I didn't know Jeff Bezos had a spaceflight company. Can we expect a flood of new patent applications where the idea ends with "in space"?
Sure. In fact, while the control panel for his rocket has all kinds of knobs and stuff, you have the option to deliver your satellite into orbit with a single click of the launch button. That way you don't have to worry about silly things like pre-launch checks, order confirmation, or other such nonsense.
Sure your satellite might end up in the wrong orbit - or planet - but that's a small price to pay for the convenience of one-click launch.
This is one of those situations where I'm really hoping that was a troll. Or else it really supports my assertion that programmers need to take some actual science classes.
Define competitive. So they don't have to compete by price? Having all books at $10-$15?
...a price point that seems to be publisher-driven. If the publisher has a book you want, and they can extract that price, they will. That's based on elasticity of supply and demand. Amazon is looking to find ways to increasing the publisher's cut while reducing their margin by offsetting with ads. That seems, well, rather competitive.
Now the lack of competition results in things like the article you cite. But in this specific example, they don't seem to be the bad guys. If you have a beef, I think it's with the publisher.
This is completely the opposite of the way a "free market" is supposed to behave.
Howzat? Apple is offering more competitive terms to publishers and Amazon has to respond to remain competitive. Neither can simply raise prices because the customer won't tolerate it.
Now I'll be the first to claim that free markets generally don't exist when there are only two participants, but I'm not seeing how this specific instance is a deviation from the classic "supply meets demand" love story.
Most conspiracy theories I've heard of have at least a shred of something to at least build the conspiracy on, but I just can't find any evidence of it in that article.
Well, the bikes *are* red. And I've heard rumors that some have a yellow hammer and sickle painted on them. Some guy told me, and he's totally reliable. Does some yard work for me when he's sober and on his meds.
I can't speak for other families, but I know my mom, my dad, my wife's mom, and wife's dad all "respect their elders" and look/looked up to them. Our parents are in their early-mid 50s. I know my grandparents, in my family, didn't think my parents' generation was a bunch of slobs, mostly: while they thought some were bad apples, they didn't think the generation was a wash.
That may have been a great family, but it doesn't necessarily generalize. You know what their elders' generation also gave us? The Klan. Jim Crow. I'm just saying, in every generation, there are good people, and there are bad people. Every generation has a tendency to glamorize their own, and gloss over the bad parts. Hell, same with high school graduating classes. I mean, everybody I talk to thinks their class was the really special one. The kids under them? Turds.
Yet, if over a lifetime a person is taught poorly - or worse and seemingly more likely, taught incorrectly - he or she is going to be a bit of a simpleton by the time they reach adulthood.
I disagree. They might lack skills, but general logic and the ability to think independently isn't something that has to be learned. Indeed, too often formal education removes that characteristic. My family had a whole lot of sharp people who, by growing up in poverty had no access to education beyond the 5th grade. Oddly enough, they weren't droolers.
While it's true that just because they thought it doesn't mean it's true, the opposite is likewise valid: just because many previous generations thought it, does not make it false.
It provides a burden for uniqueness that needs to be met, though.
It used to be that wisdom of age was respected and revered, even taken to heart.
When? When in living memory did the majority of young people actually respect their elders? Again, you're repeating things that have been said since the beginning of time. Hell, I've seen almost the exact same thing written in the bible. Kids were assholes then too. They still are. Time goes on.
We're talking about basic, first grade mathematics concepts here. How is this "not getting stupid"?
No, you're actually talking about pre-algebra if you look more closely at the example. Which kids have always generally sucked at.
The last couple generations, however, have been increasingly "stupid" in the "can't solve for x" sense. Test scores clearly prove this.
If there's a problem, it's not with the gene pool of the kids or their abilities. It's caused by well-meaning but catastrophically stupid policies that prevent the removal of problem students from classes, and the elimination of ability-based tracking. This means that normal kids are surrounded by juvenile delinquents and children who don't even speak English. If you remove those students (who would have not taken the test in prior generations) from the scoring, I wonder how the stats would play out.
