I hate paying my celphone bill. -- +2 Interesting, +1 Insightful
This post is a hodge-podge of conspiracy theory and "Workers of the World Unite". Hard to imagine anyone would think it's "Insightful".. I guess they give mod points to just anyone these days.
I predict that US cell companies will one day soon be revealed to be colluding and price-fixing, and doing all sorts of nasty oligopoly/monopoly illegal things.
Riiight. Have they been "colluding" to lower per-minute fees by 90% over the past ten years? People on the left hate competitive, successful businesses. That's why we have anti-trust laws.
why the fuck is text messaging on most carrier 5-10 cents to send and again to receive? that's pure profit
I believe you answered your own question. Oh wait, I forgot that to liberals, profit is bad. If you invest 15 or 20 billion dollars over a decade to bring people celphone service, you are greedy and evil for wanting to make a profit in return.
Despite being incredibly strong, polycarbonate is actually quite soft. You can try this yourself. Take a pair of polycarb safety glasses.. These things can stop a shotgun pellet, but you can easily scratch them by just using the edge of a quarter.
They should have used a more brittle (but harder) acrylic for covering an LCD screen. It's not like it has to be particularly strong.
Could someone explain to me why thousands of my hard-earned dollars should be spent so that a couple guys I'll never meet can walk on the moon for a week?
This is a serious question. NASA claims that returning to the moon will cost $108 billion. I personally paid 8.5 ppb of the federal government's tax revenues last year (a bit over $15,000, in case you're wondering). Let's do some math: Suppose this moon-doggle ends up costing $200 billion (that's being very generous -- usually NASA manned missions cost 4-6 times their initial estimate). My part of that bill will be $1,700.
Any NASA folks around? What am I getting for my $1,700? Because honestly, I'd rather drop it in my wife's IRA, or save it for my daughter's college education. At what point did it become ok to seize another person's hard-earned money at gunpoint and blow it on something you think might be "fun"?
Dear President Bush: Stop being such a socialist and get with the conservative program. Shut down NASA, please.
I'll leave the rants about how NO CONSUMER WANTS THIS to other people.
I'm a consumer, and I'd like working, unbreakable DRM, please. Whether any companies will ever be able to deliver that is an open question...
As someone who actually buys my movies, music, and software legally, I welcome the opportunity to stop paying 5-10 times as much due to Kazaa / BitTorrent freeloaders. Thanks.
Most people don't want to be treated as thieves, and I can see some general backlash coming to MS from this
Backlash? From people who never bought Windows in the first place? Why would Microsoft care?
The plain fact is that some of the people who stole Microsoft's software will pay up, and others will stop using it. This is win-win from Microsoft's perspective.
Consider that the last bastion of true lassaiz-faire capitalism is organized crime, and the mixed economy has become the norm in the civilised world.
I beg to differ. There are plenty of great examples of "laissez faire" capitalism, and you will note that they are also examples of market efficiency.
One example: the trend in the US over the past few years has been to auction RF spectrum rather than simply allocating it as government largesse. A slice of frequecy which cost tens of millions of dollars provides a lot of incentive to use that frequency efficiently. Witness the evolution of the celphone in just the past few years. In 1985, airtime cost $2/minute and you couldn't get coverage anywhere except major cities. In 1995 a celphone was a status symbol because not everyone could afford one. Now they sell phones at 7-11, and my wife and I have like 9,000 unused minutes.
Compare to the frequencies which were given to licensed TV stations to broadcast HDTV: they sit languishing and unused. Hell, compare to the TV and radio spectrum in general: The nominal cost of a broadcast license is almost nothing, yet an actual high-power license costs $2 million to $4 million. Why? Government hurdles and regulation. These are the people I want running my internet??
Consider the number of services that are provided through the city or town you live in, either directly or through contracts with utility companies. Do you really think you'd be better off if you had to separately and personally contract with competing providers of power, sewage, and water?
