That's an irrelevant comparison. There's no meritocratic entry requirement or competition for an 'elite family', whereas (with few exceptions) you only get into an elite university with high intelligence, hard work or both.
Would you dispute that the average ability of students at, say, Harvard, where they can pick and choose the best of the best from their pool of applicants, is higher than at a mid-range state university which accepts most applicants even with mid-range grades?
I'm not saying students at Harvard are (generally) smarter because of anything inherent to Harvard, I'm saying that a school with a greater pool of highly capable applicants will have the ability to only select the best of the best.
Even if the professors and the exams are the same (especially if they're the same, in fact), I'd definitely expect the higher ability group to achieve better grades.
The time they need to absolutely irrecovably clear the cheque to the point where nobody in the world can get the money back from the bank will be the same, whether it is a legal company or a scam artist. However, the legal company probably didn't give me the cheque just for fun. For example, they might have given me the cheque so that I put new carpets into their huge new office building, and I need money to pay for the carpets, I need money to pay for the employees, so I need to be able to spend the $500,000 as early as possible. I can't start working until the bank gives me access to the $500,000.
A very reasonable point, but shouldn't that time be about 24 hours, in either case, rendering the distinction moot? The receiving bank contacts the issuing bank, the issuing bank either irrevocably debits the issuing account or informs the receiving bank that there are not sufficient funds available to proceed, the receiving bank then either credits the receiving account or informs the customer that the cheque bounced. What part of the 'backend' process takes any longer than the day or two that the normal clearing process takes anyway?
So what do you think should happen with the first cheque? To be honest, if I received a cheque for $500,000 and was supposed to send $425,000 to someone else that I don't know, I would go to the bank and ask "Is the cheque cleared"? When the answer is "Yes", I would then ask "Is there any way whatsoever that you could ask me to return the money"? And if the answer is "No" I would then ask "Can you give that to me in writing"?
Agreed - this guy may not have been as stupid as the average 419 victim, but he still made mistakes. I do, however, think the blame is, at the very least, to be shared with the bank in this case (and it's not often that I have any sympathy for some idiot who thought Prince Njembe considered him the best financial broker for the job); a reasonable person would believe that if a bank says a cheque is cleared, the money is now yours to use, despite what some arcane and little-known regulation might have to say on the matter.
If the banks aren't properly verifying these transfers before making the funds available, how the hell are they operating? It seems shady, at best, that the series of events should be anything other than "Sending bank checks sender's account and immediately debits necessary funds; sending bank transfers funds to receiving bank; receiving bank deposits funds in receiver's account". Let the banks both play with the money in short term investments for a day or so, if you must, but I still fail to see how the system can be altered in such a manner that the transfer becomes invalid after the fact, rather than simply bouncing as 'non-sufficient funds' immediately.
I didn't realise that these scams sometimes worked in that manner - what's to stop the potential victim from taking the entire amount in the form of a cashier's cheque and jumping on the next flight to Switzerland or the Cayman Islands to deposit it somewhere out of reach?
I'm not saying grade inflation doesn't exist, but isn't it reasonable to think that a more competitive, more selective university (where only smarter, harder working people can get in) is more likely to produce a higher percentage of As than average?
The alternative of grading everything on a curve is no better - your grades become more dependent on random class groupings that actual ability.
Yea because the amount you pay back for your tuition fee loan is based on your parents income.... oh wait it isn't.
The amount of debt one can reasonably enter the working world with is clearly affected by parental income, to some extent at least. At one extreme there's "Oh, I'll just take £30,000 out of the Swiss account, that should cover it" and at the other there's "I can't possibly assume any debt, since the repayments would prevent me from giving back to my family". There's a sliding scale between those two, and at most places along it the income of the parents (or perhaps 'overall family wealth' is a better way to put it) has a decent impact on how much student debt is acceptable.
I really don't think the rise in tuition fees is going to make Cambridge less competitive academically.
Neither do I, but largely because I expect the vast majority of universities to almost immediately put their fees up to the maximum £9000.
And then click through the "Are you 18?" page by accident too?
If they're too young to understand that, and the parents are worried, they should be supervised (although realistically I'm sure the kid would just raise an eyebrow and then navigate to something they found more interesting).
Unlike a lot of slashdotters, I actually have nothing against usage based billing in principle (although I'm sure that ISPs will see it as an excuse to jack up per-GB prices far higher than even the low-usage users are paying now). I hadn't considered 'peak time' as an issue, but if they were talking about charging more for 1MB at 8-9AM than at 2AM then I'd be willing to hear them out; that's still a content-neutral billing method based on real allocation of a limited resource.