In other words - it's not that the kids are getting stupid. It's that our schools are completely failing them.
So I'm not being a curmudgeonly old jackass when I think this generation is stupid.
Oh hell. Generation N has always claimed that Generation N+1 is {stupid, lazy, amoral, immoral, bound for *insert cultural analogy to Hell*}. This holds inductively for all values of N. Strangely enough, they also happen to think that Generation N+2 is cute and cuddly.
I hate to tell you, but our parents' generation thought we were idiots too, I'm sure. I know their parents thought they were.
Unless you were a gamer at that time you have no idea what it was like to make that jump from Wolfenstein 3d to Doom.
Well, the major difference was atmosphere - they dropped the goofball stufff from Wolf and went to 2.5D.
But still - there was nothing like seeing a 3D game for the first time. I still remember the first time I saw Wolf on a demo computer at Wallyworld. I'd never heard of it before, didn't even know 3D games existed, and I started drooling. It made Prince of Persia look like a piece of shit.
You're right, kids today can't conceive of how cool that was. Every FPS for the last, say, 10 years has looked pretty danged good to the point that improvements are incremental at best. 3D killed the side-scroller star.
But wouldn't that mean someone modified the code without understanding it?
Your eyes assume things based on sane programming practices. It's like saying a car crash is your fault because you didn't notice that somebody removed all your lugnuts, causing you to lose control. I mean, you can see the lugnuts weren't there, right? Your eye glosses over stupidity of that magnitude.
Braces should *always* be there in some form, though putting them on the same line as the command (as mentioned above) is probably the cleanest for a one-liner.
I said that there has not been a damaging monopoly related to luxury items specifically as there have been with vital raw materials like oil.
I suppose that notion of 'damage' would be rather in the eye of the beholder, don't you think? If you have a business being destroyed, you might care. Additionally, as I said before, price fixing is how 'luxury items' remain luxuries. Add some competition and all of a sudden former luxuries are things we can afford. You're also on thin ice calling a $10 book a 'luxury item'.
Your comment about not giving a damn how your tone is perceived reeks of sour grapes.
I don't think 'sour grapes' means wha tyou apparently think it does, unless you have some mechanism under which I might be, what, jealous? Of what?
I don't think you're posting from an intellectually honest position.
Quite so, actually. If I've used any logical fallacies, point them out. What motive would I have?
I also think your "simple logical analysis" is colored with much more emotion and opinion than you are aware.
Good lord, you are too much. I answered your first simple-minded post with logic. I answered your second with bemused sarcasm. This one's getting disdain: don't practice armchair psychology over the internet with people you don't even know. It makes you look like a moron.
the truth is that if you examine most successful anti-trust operations (Standard Oil, ALCOA, etc.) , they have been against companies that have dramatically reduced costs for consumers or provided them incredible value, but made their competition angry because they were beating them.
I'd love to see analysis of that. The rules are that you can't use a monopoly in one area to undercut your competition in another area. That's damaging simply on face. If those guys hadn't been doing that, they wouldn't have run afoul of Sherman. Indeed, Sherman was created because Standard's activity in exploiting rail dominance to shut down competition in oil was so egregious.
Also, regarding the governmental angle - bear in mind that ALCOA was also able to provide 'incredible value' thanks to government subsidies, in the name of extremely cheap electricity created by TVA.
Sorry, but those are not exempt from the law. Also, consider that any price-fixing malfeasance is what is *keeping* them as luxury items. If the price falls, us little people will be able to afford them too. Even that ignores the appalling notion that books should be considered a luxury, but I digress.
Also, you use too many commas, and your overall tone comes across as arrogant and standoffish.
