Yeah, and t-mobile did a restart as well. They were going all HSPA, and then started rolling out LTE. And as I said, their LTE deployment is already going at a much faster pace than Sprint.
And bias? Yeah probably. I was with Sprint for 10 years, and during the last two their service was just downright crap. Of course I'm going to be biased, because I've experienced first hand just how bad they are, and how in spite of being with sprint a VERY long time, they were treating me like crap by constantly raising my rates even though I was on a contract where supposedly your rates can't go up, and as their service degraded their CSR's just plain didn't give a crap either. And likewise, I've experienced first hand how much better t-mobile is - never seen a price hike even WITHOUT a contract, and they provide features for free that sprint doesn't even offer for the purpose of making sure I never get strange charges.
Another thing to consider is that revenue isn't profit. Revenue doesn't include, for example, the cost of the tablet itself that was sold in each transaction, but rather how much they sold the tablet for.
I imagine that after R&D and physical hardware costs, they're probably operating at a pretty deep loss on Surface. I'm curious if that is both Surface Pro and RT or just the RT though.
I think the reason for that is that they aren't just ads anymore - they're collecting intelligence on the visitors. It doesn't work as well when you host the ads on your own, you need a third party to be able to track what pages your visitors are navigating to when they navigate away from your own site (assuming of course the site they navigate to is within the ad provider's network) as the web browser isn't going to allow multiple domains to share information.
It's one thing to show sponsored messages to users, but it's even more profitable to find out what your users want. Self hosted ads aren't as good at the later.
A) Cell phone company experiences always vary based on location. Generally the best coverage comes from Verizon, but if you live in a major city you shouldn't run into problems with any major carrier.
B) While Phoenix has "ok" regular coverage, their data rates are horrible and 4g practically doesn't exist. I don't really need to explain this - go look at their LTE coverage maps, and go to clear.com and look at the Phoenix maps for wimax. There are a few "spots" where clearwire is broadcasting a wimax signal, but it probably covers maybe 3% of the valley. And then there is no LTE for Sprint, period. In fact, Sprint is the ONLY carrier with no 4g coverage to speak of. Yet, even the smaller MVNO's that don't run on the Sprint network have 4g. Phoenix is one of the largest wireless markets in the US, (it's the 6th largest city in the US too) so that's just downright pathetic.
C) Sprint's "Network Vision" has earned the reputation of being called the "coming soon" network. This talking point has been repeated by them for over three years now, and what has happened is the following: The areas they do cover they don't cover very well. They have 4g "islands" that are discontiguous and call that full coverage. A former Sprint employee who now works for a company that does signal auditing of some kind called them out on this - he said something to the effect that where normal carriers do a soft launch (i.e. turning on services but maintain that they are officially unavailable because they haven't conjoined them and properly tested them yet) whereas Sprint typically calls their soft launch a full launch and just leaves it alone once it reaches the point that some people in some areas can have services, even though there are lots of dead spots.
Sprint isn't going to leapfrog anybody. They've been deploying LTE for a long time now and their rollout is going at what is by far the slowest pace. T-mobile only started 4 months ago and they've already almost caught up with Sprint in terms of soft launch - if anything, T-Mobile is leaping ahead of Sprint already, and Sprint is destined to be in last place by the end of the year if things continue at the current rate.
Now keep in mind, t-mobile already has much larger 4g coverage than Sprint through its HSPA, and also keep in mind that Sprint was the very first company to technically offer 4g. Given that Sprint started first, and they're already dead last in aggregate 4g coverage and data rates, goes to show you just how horribly they are executing their "network vision" plan.
My dad had to get picked up by an ambulance once, and they were going to bill us $5,000 just for the ride. When it came down to collecting payment, they asked how much we could afford, and we had nothing at the time. They didn't even try to setup a payment plan, they basically just called it off - no report to a credit bureau or bill collections or anything.
It's entirely possible that in situations like that, trying to collect will cost more than actually collecting anything. The high cost is probably as a result of so many people not paying, so the ones who do pay (e.g. insurance companies, governments) have to subsidize.
I have a friend who runs a pediatric urgent care who tells me that his standard billing for insurance is $200 (or something close to that) and if he gets a patient who has no insurance they ask for the same price, but if the patient says they can't afford it (or balks at it) then they'll usually just easily negotiate down to $100 or something, and he says its no big deal to do so.
I'm one of the Sprint leavers. Here's what happened in my case:
The Phoenix area is horribly neglected by Sprint. The quality of service continues to drop, and they've been promising Phoenix customers that 4g is just a few months away for the last few years. Their 3g service barely comes in at dialup speeds, and when your phone needs to do something as simple as say update an app, the phone has to burn through its battery for about a half hour for even the smaller apps just to struggle to get data. This happens with pretty much every phone model out there because the data services are so horrible. In spite of these horribly bad data rates, just the mere fact that you own a smart phone they label the service as "premium data" and charge an extra $10 per month per phone. Their excuse is that because you own a smartphone, you'll use more data, ignoring the fact that their data is so horribly slow and wasteful on battery that you always end up relying on wifi anyways.
