definition, if you have two guys with guns, and one is defending himself, the other one is trying to kill him.
If everyone was running around only using guns to defend themselves, we wouldn't need guns to defend ourselves now, would we?
'You are talking about basically a reinstallation of the entire voting system hardware.'
This illustrates the problem with these people. They view the paperless machines as voting machines that need to be reinstalled. They are not voting machines at all. The recommendation is talking about the original installation of voting system hardware where none currently exist.
This is like saying you shouldn't buy a new computer because you'd basically be reinstalling your television.
You know, if each American who reads slashdot went out and smashed just ONE voting machine each with a sledgehammer, this entire argument would be a moot point.
Why would we want to break perfectly good voting machines? The voting machines are fine. It's the FAKE voting machines that we need to smash.
Let's say you can decelerate 20 MPH in a second. Let's say it takes the driver behind you a full half second to react.
29.33 f/s/s *.2 s *.2 s = 7.3 feet
So, EVEN if your car is capable of decelerating 20 MPH in a second, and EVEN if it takes the driver behind you a full half second to react, so long as you don't slow down any quicker than the car behind you is capable of, you only need 7.3 feet of following distance. With more realistic numbers, 5 feet would work.
For starters, this 'if it hits a brick wall or stationary tractor trailer it'll stop in 0' thing is stupid. If you are going 50 MPH 5 feet behind a car when you notice the car suddenly stops because it has hit a stopped tractor trailer, you are going to die. But if there is *NO* car in front of you when you notice the tractor trailer stopped 15 feet in front of you, you're STILL going to die. The problem is you're not noticing a stopped tractor trailer. When you've got 15 feet to stop your car, how far ahead of you the car that's going to hit the trailer first is doesn't matter. Even if there isn't a car at all, you're still toast.
So first problem is, none of you have properly understood the problem. We've already established that if the car in front of you stops because it hits something, following distance IS COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT. Either you are able to stop your car before hitting that object or you're not. Hell, having a car in front of you might even buy you some extra time if it pushed the stopped car forward or out of the way.
If the car in front of you decelerates, there are two things you need following distance for: Covering the time you're going faster than the car in front of you because it's started decelerating and you havn't reacted yet, and covering the time the car in front of you is going slower than you are because it's already decelerated some AND may be able to decelerate faster than you can at all.
For example, a motorcycle following a tractor trailer needs little following distance, because it can stop much quicker than the tractor trailer can. But a tractor trailer following a motor cycle needs a LOT of following distance, because the motor cycle can decelerate much quicker than the tractor trailer.
To compute needed following distance correctly, your following distance must be the greater of:
Max Rate of Deceleration of the Lead Vehicle * (following driver's reaction time)^2 **
and
(Following Vehicle Stop Distance - Leading Vehicle Stop Distance + Following Vehicle Velocity * Following Vehicle's Driver's Reaction Time) ***
So, at 5 MPH, 5 feet might be sufficient for a motorcycle following a tractor trailer, but definitely not the other way around.
** This is how much farther the following car will travel than the lead car before the driver reacts and stops decelerating. The quicker the lead vehicle can decelerate, the more space you need to react and start decelerating before you hit the lead vehicle.
*** This is the total stopping distance needed. Note that if the following vehicle decelerates quicker than the lead vehicle, only the first equation is relevant - if you havn't hit the lead car by the time you start decelerating, you're not going to. But if the lead vehicle decelerates quicker than the following vehicle, then you need extra following distance to absorb the difference in stopping distance.
They cost that much because they treat life-threatening diseases only a small number of people have and they still cost billions of dollars to develop.
It's the product of federal incentives that encourage companies to spend a lot of money developing drugs that benefit only a few people.
And on top of that, the drug companies pervert the process. Even with insurance, most people can't afford these drugs, so in a free market, no one would buy them, helping keep insurance costs down. The drug companies realize this, so what they do is set up and fund charities that pay for the patient portion of the drug costs, so the insurance company still gets the 80-90% of the money from the insurance company.
Ultimately, what usually happens is everyone at the company where this person works loses health insurance because the cost of covering the one person are too much for either the employer or the employees to handle.
I do actuality believe that a company could make valid and secure voting machines
It may be possible to make a secure, paperless electronic voting machine.
But making a secure machine isn't the whole problem.
The problem is that even if you made a totally secure machine, there's no way to prove it actually is totally secure. All you'd know is you hadn't found a way to break it yet - a property all insecure machines have as well, until someone finds the vulnerability.
One of the big ones is that a very small number of people spend an ASSANINELY LARGE AMOUNT of money. Some people are on drugs that cost $400,000/year.
