As parent said, this is a clear sign that the market clearly isn't properly competitive. If a market can't function under the normal rules of a free market because, for example, the barriers to entry are too high, then yes, government regulation of the market is probably a good idea.
You're missing the point. Of course there are "pay as you go" plans in the U.S., we've had them pretty much forever. The point is that if you "pay as you go," you invariably end up paying a lot more per minute than you would have if you purchased a standard "We'll send you a bill for everything at the end of the month" plan.
Actually it CAN cost your provider if you run up a huge international roaming bill that you can't afford to pay, because your provider will likely end up owing money to whatever foreign phone company was providing service while you were roaming. Usually the roaming partnerships between companies/countries involve company X billing company Y at some negotiated rate for all the service X provides to Y's customers while they are in X's country. Company Y then bills their customers accordingly. Of course, by "accordingly" I mean "more than what they actually had to pay company X."
The Flash thing is especially puzzling considering how many corporate pages make you download multiple megabytes of data just to create some sort of really simple "Click here for customer service, click here for billing rates, etc." menu that could have easily been done in HTML. There are certainly many cool things that can be done in Flash, but it's silly beyond belief to use it for simple menus like that.
I probably wouldn't expect the guy with a PhD in EE to know how to wire a building off the top of his head, but I would certainly expect him to be able to read a book or two and quickly learn the relevant information. Much like I wouldn't expect a guy with a comp sci degree to necessarily know how to write code in some random language, but I would expect him to be able to learn it if he wanted to.
Many people watch a lot of television, yes, but that doesn't mean that they are addicted to it. The crucial difference is that most people who watch TV would be perfectly happy doing something else for entertainment (go to a football game, go on a date, go out to a bar with friends, play poker, whatever). Also, most people don't watch so much television that they risk their job or relationships because they don't want to take any time away from it. That's not the case for MMORPG addicts who ruin their lives because they can't do anything other than play. If you play WoW 3-4 hours on weeknights and 8 hours/day on the weekend BUT it doesn't interfere with your job or friendships and you don't particularly mind doing things other than WoW with your free time, then you aren't addicted.
Transformer oil is the usual choice of liquid for people who do this sort of thing themselves. It works well enough, although some people have reported that over time it can start to slowly dissolve some of the plastic parts on the boards. The main issue with it is that it isn't really a great heat conductor compared to most other liquids. But let's be honest, this isn't really about cooling as much as it's about having a computer swimming in liquid for its own sake.
It's exactly the same sort of reasoning that leads ISPs to ask questions like "How much bandwidth do we have to give a person before we can call it unlimited bandwidth?" Well, you have to give them an UNLIMITED amount. It's the same here, trying to ask "How much of the internet do we need to make accessible before we can claim that the entire internet is accessible?" The answer, of course, is ALL OF IT.
The talk about federal tobacco subsidies, obesity, etc. isn't really applicable. Those are risks that people voluntarily accept when they choose to engage in risky behavior. That's quite different from having my bank account pilfered by a crook.
A lawsuit about what, exactly? TELUS did not agreed to provide the same service at the same price in perpetuity. The contract is month-by-month, and can be canceled with 30 days notice. Just like the customer has the right to cancel their TELUS plan if they decide they don't want it any more, TELUS has the right to boot customers that the no longer want.
If you look at their "high end" system it's clear that they were just going out of their way to spend as much money as possible. It included a $1100 cooling system and a $580 case - both of which are laughable prices. There's also $550 for 4GB of RAM, which earns a giant WTF.
I don't know of any fool-proof identification schemes, but "Ah, you know a social security number, so CLEARLY you are the person who that social security number belongs to!" is about as idiotic as you can get.
Not only should there be criminal damages, but attempting to keep the thieft secret should carry an even heavier penalty.
Although I can appreciate the sentiment behind this, I think a better solution would be for companies to stop pretending that something like a social security number can act as a magic password that magically proves people are who they claim to be on a credit card or cell phone application. Then it wouldn't particularly matter if our "personal information" gets out.
How can anyone on this web site stand there and demand to limit to science as if the fact that the only steel buildings in existence to ever fall from fire all did so on 9/11 (which includes WTC Building 7).