I got out of my Sprint contract by doing the roaming trick, and so have a lot of Sprint customers:
T-mobile service is by far superior, by the way. Not only is it a third the price (T-mobile costs me $115 after taxes for 5 lines unlimited everything, sprint was $300 for 1500 shared minutes,) but the data services are reliable and fast as hell compared to Sprint. Sure it's not unlimited 4g, but if I pay that extra $10 Sprint was charging anyways it becomes unlimited 4g. However I find that I don't ever go above my limit anyways, so it doesn't matter, and even if I did there's never any data overage, it just goes to Edge speeds which are still MUCH faster than Sprint's 3g. T-mobile also has two (free) options you can add to your lines to completely block third party billing (from text services, 900 numbers, etc) as well as all international text/calls. Every month I had to call Sprint to fix some overage they did in error or sometimes getting signed up for a text spam service, whereas with T-Mobile I've never had to do that. Not once.
Another nice thing about t-mobile is it supports the HD Voice feature of my Nexus 4, and in addition to that when somebody calls me it actually rings immediately, whereas with Sprint the other person can hear up to four rings before my phone finally rang, often causing me to miss their call to voicemail. That and Sprint dropped calls like crazy, and when I confronted them about it they told me that their systems measured my quality of service to be 100% - and get this, when I was on the phone with the CSR, my call was dropped, and she actually called me back and then played stupid like it wasn't their problem.
I honestly have no idea how the hell Sprint intends to last long term. I'm rather shocked that they are a more popular carrier than t-mobile as their service is so much worse and by far more expensive. Plus it seems that T-Mobile has already reached 160m pop with their LTE coverage, whereas Sprint just reached 200m and they've been at it longer.
If you read between the lines of Sprint's SEC filings, their current plan is to keep revenues up by increasing the fees that each subscriber pays. They noted that in a previous filing by saying that over the last year their customers pay an average of $2 per month more than they did a year earlier, which was their way of sustaining themselves in the face of heavy subscriber losses. They do this in various ways, one way is by scaling back subscriber discounts, notice how they got rid of their premier program and they reworked their billing system so that discounts only apply to a single line instead of the whole account like every other carrier does, and lately they've been cutting people off of their discounts entirely (you now have to go through a periodic renewal process every so often.)
Labeling is stupid because it does nothing but add to the FUD.
That's like when San Fran tried to force wireless companies to label the radiation output of cell phones. It's a figure that is ultimately useless and does nothing for public health, but it creates a psychological effect that causes customer demand to shift anyways, so we could end up in a situation where cell phones are more expensive and possibly heavier because they have to add some kind of shielding or whatever to make a meaningless number go down.
All of that so that some derps have an excuse to complain about their "electromagnetic allergies."
Not only that, but the space on food labels is limited. As a kidney patient I have to concern myself daily with how much protein, phosphorus, potassium, and sodium I consume daily. Only one of those items are required to be on the labels. If I consume too much potassium in a day, I am dead as a doornail (the amount contained in three large potatoes is enough) and listing the potassium content on foods is entirely optional.
Believe me there are far higher health priorities than GMO labeling that already don't make it onto food labels. The FDA knows that label space is limited, and they can't possibly expect every food manufacturer to cater to every possible dietary restriction that somebody might possibly have, so they keep the most important ones as requirements and list the rest as optional. And I'm not even the worst - people on dialysis have even tighter dietary restrictions. I think their plight is probably a bit more important than those silly little electromagnetic aller - Oops sorry, I mean GMO fears.
As for making genes unpatentable - if they're found to be naturally occuring, they can't be patented. Period. SCOTUS killed that on June 14th. Now artificially created genes, I think those are worthy of patenting. SCOTUS agrees.
What you're doing is constructing protein structures - the DNA is just the information that tells how to transcribe them. Creating innovative protein structures is something I'd definitely call a work of art, and is absolutely non-trivial and definitely research intensive and time consuming (costly too.) Being able to figure out how they fold and interact with one another isn't exactly simple arithmetic, as is often the case with say software patents. It would be pretty damn lame if you poured your life's work into the cure or biotech invention of the 22nd century and somebody just rips it off for free, and you have nothing to show for it.
And read my article by the way - the terminator genes already exist and there is a patent for them. But the one company who holds that patent has said it has no intention of ever using it. Will they keep that promise? Who knows. But in the mean time, nobody else can without their permission.
Well first of all, no, I am not a paid Monsanto shill. I know, shocker. No, I'm a network engineer who recently came down with kidney disease due to a freak allergy condition, and in that process have done all kinds of research about proper nutrition (I have to baby my metabolic system as part of managing my chronic kidney disease.) In addition to that, I have a very diminished ability to work, so my wallet is tight. Therefore, I have a vested interest in nutritional food being available on the cheap.
Beyond that, I have no dog in the agriculture industry. None. I'm not invested in any company, I own no stocks, I don't work for any food related business, I don't have any friends in the business, and I don't have any relatives in the business. Zero ties, period.