As long as we are unwilling to say "You know what, it's too expensive to keep you alive", a lot of people are going to die because they can't afford to subsidize the healthcare costs of the extremely sick and therefore can't get even basic healthcare.
We need insurance plans that cap maximum expense - so you can sign up for death if you catch something that's going to cost 3 million to fix so you can survive the far more likely chance you get a disease/injury that costs $40,000 without going bankrupt.
Clearly, we don't want people calling up our phone or credit card companies, pretending to be us, and getting private information. That's bad.
But, we also don't want to prevent law enforcement from pretending to be a drug dealer in order to bust drug dealers, or pretending to be a kiddie porn trader in order to bust kiddie porn producers. On a more germaine front, we probably don't want it to be illegal for you to register at the hotel as John Smith when your real name is Ed Johnson.
It sounds like this is a case of a law with a very popular goal that was written in way, way, way too broad a manner, and caught up a lot of things that shouldn't have been included. This shouldn't be a concept that's so hard to understand for Slashdotters, who are quick to point out when laws proposed by groups we don't like have broad, nasty consequences.
Just because the MPAA was the most organized party pushing for the law to be changed doesn't mean that (necessarily) the law didn't need to be changed.
Strikes me as true, and as always when claiming something is obvious, it begs the question "how come you didn't think of it then?"
Because they didn't have a reason to think of it?
Or it uses new technology didn't exist when they last encountered the problem?
For example, good, free database software has recently become available, making it feasible for many people to apply databases to problems who didn't have that option before.
So does that mean the first person in any industry to become aware of database software should be able to get a patent on "Using a database to solve this problem"? No. And letting the first person to realize this obvious application of databases to patent it is BAD for EVERYONE.
Slashdot Mirror
Part of the problem is there's network, and then there's network. Just because you operate the most extensive network of any single cell phone company doesn't mean you have the biggest area where your customers can place non-roaming calls.
For example, I have a phone with T-Mobile. T-Mobile has a pretty small network; however, you can roam on a lot of other networks, particularly Cellular One in my area, at no additional charge over your normal plan. So the effective network is bigger than their actual company network.
Other cell phone providers have bigger networks themselves, but don't partner with anyone, so their effective network may be smaller.
What if he works at White Castle?
The activation fee covers the costs of acquiring a new customer. That's mostly the fee paid to whoever actually sells you the service - Radio Shack, mall kiosk, whatever. The also wrap advertising and other expenses in there.
As for both types of plans, I think if you asked, most companies would give you a lower rate IF you did it online AND already had a phone.
Exactly my point - you don't need guns to protect you from the government, because if you really have a case where you're at civil war with the government, you'll have a good portion of the military on your side as well as access to plenty of black-market firearms.
The handgun somebody keeps in their closet is pretty much pointless.
Am I the only one who sees how ridiculous the whole thing is?
No, the phone company thinks it's ridiculous too. They would much rather have you pay the $200 for the cell phone up-front than get the $200 from you over a period of 24 months or if you cancel. They would much rather have you pay a $50 or $100 activation fee than get that back over the course of 12-24 monthly payments. To a phone company, $360 now and $25/month is FAR better than $40/month with a termination fee.
It's the same reason you get 'huge' discounts for registering a domain name for 10 years - that's money in the bank for the registrar, and they'll make more money from you getting you to pay early than 'charging you more' annually.
The problem is, if I tell you that to get my cell phone plan, you have to pay me $240 for a phone and a $120 activation fee (to cover the costs of acquiring you as a customer) and I'll give you service for $25 month, you won't sign up with me. You'll go to the company that charges $40/month, with a 'free' phone and 'free' activation.
Well, maybe YOU wouldn't, but most people will pay $40/month for cell service. Most people will not pay $360 for cell service. Most people don't HAVE $360 to pay up-front for cell service. The cell companies are only giving people what they want.
They did very well in killing up 3,000 civilians.
They made the system stronger.
What really angers me about the 'need firearms to protect us from the government' people is that they don't understand what they are really saying. "We need guns so the government doesn't take away our rights" they say.
That's saying that you don't have to comply with the will over the democratically elected government. It's saying that if you don't like the law, yu're going to become a terrorist. That you would rather just become a terrorist than elect people who are going to protect your rights in the first place.
The people who scream bloody murder about the government taking away the guns they need to protect their rights from the government tend to the VERY SAME PEOPLE who ELECT OFFICIALS WHO TAKE AWAY YOUR RIGHTS!
How many times have you heard someone say "We need guns to protect our rights!" and then say "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear!"
How about instead of letting people say "Elect me, and I won't take away your guns!", you elect people who say "Elect me, and I'll repeal the Patriot Act!"