Ummm, hell yes??!? Is this a trick question? The city I live in just reduced the amount of trash you can put out every week from 3 barrels to 1, yet we're still going to pay the same $204 per year for the privelege. You think a private company could get away with trippling their prices, while their competitors stayed the same? They wouldn't last one year if the local government didn't grant them a monopoly.
Since you're so sure that the free market is the best model, I'm sure you've already thought about this stuff.
I submit that anyone who's spent a lot of time "thinking about this stuff" will end up slightly further right than the Cato Institute on economic issues. At least, if they have a good head on their shoulders. Like Margaret Thatcher once said, "The facts of life are conservative."
Honestly, if you had to summarize the entire 20th century in just one sentence, it would be this: "Socialism didn't work." But some people never learn.
Cue 50,000 slashdotters to explain why socialism is ok when it benefits them personally, and why free market economics don't work in this one isolated case.
Look, if you people would just come out and say "I admire Karl Marx and think Che is the guardian of principled socialist ideals," at least I'd respect you. I would think you're a flippin' idiot, but an honest idiot.
Instead we have to put up with a bunch of noise about "price gouging" and "greed" and "market failure", which are just fancy ways of saying "I want internet service, and I'd like everyone else to help me pay for it -- even if they have no interest in using such a service. Government, please help me."
The conservatives want the rich to own all the businesses and property. The liberals want the government to own all the businesses and property.
Contrary to what the Latte Liberals would have you believe, the best way to get property into the hands of rich people and businesses is to have the government control who owns what.
You think it's rich people's houses which are getting bulldozed for the benefit of this developer? Hardly. These people are a bunch of lower-middle-class nobodies, and thanks to liberals, the government can now decide whether the land their house is built on would be more "productive" if there were a Wal-Mart there.
Which brings us back to our point: if you want to restrain the power of big corporations, vote conservative.
Could we stop referring to government-funded boondoggles such as this as "Free WiFi"? Just because you aren't getting a bill doesn't make something free. Here are a some accurate headlines:
Orlando Cancels Taxpayer-Funded Wifi Project
Orlando Decides Internet Should Be Paid For By Internet Users
To everyone who thinks using tax revenues to pay for the internet is a great idea: Why stop with the internet? How about "free" gas for our cars (paid for by the city)? Think how convenient that would be!!
Happens all the time. (*cough* Iridium sattelite phones *cough*...)
The difference is, when private industry puts together a boondoggle project like this, they lose their own money instead of taxpayers'.
Re:Stallman = Socialist
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Drafting GPL3
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· Score: 1
HishamMuhammad: Hate to go over this again, but you do realize that by "free" he is talking about "freedom", not "price", right?
Hate to call you out, but patented drugs are already "free" in the sense that their chemical structure is widely published for every chemist in the world to explore.
GPL fanbois love to distinguish between "freedom" and "price", but there is no real difference. Drug companies are not going to shell out between $500 million and $2 billion to research a drug, just for the chance to "try to make money" while every generic drug company in the world is undercutting them.. Drug research happens because of drug patents, period.
You have no idea the kind of money these companies go through just ruling out drugs you've never heard of. Promising compounds which kill cancer cells like mad in a petri dish, but oops! when you inject them in a mammal they stop breathing or maybe all the blood in their body gels (seen that).
The people doing this work are PhD's with student loans to pay off, and skilled chemists/biologists with college degrees. News flash: they expect to be fucking paid. So do the people like myself, working in IT. Did I mention the investors who ponied up $5 or $10 billion in the hopes of finding two or three useful drugs? Think they might want something in return? Or is that just greedy?
Here's what Stallman and idiots like him think should be done with the end result of all their labor: It should be "free" for any two-bit company to manufacture and sell for 1% of its true development cost. Ummm, no.
How naive can you possibly be? You think that quarter-million dollar DNA sequencers and lab mice security guards and computers and reagents and liquid nitrogen and skilled chemists are just going to show up on our loading dock while no one's looking?