First, nearly all of your claims have been pretty well established as false, especially the ones about terminator genes:
Do I think Monsanto is in it to end world hunger? Nope. They're in it to make money, just like any other business. However through their developments, the farmers are able to grow crops at a reduced overall cost per yield in addition to higher yields in general; in other words your food costs less and there is more of it. This is why Monsanto products are sought after. Do we use more glyphosate based pesticides? Probably. Given that we have created a situation where the plants we want are immune to them, and it kills the plants we don't want, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest that we now make more of them. Why, did that surprise you? If it did, that doesn't say much about your intelligence. Glyphosate doesn't end up on our dinner plates in any significant quantities, so it's not a problem.
The organic industry hates Monsanto because now they have to compete with their prices. And it sucks for them particularly bad because organic farming has otherwise very high profit margins, but its costs will never go down, even though it is already scientifically proven to offer zero health or taste benefit over any other form of farming. You know why the costs for organic will never go down? Because it is technologically capped - i.e. there are strict limits on what kinds of technologies they can use for their farming. Worse is that the organic crops will continue to adapt to the pesticides they use, which means they'll always need to use larger quantities of them as time goes by since they can't use synthetic pesticides (which is why modern farming uses far less pesticides than organic already.)
The organic industry isn't suing Monsanto because they want to protect you from bad food, they're suing because they want to protect their revenue stream long term. How you like that one? Whole Foods is in it to make money as well. And what do you know, I don't shop there because I can't afford their food. I've found that a wal-mart strawberry tastes the same as a whole foods strawberry, only costs about half as much, so I shop there. Does that anger you? Makes me happy to be honest, because as the saying goes: A penny saved is a penny earned.
Fun fact: Since the 1950's, the food yields from American farms has increased 300% while the landmass required to produce them has only increased 12%. Not true of Organic though - organic farming requires increased landmass at a closer to linear scale. And as if that isn't enough, organic farming will continue on that trend. Contrary to popular belief, organic farming is unsustainable.
The anti-GMO movement in my mind equates to the following:
anti-vaccine movement 9/11 conspiracy theorists moon landing hoaxers chemtrail fearmongerers
Yes, it being anti-GMO is every bit as unreasonable and even harmful as all of the above things to me. To me there is no difference, all of these people conveniently ignore any evidence that they
Actually the HK is an old reference to a gamer tag I have long since stopped using. I tend to respect Asian cultures for their high disciplinary values (which is why they are so damn successful in academia that affirmative action throws them under the bus - yet another reason why I think we need to get rid of it - we should be encouraging talent, not condemning it) but I am about as white as casper and have no Asian ancestry whatsoever.
But anyways I don't think bringing up internment camps is a prudent thing to do in the greater context of things.
While we've landed on the moon physically, technologically we just aren't there yet. It isn't currently practical to commercially exploit yet (i.e. where the gain of doing so outweighs the losses.) While landing on the moon is surely a neat thing to do, and I myself am a big fan of NASA, doing so on the government dime just doesn't make sense right now. We're not in a space race with the Russians anymore and communism died in the 80's (save for a few select groups still in denial,) so we don't have anything to prove.
The private sector is currently in a race of its own to make getting to space more practical daily, and I think we should let it continue on that course. Space continues to see more and more commercial exploitation all the time, and the private sector will take us to the moon in the appropriate time. I think NASA's resources are probably best spent on the theoretical - the mars rovers for example are a good place for NASA to be.
Sure there are lots of scary looking methods of splicing DNA, but those are all done experimentally for research purposes. Those don't ever make it to your dinner plate.
You know the human body contains 3 complete genomes from viruses and about a hundred thousand or so incomplete ones. One of these virus genomes includes genetic material that transcribes to create a critical reproductive function that we could not live without today, and it came from some other animal. So indeed, humans themselves carry DNA from some other animal, and in fact depend on it. In fact, 8% of our genome comes from foreign sources.
GMO has the potential to reduce the need for farmland, which if I were an environmentalist I would be ecstatic for because that means tearing down less forest land to create farms to feed people and end world hunger. In addition, it will make food much less expensive which means your bargaining power goes up, which means less poor people.
In commercially sold GMO, all they do is modify a very tiny number of codons to make the plant resistant to glyphosate. That's it. During natural reproduction, plants go through thousands of mutations, mutations much larger than this one, and we haven't the slightest clue what these mutations do. Yet making a small tiny change where we know exactly what it does has people like you raging? Why? Especially given that the chemical composition of the food that ends up on your plate is not chemically distinct from non-GMO based foods.
I don't know what GMO did to ruin your life, but having a vendetta against it because you're ideologically opposed to it doesn't do anybody else any favors. In fact, it does the world a disservice akin to the new rise of smallpox due to the FUD campaign against vaccines. In fact I'd say it's equally destructive.
I found the saying by the way, I posted earlier on my smartphone so I did some wreckless paraphrasing, but here are the original quotes:
The sooner the Americans come, the better...One hundred million die proudly. -- Japanese slogan in the summer of 1945.