People who argue that they need guns to protect their rights from the government are just gun nuts. The 'protect us from the government' argument is a red herring. If their RIGHTS were really what is important to them, they'd vote for people who wanted to protect their rights instead of people who wanted to protect their guns.
But that's not what happens. Search you without a warrant? Listen in to your phone calls? Arrest and detain you, even if you're a US citizen, without access to courts or a lawyer? Torture people? Sure, we'll reelect that guy, as long as he promises we can keep our guns!
Using the right to bear arms to protect your rights is useless if you're willing to trade away all your other rights just to keep your gun. Then what are you protecting?
The US Army does not have enough tanks to cover the contry. If it actually came down to it, you would not have a tank in your neighborhood, but your friendly local cop at your door. And him I can defend against.
You'll have a 500 lb bomb dropped from 20,000 feet.
Or a missile fired from an unmanned drone.
It seems like you are trying to say that the crime rate would be lower if nobody had guns
Grr, I meant EVERYBODY had guns.
It should be no shock that D.C. is still one of the most violent cities in the U.S. (#2 or #3, the last I checked). The murder rate drops by a factor of 10 when you cross the Potomac River into Virginia (still in metropolitan Washington; it gets even lower further away) where there is no gun ban.
What are you trying to say?
It seems like you are trying to say that the crime rate would be lower if nobody had guns. If that is what you are trying to say, either you are intentionally putting forth a bad argument, or you're stupid.
We have two sets of data: Data when it was legal to own handguns on both sides of the river, and data when it was legal to own a gun on only the low-crime side of the river.
The high-crime side of the river had high crime in both circumstances. At best, with the data you're using in your argument, you can argue that taking away legal handguns didn't make a difference.
That's the big problem with the gun debate. There are very few people involved capable of a rational argument. They know what side they are on, and emotionally, irrationally argue in support of their position, summarily dismissing any information that does not help their cause, while seizing on any bit that seems to support it, no matter how flawed.
It says something of the grandparent's personal character that when he sees a gun he thinks, "that's for killing" as opposed to "that's for safeguarding."
You're right, it shows he's smarter than the average person, because he's able to understand that an object can have more than one function.
By definition, if you have two guys with guns, and one is defending himself, the other one is trying to kill him.
If everyone was running around only using guns to defend themselves, we wouldn't need guns to defend ourselves now, would we?
From the article:
'You are talking about basically a reinstallation of the entire voting system hardware.'
This illustrates the problem with these people. They view the paperless machines as voting machines that need to be reinstalled. They are not voting machines at all. The recommendation is talking about the original installation of voting system hardware where none currently exist.
This is like saying you shouldn't buy a new computer because you'd basically be reinstalling your television.
You know, if each American who reads slashdot went out and smashed just ONE voting machine each with a sledgehammer, this entire argument would be a moot point.
Why would we want to break perfectly good voting machines? The voting machines are fine. It's the FAKE voting machines that we need to smash.
We know that they paid a total of $1 million in penalties.
But how much in profits did they make?
If they made $2 million in profits, then the law didn't work at all.
Let's say you can decelerate 20 MPH in a second. Let's say it takes the driver behind you a full half second to react.
.2 s * .2 s = 7.3 feet
29.33 f/s/s *
So, EVEN if your car is capable of decelerating 20 MPH in a second, and EVEN if it takes the driver behind you a full half second to react, so long as you don't slow down any quicker than the car behind you is capable of, you only need 7.3 feet of following distance. With more realistic numbers, 5 feet would work.
So far, you're all wrong.
For starters, this 'if it hits a brick wall or stationary tractor trailer it'll stop in 0' thing is stupid. If you are going 50 MPH 5 feet behind a car when you notice the car suddenly stops because it has hit a stopped tractor trailer, you are going to die. But if there is *NO* car in front of you when you notice the tractor trailer stopped 15 feet in front of you, you're STILL going to die. The problem is you're not noticing a stopped tractor trailer. When you've got 15 feet to stop your car, how far ahead of you the car that's going to hit the trailer first is doesn't matter. Even if there isn't a car at all, you're still toast.
So first problem is, none of you have properly understood the problem. We've already established that if the car in front of you stops because it hits something, following distance IS COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT. Either you are able to stop your car before hitting that object or you're not. Hell, having a car in front of you might even buy you some extra time if it pushed the stopped car forward or out of the way.
If the car in front of you decelerates, there are two things you need following distance for: Covering the time you're going faster than the car in front of you because it's started decelerating and you havn't reacted yet, and covering the time the car in front of you is going slower than you are because it's already decelerated some AND may be able to decelerate faster than you can at all.
For example, a motorcycle following a tractor trailer needs little following distance, because it can stop much quicker than the tractor trailer can. But a tractor trailer following a motor cycle needs a LOT of following distance, because the motor cycle can decelerate much quicker than the tractor trailer.
