Just what we need. The problem with camcorders is they are too cheap, and too many people are making too many pointless home movies. I agree with George Carlin, in that there's nothing worse than some asshole with a camcorder at every soccer game his kid plays in. Or those people who bring camcorders to amusement parks and and annoy the crap out of everyone, wanting their family to "say something for the camera". Seriously, if there were any device I could choose to uninvent, it wouldn't be the atomic bomb, it would be the home camcorder.
While I agree that eventually prices will rise due to some of these issues you pointed out, it's also worth remembering that traditional phone companies were generally monopolies. Sure they were regulated, but it's not hard to get a regulator to agree to a price increase. VOIP will always offer more competition than POTS ever could. It's trivially easy to switch VOIP providers, so that will provide an enormous incentive to them to keep prices reasonable.
This brings up an interesting point. What if Microsoft, or some other large vendor of commonly used software, went to the subscription model and someone DDOS'd the authentication servers (kind of like what happend to WindowsUpdate)? How much money would they and their clients lose as a result of everyone being locked out of their software? This is too much of a single point of failure for people to be comfortable with.
Considering how easy it is to break Windows XP Activation, I wouldn't bet on this method working for more than 10 minutes without someone finding a way to keep the software running locally without reporting or getting authorization from a server. The end result would be inconvenience and frustration for users that cannot connect to the authentication server with massive piracy continuing unabated. Unless DRM can be built into the hardware all the way down to the BIOS level, security of subscriptionware could not be guaranteed. Based on the outcry when the BIOS DRM system was proposed a couple of years ago, I don't see it happening anytime soon.
Reduced operational costs do not bring down prices. Competition does. When it becomes cheaper to make something and the few companies that make it are charging high prices, somebody else who wants to get in that market will come along and charge lower prices. The older companies can either lower prices or lose business. Look at what Vonage is doing to the telecom industry. Does anyone think SBC would have given me unlimited calling within the US for $50 a month 3 years ago? Now they do, since there is much lower priced competition.
Your understanding of wealth and economies is misguided, to say the least. There is not some finite amount of wealth in the world that must be divided up among the people and for someone to become rich, 4 other people must become poor. That's not how it works. Wealth is created or destroyed by the pace of economic activity. There is a lot more wealth worldwide now than there was in 1900. Not because we discovered a new stash of gold, but because we have more efficient ways of doing things which makes us more productive. Higher productivity = increased wealth. If I start a company and hire you as an employee, paying you a profit sharing bonus, we could both become wealthy. Me probably moreso than you, since I took the risk to start the company, but when the money comes in, there's more than enough to go around. The problem is that some people who run companies, usually not the original founders, are looking out for the short term only and have no interest in the long term good of the company so they take unadvisable shortcuts such as treating employees like crap and causing the best ones to leave.
In most stores, it seems like the employees completely ignore the alarm when someone sets it off. The most I've ever seen them do is waive somebody through when they see that the person has a bag of merchandise in hand and has just left the register. Having worked in a $7 an hour sales job, I know what I would do if I suspected someone shoplifting - absolutely nothing. $7 an hour is not enough to risk a potentially dangerous confrontation. The main reason for sensors is to make people think they'll get caught shoplifting and to make management feel like they are doing something to prevent theft (maybe the store's insurance requires them). I'm sure they don't even begin to deter the serious professional thief.
I don't think too many cities would want to do that. Consider how much money the towing fees cost multiplied by number of cars towed, and that's how much the city would lose. Street cleaning is more of a revenue generator from parking fines than anything, considering how seldom they actually come through and clean the street. But yes, it would be a great idea if the city's revenue department were not opposed to it, which I know they would be.
Our GM said we would be "surprised by the increase in productivity."
It sounds better than saying that he would be surprised by the decrease in the cost of office space. Companies use cube farms for one reason: it's cheaper. You can put more people in the space and spend less money to do it. This must be sold to the employee as somehow being beneficial, so that's where the "increased productivity" line of BS comes from.
That was the idea, when they implemented this policy in France. But in reality, unemployment did not go down, in fact it increased. Economic activity as a whole will decline when companies are not allowed to be as productive. Not to mention, international companies will pull out of countries where the work laws are so restrictive as to make it a non-profitable business venture. There is not a finite amount of work that must be divided among a finite number of people. Higher productivity = more work to be done. New jobs get created when the number of people needed to do an old job are reduced. France is considering changing their laws for this reason.
Just post a conservative rant and watch it be yanked down within 24 hours.