You're a grammar pedant; you mistake simple logical analysis for arrogance; you falsely assume that I give a damn what you think of my 'tone'.
it seems kind of silly that the best use of the Connecticut AG's time is making sure people aren't overpaying a few bucks for items they're obviously already comfortable purchasing at that price.
By that logic, there's never been a damaging monopoly at all - after all, by definition, all the customers are comfortable paying the price charged or they wouldn't be customers, right?
Lots of things that "don't seem so far-fetched" aren't actually true. In this case, while the author cites the 'numerous studies' that support his claim, he didn't cite the 'numerous studies' that don't.
In fact, I could argue the reverse with just as much analytic rigor as the quoted article. By providing a healthy outlet for aggression outside the confines of actual social interaction, people with tendencies toward aggression are able to find a non-destructive release for their urges.
Note also that while the study seemed to control for many external variables, they completely whiff on the obvious: namely, I think it's far, far more likely that violent people with violent tendencies are more likely to play violent video games than some mechanism by which violent video games corrupt otherwise angelic children. One needs to control for causality. Perhaps a longitudinal study of children who have not yet been introduced to these games?
Somewhere along the line, "open markets" became an end unto themselves, mostly through deregulation, instead of a means to create better competition.
Aha - except watch the shell game we played there. Does an "open" market mean a "free" market, and does "free" mean "deregulated" or "anarchic"? I would say no, absolutely not.
To me, the truest definition of a free market, and the best sort of market, is one in which supply can meet demand with the fewest barriers possible. That's the motivation of Sherman - to prevent a monopoly or oligopoly from erecting barriers that would prevent competitors from creating supply to meet demand.
So, what does my definition of a free market mean?
Does that mean an anarchic market where people can do anything they want, including dirty tricks to artificially reduce supply? Absolutely not.
Would it allow mega-mergers, such that there are few competitors, thereby breaking the equilibrium theory of a free market? Nope.
Would it deregulate to the hilt, creating problems in companies' abilities to meet consumer demand? Not a chance.
So, from that standpoint, where would a truly free market come down in favor of net neutrality? Well, if we had a free market, the answer would be against - with a caveat. That caveat assumes that we have so many competitors, and strong regulation, and strong Sherman protection, that companies who tried to implement a non-neutral net would get run out of business because that internet would suck.
However, we don't have that. There are few telcos, and they're in bed with media companies. As such, the freest market is actually created by facilitating net neutrality, which provides the market freedom required for supply and demand to meet.
The notion of a free market gets kicked around on left-leaning sites, largely because the concept is bastardized by the right. But if we reconsider what is meant by a free market - doing whatever is necessary to reduce the barriers to a free-flow of supply and demand - we might find that we rather like it.
BUT, here's where he seems to be wrong (without having read the paper)... an ISP isn't like your backyard or your private residence. They're engaged in commerce, and under the Commerce Clause, the Federal government has the power to regulate them. The case on point would be Heart of Atlanta Motel v. US [wikipedia.org], which said that the interstate commerce clause allows the government to establish regulations that prevent discrimination in commerce.
Right. This guy is trying to pull a fast one, and everybody gets bogged down in the details, but there's also this: if his interpretation is legit, it should exist within the current legal landscape at large. Presumably, he's not trying to prove that the vast majority of regulations currently on the books are illegal. Given that, how is the proposed law substantially different than existing regulations that have extremely similar effects? His argument does not seem unique to net neutrality, and seems to apply to a whole lot of things in ways that the Congress and Court don't seem to agree.
Of course, since the guy's a professor, he's probably just trying to stir the pot, and seems to have done so successfully.
Apple just put out something that is so well integrated and Microsoft decides to start with a derivative? OMG! Calculus MS101 fighting Calculus MS102! Is it normal or am I talking at a tangent here?
I don't know, but it's really struck a chord with me.