To compute needed following distance correctly, your following distance must be the greater of:
Max Rate of Deceleration of the Lead Vehicle * (following driver's reaction time)^2 **
and
(Following Vehicle Stop Distance - Leading Vehicle Stop Distance + Following Vehicle Velocity * Following Vehicle's Driver's Reaction Time) ***
So, at 5 MPH, 5 feet might be sufficient for a motorcycle following a tractor trailer, but definitely not the other way around.
** This is how much farther the following car will travel than the lead car before the driver reacts and stops decelerating. The quicker the lead vehicle can decelerate, the more space you need to react and start decelerating before you hit the lead vehicle.
*** This is the total stopping distance needed. Note that if the following vehicle decelerates quicker than the lead vehicle, only the first equation is relevant - if you havn't hit the lead car by the time you start decelerating, you're not going to. But if the lead vehicle decelerates quicker than the following vehicle, then you need extra following distance to absorb the difference in stopping distance.
They cost that much because they treat life-threatening diseases only a small number of people have and they still cost billions of dollars to develop.
It's the product of federal incentives that encourage companies to spend a lot of money developing drugs that benefit only a few people.
And on top of that, the drug companies pervert the process. Even with insurance, most people can't afford these drugs, so in a free market, no one would buy them, helping keep insurance costs down. The drug companies realize this, so what they do is set up and fund charities that pay for the patient portion of the drug costs, so the insurance company still gets the 80-90% of the money from the insurance company.
Ultimately, what usually happens is everyone at the company where this person works loses health insurance because the cost of covering the one person are too much for either the employer or the employees to handle.
I do actuality believe that a company could make valid and secure voting machines
It may be possible to make a secure, paperless electronic voting machine.
But making a secure machine isn't the whole problem.
The problem is that even if you made a totally secure machine, there's no way to prove it actually is totally secure. All you'd know is you hadn't found a way to break it yet - a property all insecure machines have as well, until someone finds the vulnerability.
One of the big ones is that a very small number of people spend an ASSANINELY LARGE AMOUNT of money. Some people are on drugs that cost $400,000/year.
As long as we are unwilling to say "You know what, it's too expensive to keep you alive", a lot of people are going to die because they can't afford to subsidize the healthcare costs of the extremely sick and therefore can't get even basic healthcare.
We need insurance plans that cap maximum expense - so you can sign up for death if you catch something that's going to cost 3 million to fix so you can survive the far more likely chance you get a disease/injury that costs $40,000 without going bankrupt.
Clearly, we don't want people calling up our phone or credit card companies, pretending to be us, and getting private information. That's bad.
But, we also don't want to prevent law enforcement from pretending to be a drug dealer in order to bust drug dealers, or pretending to be a kiddie porn trader in order to bust kiddie porn producers. On a more germaine front, we probably don't want it to be illegal for you to register at the hotel as John Smith when your real name is Ed Johnson.
It sounds like this is a case of a law with a very popular goal that was written in way, way, way too broad a manner, and caught up a lot of things that shouldn't have been included. This shouldn't be a concept that's so hard to understand for Slashdotters, who are quick to point out when laws proposed by groups we don't like have broad, nasty consequences.
Just because the MPAA was the most organized party pushing for the law to be changed doesn't mean that (necessarily) the law didn't need to be changed.
But isn't a cotton gin just a "method and apparatus for removing seeds from cotton?"
No. A cotton gin is specifically a system including a comb and a wheel with spines.
Strikes me as true, and as always when claiming something is obvious, it begs the question "how come you didn't think of it then?"
Also, what about cases where the whole problem is someone else DID think of it? Or lots of someone elses thought of it?
If you patent something that 10 other people independently start doing, doesn't that kind of demonstrate that it was pretty obvious?
The problem with a lot of these obvious patents isn't whether the invention was obvious or not, but whether the patent is an invention at all.
A cotton gin is an invention, and should be patentable. Mechanically removing seeds from cotton is a problem, and shouldn't be patentable.
Strikes me as true, and as always when claiming something is obvious, it begs the question "how come you didn't think of it then?"
Because they didn't have a reason to think of it?
Or it uses new technology didn't exist when they last encountered the problem?
For example, good, free database software has recently become available, making it feasible for many people to apply databases to problems who didn't have that option before.
So does that mean the first person in any industry to become aware of database software should be able to get a patent on "Using a database to solve this problem"? No. And letting the first person to realize this obvious application of databases to patent it is BAD for EVERYONE.
I can crack a blackberry with a $4 hammer!
I can do it for free with my fist, but that kinda hurts.
It is designed strictly for recieving email you don't want.
Is there any service strictly designed for not receiving the email I don't want?