Heck, publicizing the thing is a pretty good show of his intent. If he'd wanted to defraud Microsoft, he'd be keeping quiet about it. This is pretty clearly about disclosing a vulnerability, not "bragging" about defrauding a large corporation.
Many tariffs are put in place because some industry or union has lobbied against the "unfair competition!!" overseas and basically wants a bigger slice of Americans' wallet in the end. "The environment" or "exploitation" is the excuse for the tariff, not the actual reason (like Bush taking us into Iraq- WMDs were the excuse- and sometimes the excuses are actually true.)
In these cases, the economic winners are few and concentrated (e.g. GM autoworkers) and have a large incentive to produce political pressure and hire lobbyists, whereas the losers are many, but they don't lose very much. Would you hire a lobbyist over a your car being $200 more expensive because of a tariff on a particular component? Would you hire a lobbyist to pass a tariff if it could mean your job? Similar incentive structures frequently the cause when regulation proves to be a failure. You can look at some of the figures some time - I recall seeing one where each job saved from a certain steel-related tariff cost the economy something like $150,000 a year. That'd take a pretty cushy job for the country to break even.
How about upper-atmosphere wind? You basically have a gigantic kite with a turbine in it flying waaaay up in the upper atmosphere where the winds are crazy fast and never really die down. In a place with an east coast like Japan you could probably fly it mostly over the ocean, too, so you needn't worry too hard about having it crash into a city if the tether snaps or anything like that.
If it comes to that, we have nukes. By the 2100s, we might even have fusion power too (I'd hold out for 2200s for that, though, myself). Heck, even coating the landscape with solar panels and windmills is cost-effective if the alternative is "cold homes, very little travel, and dark nights".
And really, even some of the "dark nights" are being solved in Africa through simple hand-cranked LED lanterns. Light has gotten incredibly cheap.
You might think that a proper telco like AT&T might want to make a good wired-phone infrastructure, to stop the flight of people to cell phones, so they'd encourage the development of features like syncable phone books, and Internet-accessible voicemail (a la Google Voice) and things like that.
Then you'd remember that AT&T bought out Cingular a while ago, so they probably make more money off your cell phones anyway, and they're just try to wring as much as they still can out of their existing infrastructure without spending any money to develop it further. (Also, you'd remember that AT&T is legendary for being slow and stupid and incompetent.)
It's a good thing the Senate needs to vote on these things, too, because when the Senate does ratify a treaty, its legal weight is second only to the Constitution itself.
This is also why giving Presidents "fast-track" treaty negotiation votes is a Big Deal.
Think of it as laptop insurance. Just in case. Maybe you won't need it, but maybe you will. Also probably cheaper to pay the ToughBook premium than replacing your laptop a year earlier.
If they're going to just hand out a lump sum of money to a bunch of random people, at least they're not making them destroy perfectly functional automobiles to do so this time.
Wheel motors aren't the greatest because it means there's a lot more unsprung weight (not on your suspension). Also, while 4 small engines may or may not be as efficient overall as one big engine and some transmission, they're almost certainly more expensive.
In an economics course, when they teach you about the free market, they start with something like, "When transaction costs are low, there are no barriers to entry, and property rights exist and are enforced, then the free market is efficient". Otherwise.... it's generally not. One of the things that lets negative externalities like pollution come to pass is that the "property rights" for "living in a town that's not crazy polluted" didn't exist / weren't enforced.
You'd think that for a good slice of that $40-$60/mo they'd be willing to offer them a subscription of some sort. Especially if they've been complaining that "the purely free-content business model is unsustainable".
A speed limit of 30 mph isn't there to make it take longer for you to get to work - it's there to ensure that everyone is traveling at roughly 30 mph.
I generally agree, but realistically, a speed limit of 30mph is there to make sure that everyone is travelling roughly 35-40mph. If they wanted you traveling at about 30mph they'd sign it for 25mph.
I always thought the general logic must be "sign it at 55mph and people will go 10mph faster, i.e. 65mph. If you went and signed it at 65mph everyone would go 75." 10mph faster than the signed speed limit (sometimes 15) seems to be the target most people actually go for, so if you were actually interested in highway safety that's what you'd need to do.
Myself, I don't care as much about a few miles over the speed limit as those lane-jockeys who keep weaving in and out of traffic on a crowded freeway at the first sign they might be able to go a little faster. I bet they think they're "good" drivers too, because they go "fast" (and it's not really much faster, but it feels like you're doing something).
You know, I can see complaints about cell phone conversations in crowded places, sure, or bums with boomboxes on the bus, but good lord! A few keypresses and the "tinny whine" of someone listening to an iPod is too much for you? On an airplane, no less, with all the engine noise that entails? Dude. Get a $30-$90 pair of noise-cancelling headphones and stop acting like interacting with the rest of Humanity from time to time is such a burden.
The airlines don't make the rules; the TSA would be the ones to outlaw batteries. The airlines would just take advantage of the situation (like how "complementary" half cans of coke were no longer free once liquids were banned).
And that is why I fly United.
That, and a really miserable experience with Delta when a plane landed late at 2am with 400+ people and there were all of 2 airline representatives (allllll the way up at the front of the airport) to help people get rebooked, and I nearly didn't have the time to get on a (rescheduled) 8am flight.... mind you, Delta has very nice people on the planes, they're just organizationally incompetent....