To an extent, this is just how college is. How long have you been at it? I had a similar situation in a brick-n-mortar college; I re-took classes I'd gotten 4s and 5s from AP tests. Yeah, I was bored. But that stopped by the second year. Might be a question of whether your program is the right one.
if you already know enough to get certifications in the things you want to do, do that, and get a degree in something that would differentiate you from the hordes. I can't say more without knowing what you want to do, but as an analogy, I always recommend that CS grads get a second minor (math is usually the first) in a science, whether it be biology, chemistry, physics, or something similar. Why? Because you know another field that frequently intersects with CS, making someone much more marketable. I'm not saying that particular program is or isn't right for you, but the general principle still holds, I think.
In any event, good luck however you choose to proceed.
And that's what you do, right? Because it's just that easy. Grab your passport, get some plane tickets, fly your way to Myanmar, buy your way into the inner circle of government, then fly back to Los Angeles and write your exposé on corruption in the Myanmar dictatorship and sell it to the Los Angeles Times for, oh, let's say $1,000. Rinse and repeat. Right?
Point well taken, but there's lots of room to add good investigative journalism much closer to home. Every time I watch/read mainstream news, I'm struck by some obvious connection to the story they've missed, an obvious question that went unasked, or a complete misuse of basic math that went unquestioned.
I imagine that if someone wants to do good work, the best thing these days is to find a niche, learn it inside and out, and own it. FOIA can always help here in the US for going after the government - they redact a lot, but there's still enough meat on the bone in many cases.
Also, no reason to rely on the mainstream press to buy your stories. They're so busy trying to become an inane combination of twitter and youtube that it's pointless. I'd say it's a case of "if you can't join 'em, beat 'em". If you really can do good work, start small and build your own ad-supported site. You may not get rich, but it'll let you start small with not so much risk.
And yes, that model can work. Best example I can think of is a site devoted to covering the NFL started by a lawyer in his free time. Through sheer doggedness (and a bit of luck) the guy built it into a hybrid news/rumor site. In doing so, the guy has developed surprisingly good connections inside the NFL which has allowed him to break some stories. He parlayed his unique take on NFL news into an enormous readership - sufficient that he got bought out by NBC this past year. Site is called profootballtalk.com (and no, I'm not affiliated).
There are - and it's been covered here, even if not called those terms. There are "organizations" that do nothing but collect this info and then sell it off over time to whoever wants to buy it. I'm sure they dont put expiration dates on their data, and will gladly sell you a collection of records with 10 day old data and 10 year old data, all mixed together.
You beat me to it. Why would we expect exploit lists to differ substantially from marketing lists - and just how separated do we really think these groups are? I'd expect that data to get passed around like a bottle of cheap wine.
As to using it - it may be true that CC#s for exploitation are only used from "fresh" lists. But what about all your other data, depending on where they got it? You probably won't move due to this event. Your SSN won't expire - or if it does, you have bigger problems than identity theft. So yeah, if your ID gets out there it's not good news, and not something I'd expect to cease being a threat.
Incidentally, some might be surprised how long lists stay in the wild. I recall once getting snail mail spam addressed to the previous owner of the house. This wouldn't have been remarkable, except that *we'd* lived in the house 20 years or so.
It's fun, isn't it? Those of us with sadistic tendencies but these inconvenient scruples get to have fun without the guilt picking on people we don't even feel remotely sorry for.
I've answered the phone as Satan, I've tried converting a telemarketer to Zoroasteranism, all great fun. One of my favorites, though, was when I had one trying to sell me windows and I told her my house burned down. It took a couple minutes before it dawned on her that I was talking on my landline - ergo, house exists. I told her the phone was the only thing that survived, but she didn't believe it, and the level of triumph in her voice was pathetically hilarious.
Another one of my favorites with surveys is to patiently take them and do what I can to poison the data. Probably the best thing you can do to hurt these assholes.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't know Jeff Bezos had a spaceflight company. Can we expect a flood of new patent applications where the idea ends with "in space"?