This is absolutely false. There are many examples of other steel buildings that collapsed due to fire before 9/11. One example off the top of my head would be the Sight and Sound Theater fire of 1997. http://www.firefightersonline.com/opsandtactics/tr-097/ Just google around for a few minutes if you want many more examples.
The way 9/11 conspiracy theorists mindlessly repeat these lies (like the lie that no other steel buildings have collapsed due to fire) without bothering to spend even five minutes googling around with terms like "steel building fire collapse" is a testimony to their extreme gullibility and intellectual laziness. It's not different than the oft-repeated claim that the fire wasn't hot enough to melt steel, which ignores the fact that steel loses much of its strength well before it actually melts.
Could you imagine what would happen to the price of other tools simply because they might be used to create some very expensive product or end result? My god, those would be some expensive hammers and nails!
Part of the problem is that there isn't really much competition in the high-end niche software world. A company could probably actually get away with charging a carpenter $500 for a hammer if they didn't have to worry about some other company selling an equivalent hammer for $6. For many things like autocad, there aren't really any equivalent competing software packages (at the moment).
Of course, when companies try to use piracy as an excuse for poor sales they never seem to want to address the issue of why many games ARE actually selling well and making a lot of money, sometimes even years after their release (Oblivion, for example).
Exactly. It's shocking to me that many local papers STILL expect you to pay for online access, when the likes of the NY Times, Washington Post, an Wallstreet Journal will give you online access for free. Maybe there would still be some incentive to pay for access to a local newspaper if it actually covered local news and issues that you couldn't get from a big national source, but the vast majority of stuff in local papers seems to be wire stories, regurgitated press releases, and non-news crap that's local but not actually relevant or useful for anyone.
Exactly. It seems like local newspapers should have a safe niche covering local news, but most of the time they're strangely reluctant to do that. Most local newspapers are just a compilation of wire stories that you can already get for free from about a billion sources on the web, regurgitated press releases (also free from a billion sources on the web), and local non-news bullshit about things like how hot it has been lately. Do some ACTUAL JOURNALISM about LOCAL matters, and people will probably buy your paper. As it it, most local papers seem determined to not actually offer the reader anything of value.
For that mater, if you're an actual criminal it would be trivially easy to simply book the flight under someone else's name and get a fake ID. I don't really know how hard it is to get a reasonably good fake ID, but if idiot teenagers can produce them for getting into bars then I'm guessing that hardened terrorists wouldn't have much trouble. It's not like the community college-educated wannabe cops and retired cafeteria lunch ladies who work for the TSA make any real effort to examine your driver's license when you flash it at them.
And it is odd that we make special note of achievement when a 'minority' does something. For some reason we care that [person] is the first [label] to do something. If a white guy does something, so what? If it is novel that someone of x group did something, like say, a child composing a concerto, then sure... mention away.
It doesn't appear to me that the author of the summary was making any particular effort to point out that the inventor was female. Had it been a man, you could easily imagine it saying "The winner is a crafty dude who devised..."
And yet their religion very explicitly teaches that you should should behave yourself while alive and be kind to all living things, and uses the idea of a soul to back up that teaching. In other words, it is the EXACT OPPOSITE of your claim that the idea of a soul allows people to treat other living things callously. Sorry, but real-world examples of how the concept of a soul influences society trump your conjecture. You can try top dismiss their religion as detached and nihilistic if you want, but that doesn't change the fact that their religion uses the concept of a soul to teach the complete opposite behavior of what you suppose.
Also, your entire concept of the soul as a mechanism for allowing people to disregard the world and those in it makes no sense whatsoever, because even if you don't believe in a soul you are still faced with the certainty that one day you will die and cease to exist. If anything, the idea of a soul provides a way to AVOID the conclusion that people should do whatever they want, because it allows religions to threaten people with divine punishments for misdeeds that they commit in life (or be reinserted back into the "real world").
Yeah, for me that was definitely the most confusing part of the whole story for me. Why did he go through the trouble of encrypting his hard drive, but then apparently turned the computer on an entered his password for the border guards?
Slashdot Mirror
Please provide ONE example of ANYONE ever being "slapped pretty heavy" for an abusive DMCA notice.