Problem is, that's not what they're proposing here; what this article suggests is that they charge you more for 1MB at 2AM from Netflix and less for an identical 1MB of data at 2AM from, say, Google. It is an entirely artificial pricing scheme, nothing to do with network management, and it creates an extremely strong market imbalance, not to mention a severe conflict of interest where bandwidth providers are owned by the same companies as content providers. It genuinely risks fundamentally fragmenting the internet into a collection of AOL-style walled gardens.
If you just insert "...at a given time [a MB is a MB]" into my original post, the point still stands. Your posts do seem quite reasonable, but they all appear to conflate the issues of time-based and content-based billing; don't you think you're addressing a different issue to the one put in question by the article? Selling "a 9AM MB" is still neutral, selling "a Netflix MB" is not.
The sensible alternative is straightforward usage-based billing. You charge for the quantity of traffic, not the type of traffic. It's not the most popular solution, partly because ISPs are going to use it as an unfair excuse for a price hike, but it recognises that 'unlimited' is impossible and it beats the hell out of arbitrary distinctions on identical bits purely intended to extort the most cash from both consumer and content provider.
You seem to be letting a personal dislike of certain technologies cloud your view. Firstly, net-capable phones are by no means limited to iPhone price territory - a perfectly capable smartphone can easily be found for about £100 unlocked or less than £20/month on a contract. You call Facebook a waste of time, I call it a useful supplement to my other choices of mobile communication (i.e. calls and texts), especially for group conversations or 'broadcast' messaging (think "We're in the pub, feel free to join us", or some such. Not life-or-death, obviously, but a damn useful tool nonetheless). Just because you judge something to be worthless doesn't make it so - plenty of people would consider posting on slashdot to be a waste of time, yet you still do so.
What's much more important, though is that many of us are of the opinion that (aside from edge cases regarding certain peering arrangements or QOS) a MB is a MB, and thus any distinction places artificial restrictions on net access, almost inevitably leading to carriers coercing content providers to pay more for the use of their network despite the fact that upstream was paid at the datacenter and downstream was paid by the consumer. The fact that the first moves in this direction happen to be on mobile connections rather than fixed lines, and that the services mentioned happen not to be ones that you personally use, surely shouldn't be enough to prevent you from seeing that any kind of restriction will lay the groundwork for you, the consumer, being screwed over.
I really don't understand why online ads are worth so much less. Or perhaps more accurately, I don't understand why TV ads are worth so much. If I happen to be watching non-timeshifted broadcast TV (a rare event in itself) I'll hit pause for 15 minutes at the start and do something else specifically to avoid the seemingly interminable ad breaks. Exposure to advertising (other than product placement) there is zero.
If I'm watching Hulu I might tab over to another window, but the fact that the ads are only a minute or so long means I'm a lot more likely to watch them - hell, there's even the rare occasion where one of them is somewhat entertaining (although that invariably wears off after the first showing, and becomes progressively more annoying the subsequent 35 times they play it).
In any case, I'm continually amazed that most of the TV industry, Facebook, Google and the press are all supported by ads; I just can't believe that advertising is really worth that much (although very successful people obviously appear to think differently). I'd say about 75% of the ads I see do nothing beyond reinforcing the existence of the brand name in my mind (of value to advertisers, I know, but half the time 'big name' brands are crap anyway), maybe 5% tell me about a product I might actually be interested in (and will subsequently research online if it costs any significant amount), and the remaining 20% are so bad that they make me actively avoid the company that made them.
Obviously slashdotters are not the most representative group, but my totally unscientific and anecdotal experience does seem to indicate that it's not just us geeks that this applies to.
Survives to what end, though? To spend 'x' months in a dank bunker with no country left to come out to once the radiation's cleared a bit (not to mention an awful lot of pissed off, probably armed, survivors on both sides of the border)?
Even assuming a psychopathic disregard for the lives and well being of others, that doesn't sound like a sensible choice.
Nobody's talking about nuking North Korea pre-emptively because "we don't like the guys in charge" (nobody sane, anyway) but if it comes down to the situation where they fire a nuclear weapon at Seoul, or Tokyo, or wherever (thereby killing millions) then there are many who would state that retaliation in kind is the safest option.