Re:Stallman = Socialist
on
Drafting GPL3
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· Score: 1
Swelke: I don't know what kind of scientific research you do, but at least in most universities I have had experience with, most research is paid for by grants.
Hahahaha, I couldn't have written a better proto-Marxist-GPL-fanboi response if I had tried. Honestly, thank you.
Actually, I work for something known as a "corporation". Our research is paid for by things which we call "customers". They make money by having something called "a job". You may have seen some of these corporations around the fringes of your university.
Stallman: Free and open scientific research is the only ethically satisfactory context for the conduct of biology.
Wow, someone should tell all the scientists I work with at this pharmaceutical company.
"Guys, turns out we can just give everything away! Those protein mass spectrometers we just paid $90,000 apiece for -- yeah, we'll just get those for free from now on. Someone will donate them, or something."
Turns out that by trying to make money off our discoveries, we were acting unethically! Who woulda thunk it?
What's with the language curmudgeon? Words get verbed all the time. There's nothing wrong with it; it's been happening for at least as long as people have been speaking English.
Consider these nouns which got verbed (or perhaps they're verbs which got nouned?):
Google aren't forcing anybody to install their client
Ahhh yes, I remember the day when Bill Gates and his thugs "forced" me to install Windows. I certainly didn't choose between Windows, MacOS, and Linux. Definitely not.
Would you suggest that some natural benevolence inherent in a market economy will "promote the general welfare" once we neuter the government?
On the contrary. There is no natural benevolence in a true market economy. Free market economics is predicated on the notion that people act in their own rational best interests. Liberal yahoos hate this idea, and will try to convince you that people would sell their labors for magic beans, if Momma Government weren't there to protect tell them better.
Government regulation functions primarily to protect the businesses being regulated, not consumers. For a quick-and-dirty explanation of why, click here.
Phrased another way, the only "natural benevolence" which I foresee, is the benevolence people have for their own interests. That will be more than sufficient.
Power begets a desire for more power. Why do you think that econimic power is any different? In reality, unless free-thinking people band together to reign in economic power early via some sort of organized effort (like... let's say... a government?)
Oh, Lordy-Lou, here come the proto-Socialists to tell us that if we don't put the government in charge of everything, the Big Bad Capitalists will convert us all into nerve-stapled slave labor over the next 20 years. The only thing governments are interested in is convincing people like you that they can solve all your problems.
Power begets a desire for more power. Why do you think that governments are any different?
If you're really worried about Chinese, Eastern Europeans, and the rest of the bogeymen, there is something you can do about them: push for governmental reform. Lower the income tax to 10%, elimintate 80% of the cabinet departments, and get rid of "Government is your granny" entitlements like Social Security and Medicare.
If you'd like to learn some basics about how economies function, I recommend this book by Thomas Sowell. While you're at it, buy a copy for that wacko who thinks a government-mandated push for biodiesel is going to solve all our problems.
Incoming: 300 alarmist responses about how India and China and the rest of the Asian Tigers are going to own everything / run everything in 10 or 50 years, because they work so much harder than us.
Funny thing. 20 years ago it was the Japanese who were going to "own everything". It's actually funny (in a tragic sort of way) to watch movies from the 80's and early 90's, with their dire predictions of our impending Japanese Overlords. For a good laugh, go rent "Rising Sun" or even the Micheal Keaton comedy "Gung Ho".
In reality, Japan is slowly dragging itself out of a recession which has spanned decades due to the inept bungling of the bureaucratic masterminds who were supposedly going to guide Japan to a peaceful takeover of the world's economy. Heck, I even drive a Honda: it was made in Kentucky.
If you honestly think that China and India are going to surpass the West through the magical power of Central Planning, you haven't been paid much attention for the past 100 years or so.
Incoming: Hundreds of slashdotters raving about how hard Indians and Chinese work in school (quietly ignoring the vast majority who live in rural areas). Big deal. It didn't help the Soviets, did it?