Japan was finished as a warmaking nation, in spite of its four million men still under arms. But...Japan was not going to quit. Despite the fact that she was militarily finished, Japan's leaders were going to fight right on. To not lose "face" was more important than hundreds and hundreds of thousands of lives. And the people concurred, in silence, without protest. To continue was no longer a question of Japanese military thinking, it was an aspect of Japanese culture and psychology. -- James Jones, WWII
We will prepare 10,000 planes to meet the landing of the enemy. We will mobilize every aircraft possible, both training and "special attack" (kamikaze) planes. We will smash one third of the enemy's war potential with this air force at sea. Another third will also be smashed at sea by our warships, human torpedoes and other special weapons. Furthermore, when the enemy actually lands, if we are ready to sacrifice a million men we will be able to inflict an equal number of casualties upon them. If the enemy loses a million men, then the public opinion in America will become inclined towards peace, and Japan will be able to gain peace with comparatively advantageous conditions. -- Imperial General HQ army staff officer in July 1945, from Weintraub's "The Last Great Victory"
"We hated the Japs but nobody had the slightest desire to go there and fight them because the one thing we knew was that we'd all be killed. I mean we really knew it. I never used to think that, I used to say the Japs would never get me. But there was no question about the mainland. How the hell are you going to storm a country where women and children, everybody would be fighting you? Of course we'd have won eventually but I don't think anybody who hasn't actually seen the Japanese fight can have any idea of what it would have cost." -- Austin Aria, veteran of the Okinawa campaign
But if you have Japanese heritage, I'm sure you're already familiar with how Japan treats immigrants (dare I say not even qualify as second class citizens) and indeed even how they treat hibakusha and even their descendents.
Today I view Japan as an honorable nation with an honorable culture for the most part, but they certainly haven't always been that way. It really did take western pressure to turn them around. Whether that is a good or a bad thing (i.e. western civilization destroying what was otherwise a rather unique militaristic culture) I don't know, but they have a very dark history - in fact most Asians I know (that is, ones who spent most of their lives in Asia) seem to have a distaste for Japanese. I.e. Koreans and Chinese have a rivalry thing going on, but they dislike the Japanese more than they dislike one another, and that largely seems to stem from what happened in the 40's - a very long time ago to the point of being mostly forgotten in the US it seems.
Perhaps the slippery slope isn't a logical fallacy after all? This all started with child porn, now all porn, and now almost everything that somebody can find objectionable.
I expected this out of Iran or China...but England?
Today's Japanese perhaps, but back then, no. I mean shit, 5,000 civilians committed suicide upon report of US advancement of Saipan because they didn't want the shame of being captured. It was a regular saying/chanting there that should Americans reach the mainland, they (the civilians) will all rise up and kill millions. The nukes prevented that.
Japan was a very militaristic society. Even today they remain highly xenophobic.
You know, your revised figure still includes basically all of the major contributors to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.
Of course, if you want to argue that all of them are secretly plotting to take over the world and/or ruin your life somehow, be my guest, but that view had no basis in reality. Unless of course you believe that vaccines, GMO, and nuclear energy are all plots to oppress the poor, and if so I truly pity how miserable you must needlessly make yourself feel every day.
I'm trying to figure out for the life of me how an economist profits off of this one. All they really do is observe and model how the economy works, without necessarily partaking in it as part of their job title.
And the actions of the 1%, who is the 1%? The richest 1%? That includes people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet right, the same people who dump billions into trying to solve world hunger, ending diseases, and researching next generation green energy?
Or are you talking about 1% of the global wealthiest? Because if you make more than $40,000 per year, then you are that 1%. And why 1%? Why not the top 3.14159%?
I love how slashdot randomly attacks groups that it perceives as being powerful for no reason other than the fact that it perceives them as being powerful, doesn't matter if they actually did anything wrong.
Until the kernel is patched in existing devices. Ideally you hit firmware components that can't be patched. Not only does that make that entire hardware line good for quite some time, but you don't have to wait for the kernel to be authenticated and then loaded before you can finally start booting the actual code that you care about and actually want to run.
Google sells its Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 tablets at basically a wash (or rather, it was a wash at time of release) and makes their return on Play store sales and/or in-app ads, at least that's the model anyways.
Amazon same thing with the kindle fire.
I don't see any reason Microsoft couldn't do the same. At present their store is barren compared to the competition, but getting devices into the hands of consumers wouldn't hurt if you want to attract developers and content providers.
Problem with that theory is that cable operates on RF, which means you have limited spectrum to deal with. That's why cable has caps and FiOS/google fiber do not. I'm a network engineer myself, and when we have saturated links, we add more trunk lines.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and t-mobile did a restart as well. They were going all HSPA, and then started rolling out LTE. And as I said, their LTE deployment is already going at a much faster pace than Sprint.
And bias? Yeah probably. I was with Sprint for 10 years, and during the last two their service was just downright crap. Of course I'm going to be biased, because I've experienced first hand just how bad they are, and how in spite of being with sprint a VERY long time, they were treating me like crap by constantly raising my rates even though I was on a contract where supposedly your rates can't go up, and as their service degraded their CSR's just plain didn't give a crap either. And likewise, I've experienced first hand how much better t-mobile is - never seen a price hike even WITHOUT a contract, and they provide features for free that sprint doesn't even offer for the purpose of making sure I never get strange charges.