I don't know if this is how the GP intended it, but I read that as a comment on business vs. economy - the 'product' is the same: transportation from A to B, but the price is (often vastly) higher if you want to have better service and comfort throughout. It's a decent example of established companies putting a dollar value on the customer's overall experience.
I'm not sure what the answer is, but a pure-capitalism, only-the-price-matters approach certainly isn't it.
Don't blame capitalism - the overall customer satisfaction is as marketable as the physical product. The issue is that most people place a very low dollar value on ancillary services (nice store, helpful staff, etc.) - often a much lower value than it costs to provide those nice extras. The fact that your local book store is still in business is proof that there is a market for good service even at a premium price, although it's something of a niche. I do sometimes think it's a shame that most people will apparently put up with some really terrible service in an effort to save a very small amount of money, but there will more or less always be a little space for stores which are competitive on service not just price. How the big-box electronics stores survive, however, I simply cannot understand - I've never found one with remotely worthwhile price or service.
I often wonder why Currys/Comet still exist. Their prices are almost universally terrible and the service sucks - is the market for people who can't wait 24-48 hours for shipping really that large?
I always thought much the same for the people who throw in an asterisk rather than typing the word verbatim. Either say it or don't (and for those sites with profanity filters, either allow it or don't), don't say 'f*ck' and pretend it's any different to saying 'fuck'.
So rather than, say, mandating a "Non-US procured origin" notification by the US reseller & leaving the choice to the consumer, the route chosen is to give manufacturers perpetual control of their products sold overseas (and thus allow them to severely distort the market even for the many products which are, in fact, identical). Seems to me to be a rather sub-optimal solution.
You keep saying it's not an issue of individual rights, then adding the "purchased in the US" caveat. The fact of the matter is that it is an issue of what US citizens can do with their legally owned property within the US, if they happened to buy that property overseas. Sure, that might take a little of the edge off compared to the wording of the summary, but that doesn't mean it's not an issue for individuals.
Slashdot Mirror
That's an irrelevant comparison. There's no meritocratic entry requirement or competition for an 'elite family', whereas (with few exceptions) you only get into an elite university with high intelligence, hard work or both.
Would you dispute that the average ability of students at, say, Harvard, where they can pick and choose the best of the best from their pool of applicants, is higher than at a mid-range state university which accepts most applicants even with mid-range grades?
I'm not saying students at Harvard are (generally) smarter because of anything inherent to Harvard, I'm saying that a school with a greater pool of highly capable applicants will have the ability to only select the best of the best.
Even if the professors and the exams are the same (especially if they're the same, in fact), I'd definitely expect the higher ability group to achieve better grades.
The time they need to absolutely irrecovably clear the cheque to the point where nobody in the world can get the money back from the bank will be the same, whether it is a legal company or a scam artist. However, the legal company probably didn't give me the cheque just for fun. For example, they might have given me the cheque so that I put new carpets into their huge new office building, and I need money to pay for the carpets, I need money to pay for the employees, so I need to be able to spend the $500,000 as early as possible. I can't start working until the bank gives me access to the $500,000.
A very reasonable point, but shouldn't that time be about 24 hours, in either case, rendering the distinction moot? The receiving bank contacts the issuing bank, the issuing bank either irrevocably debits the issuing account or informs the receiving bank that there are not sufficient funds available to proceed, the receiving bank then either credits the receiving account or informs the customer that the cheque bounced. What part of the 'backend' process takes any longer than the day or two that the normal clearing process takes anyway?
So what do you think should happen with the first cheque? To be honest, if I received a cheque for $500,000 and was supposed to send $425,000 to someone else that I don't know, I would go to the bank and ask "Is the cheque cleared"? When the answer is "Yes", I would then ask "Is there any way whatsoever that you could ask me to return the money"? And if the answer is "No" I would then ask "Can you give that to me in writing"?
Agreed - this guy may not have been as stupid as the average 419 victim, but he still made mistakes. I do, however, think the blame is, at the very least, to be shared with the bank in this case (and it's not often that I have any sympathy for some idiot who thought Prince Njembe considered him the best financial broker for the job); a reasonable person would believe that if a bank says a cheque is cleared, the money is now yours to use, despite what some arcane and little-known regulation might have to say on the matter.