China isn't going to be a frist-world country as long as their central government insists on tightly controlling the most important aspects of their economy. India is better off in this regard, but as an imperfect democracy I see them as a potential ally, not a rival. Indeed, the Bush administration is cozying up to democratic India specifically as a foil to totalitarian China. Smart move.
Most people even on slashdot are profoundly igrnorant of economics. For example, they routinely assume that economics is a zero-sum game. If that were true, we'd still be living in caves.
...once they get into your lungs, they stay there. This could cause a lung disease similar to silicosis.
If you're trying to breath on the moon, I wouldn't worry too much about silicosis.
Still waiting for a good SFF..
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Pentium M Goes SFF
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Still isn't what people are looking for. Wintel folks: look to the Mac Mini for inspiration.
People don't need expansion slots. Everything is built into the motherboard. If they really need something which isn't there, it can be plugged into a USB port. Expansion slots are a huge waste of real estate, and screw up your airflow too.
People want good video performance. That means no shared memory for video. The only reason people buy these huge AOpen and Shuttle SFF's is that the Mini-ITX boards are saddled with lousy graphics. Put an ATi Mobility X700 with 128 megs of video memory in there, and customers won't want or need an AGP or PCIE16 slot. Now you can get away with no expansion slots at all.
The solution is staring the industry in the face, but no one seems to sell it: SFF machines built using laptop motherboards. If Dell can sell this for $1,000 why can't they sell the same thing with no display, battery, or keyboard for $500?
Even cryptography is restricted by the government, making the European version of putty.exe (SSH client) illegal in the United States.
What a shame -- I have mod points, but there doesn't seem to be a "-1 Completely Wrong" option. I'll just have to reply.
This is complete bullshit. These restrictions went away years ago. At some point, the NSA realized that breaking into your house and installing a secret keylogger was much easier than trying to prevent you from downloading encryption software.
Heck, go here and download Microsoft's.NET common runtime for free. In case you aren't a programmer, this package contains implementaions of DES, TripleDES, Rijndael (AES), Public Key Encryption, Cryptographic Hashes like MD5 and SHA-1 (now 1000 times weaker!!), Digital Signatures, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
They should have used a more brittle (but harder) acrylic for covering an LCD screen. It's not like it has to be particularly strong.
Could someone explain to me why thousands of my hard-earned dollars should be spent so that a couple guys I'll never meet can walk on the moon for a week?
This is a serious question. NASA claims that returning to the moon will cost $108 billion. I personally paid 8.5 ppb of the federal government's tax revenues last year (a bit over $15,000, in case you're wondering). Let's do some math: Suppose this moon-doggle ends up costing $200 billion (that's being very generous -- usually NASA manned missions cost 4-6 times their initial estimate). My part of that bill will be $1,700.
Any NASA folks around? What am I getting for my $1,700? Because honestly, I'd rather drop it in my wife's IRA, or save it for my daughter's college education. At what point did it become ok to seize another person's hard-earned money at gunpoint and blow it on something you think might be "fun"?
Dear President Bush: Stop being such a socialist and get with the conservative program. Shut down NASA, please.
As someone who actually buys my movies, music, and software legally, I welcome the opportunity to stop paying 5-10 times as much due to Kazaa / BitTorrent freeloaders. Thanks.
The plain fact is that some of the people who stole Microsoft's software will pay up, and others will stop using it. This is win-win from Microsoft's perspective.
One example: the trend in the US over the past few years has been to auction RF spectrum rather than simply allocating it as government largesse. A slice of frequecy which cost tens of millions of dollars provides a lot of incentive to use that frequency efficiently. Witness the evolution of the celphone in just the past few years. In 1985, airtime cost $2/minute and you couldn't get coverage anywhere except major cities. In 1995 a celphone was a status symbol because not everyone could afford one. Now they sell phones at 7-11, and my wife and I have like 9,000 unused minutes.