Another thing to consider is that revenue isn't profit. Revenue doesn't include, for example, the cost of the tablet itself that was sold in each transaction, but rather how much they sold the tablet for.
I imagine that after R&D and physical hardware costs, they're probably operating at a pretty deep loss on Surface. I'm curious if that is both Surface Pro and RT or just the RT though.
I think the reason for that is that they aren't just ads anymore - they're collecting intelligence on the visitors. It doesn't work as well when you host the ads on your own, you need a third party to be able to track what pages your visitors are navigating to when they navigate away from your own site (assuming of course the site they navigate to is within the ad provider's network) as the web browser isn't going to allow multiple domains to share information.
It's one thing to show sponsored messages to users, but it's even more profitable to find out what your users want. Self hosted ads aren't as good at the later.
Oh, plus the fixed FCC fees which I don't remember at the moment. It's $115 and some change.
A) Cell phone company experiences always vary based on location. Generally the best coverage comes from Verizon, but if you live in a major city you shouldn't run into problems with any major carrier.
B) While Phoenix has "ok" regular coverage, their data rates are horrible and 4g practically doesn't exist. I don't really need to explain this - go look at their LTE coverage maps, and go to clear.com and look at the Phoenix maps for wimax. There are a few "spots" where clearwire is broadcasting a wimax signal, but it probably covers maybe 3% of the valley. And then there is no LTE for Sprint, period. In fact, Sprint is the ONLY carrier with no 4g coverage to speak of. Yet, even the smaller MVNO's that don't run on the Sprint network have 4g. Phoenix is one of the largest wireless markets in the US, (it's the 6th largest city in the US too) so that's just downright pathetic.
C) Sprint's "Network Vision" has earned the reputation of being called the "coming soon" network. This talking point has been repeated by them for over three years now, and what has happened is the following: The areas they do cover they don't cover very well. They have 4g "islands" that are discontiguous and call that full coverage. A former Sprint employee who now works for a company that does signal auditing of some kind called them out on this - he said something to the effect that where normal carriers do a soft launch (i.e. turning on services but maintain that they are officially unavailable because they haven't conjoined them and properly tested them yet) whereas Sprint typically calls their soft launch a full launch and just leaves it alone once it reaches the point that some people in some areas can have services, even though there are lots of dead spots.
Sprint isn't going to leapfrog anybody. They've been deploying LTE for a long time now and their rollout is going at what is by far the slowest pace. T-mobile only started 4 months ago and they've already almost caught up with Sprint in terms of soft launch - if anything, T-Mobile is leaping ahead of Sprint already, and Sprint is destined to be in last place by the end of the year if things continue at the current rate.
Now keep in mind, t-mobile already has much larger 4g coverage than Sprint through its HSPA, and also keep in mind that Sprint was the very first company to technically offer 4g. Given that Sprint started first, and they're already dead last in aggregate 4g coverage and data rates, goes to show you just how horribly they are executing their "network vision" plan.
I forgot to add I have a veterans discount of 15%. There's discounts for all kinds of stuff with t-mobile, they tend to vary between 5% and 27%.
The base cost is $80 for the first two lines, $10 each for the remaining 3 for a total of $110. Subtract the 15% from that, then add 18% for AZ taxes.
My dad had to get picked up by an ambulance once, and they were going to bill us $5,000 just for the ride. When it came down to collecting payment, they asked how much we could afford, and we had nothing at the time. They didn't even try to setup a payment plan, they basically just called it off - no report to a credit bureau or bill collections or anything.
It's entirely possible that in situations like that, trying to collect will cost more than actually collecting anything. The high cost is probably as a result of so many people not paying, so the ones who do pay (e.g. insurance companies, governments) have to subsidize.
I have a friend who runs a pediatric urgent care who tells me that his standard billing for insurance is $200 (or something close to that) and if he gets a patient who has no insurance they ask for the same price, but if the patient says they can't afford it (or balks at it) then they'll usually just easily negotiate down to $100 or something, and he says its no big deal to do so.
I'm one of the Sprint leavers. Here's what happened in my case:
The Phoenix area is horribly neglected by Sprint. The quality of service continues to drop, and they've been promising Phoenix customers that 4g is just a few months away for the last few years. Their 3g service barely comes in at dialup speeds, and when your phone needs to do something as simple as say update an app, the phone has to burn through its battery for about a half hour for even the smaller apps just to struggle to get data. This happens with pretty much every phone model out there because the data services are so horrible. In spite of these horribly bad data rates, just the mere fact that you own a smart phone they label the service as "premium data" and charge an extra $10 per month per phone. Their excuse is that because you own a smartphone, you'll use more data, ignoring the fact that their data is so horribly slow and wasteful on battery that you always end up relying on wifi anyways.