Sure. In fact, while the control panel for his rocket has all kinds of knobs and stuff, you have the option to deliver your satellite into orbit with a single click of the launch button. That way you don't have to worry about silly things like pre-launch checks, order confirmation, or other such nonsense.
Sure your satellite might end up in the wrong orbit - or planet - but that's a small price to pay for the convenience of one-click launch.
This is one of those situations where I'm really hoping that was a troll. Or else it really supports my assertion that programmers need to take some actual science classes.
Define competitive. So they don't have to compete by price? Having all books at $10-$15?
...a price point that seems to be publisher-driven. If the publisher has a book you want, and they can extract that price, they will. That's based on elasticity of supply and demand. Amazon is looking to find ways to increasing the publisher's cut while reducing their margin by offsetting with ads. That seems, well, rather competitive.
Now the lack of competition results in things like the article you cite. But in this specific example, they don't seem to be the bad guys. If you have a beef, I think it's with the publisher.
This is completely the opposite of the way a "free market" is supposed to behave.
Howzat? Apple is offering more competitive terms to publishers and Amazon has to respond to remain competitive. Neither can simply raise prices because the customer won't tolerate it.
Now I'll be the first to claim that free markets generally don't exist when there are only two participants, but I'm not seeing how this specific instance is a deviation from the classic "supply meets demand" love story.
Most conspiracy theories I've heard of have at least a shred of something to at least build the conspiracy on, but I just can't find any evidence of it in that article.
Well, the bikes *are* red. And I've heard rumors that some have a yellow hammer and sickle painted on them. Some guy told me, and he's totally reliable. Does some yard work for me when he's sober and on his meds.
You can't be too careful these days.
I can't speak for other families, but I know my mom, my dad, my wife's mom, and wife's dad all "respect their elders" and look/looked up to them. Our parents are in their early-mid 50s. I know my grandparents, in my family, didn't think my parents' generation was a bunch of slobs, mostly: while they thought some were bad apples, they didn't think the generation was a wash.
That may have been a great family, but it doesn't necessarily generalize. You know what their elders' generation also gave us? The Klan. Jim Crow. I'm just saying, in every generation, there are good people, and there are bad people. Every generation has a tendency to glamorize their own, and gloss over the bad parts. Hell, same with high school graduating classes. I mean, everybody I talk to thinks their class was the really special one. The kids under them? Turds.
Yet, if over a lifetime a person is taught poorly - or worse and seemingly more likely, taught incorrectly - he or she is going to be a bit of a simpleton by the time they reach adulthood.
I disagree. They might lack skills, but general logic and the ability to think independently isn't something that has to be learned. Indeed, too often formal education removes that characteristic. My family had a whole lot of sharp people who, by growing up in poverty had no access to education beyond the 5th grade. Oddly enough, they weren't droolers.
While it's true that just because they thought it doesn't mean it's true, the opposite is likewise valid: just because many previous generations thought it, does not make it false.
It provides a burden for uniqueness that needs to be met, though.
It used to be that wisdom of age was respected and revered, even taken to heart.
When? When in living memory did the majority of young people actually respect their elders? Again, you're repeating things that have been said since the beginning of time. Hell, I've seen almost the exact same thing written in the bible. Kids were assholes then too. They still are. Time goes on.
We're talking about basic, first grade mathematics concepts here. How is this "not getting stupid"?
No, you're actually talking about pre-algebra if you look more closely at the example. Which kids have always generally sucked at.
The last couple generations, however, have been increasingly "stupid" in the "can't solve for x" sense. Test scores clearly prove this.
If there's a problem, it's not with the gene pool of the kids or their abilities. It's caused by well-meaning but catastrophically stupid policies that prevent the removal of problem students from classes, and the elimination of ability-based tracking. This means that normal kids are surrounded by juvenile delinquents and children who don't even speak English. If you remove those students (who would have not taken the test in prior generations) from the scoring, I wonder how the stats would play out.