Compare to the frequencies which were given to licensed TV stations to broadcast HDTV: they sit languishing and unused. Hell, compare to the TV and radio spectrum in general: The nominal cost of a broadcast license is almost nothing, yet an actual high-power license costs $2 million to $4 million. Why? Government hurdles and regulation. These are the people I want running my internet??
Ummm, hell yes??!? Is this a trick question? The city I live in just reduced the amount of trash you can put out every week from 3 barrels to 1, yet we're still going to pay the same $204 per year for the privelege. You think a private company could get away with trippling their prices, while their competitors stayed the same? They wouldn't last one year if the local government didn't grant them a monopoly. I submit that anyone who's spent a lot of time "thinking about this stuff" will end up slightly further right than the Cato Institute on economic issues. At least, if they have a good head on their shoulders. Like Margaret Thatcher once said, "The facts of life are conservative."Honestly, if you had to summarize the entire 20th century in just one sentence, it would be this: "Socialism didn't work." But some people never learn.
Look, if you people would just come out and say "I admire Karl Marx and think Che is the guardian of principled socialist ideals," at least I'd respect you. I would think you're a flippin' idiot, but an honest idiot.
Instead we have to put up with a bunch of noise about "price gouging" and "greed" and "market failure", which are just fancy ways of saying "I want internet service, and I'd like everyone else to help me pay for it -- even if they have no interest in using such a service. Government, please help me."
You think it's rich people's houses which are getting bulldozed for the benefit of this developer? Hardly. These people are a bunch of lower-middle-class nobodies, and thanks to liberals, the government can now decide whether the land their house is built on would be more "productive" if there were a Wal-Mart there.
Which brings us back to our point: if you want to restrain the power of big corporations, vote conservative.
Orlando Cancels Taxpayer-Funded Wifi Project
Orlando Decides Internet Should Be Paid For By Internet Users
To everyone who thinks using tax revenues to pay for the internet is a great idea: Why stop with the internet? How about "free" gas for our cars (paid for by the city)? Think how convenient that would be!!
The difference is, when private industry puts together a boondoggle project like this, they lose their own money instead of taxpayers'.
GPL fanbois love to distinguish between "freedom" and "price", but there is no real difference. Drug companies are not going to shell out between $500 million and $2 billion to research a drug, just for the chance to "try to make money" while every generic drug company in the world is undercutting them.. Drug research happens because of drug patents, period.
You have no idea the kind of money these companies go through just ruling out drugs you've never heard of. Promising compounds which kill cancer cells like mad in a petri dish, but oops! when you inject them in a mammal they stop breathing or maybe all the blood in their body gels (seen that).
The people doing this work are PhD's with student loans to pay off, and skilled chemists/biologists with college degrees. News flash: they expect to be fucking paid. So do the people like myself, working in IT. Did I mention the investors who ponied up $5 or $10 billion in the hopes of finding two or three useful drugs? Think they might want something in return? Or is that just greedy?
Here's what Stallman and idiots like him think should be done with the end result of all their labor: It should be "free" for any two-bit company to manufacture and sell for 1% of its true development cost. Ummm, no.
How naive can you possibly be? You think that quarter-million dollar DNA sequencers and lab mice security guards and computers and reagents and liquid nitrogen and skilled chemists are just going to show up on our loading dock while no one's looking?
Actually, I work for something known as a "corporation". Our research is paid for by things which we call "customers". They make money by having something called "a job". You may have seen some of these corporations around the fringes of your university.
"Guys, turns out we can just give everything away! Those protein mass spectrometers we just paid $90,000 apiece for -- yeah, we'll just get those for free from now on. Someone will donate them, or something."
Turns out that by trying to make money off our discoveries, we were acting unethically! Who woulda thunk it?
What's with the language curmudgeon? Words get verbed all the time. There's nothing wrong with it; it's been happening for at least as long as people have been speaking English.