I got out of my Sprint contract by doing the roaming trick, and so have a lot of Sprint customers:
http://www.sprintusers.com/forum/showthread.php?t=229968
T-mobile service is by far superior, by the way. Not only is it a third the price (T-mobile costs me $115 after taxes for 5 lines unlimited everything, sprint was $300 for 1500 shared minutes,) but the data services are reliable and fast as hell compared to Sprint. Sure it's not unlimited 4g, but if I pay that extra $10 Sprint was charging anyways it becomes unlimited 4g. However I find that I don't ever go above my limit anyways, so it doesn't matter, and even if I did there's never any data overage, it just goes to Edge speeds which are still MUCH faster than Sprint's 3g. T-mobile also has two (free) options you can add to your lines to completely block third party billing (from text services, 900 numbers, etc) as well as all international text/calls. Every month I had to call Sprint to fix some overage they did in error or sometimes getting signed up for a text spam service, whereas with T-Mobile I've never had to do that. Not once.
Another nice thing about t-mobile is it supports the HD Voice feature of my Nexus 4, and in addition to that when somebody calls me it actually rings immediately, whereas with Sprint the other person can hear up to four rings before my phone finally rang, often causing me to miss their call to voicemail. That and Sprint dropped calls like crazy, and when I confronted them about it they told me that their systems measured my quality of service to be 100% - and get this, when I was on the phone with the CSR, my call was dropped, and she actually called me back and then played stupid like it wasn't their problem.
I honestly have no idea how the hell Sprint intends to last long term. I'm rather shocked that they are a more popular carrier than t-mobile as their service is so much worse and by far more expensive. Plus it seems that T-Mobile has already reached 160m pop with their LTE coverage, whereas Sprint just reached 200m and they've been at it longer.
If you read between the lines of Sprint's SEC filings, their current plan is to keep revenues up by increasing the fees that each subscriber pays. They noted that in a previous filing by saying that over the last year their customers pay an average of $2 per month more than they did a year earlier, which was their way of sustaining themselves in the face of heavy subscriber losses. They do this in various ways, one way is by scaling back subscriber discounts, notice how they got rid of their premier program and they reworked their billing system so that discounts only apply to a single line instead of the whole account like every other carrier does, and lately they've been cutting people off of their discounts entirely (you now have to go through a periodic renewal process every so often.)
Labeling is stupid because it does nothing but add to the FUD.
That's like when San Fran tried to force wireless companies to label the radiation output of cell phones. It's a figure that is ultimately useless and does nothing for public health, but it creates a psychological effect that causes customer demand to shift anyways, so we could end up in a situation where cell phones are more expensive and possibly heavier because they have to add some kind of shielding or whatever to make a meaningless number go down.
All of that so that some derps have an excuse to complain about their "electromagnetic allergies."
Not only that, but the space on food labels is limited. As a kidney patient I have to concern myself daily with how much protein, phosphorus, potassium, and sodium I consume daily. Only one of those items are required to be on the labels. If I consume too much potassium in a day, I am dead as a doornail (the amount contained in three large potatoes is enough) and listing the potassium content on foods is entirely optional.
Believe me there are far higher health priorities than GMO labeling that already don't make it onto food labels. The FDA knows that label space is limited, and they can't possibly expect every food manufacturer to cater to every possible dietary restriction that somebody might possibly have, so they keep the most important ones as requirements and list the rest as optional. And I'm not even the worst - people on dialysis have even tighter dietary restrictions. I think their plight is probably a bit more important than those silly little electromagnetic aller - Oops sorry, I mean GMO fears.
As for making genes unpatentable - if they're found to be naturally occuring, they can't be patented. Period. SCOTUS killed that on June 14th. Now artificially created genes, I think those are worthy of patenting. SCOTUS agrees.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/06/130614-supreme-court-gene-patent-ruling-human-genome-science/
What you're doing is constructing protein structures - the DNA is just the information that tells how to transcribe them. Creating innovative protein structures is something I'd definitely call a work of art, and is absolutely non-trivial and definitely research intensive and time consuming (costly too.) Being able to figure out how they fold and interact with one another isn't exactly simple arithmetic, as is often the case with say software patents. It would be pretty damn lame if you poured your life's work into the cure or biotech invention of the 22nd century and somebody just rips it off for free, and you have nothing to show for it.
And read my article by the way - the terminator genes already exist and there is a patent for them. But the one company who holds that patent has said it has no intention of ever using it. Will they keep that promise? Who knows. But in the mean time, nobody else can without their permission.
Well first of all, no, I am not a paid Monsanto shill. I know, shocker. No, I'm a network engineer who recently came down with kidney disease due to a freak allergy condition, and in that process have done all kinds of research about proper nutrition (I have to baby my metabolic system as part of managing my chronic kidney disease.) In addition to that, I have a very diminished ability to work, so my wallet is tight. Therefore, I have a vested interest in nutritional food being available on the cheap.
Beyond that, I have no dog in the agriculture industry. None. I'm not invested in any company, I own no stocks, I don't work for any food related business, I don't have any friends in the business, and I don't have any relatives in the business. Zero ties, period.