MySpace could do better by opening itself up to developers with a real theming engine, instead of the abomination of a system they had last time I checked where you inserted random CSS style rules into one of your profile sections.
The last Nobel Prize in economics was basically saying, "Hey, a lot of important 'commons' have a small set of people who use them in repeated interactions, and so you can use game theory principles to describe how these people self-regulate the use of the commons. Oh, and therefore the government getting in on the action is less important than it might otherwise be."
It would be interesting to see whether the use of this spectrum white space "commons" will be effective.
Slashdot Mirror
HP already has its ProCurve line. It seems they mostly bought 3Com because it's big in Asia? That's what the talk is anyway,
His screenshot showed it was all 'pending'. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it or collect the money, is it fraud?
Heck, publicizing the thing is a pretty good show of his intent. If he'd wanted to defraud Microsoft, he'd be keeping quiet about it. This is pretty clearly about disclosing a vulnerability, not "bragging" about defrauding a large corporation.
In these cases, the economic winners are few and concentrated (e.g. GM autoworkers) and have a large incentive to produce political pressure and hire lobbyists, whereas the losers are many, but they don't lose very much. Would you hire a lobbyist over a your car being $200 more expensive because of a tariff on a particular component? Would you hire a lobbyist to pass a tariff if it could mean your job? Similar incentive structures frequently the cause when regulation proves to be a failure. You can look at some of the figures some time - I recall seeing one where each job saved from a certain steel-related tariff cost the economy something like $150,000 a year. That'd take a pretty cushy job for the country to break even.
More likely you pay a fee, so you get to use the "road train" and go faster. How's that for your revenue incentive?
How about upper-atmosphere wind? You basically have a gigantic kite with a turbine in it flying waaaay up in the upper atmosphere where the winds are crazy fast and never really die down. In a place with an east coast like Japan you could probably fly it mostly over the ocean, too, so you needn't worry too hard about having it crash into a city if the tether snaps or anything like that.
And really, even some of the "dark nights" are being solved in Africa through simple hand-cranked LED lanterns. Light has gotten incredibly cheap.
Then you'd remember that AT&T bought out Cingular a while ago, so they probably make more money off your cell phones anyway, and they're just try to wring as much as they still can out of their existing infrastructure without spending any money to develop it further. (Also, you'd remember that AT&T is legendary for being slow and stupid and incompetent.)
(did you mean: fare collection machines?)
You live in Portland?
I'm surprised that there aren't a bunch of multi-plugs built into houses, then. Sort of like what they do for dual-gauge railways.
This is also why giving Presidents "fast-track" treaty negotiation votes is a Big Deal.
Think of it as laptop insurance. Just in case. Maybe you won't need it, but maybe you will. Also probably cheaper to pay the ToughBook premium than replacing your laptop a year earlier.
If they're going to just hand out a lump sum of money to a bunch of random people, at least they're not making them destroy perfectly functional automobiles to do so this time.
Wheel motors aren't the greatest because it means there's a lot more unsprung weight (not on your suspension). Also, while 4 small engines may or may not be as efficient overall as one big engine and some transmission, they're almost certainly more expensive.
Wikipedia mentions some other work in the Asimoviverse; of course, Bear, Benford and Brin are all decently well-known scifi authors.
In an economics course, when they teach you about the free market, they start with something like, "When transaction costs are low, there are no barriers to entry, and property rights exist and are enforced, then the free market is efficient". Otherwise.... it's generally not. One of the things that lets negative externalities like pollution come to pass is that the "property rights" for "living in a town that's not crazy polluted" didn't exist / weren't enforced.
You'd think that for a good slice of that $40-$60/mo they'd be willing to offer them a subscription of some sort. Especially if they've been complaining that "the purely free-content business model is unsustainable".
I generally agree, but realistically, a speed limit of 30mph is there to make sure that everyone is travelling roughly 35-40mph. If they wanted you traveling at about 30mph they'd sign it for 25mph.
Myself, I don't care as much about a few miles over the speed limit as those lane-jockeys who keep weaving in and out of traffic on a crowded freeway at the first sign they might be able to go a little faster. I bet they think they're "good" drivers too, because they go "fast" (and it's not really much faster, but it feels like you're doing something).
You know, I can see complaints about cell phone conversations in crowded places, sure, or bums with boomboxes on the bus, but good lord! A few keypresses and the "tinny whine" of someone listening to an iPod is too much for you? On an airplane, no less, with all the engine noise that entails? Dude. Get a $30-$90 pair of noise-cancelling headphones and stop acting like interacting with the rest of Humanity from time to time is such a burden.
And that is why I fly United.
That, and a really miserable experience with Delta when a plane landed late at 2am with 400+ people and there were all of 2 airline representatives (allllll the way up at the front of the airport) to help people get rebooked, and I nearly didn't have the time to get on a (rescheduled) 8am flight .... mind you, Delta has very nice people on the planes, they're just organizationally incompetent....
MySpace could do better by opening itself up to developers with a real theming engine, instead of the abomination of a system they had last time I checked where you inserted random CSS style rules into one of your profile sections.
Looks like they accidentally their whole debt to society.
It would be interesting to see whether the use of this spectrum white space "commons" will be effective.