In other words - it's not that the kids are getting stupid. It's that our schools are completely failing them.
So I'm not being a curmudgeonly old jackass when I think this generation is stupid.
Oh hell. Generation N has always claimed that Generation N+1 is {stupid, lazy, amoral, immoral, bound for *insert cultural analogy to Hell*}. This holds inductively for all values of N. Strangely enough, they also happen to think that Generation N+2 is cute and cuddly.
I hate to tell you, but our parents' generation thought we were idiots too, I'm sure. I know their parents thought they were.
Unless you were a gamer at that time you have no idea what it was like to make that jump from Wolfenstein 3d to Doom.
Well, the major difference was atmosphere - they dropped the goofball stufff from Wolf and went to 2.5D.
But still - there was nothing like seeing a 3D game for the first time. I still remember the first time I saw Wolf on a demo computer at Wallyworld. I'd never heard of it before, didn't even know 3D games existed, and I started drooling. It made Prince of Persia look like a piece of shit.
You're right, kids today can't conceive of how cool that was. Every FPS for the last, say, 10 years has looked pretty danged good to the point that improvements are incremental at best. 3D killed the side-scroller star.
More likely to be disarmed with a steak and a rub behind the ears.
Props for mis-spelling a random word in a Dan Quayle joke.
But wouldn't that mean someone modified the code without understanding it?
Your eyes assume things based on sane programming practices. It's like saying a car crash is your fault because you didn't notice that somebody removed all your lugnuts, causing you to lose control. I mean, you can see the lugnuts weren't there, right? Your eye glosses over stupidity of that magnitude.
Braces should *always* be there in some form, though putting them on the same line as the command (as mentioned above) is probably the cleanest for a one-liner.
I said that there has not been a damaging monopoly related to luxury items specifically as there have been with vital raw materials like oil.
I suppose that notion of 'damage' would be rather in the eye of the beholder, don't you think? If you have a business being destroyed, you might care. Additionally, as I said before, price fixing is how 'luxury items' remain luxuries. Add some competition and all of a sudden former luxuries are things we can afford. You're also on thin ice calling a $10 book a 'luxury item'.
Your comment about not giving a damn how your tone is perceived reeks of sour grapes.
I don't think 'sour grapes' means wha tyou apparently think it does, unless you have some mechanism under which I might be, what, jealous? Of what?
I don't think you're posting from an intellectually honest position.
Quite so, actually. If I've used any logical fallacies, point them out. What motive would I have?
I also think your "simple logical analysis" is colored with much more emotion and opinion than you are aware.
Good lord, you are too much. I answered your first simple-minded post with logic. I answered your second with bemused sarcasm. This one's getting disdain: don't practice armchair psychology over the internet with people you don't even know. It makes you look like a moron.
the truth is that if you examine most successful anti-trust operations (Standard Oil, ALCOA, etc.) , they have been against companies that have dramatically reduced costs for consumers or provided them incredible value, but made their competition angry because they were beating them.
I'd love to see analysis of that. The rules are that you can't use a monopoly in one area to undercut your competition in another area. That's damaging simply on face. If those guys hadn't been doing that, they wouldn't have run afoul of Sherman. Indeed, Sherman was created because Standard's activity in exploiting rail dominance to shut down competition in oil was so egregious.
Also, regarding the governmental angle - bear in mind that ALCOA was also able to provide 'incredible value' thanks to government subsidies, in the name of extremely cheap electricity created by TVA.
With specific regard to luxury items? Damn right.
Sorry, but those are not exempt from the law. Also, consider that any price-fixing malfeasance is what is *keeping* them as luxury items. If the price falls, us little people will be able to afford them too. Even that ignores the appalling notion that books should be considered a luxury, but I digress.
Also, you use too many commas, and your overall tone comes across as arrogant and standoffish.
You're a grammar pedant; you mistake simple logical analysis for arrogance; you falsely assume that I give a damn what you think of my 'tone'.