If the banks aren't properly verifying these transfers before making the funds available, how the hell are they operating? It seems shady, at best, that the series of events should be anything other than "Sending bank checks sender's account and immediately debits necessary funds; sending bank transfers funds to receiving bank; receiving bank deposits funds in receiver's account". Let the banks both play with the money in short term investments for a day or so, if you must, but I still fail to see how the system can be altered in such a manner that the transfer becomes invalid after the fact, rather than simply bouncing as 'non-sufficient funds' immediately.
I didn't realise that these scams sometimes worked in that manner - what's to stop the potential victim from taking the entire amount in the form of a cashier's cheque and jumping on the next flight to Switzerland or the Cayman Islands to deposit it somewhere out of reach?
Come to think of it, what the hell is a book depository? Some kind of library warehouse or something?
I'm pretty sure I've never heard the term (nor 'grassy knoll', for that matter) outside of a JFK context.
I'm not saying grade inflation doesn't exist, but isn't it reasonable to think that a more competitive, more selective university (where only smarter, harder working people can get in) is more likely to produce a higher percentage of As than average?
The alternative of grading everything on a curve is no better - your grades become more dependent on random class groupings that actual ability.
Yea because the amount you pay back for your tuition fee loan is based on your parents income.... oh wait it isn't.
The amount of debt one can reasonably enter the working world with is clearly affected by parental income, to some extent at least. At one extreme there's "Oh, I'll just take £30,000 out of the Swiss account, that should cover it" and at the other there's "I can't possibly assume any debt, since the repayments would prevent me from giving back to my family". There's a sliding scale between those two, and at most places along it the income of the parents (or perhaps 'overall family wealth' is a better way to put it) has a decent impact on how much student debt is acceptable.
I really don't think the rise in tuition fees is going to make Cambridge less competitive academically.
Neither do I, but largely because I expect the vast majority of universities to almost immediately put their fees up to the maximum £9000.
I thought it was the Brits who felt that their country wasn't prudish enough who then went off to found America?
And then click through the "Are you 18?" page by accident too?
If they're too young to understand that, and the parents are worried, they should be supervised (although realistically I'm sure the kid would just raise an eyebrow and then navigate to something they found more interesting).
Unlike a lot of slashdotters, I actually have nothing against usage based billing in principle (although I'm sure that ISPs will see it as an excuse to jack up per-GB prices far higher than even the low-usage users are paying now). I hadn't considered 'peak time' as an issue, but if they were talking about charging more for 1MB at 8-9AM than at 2AM then I'd be willing to hear them out; that's still a content-neutral billing method based on real allocation of a limited resource.
Problem is, that's not what they're proposing here; what this article suggests is that they charge you more for 1MB at 2AM from Netflix and less for an identical 1MB of data at 2AM from, say, Google. It is an entirely artificial pricing scheme, nothing to do with network management, and it creates an extremely strong market imbalance, not to mention a severe conflict of interest where bandwidth providers are owned by the same companies as content providers. It genuinely risks fundamentally fragmenting the internet into a collection of AOL-style walled gardens.
If you just insert "...at a given time [a MB is a MB]" into my original post, the point still stands. Your posts do seem quite reasonable, but they all appear to conflate the issues of time-based and content-based billing; don't you think you're addressing a different issue to the one put in question by the article? Selling "a 9AM MB" is still neutral, selling "a Netflix MB" is not.
Which makes the act of ascribing responsibility to 'Anonymous' meaningless in itself, I guess.
If they were operating under any suggestion of official support from Wikileaks I'd agree with you. As it stands I think they're just inept.
But I have trouble seeing alternatives.
The sensible alternative is straightforward usage-based billing. You charge for the quantity of traffic, not the type of traffic. It's not the most popular solution, partly because ISPs are going to use it as an unfair excuse for a price hike, but it recognises that 'unlimited' is impossible and it beats the hell out of arbitrary distinctions on identical bits purely intended to extort the most cash from both consumer and content provider.
You seem to be letting a personal dislike of certain technologies cloud your view. Firstly, net-capable phones are by no means limited to iPhone price territory - a perfectly capable smartphone can easily be found for about £100 unlocked or less than £20/month on a contract. You call Facebook a waste of time, I call it a useful supplement to my other choices of mobile communication (i.e. calls and texts), especially for group conversations or 'broadcast' messaging (think "We're in the pub, feel free to join us", or some such. Not life-or-death, obviously, but a damn useful tool nonetheless). Just because you judge something to be worthless doesn't make it so - plenty of people would consider posting on slashdot to be a waste of time, yet you still do so.
