and just a minor correction... Queeg was obsessed with the theft of strawberries, to which he overturned the entire ship, not ice cream as I previously indicated.
I've participated on Groklaw since the beginning, and would suggest that SCO is very troubled if this is all its legal team is left to manifest on.
It's comparable to Captain Queeg's determined investigation of the theft of ice cream in the classic Bogart film, The Caine Mutiny. Lacking anything else of substance to confirm his paranoid belief of mass insubordination, Captain Queeg becomes consumed with the delusion that a conspiracy is involved in the disappearance of ice cream on his ship. Unfortunately, this paranoia and further indecision under crisis results in his being relieved of duty.
SCO's relief of duty isn't far away, from reviewing their financials (absent third party financing at this point, 2007 should be their last as an operating concern). Pursuing delusions of a grand IBM conspiracy through the proxy of Pamela is unfortunate. I can certainly understand the absolute frustration some of Salt Lake City's finest socialites must feel in being beaten by unworthy middle class losers, open source geeks and an old money company like IBM. They were confident that political connections, "contributions" to candidates like dear Senator Hatch, ownership of the state judicial system and other entitlements the Salt Lake City elite expect on their home turf would extend to this litigation. Those born with the proverbial silver spoon affixed to their rear egress-orifice simply can't conceive that those from lessor social classes could ever best them.
Having closed at $1.01 today, SCO investors (even those who have shorted the stock) need to remember that when this security stresses, liquidity will be impossible to come by. Expect some real fireworks soon when shareholders discover liquidity necessary to exit is gone and a "bank run" occurs. Those considering shareholder action need to move before the management team constructs their parachutes in the next month or so, leaving nothing for creditors and litigants.
dave writes... the underdog never has an advantage
Sort of the definition of underdog, right?:) As sort of indicated in my post, I also think loser-pays has issues, and concur it won't inhibit patent-trolls (but it will probably impact their risk taking by limiting the entity to a single effort and then liquidation either upon successful or unsuccessful outcomes, which would have a positive effect overall).
Regarding bonding and your comment that it too impairs the little inventor, you've got to compare it to the status quo for perspective. I've dealt first-hand with litigation where one side was dead wrong and yet they were well funded with very large law firms. They'll wear all but another equal opponent out.
I don't know that there's an effective solution today for the little guy in either scenario - he's little, lacks any real financial assets to leverage against well funded opponents, and is in most cases simply screwed. What I believe could be dealt with is the well funded trust-fund baby patent troll vehicle. It's a speculative investment game they play at the expense of honest inventors, and represents a much more significant threat (as they are financed for high risk, unlike larger corporations which are usually very risk averse).
Maybe required use of patents or they expire much more quickly.
Some sort of system that only recognizes the intellectual property if it is successfully placed into production might be better. Thinking up unique ideas is nothing - what matters is actually figuring how to execute your ideas in the marketplace. That's what the patent system should recognize, but then, the markets already recognize them financially. Perhaps patents really don't serve a useful purpose given an efficient market?
Is it just me or does this speak so clearly to the culture we have developed in the US?
Not really. Parasites exist in most systems and represent a legitimate (though culturally reprehensible) strategy in game theory, economics, etc. "Patent trolls" exemplify parasitic behavior by trying to obtain resources (cash, reputation) without being responsible for original productive work. They live off of others efforts through a less-than-equitable exchange.
Think about how long criminal organizations have coerced others through various rackets - Mafia "insurance" rackets (e.g. pay me for fire insurance so Tony here won't burn your business down tonight). To many, this behavior is wrong (it certainly introduces greater inefficiencies), but at a minimal level, it provides the benefit of killing off the weak. Economies really want to see the weak removed as it punishes bad strategy and allows those who made better decisions to attain their reward. Parasitism is also a moderate risk strategy for those that speculate on the patent troll organizations as their capital invested to pay the legal bills is very much at total risk.
It just sounds like this corporation exists only to gather every patent it can get it's hands on
The real disappointment is that the U.S. legal system does not provide an opportunity for greater risk than the invested capital paid into these speculative patent troll firms. For example, if this firm loses in the joystick litigation and goes bankrupt, all those who invested in it only lose their capital they intentionally placed at risk. If you put in $100K for your shares, you're out $100K. A "loser pays" judicial system would help reduce repeat behavior as a troll firm once successful would likely rather liquidate and take the gains after one win, rather than expose it all to a second, so this type of reform would not really address the core problem.