Re:Duplicate story....
on
Port-A-Nuke
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Yes, but the earlier story didn't drive traffic to Roland's blog, so it had to be posted again. He pays Slashdot good money to pimp his blog so they're going to make sure it gets linked to at least once a day, even if it means posting duped stories.
This happened to me at Purdue, I kid you not. Our Systems Analysis and Design final project presentation was graded, in part, by a panel of MBA students. Luckily, we were prepared for this and thought up a bunch of impressive sounding bullshit with only a brief mention of technical details. They bought it hook, line and sinker and gave us an A. There was a group that had very impressive solutions from a technical standpoint and then stood up there and lectured about network layer protocols got a low C, which they complained about to the department head. This was excellent preparation for the working world, unfortunately. Only later did I realize what a genius my professor was for doing that.
The one possible positive that could come out of this plan is that it could be proven with statistical evidence that many people do the things you mention and don't have accidents. And that many people who drive like little old ladies do in fact have accidents. Would this result in cheaper insurance for people who know the capabilities of their vehicles really well?
On second thought, probably not. Insurance companies will do what they continue to do now and manufacture statistics to make sure they can discriminate against people who it is politically correct to discriminate against. What if it were determined that women actually were more likely to get in accidents than men? Does anyone believe that insurance companies would actually be allowed to charge them more? Are they allowed to charge older drivers more, since they are in fact more likely to have an accident as they age?
In any case, having this data could possibly force states to require insurance companies to assign rates more fairly and accurately.
How about people who simply have loud and annoying voices all the time? Should we ban them from talking in public? As much as I'd love to, I somehow think such a ban would be held unconstitutional.
Another advantage of paying full price for your own phone is that you can generally sign up for service with no contract. And now that we have number portability, you can easily switch carriers if your original carrier becomes too much of a pain in the ass.
I am six foot seven inches and weigh over 300 pounds.
I'm going to assume you're exaggerating the height, so we'll say 6'3". 300 pounds? You're not a big strong guy, you're a fatass. I, or anyone for that matter, could just wear you out by sustaining the fight for more than say, one minute. That would leave you gasping for air nearly having a heart attack. A muscular guy, even one that is 6'7, does not weight 300 lbs. Take my advice, stay out of fights. Your first one will be your last, and then you won't be able to prove anything at all.
As satisfying as it would be for IBM to buy SCO and give the execs 10 minutes to clean out their offices, I believe the reason they have resisted doing this so far is because it would create an enormous incentive for every failing technology company to try the same thing. Getting bought out is a lot more attractive than watching your company wither and die. IBM is a big enough target that they could very well be made to suffer if enough companies thought they could get themselves bought by filing a bogus lawsuit.
Yea, because there's no such thing as terrorism. It was fully made up by Bush and Asscroft to keep you scared. Osama Bin Laden was made up too, and 9/11 was just a structural failure of the buildings. Must be a nice little dream world to live in.
Regardless of the regulations, this cop simply had too much time on his hands. I'll bet if the priest was sending spam and said it was his constitutional free speech right to do so, the cop would have backed off.
Not only is the fee about $6 now, but the rural lines were in place well before the Universal Socialism Fee. All it is now is a gravy train for politically connected telecom providers. Previous slashdot discussions have addressed the issue of contractors making insane amounts of money for providing basic internet connections to schools. Schools themselves have pilfered funds to be used for just about anything computer related or not. Besides, if urban residents have to pay a lot more for housing, food, and just about everything else, why shouldn't rural people have to pay more for phone service? When they subsidize my rent, I'll feel right about subsidizing their phones.
I'm sure that if this actually works, Asscroft will make them add wiretapping capabilities. And if the telecom monopolies have their way, Universal Service Fees as well. And then it's just an overhyped telephone. We can't have people making things that are too revolutionary, now can we?
It appears that Trolland is a paying advertiser on Slashdot. Surely they aren't stupid enough to give him this kind of publicity for free. It would be only fair for Slashdot to disclose in each Trolland Picknose article that it is a paid advertisement for Radio Wasteland or whatever that stupid blog is called. Also, a Trolland category would be appreciated so people can filter accordingly.
It depends on the context in which the information is presented. If you make it available on a website that is known as a place to air radical views and it is posted with an undertone of "let these people know how you feel", it can be rightly viewed as intimidation. Personally, I think Indymedia knew this would happen, and chose to post something provocative like this so they could later cry out about censorship. Trust me, it was a carefully crafted public relations stunt.