Consider these nouns which got verbed (or perhaps they're verbs which got nouned?):
Walk, run, shop, sleep, look, smell, call, visit, drive, kill, drink....
Are all of these bad as well?
I can't believe people just sit down and take this. WAKE UP, Google is leveraging their dominant position in search engines to corner online mapping!
Oh wait. Providing a free, useful new service to consumers is only wrong when Microsoft does it. Sorry, I forgot.
Fun Fact: European governments subsidize Airbus.
When you ride JetBlue (or any carrier who flies Airbus jets), European taxpayers helped pay for your ticket. Enjoy your flight.
Government regulation functions primarily to protect the businesses being regulated, not consumers. For a quick-and-dirty explanation of why, click here.
Phrased another way, the only "natural benevolence" which I foresee, is the benevolence people have for their own interests. That will be more than sufficient.Power begets a desire for more power. Why do you think that governments are any different?
If you're really worried about Chinese, Eastern Europeans, and the rest of the bogeymen, there is something you can do about them: push for governmental reform. Lower the income tax to 10%, elimintate 80% of the cabinet departments, and get rid of "Government is your granny" entitlements like Social Security and Medicare.
If you'd like to learn some basics about how economies function, I recommend this book by Thomas Sowell. While you're at it, buy a copy for that wacko who thinks a government-mandated push for biodiesel is going to solve all our problems.
Incoming: 300 alarmist responses about how India and China and the rest of the Asian Tigers are going to own everything / run everything in 10 or 50 years, because they work so much harder than us.
Funny thing. 20 years ago it was the Japanese who were going to "own everything". It's actually funny (in a tragic sort of way) to watch movies from the 80's and early 90's, with their dire predictions of our impending Japanese Overlords. For a good laugh, go rent "Rising Sun" or even the Micheal Keaton comedy "Gung Ho".
In reality, Japan is slowly dragging itself out of a recession which has spanned decades due to the inept bungling of the bureaucratic masterminds who were supposedly going to guide Japan to a peaceful takeover of the world's economy. Heck, I even drive a Honda: it was made in Kentucky.
If you honestly think that China and India are going to surpass the West through the magical power of Central Planning, you haven't been paid much attention for the past 100 years or so.
Incoming: Hundreds of slashdotters raving about how hard Indians and Chinese work in school (quietly ignoring the vast majority who live in rural areas). Big deal. It didn't help the Soviets, did it?
China isn't going to be a frist-world country as long as their central government insists on tightly controlling the most important aspects of their economy. India is better off in this regard, but as an imperfect democracy I see them as a potential ally, not a rival. Indeed, the Bush administration is cozying up to democratic India specifically as a foil to totalitarian China. Smart move.
Most people even on slashdot are profoundly igrnorant of economics. For example, they routinely assume that economics is a zero-sum game. If that were true, we'd still be living in caves.
Still isn't what people are looking for. Wintel folks: look to the Mac Mini for inspiration.
- People want good video performance. That means no shared memory for video. The only reason people buy these huge AOpen and Shuttle SFF's is that the Mini-ITX boards are saddled with lousy graphics. Put an ATi Mobility X700 with 128 megs of video memory in there, and customers won't want or need an AGP or PCIE16 slot. Now you can get away with no expansion slots at all.
The solution is staring the industry in the face, but no one seems to sell it: SFF machines built using laptop motherboards. If Dell can sell this for $1,000 why can't they sell the same thing with no display, battery, or keyboard for $500?This is complete bullshit. These restrictions went away years ago. At some point, the NSA realized that breaking into your house and installing a secret keylogger was much easier than trying to prevent you from downloading encryption software.
Heck, go here and download Microsoft's .NET common runtime for free. In case you aren't a programmer, this package contains implementaions of DES, TripleDES, Rijndael (AES), Public Key Encryption, Cryptographic Hashes like MD5 and SHA-1 (now 1000 times weaker!!), Digital Signatures, etc.