But do have a nice day. ;)
it seems kind of silly that the best use of the Connecticut AG's time is making sure people aren't overpaying a few bucks for items they're obviously already comfortable purchasing at that price.
By that logic, there's never been a damaging monopoly at all - after all, by definition, all the customers are comfortable paying the price charged or they wouldn't be customers, right?
Mike Godwin (please omit certain jokes)
You Nazi, stop restricting my free speech.
Doesn't seem so far fetched.
Lots of things that "don't seem so far-fetched" aren't actually true. In this case, while the author cites the 'numerous studies' that support his claim, he didn't cite the 'numerous studies' that don't.
In fact, I could argue the reverse with just as much analytic rigor as the quoted article. By providing a healthy outlet for aggression outside the confines of actual social interaction, people with tendencies toward aggression are able to find a non-destructive release for their urges.
Note also that while the study seemed to control for many external variables, they completely whiff on the obvious: namely, I think it's far, far more likely that violent people with violent tendencies are more likely to play violent video games than some mechanism by which violent video games corrupt otherwise angelic children. One needs to control for causality. Perhaps a longitudinal study of children who have not yet been introduced to these games?
Somewhere along the line, "open markets" became an end unto themselves, mostly through deregulation, instead of a means to create better competition.
Aha - except watch the shell game we played there. Does an "open" market mean a "free" market, and does "free" mean "deregulated" or "anarchic"? I would say no, absolutely not.
To me, the truest definition of a free market, and the best sort of market, is one in which supply can meet demand with the fewest barriers possible. That's the motivation of Sherman - to prevent a monopoly or oligopoly from erecting barriers that would prevent competitors from creating supply to meet demand.
So, what does my definition of a free market mean?
Does that mean an anarchic market where people can do anything they want, including dirty tricks to artificially reduce supply? Absolutely not.
Would it allow mega-mergers, such that there are few competitors, thereby breaking the equilibrium theory of a free market? Nope.
Would it deregulate to the hilt, creating problems in companies' abilities to meet consumer demand? Not a chance.
So, from that standpoint, where would a truly free market come down in favor of net neutrality? Well, if we had a free market, the answer would be against - with a caveat. That caveat assumes that we have so many competitors, and strong regulation, and strong Sherman protection, that companies who tried to implement a non-neutral net would get run out of business because that internet would suck.
However, we don't have that. There are few telcos, and they're in bed with media companies. As such, the freest market is actually created by facilitating net neutrality, which provides the market freedom required for supply and demand to meet.
The notion of a free market gets kicked around on left-leaning sites, largely because the concept is bastardized by the right. But if we reconsider what is meant by a free market - doing whatever is necessary to reduce the barriers to a free-flow of supply and demand - we might find that we rather like it.
BUT, here's where he seems to be wrong (without having read the paper)... an ISP isn't like your backyard or your private residence. They're engaged in commerce, and under the Commerce Clause, the Federal government has the power to regulate them. The case on point would be Heart of Atlanta Motel v. US [wikipedia.org], which said that the interstate commerce clause allows the government to establish regulations that prevent discrimination in commerce.
Right. This guy is trying to pull a fast one, and everybody gets bogged down in the details, but there's also this: if his interpretation is legit, it should exist within the current legal landscape at large. Presumably, he's not trying to prove that the vast majority of regulations currently on the books are illegal. Given that, how is the proposed law substantially different than existing regulations that have extremely similar effects? His argument does not seem unique to net neutrality, and seems to apply to a whole lot of things in ways that the Congress and Court don't seem to agree.
Of course, since the guy's a professor, he's probably just trying to stir the pot, and seems to have done so successfully.
Apple just put out something that is so well integrated and Microsoft decides to start with a derivative? OMG! Calculus MS101 fighting Calculus MS102! Is it normal or am I talking at a tangent here?
I don't know, but it's really struck a chord with me.