I'd advocate a personal liability provision similar to the attestation liability that public corporation executives now have due to Sarbanes Oxley (e.g. they are personally at risk to significant criminal penalties for the integrity of their company's financial statements). If you really believe in your claims and seek to litigate on the patent issue, you'll be required to place a $500K bond with the court which will be forfeit if your case is determined to be frivolous. Combine this exposure with dramatically increased sanctions against attorneys for polluting the system with this junk (e.g. one year suspension of their license for the first offense) and you'll reduce this parasitism to a more normal frequency.
This puts Google in the league of "Common Carriers."
Not quite, though unlike the previous poster's criticism of your reference, I think it may be more suitable as a model that illustrates the implied expectation of Google's customers respective to their detrimental manipulation of their brand.
Consumers use Google because it is considered to be a relatively accurate, comprehensive and consistent source of search information that appears to be mostly objective. Consider all the people who search for neutral car information, objective prices on electronics, directions to get to a destination, and mostly unbiased links to information.
The moment the consumer discovers they're being given distorted information (due to either political or commercial bias), Google is no longer a credible source. That happened to many this last election year when Google would irrationally block conservative blogs from listing but link the most extreme liberal blogs. Google News is no longer considered by many to be a useful source for news searches because it has no credibility any longer to the uncovering of its employment as a political weapon, not as an objective, impartial source for its consumers.
This unfortunately appears to be a trend with the placement of searches issue and will likely get worse. Imagine if you searched for directions and Google and got sent on a longer path so Google could direct you past a fast food advertiser's shop? Would you keep using Google or use another source? Seeking information on one company and get an unusually negative search result (because the company's competitor paid Google to present them in a negative light)? Still a consumer of Google?
Google has shown it has no objective standard and lacks ethics from the top down (this is also found in their creativity in their financial statements, which I expect will eventually bite them). The more they dillute their brand with garbage information that misleads their consumer, the more they will struggle.
If the house is more then 30-40 years old (which is common in the north east), I don't think one small heat source in the basement will cut it either
Actually, the house was 60+ years old, very poorly insulated at first, had drafty windows and was located in Nebraska where we have/real/ cold in the winter. I wouldn't expect it to heat the house to a balmy 80 degrees, but it certainly kept it from freezing. Actually we found our primary furnace (which was 30+ years old, tired and very inefficient) hardly running during normal mild winter days.
I'd call a plumber and have him "winterize" the water and drain systems
That's great when you can spare several hundred dollars to do that and the inconvenience, and can schedule it in advance. But what do you do when you lose power for several days and the pipes freeze? Either way, you'll find a power-free heating source bails you out as we've found.
If you take a more scientific approach to this problem, consider the BTUs being outputted. A nice wall-mount blue-flame heater (don't ever consider this with a non-mounted unit) puts out 30,000 BTUs with 100% efficiency (meaning 100% of the heat is going to heat your house, unlike older furnaces). 30,000 BTUs is estimated to fully heat 1,000 square feet, so a home with a 30x30 main floor will be taken care of for regular heating. Placed in a basement, you'll certainly maintain 50 degrees or more in an emergency (we held in the 60s with drafty windows, no wall insulation but new attic insulation).
You can go up to 50,000 BTUs with gas-operated fireplaces but I'd check into the safety of running those unattended first.
If you're worried about bursting pipes (which you should be - it's an incredible expense if it goes and runs for days or weeks). The best solution is to keep it heated and you can do that easily without electricity, assuming you have either natural gas or propane.
Buy a blue-flame wall-mount heater and have it professionally installed by a plumber. It is a 100% efficient heater that runs off of propane or natural gas and uses a manually-sparked pilot light. You can adjust the manual thermostat mostly which is pretty unsophisticated - e.g. low to high - and it'll cycle on and off depending upon need.
We've done that ever since a bad ice storm took our power out for a week and now that we live on a farm, it's even more important. Plus, the 100% efficient heating is a nice supplement to less efficient furnaces. Put them on the lowest level of a home - e.g. the basement - as heat rises. It makes a nice supplement for heating basements too incidentally.
The small versions are well under $100 and don't take a lot of time to install if you're going into an unfinished basement. For not much more, the big units really cut your electric heating costs and pay for themselves usually in 1-2 years since your regular forced air furnace has to run a lot less (and at best, they're less efficient).