Slashdot Mirror
Just what we need. The problem with camcorders is they are too cheap, and too many people are making too many pointless home movies. I agree with George Carlin, in that there's nothing worse than some asshole with a camcorder at every soccer game his kid plays in. Or those people who bring camcorders to amusement parks and and annoy the crap out of everyone, wanting their family to "say something for the camera". Seriously, if there were any device I could choose to uninvent, it wouldn't be the atomic bomb, it would be the home camcorder.
While I agree that eventually prices will rise due to some of these issues you pointed out, it's also worth remembering that traditional phone companies were generally monopolies. Sure they were regulated, but it's not hard to get a regulator to agree to a price increase. VOIP will always offer more competition than POTS ever could. It's trivially easy to switch VOIP providers, so that will provide an enormous incentive to them to keep prices reasonable.
This brings up an interesting point. What if Microsoft, or some other large vendor of commonly used software, went to the subscription model and someone DDOS'd the authentication servers (kind of like what happend to WindowsUpdate)? How much money would they and their clients lose as a result of everyone being locked out of their software? This is too much of a single point of failure for people to be comfortable with.
Considering how easy it is to break Windows XP Activation, I wouldn't bet on this method working for more than 10 minutes without someone finding a way to keep the software running locally without reporting or getting authorization from a server. The end result would be inconvenience and frustration for users that cannot connect to the authentication server with massive piracy continuing unabated. Unless DRM can be built into the hardware all the way down to the BIOS level, security of subscriptionware could not be guaranteed. Based on the outcry when the BIOS DRM system was proposed a couple of years ago, I don't see it happening anytime soon.
Reduced operational costs do not bring down prices. Competition does. When it becomes cheaper to make something and the few companies that make it are charging high prices, somebody else who wants to get in that market will come along and charge lower prices. The older companies can either lower prices or lose business. Look at what Vonage is doing to the telecom industry. Does anyone think SBC would have given me unlimited calling within the US for $50 a month 3 years ago? Now they do, since there is much lower priced competition.
Your understanding of wealth and economies is misguided, to say the least. There is not some finite amount of wealth in the world that must be divided up among the people and for someone to become rich, 4 other people must become poor. That's not how it works. Wealth is created or destroyed by the pace of economic activity. There is a lot more wealth worldwide now than there was in 1900. Not because we discovered a new stash of gold, but because we have more efficient ways of doing things which makes us more productive. Higher productivity = increased wealth. If I start a company and hire you as an employee, paying you a profit sharing bonus, we could both become wealthy. Me probably moreso than you, since I took the risk to start the company, but when the money comes in, there's more than enough to go around. The problem is that some people who run companies, usually not the original founders, are looking out for the short term only and have no interest in the long term good of the company so they take unadvisable shortcuts such as treating employees like crap and causing the best ones to leave.
In most stores, it seems like the employees completely ignore the alarm when someone sets it off. The most I've ever seen them do is waive somebody through when they see that the person has a bag of merchandise in hand and has just left the register. Having worked in a $7 an hour sales job, I know what I would do if I suspected someone shoplifting - absolutely nothing. $7 an hour is not enough to risk a potentially dangerous confrontation. The main reason for sensors is to make people think they'll get caught shoplifting and to make management feel like they are doing something to prevent theft (maybe the store's insurance requires them). I'm sure they don't even begin to deter the serious professional thief.
e-reminder when the street cleaning day is
I don't think too many cities would want to do that. Consider how much money the towing fees cost multiplied by number of cars towed, and that's how much the city would lose. Street cleaning is more of a revenue generator from parking fines than anything, considering how seldom they actually come through and clean the street. But yes, it would be a great idea if the city's revenue department were not opposed to it, which I know they would be.
Our GM said we would be "surprised by the increase in productivity."
It sounds better than saying that he would be surprised by the decrease in the cost of office space. Companies use cube farms for one reason: it's cheaper. You can put more people in the space and spend less money to do it. This must be sold to the employee as somehow being beneficial, so that's where the "increased productivity" line of BS comes from.
That was the idea, when they implemented this policy in France. But in reality, unemployment did not go down, in fact it increased. Economic activity as a whole will decline when companies are not allowed to be as productive. Not to mention, international companies will pull out of countries where the work laws are so restrictive as to make it a non-profitable business venture. There is not a finite amount of work that must be divided among a finite number of people. Higher productivity = more work to be done. New jobs get created when the number of people needed to do an old job are reduced. France is considering changing their laws for this reason.