To an extent, this is just how college is. How long have you been at it? I had a similar situation in a brick-n-mortar college; I re-took classes I'd gotten 4s and 5s from AP tests. Yeah, I was bored. But that stopped by the second year. Might be a question of whether your program is the right one.
if you already know enough to get certifications in the things you want to do, do that, and get a degree in something that would differentiate you from the hordes. I can't say more without knowing what you want to do, but as an analogy, I always recommend that CS grads get a second minor (math is usually the first) in a science, whether it be biology, chemistry, physics, or something similar. Why? Because you know another field that frequently intersects with CS, making someone much more marketable. I'm not saying that particular program is or isn't right for you, but the general principle still holds, I think.
In any event, good luck however you choose to proceed.
And that's what you do, right? Because it's just that easy. Grab your passport, get some plane tickets, fly your way to Myanmar, buy your way into the inner circle of government, then fly back to Los Angeles and write your exposé on corruption in the Myanmar dictatorship and sell it to the Los Angeles Times for, oh, let's say $1,000. Rinse and repeat. Right?
Point well taken, but there's lots of room to add good investigative journalism much closer to home. Every time I watch/read mainstream news, I'm struck by some obvious connection to the story they've missed, an obvious question that went unasked, or a complete misuse of basic math that went unquestioned.
I imagine that if someone wants to do good work, the best thing these days is to find a niche, learn it inside and out, and own it. FOIA can always help here in the US for going after the government - they redact a lot, but there's still enough meat on the bone in many cases.
Also, no reason to rely on the mainstream press to buy your stories. They're so busy trying to become an inane combination of twitter and youtube that it's pointless. I'd say it's a case of "if you can't join 'em, beat 'em". If you really can do good work, start small and build your own ad-supported site. You may not get rich, but it'll let you start small with not so much risk.
And yes, that model can work. Best example I can think of is a site devoted to covering the NFL started by a lawyer in his free time. Through sheer doggedness (and a bit of luck) the guy built it into a hybrid news/rumor site. In doing so, the guy has developed surprisingly good connections inside the NFL which has allowed him to break some stories. He parlayed his unique take on NFL news into an enormous readership - sufficient that he got bought out by NBC this past year. Site is called profootballtalk.com (and no, I'm not affiliated).
There are - and it's been covered here, even if not called those terms. There are "organizations" that do nothing but collect this info and then sell it off over time to whoever wants to buy it. I'm sure they dont put expiration dates on their data, and will gladly sell you a collection of records with 10 day old data and 10 year old data, all mixed together.
You beat me to it. Why would we expect exploit lists to differ substantially from marketing lists - and just how separated do we really think these groups are? I'd expect that data to get passed around like a bottle of cheap wine.
As to using it - it may be true that CC#s for exploitation are only used from "fresh" lists. But what about all your other data, depending on where they got it? You probably won't move due to this event. Your SSN won't expire - or if it does, you have bigger problems than identity theft. So yeah, if your ID gets out there it's not good news, and not something I'd expect to cease being a threat.
Incidentally, some might be surprised how long lists stay in the wild. I recall once getting snail mail spam addressed to the previous owner of the house. This wouldn't have been remarkable, except that *we'd* lived in the house 20 years or so.
It's fun, isn't it? Those of us with sadistic tendencies but these inconvenient scruples get to have fun without the guilt picking on people we don't even feel remotely sorry for.
I've answered the phone as Satan, I've tried converting a telemarketer to Zoroasteranism, all great fun. One of my favorites, though, was when I had one trying to sell me windows and I told her my house burned down. It took a couple minutes before it dawned on her that I was talking on my landline - ergo, house exists. I told her the phone was the only thing that survived, but she didn't believe it, and the level of triumph in her voice was pathetically hilarious.
Another one of my favorites with surveys is to patiently take them and do what I can to poison the data. Probably the best thing you can do to hurt these assholes.