As parent said, this is a clear sign that the market clearly isn't properly competitive. If a market can't function under the normal rules of a free market because, for example, the barriers to entry are too high, then yes, government regulation of the market is probably a good idea.
You're missing the point. Of course there are "pay as you go" plans in the U.S., we've had them pretty much forever. The point is that if you "pay as you go," you invariably end up paying a lot more per minute than you would have if you purchased a standard "We'll send you a bill for everything at the end of the month" plan.
Actually it CAN cost your provider if you run up a huge international roaming bill that you can't afford to pay, because your provider will likely end up owing money to whatever foreign phone company was providing service while you were roaming. Usually the roaming partnerships between companies/countries involve company X billing company Y at some negotiated rate for all the service X provides to Y's customers while they are in X's country. Company Y then bills their customers accordingly. Of course, by "accordingly" I mean "more than what they actually had to pay company X."
The Flash thing is especially puzzling considering how many corporate pages make you download multiple megabytes of data just to create some sort of really simple "Click here for customer service, click here for billing rates, etc." menu that could have easily been done in HTML. There are certainly many cool things that can be done in Flash, but it's silly beyond belief to use it for simple menus like that.
I probably wouldn't expect the guy with a PhD in EE to know how to wire a building off the top of his head, but I would certainly expect him to be able to read a book or two and quickly learn the relevant information. Much like I wouldn't expect a guy with a comp sci degree to necessarily know how to write code in some random language, but I would expect him to be able to learn it if he wanted to.
Many people watch a lot of television, yes, but that doesn't mean that they are addicted to it. The crucial difference is that most people who watch TV would be perfectly happy doing something else for entertainment (go to a football game, go on a date, go out to a bar with friends, play poker, whatever). Also, most people don't watch so much television that they risk their job or relationships because they don't want to take any time away from it. That's not the case for MMORPG addicts who ruin their lives because they can't do anything other than play. If you play WoW 3-4 hours on weeknights and 8 hours/day on the weekend BUT it doesn't interfere with your job or friendships and you don't particularly mind doing things other than WoW with your free time, then you aren't addicted.
Simply having the deionized water exposed to air will cause it to become conductive as CO2 dissolves into it and forms carbonic acid.
Transformer oil is the usual choice of liquid for people who do this sort of thing themselves. It works well enough, although some people have reported that over time it can start to slowly dissolve some of the plastic parts on the boards. The main issue with it is that it isn't really a great heat conductor compared to most other liquids. But let's be honest, this isn't really about cooling as much as it's about having a computer swimming in liquid for its own sake.
It's exactly the same sort of reasoning that leads ISPs to ask questions like "How much bandwidth do we have to give a person before we can call it unlimited bandwidth?" Well, you have to give them an UNLIMITED amount. It's the same here, trying to ask "How much of the internet do we need to make accessible before we can claim that the entire internet is accessible?" The answer, of course, is ALL OF IT.
The talk about federal tobacco subsidies, obesity, etc. isn't really applicable. Those are risks that people voluntarily accept when they choose to engage in risky behavior. That's quite different from having my bank account pilfered by a crook.
A lawsuit about what, exactly? TELUS did not agreed to provide the same service at the same price in perpetuity. The contract is month-by-month, and can be canceled with 30 days notice. Just like the customer has the right to cancel their TELUS plan if they decide they don't want it any more, TELUS has the right to boot customers that the no longer want.
If you look at their "high end" system it's clear that they were just going out of their way to spend as much money as possible. It included a $1100 cooling system and a $580 case - both of which are laughable prices. There's also $550 for 4GB of RAM, which earns a giant WTF.
I don't know of any fool-proof identification schemes, but "Ah, you know a social security number, so CLEARLY you are the person who that social security number belongs to!" is about as idiotic as you can get.
Not only should there be criminal damages, but attempting to keep the thieft secret should carry an even heavier penalty.
Although I can appreciate the sentiment behind this, I think a better solution would be for companies to stop pretending that something like a social security number can act as a magic password that magically proves people are who they claim to be on a credit card or cell phone application. Then it wouldn't particularly matter if our "personal information" gets out.
That's exactly what I was thinking. Okay, a hi-def movie is 25 GB - but does some company really have 40k hi-def movies to stored?