What's much more important, though is that many of us are of the opinion that (aside from edge cases regarding certain peering arrangements or QOS) a MB is a MB, and thus any distinction places artificial restrictions on net access, almost inevitably leading to carriers coercing content providers to pay more for the use of their network despite the fact that upstream was paid at the datacenter and downstream was paid by the consumer. The fact that the first moves in this direction happen to be on mobile connections rather than fixed lines, and that the services mentioned happen not to be ones that you personally use, surely shouldn't be enough to prevent you from seeing that any kind of restriction will lay the groundwork for you, the consumer, being screwed over.
Wait, we need support now?
I really don't understand why online ads are worth so much less. Or perhaps more accurately, I don't understand why TV ads are worth so much. If I happen to be watching non-timeshifted broadcast TV (a rare event in itself) I'll hit pause for 15 minutes at the start and do something else specifically to avoid the seemingly interminable ad breaks. Exposure to advertising (other than product placement) there is zero.
If I'm watching Hulu I might tab over to another window, but the fact that the ads are only a minute or so long means I'm a lot more likely to watch them - hell, there's even the rare occasion where one of them is somewhat entertaining (although that invariably wears off after the first showing, and becomes progressively more annoying the subsequent 35 times they play it).
In any case, I'm continually amazed that most of the TV industry, Facebook, Google and the press are all supported by ads; I just can't believe that advertising is really worth that much (although very successful people obviously appear to think differently). I'd say about 75% of the ads I see do nothing beyond reinforcing the existence of the brand name in my mind (of value to advertisers, I know, but half the time 'big name' brands are crap anyway), maybe 5% tell me about a product I might actually be interested in (and will subsequently research online if it costs any significant amount), and the remaining 20% are so bad that they make me actively avoid the company that made them.
Obviously slashdotters are not the most representative group, but my totally unscientific and anecdotal experience does seem to indicate that it's not just us geeks that this applies to.
Survives to what end, though? To spend 'x' months in a dank bunker with no country left to come out to once the radiation's cleared a bit (not to mention an awful lot of pissed off, probably armed, survivors on both sides of the border)?
Even assuming a psychopathic disregard for the lives and well being of others, that doesn't sound like a sensible choice.
Interesting site, but I'm wondering if it's legit? Seems odd that they'd have a Japanese domain.
Nobody's talking about nuking North Korea pre-emptively because "we don't like the guys in charge" (nobody sane, anyway) but if it comes down to the situation where they fire a nuclear weapon at Seoul, or Tokyo, or wherever (thereby killing millions) then there are many who would state that retaliation in kind is the safest option.
I don't know if this is how the GP intended it, but I read that as a comment on business vs. economy - the 'product' is the same: transportation from A to B, but the price is (often vastly) higher if you want to have better service and comfort throughout. It's a decent example of established companies putting a dollar value on the customer's overall experience.
I'm not sure what the answer is, but a pure-capitalism, only-the-price-matters approach certainly isn't it.
Don't blame capitalism - the overall customer satisfaction is as marketable as the physical product. The issue is that most people place a very low dollar value on ancillary services (nice store, helpful staff, etc.) - often a much lower value than it costs to provide those nice extras. The fact that your local book store is still in business is proof that there is a market for good service even at a premium price, although it's something of a niche. I do sometimes think it's a shame that most people will apparently put up with some really terrible service in an effort to save a very small amount of money, but there will more or less always be a little space for stores which are competitive on service not just price. How the big-box electronics stores survive, however, I simply cannot understand - I've never found one with remotely worthwhile price or service.
I often wonder why Currys/Comet still exist. Their prices are almost universally terrible and the service sucks - is the market for people who can't wait 24-48 hours for shipping really that large?
I always thought much the same for the people who throw in an asterisk rather than typing the word verbatim. Either say it or don't (and for those sites with profanity filters, either allow it or don't), don't say 'f*ck' and pretend it's any different to saying 'fuck'.
So rather than, say, mandating a "Non-US procured origin" notification by the US reseller & leaving the choice to the consumer, the route chosen is to give manufacturers perpetual control of their products sold overseas (and thus allow them to severely distort the market even for the many products which are, in fact, identical). Seems to me to be a rather sub-optimal solution.
You keep saying it's not an issue of individual rights, then adding the "purchased in the US" caveat. The fact of the matter is that it is an issue of what US citizens can do with their legally owned property within the US, if they happened to buy that property overseas. Sure, that might take a little of the edge off compared to the wording of the summary, but that doesn't mean it's not an issue for individuals.