Just post a conservative rant and watch it be yanked down within 24 hours.
Yes, but the earlier story didn't drive traffic to Roland's blog, so it had to be posted again. He pays Slashdot good money to pimp his blog so they're going to make sure it gets linked to at least once a day, even if it means posting duped stories.
This happened to me at Purdue, I kid you not. Our Systems Analysis and Design final project presentation was graded, in part, by a panel of MBA students. Luckily, we were prepared for this and thought up a bunch of impressive sounding bullshit with only a brief mention of technical details. They bought it hook, line and sinker and gave us an A. There was a group that had very impressive solutions from a technical standpoint and then stood up there and lectured about network layer protocols got a low C, which they complained about to the department head. This was excellent preparation for the working world, unfortunately. Only later did I realize what a genius my professor was for doing that.
The one possible positive that could come out of this plan is that it could be proven with statistical evidence that many people do the things you mention and don't have accidents. And that many people who drive like little old ladies do in fact have accidents. Would this result in cheaper insurance for people who know the capabilities of their vehicles really well?
On second thought, probably not. Insurance companies will do what they continue to do now and manufacture statistics to make sure they can discriminate against people who it is politically correct to discriminate against. What if it were determined that women actually were more likely to get in accidents than men? Does anyone believe that insurance companies would actually be allowed to charge them more? Are they allowed to charge older drivers more, since they are in fact more likely to have an accident as they age?
In any case, having this data could possibly force states to require insurance companies to assign rates more fairly and accurately.
How about people who simply have loud and annoying voices all the time? Should we ban them from talking in public? As much as I'd love to, I somehow think such a ban would be held unconstitutional.
Another advantage of paying full price for your own phone is that you can generally sign up for service with no contract. And now that we have number portability, you can easily switch carriers if your original carrier becomes too much of a pain in the ass.
Nothing like a little math humor...
I am six foot seven inches and weigh over 300 pounds.
I'm going to assume you're exaggerating the height, so we'll say 6'3". 300 pounds? You're not a big strong guy, you're a fatass. I, or anyone for that matter, could just wear you out by sustaining the fight for more than say, one minute. That would leave you gasping for air nearly having a heart attack. A muscular guy, even one that is 6'7, does not weight 300 lbs. Take my advice, stay out of fights. Your first one will be your last, and then you won't be able to prove anything at all.
As satisfying as it would be for IBM to buy SCO and give the execs 10 minutes to clean out their offices, I believe the reason they have resisted doing this so far is because it would create an enormous incentive for every failing technology company to try the same thing. Getting bought out is a lot more attractive than watching your company wither and die. IBM is a big enough target that they could very well be made to suffer if enough companies thought they could get themselves bought by filing a bogus lawsuit.
Yea, because there's no such thing as terrorism. It was fully made up by Bush and Asscroft to keep you scared. Osama Bin Laden was made up too, and 9/11 was just a structural failure of the buildings. Must be a nice little dream world to live in.
Regardless of the regulations, this cop simply had too much time on his hands. I'll bet if the priest was sending spam and said it was his constitutional free speech right to do so, the cop would have backed off.
Not only is the fee about $6 now, but the rural lines were in place well before the Universal Socialism Fee. All it is now is a gravy train for politically connected telecom providers. Previous slashdot discussions have addressed the issue of contractors making insane amounts of money for providing basic internet connections to schools. Schools themselves have pilfered funds to be used for just about anything computer related or not. Besides, if urban residents have to pay a lot more for housing, food, and just about everything else, why shouldn't rural people have to pay more for phone service? When they subsidize my rent, I'll feel right about subsidizing their phones.
I'm sure that if this actually works, Asscroft will make them add wiretapping capabilities. And if the telecom monopolies have their way, Universal Service Fees as well. And then it's just an overhyped telephone. We can't have people making things that are too revolutionary, now can we?
It appears that Trolland is a paying advertiser on Slashdot. Surely they aren't stupid enough to give him this kind of publicity for free. It would be only fair for Slashdot to disclose in each Trolland Picknose article that it is a paid advertisement for Radio Wasteland or whatever that stupid blog is called. Also, a Trolland category would be appreciated so people can filter accordingly.
It depends on the context in which the information is presented. If you make it available on a website that is known as a place to air radical views and it is posted with an undertone of "let these people know how you feel", it can be rightly viewed as intimidation. Personally, I think Indymedia knew this would happen, and chose to post something provocative like this so they could later cry out about censorship. Trust me, it was a carefully crafted public relations stunt.