First, nearly all of your claims have been pretty well established as false, especially the ones about terminator genes:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/10/18/163034053/top-five-myths-of-genetically-modified-seeds-busted
Do I think Monsanto is in it to end world hunger? Nope. They're in it to make money, just like any other business. However through their developments, the farmers are able to grow crops at a reduced overall cost per yield in addition to higher yields in general; in other words your food costs less and there is more of it. This is why Monsanto products are sought after. Do we use more glyphosate based pesticides? Probably. Given that we have created a situation where the plants we want are immune to them, and it kills the plants we don't want, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest that we now make more of them. Why, did that surprise you? If it did, that doesn't say much about your intelligence. Glyphosate doesn't end up on our dinner plates in any significant quantities, so it's not a problem.
The organic industry hates Monsanto because now they have to compete with their prices. And it sucks for them particularly bad because organic farming has otherwise very high profit margins, but its costs will never go down, even though it is already scientifically proven to offer zero health or taste benefit over any other form of farming. You know why the costs for organic will never go down? Because it is technologically capped - i.e. there are strict limits on what kinds of technologies they can use for their farming. Worse is that the organic crops will continue to adapt to the pesticides they use, which means they'll always need to use larger quantities of them as time goes by since they can't use synthetic pesticides (which is why modern farming uses far less pesticides than organic already.)
The organic industry isn't suing Monsanto because they want to protect you from bad food, they're suing because they want to protect their revenue stream long term. How you like that one? Whole Foods is in it to make money as well. And what do you know, I don't shop there because I can't afford their food. I've found that a wal-mart strawberry tastes the same as a whole foods strawberry, only costs about half as much, so I shop there. Does that anger you? Makes me happy to be honest, because as the saying goes: A penny saved is a penny earned.
Fun fact: Since the 1950's, the food yields from American farms has increased 300% while the landmass required to produce them has only increased 12%. Not true of Organic though - organic farming requires increased landmass at a closer to linear scale. And as if that isn't enough, organic farming will continue on that trend. Contrary to popular belief, organic farming is unsustainable.
The anti-GMO movement in my mind equates to the following:
anti-vaccine movement
9/11 conspiracy theorists
moon landing hoaxers
chemtrail fearmongerers
Yes, it being anti-GMO is every bit as unreasonable and even harmful as all of the above things to me. To me there is no difference, all of these people conveniently ignore any evidence that they
Actually the HK is an old reference to a gamer tag I have long since stopped using. I tend to respect Asian cultures for their high disciplinary values (which is why they are so damn successful in academia that affirmative action throws them under the bus - yet another reason why I think we need to get rid of it - we should be encouraging talent, not condemning it) but I am about as white as casper and have no Asian ancestry whatsoever.
But anyways I don't think bringing up internment camps is a prudent thing to do in the greater context of things.
There's a ring of truth to that.
While we've landed on the moon physically, technologically we just aren't there yet. It isn't currently practical to commercially exploit yet (i.e. where the gain of doing so outweighs the losses.) While landing on the moon is surely a neat thing to do, and I myself am a big fan of NASA, doing so on the government dime just doesn't make sense right now. We're not in a space race with the Russians anymore and communism died in the 80's (save for a few select groups still in denial,) so we don't have anything to prove.
The private sector is currently in a race of its own to make getting to space more practical daily, and I think we should let it continue on that course. Space continues to see more and more commercial exploitation all the time, and the private sector will take us to the moon in the appropriate time. I think NASA's resources are probably best spent on the theoretical - the mars rovers for example are a good place for NASA to be.
Sure there are lots of scary looking methods of splicing DNA, but those are all done experimentally for research purposes. Those don't ever make it to your dinner plate.
You know the human body contains 3 complete genomes from viruses and about a hundred thousand or so incomplete ones. One of these virus genomes includes genetic material that transcribes to create a critical reproductive function that we could not live without today, and it came from some other animal. So indeed, humans themselves carry DNA from some other animal, and in fact depend on it. In fact, 8% of our genome comes from foreign sources.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/science/12paleo.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2012/06/14/we-are-viral-from-the-beginning/
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/05/10/the-lurker-how-a-virus-hid-in-our-genome-for-six-million-years/
GMO has the potential to reduce the need for farmland, which if I were an environmentalist I would be ecstatic for because that means tearing down less forest land to create farms to feed people and end world hunger. In addition, it will make food much less expensive which means your bargaining power goes up, which means less poor people.
In commercially sold GMO, all they do is modify a very tiny number of codons to make the plant resistant to glyphosate. That's it. During natural reproduction, plants go through thousands of mutations, mutations much larger than this one, and we haven't the slightest clue what these mutations do. Yet making a small tiny change where we know exactly what it does has people like you raging? Why? Especially given that the chemical composition of the food that ends up on your plate is not chemically distinct from non-GMO based foods.
I don't know what GMO did to ruin your life, but having a vendetta against it because you're ideologically opposed to it doesn't do anybody else any favors. In fact, it does the world a disservice akin to the new rise of smallpox due to the FUD campaign against vaccines. In fact I'd say it's equally destructive.
Please stop spreading FUD about GMO. Thank you.
I found the saying by the way, I posted earlier on my smartphone so I did some wreckless paraphrasing, but here are the original quotes:
The sooner the Americans come, the better...One hundred million die proudly.
-- Japanese slogan in the summer of 1945.