How can anyone on this web site stand there and demand to limit to science as if the fact that the only steel buildings in existence to ever fall from fire all did so on 9/11 (which includes WTC Building 7).
This is absolutely false. There are many examples of other steel buildings that collapsed due to fire before 9/11. One example off the top of my head would be the Sight and Sound Theater fire of 1997. http://www.firefightersonline.com/opsandtactics/tr-097/ Just google around for a few minutes if you want many more examples.
The way 9/11 conspiracy theorists mindlessly repeat these lies (like the lie that no other steel buildings have collapsed due to fire) without bothering to spend even five minutes googling around with terms like "steel building fire collapse" is a testimony to their extreme gullibility and intellectual laziness. It's not different than the oft-repeated claim that the fire wasn't hot enough to melt steel, which ignores the fact that steel loses much of its strength well before it actually melts.
Could you imagine what would happen to the price of other tools simply because they might be used to create some very expensive product or end result? My god, those would be some expensive hammers and nails!
Part of the problem is that there isn't really much competition in the high-end niche software world. A company could probably actually get away with charging a carpenter $500 for a hammer if they didn't have to worry about some other company selling an equivalent hammer for $6. For many things like autocad, there aren't really any equivalent competing software packages (at the moment).
Of course, when companies try to use piracy as an excuse for poor sales they never seem to want to address the issue of why many games ARE actually selling well and making a lot of money, sometimes even years after their release (Oblivion, for example).
Exactly. It's shocking to me that many local papers STILL expect you to pay for online access, when the likes of the NY Times, Washington Post, an Wallstreet Journal will give you online access for free. Maybe there would still be some incentive to pay for access to a local newspaper if it actually covered local news and issues that you couldn't get from a big national source, but the vast majority of stuff in local papers seems to be wire stories, regurgitated press releases, and non-news crap that's local but not actually relevant or useful for anyone.
Exactly. It seems like local newspapers should have a safe niche covering local news, but most of the time they're strangely reluctant to do that. Most local newspapers are just a compilation of wire stories that you can already get for free from about a billion sources on the web, regurgitated press releases (also free from a billion sources on the web), and local non-news bullshit about things like how hot it has been lately. Do some ACTUAL JOURNALISM about LOCAL matters, and people will probably buy your paper. As it it, most local papers seem determined to not actually offer the reader anything of value.
For that mater, if you're an actual criminal it would be trivially easy to simply book the flight under someone else's name and get a fake ID. I don't really know how hard it is to get a reasonably good fake ID, but if idiot teenagers can produce them for getting into bars then I'm guessing that hardened terrorists wouldn't have much trouble. It's not like the community college-educated wannabe cops and retired cafeteria lunch ladies who work for the TSA make any real effort to examine your driver's license when you flash it at them.
And it is odd that we make special note of achievement when a 'minority' does something. For some reason we care that [person] is the first [label] to do something. If a white guy does something, so what? If it is novel that someone of x group did something, like say, a child composing a concerto, then sure... mention away.
It doesn't appear to me that the author of the summary was making any particular effort to point out that the inventor was female. Had it been a man, you could easily imagine it saying "The winner is a crafty dude who devised..."
And yet their religion very explicitly teaches that you should should behave yourself while alive and be kind to all living things, and uses the idea of a soul to back up that teaching. In other words, it is the EXACT OPPOSITE of your claim that the idea of a soul allows people to treat other living things callously. Sorry, but real-world examples of how the concept of a soul influences society trump your conjecture. You can try top dismiss their religion as detached and nihilistic if you want, but that doesn't change the fact that their religion uses the concept of a soul to teach the complete opposite behavior of what you suppose.
Also, your entire concept of the soul as a mechanism for allowing people to disregard the world and those in it makes no sense whatsoever, because even if you don't believe in a soul you are still faced with the certainty that one day you will die and cease to exist. If anything, the idea of a soul provides a way to AVOID the conclusion that people should do whatever they want, because it allows religions to threaten people with divine punishments for misdeeds that they commit in life (or be reinserted back into the "real world").
Yeah, for me that was definitely the most confusing part of the whole story for me. Why did he go through the trouble of encrypting his hard drive, but then apparently turned the computer on an entered his password for the border guards?