Japan was finished as a warmaking nation, in spite of its four million men still under arms. But...Japan was not going to quit. Despite the fact that she was militarily finished, Japan's leaders were going to fight right on. To not lose "face" was more important than hundreds and hundreds of thousands of lives. And the people concurred, in silence, without protest. To continue was no longer a question of Japanese military thinking, it was an aspect of Japanese culture and psychology.
-- James Jones, WWII
We will prepare 10,000 planes to meet the landing of the enemy. We will mobilize every aircraft possible, both training and "special attack" (kamikaze) planes. We will smash one third of the enemy's war potential with this air force at sea. Another third will also be smashed at sea by our warships, human torpedoes and other special weapons. Furthermore, when the enemy actually lands, if we are ready to sacrifice a million men we will be able to inflict an equal number of casualties upon them. If the enemy loses a million men, then the public opinion in America will become inclined towards peace, and Japan will be able to gain peace with comparatively advantageous conditions.
-- Imperial General HQ army staff officer in July 1945, from Weintraub's "The Last Great Victory"
"We hated the Japs but nobody had the slightest desire to go there and fight them because the one thing we knew was that we'd all be killed. I mean we really knew it. I never used to think that, I used to say the Japs would never get me. But there was no question about the mainland. How the hell are you going to storm a country where women and children, everybody would be fighting you? Of course we'd have won eventually but I don't think anybody who hasn't actually seen the Japanese fight can have any idea of what it would have cost."
-- Austin Aria, veteran of the Okinawa campaign
But if you have Japanese heritage, I'm sure you're already familiar with how Japan treats immigrants (dare I say not even qualify as second class citizens) and indeed even how they treat hibakusha and even their descendents.
Today I view Japan as an honorable nation with an honorable culture for the most part, but they certainly haven't always been that way. It really did take western pressure to turn them around. Whether that is a good or a bad thing (i.e. western civilization destroying what was otherwise a rather unique militaristic culture) I don't know, but they have a very dark history - in fact most Asians I know (that is, ones who spent most of their lives in Asia) seem to have a distaste for Japanese. I.e. Koreans and Chinese have a rivalry thing going on, but they dislike the Japanese more than they dislike one another, and that largely seems to stem from what happened in the 40's - a very long time ago to the point of being mostly forgotten in the US it seems.
Perhaps the slippery slope isn't a logical fallacy after all? This all started with child porn, now all porn, and now almost everything that somebody can find objectionable.
I expected this out of Iran or China...but England?
Today's Japanese perhaps, but back then, no. I mean shit, 5,000 civilians committed suicide upon report of US advancement of Saipan because they didn't want the shame of being captured. It was a regular saying/chanting there that should Americans reach the mainland, they (the civilians) will all rise up and kill millions. The nukes prevented that.
Japan was a very militaristic society. Even today they remain highly xenophobic.
... really?
You know, your revised figure still includes basically all of the major contributors to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.
Of course, if you want to argue that all of them are secretly plotting to take over the world and/or ruin your life somehow, be my guest, but that view had no basis in reality. Unless of course you believe that vaccines, GMO, and nuclear energy are all plots to oppress the poor, and if so I truly pity how miserable you must needlessly make yourself feel every day.
Greedy economists?
I'm trying to figure out for the life of me how an economist profits off of this one. All they really do is observe and model how the economy works, without necessarily partaking in it as part of their job title.
And the actions of the 1%, who is the 1%? The richest 1%? That includes people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet right, the same people who dump billions into trying to solve world hunger, ending diseases, and researching next generation green energy?
Or are you talking about 1% of the global wealthiest? Because if you make more than $40,000 per year, then you are that 1%. And why 1%? Why not the top 3.14159%?
I love how slashdot randomly attacks groups that it perceives as being powerful for no reason other than the fact that it perceives them as being powerful, doesn't matter if they actually did anything wrong.
AV-comparatives puts MSE a little lower down the list of detection rates, but far from placebo.
I myself have had good results with removing a rootkit on an XP box that had no AV on it before.
Until the kernel is patched in existing devices. Ideally you hit firmware components that can't be patched. Not only does that make that entire hardware line good for quite some time, but you don't have to wait for the kernel to be authenticated and then loaded before you can finally start booting the actual code that you care about and actually want to run.
Windows store sales?
Google sells its Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 tablets at basically a wash (or rather, it was a wash at time of release) and makes their return on Play store sales and/or in-app ads, at least that's the model anyways.
Amazon same thing with the kindle fire.
I don't see any reason Microsoft couldn't do the same. At present their store is barren compared to the competition, but getting devices into the hands of consumers wouldn't hurt if you want to attract developers and content providers.
Problem with that theory is that cable operates on RF, which means you have limited spectrum to deal with. That's why cable has caps and FiOS/google fiber do not. I'm a network engineer myself, and when we have saturated links, we add more trunk lines.
Personally I think over regulation is the problem. Wired agrees:
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/07/we-need-to-stop-focusing-on-just-cable-companies-and-blame-local-government-for-dismal-broadband-competition/
Google (or somebody like them) would be more likely to come if it weren't so hard to.
Nah I'd say mecca.