"Cross-specialization" actually hurts a candidate in the American market nowadays.
It can, but for the companies that make this an issue: screw them.
I was contacted by headhunters for a position at one of the two largest railroads in the US not so long ago. In addition to the finance (4.0 GPA) and IT background, I've got the CISSP, CISA, CIA and various tech certs (e.g. Cisco, Solaris, etc.) plus risk management certification and a CFA in process. I'm no slouch. I decided to go thru the interview process at this railroad as they've got serious management turnover and it'd be a great opportunity.
In my first interview in the second round, I got accosted by some finance director for not "being in the bubble" (WTF?!!). She showed me a diagram of the company org chart and made it clear that I wasn't someone who fit inside one of those bubbles. "You see, people here FIT inside one of those bubbles. Not many of them. I'm having a HARD time right now understanding which bubble you fit into. It sounds as if you fit in many bubbles, and that just doesn't make sense to me."
I spanned across bubbles. Apparently at a Fortune 25 company, having cross-functional expertise is prohibited. God forbid executive management thinks that way... if they do, it's time to run, not walk, from their stock.
Besides the fact that her observation was absurd (my younger brother is the cross-functional manager between marketing and IT for a Fortune 25 company and can attest to the fact that cross-functional people either occur in companies or they fail), it pointed out that that the railroad she worked for would be in chapter 11 except for the fact they're a protected monopoly.
So if you're able to be cross-functional in your expertise, don't give it up. Screw the companies that don't appreciate it - trust me on the fact that 5-10 years of management underperformance in those firms will result in those executives being shown the door. And even if not, who cares? If you're cross-functional, you're worth something, and you deserve to work for a firm that has a clue. Let the others become part of the food cycle or whatever. The point is that the problems we're dealing with are in this area, and critically need people to look outside their cubical to solve them.
Don't forget how the US saved Europe's butts in WW-II and WW-I (as my grandfather pointed out many times). American GIs were able to fight, fix jeeps, dig trenches and handle any task thrown at them. They didn't over-specialized and become rigid, useless individuals.
it is more from people who were forced out during the "offshoring" boom and the waves of layoffs due to "restructuring".
And to add to that, it's also due to the segmented, "pigeon-hole" strategy that most larger corporations use with their IT (which, incidentally, is even worse with off-shore IT workers).
I was a telecom engineer and manager who experienced the dot-com bust, worked as an infosec consultant for banks for several years while I went back and got a finance and risk management education. I'm now contracting to one of the larger international firms in critical infosec projects. I was brought on to accelerate lagging and failing infosec systems due to client and compliance issues - in spite of over 2,000 IT workers worldwide, serious problems were developing. Logs were being ignored, policies not implemented, and basic infosec systems falling apart. Production system hardening was being done poorly and risks were being assumed all over the place.
Outsourcing work the past 4 years for this firm made things even more of a disaster. The result was a segmentation IT environment where everyone just focused on their own specific area and nobody thought about interdependencies, broader operational and infosec issues, etc. When it got outsourced, the remaining internal people couldn't communicate with the outsourcing firms and nobody took ownership for understanding how things worked.
This is the real IT problem, and our educational systems do very little to address it. Cross-specialization is critical but ignored. H1Bs make this worse, not better, as the cultural/caste issues inherent in many of the outsourcing target nations make it less likely that people will speak up about potential items outside of their speciality. I deal with that aspect nearly daily.
So why is the Bush administration and the Democratic congresspersons so eager to blame US IT workers? They pursue the same myth the previous executive management of the firm I'm working with believed (previous as in their mismanagement led to across-the-board pink slips for the execs - something that is unfortunately too infrequent given how poorly many run their firms). Rather than develop a cross-functional culture (which is not easy), they seek the 1920s assembly-line, replacable cheap worker dreams where IT people only handle a single function and nobody is made responsible for the larger picture. Those people are difficult to replace for half the wages.
In a nutshell, bubbles are unsustainable excessive growth not explained by underlying fundamentals. Kindleberger's historical analysis strongly suggests that excessive speculative credit is usually the best method for creating bubbles. When credit gets loose and easy, credit quality also degrades quickly and it becomes a highly elastic dynamic like a slingshot that snaps back very quickly when it is finally realized that the underlying fundamentals don't provide for the credit environment.
If you've taken an economics course, you learn about the multiplier effects that banks have due to reserve requirements being a fraction of what they can lend (e.g. receive a dollar from a depositor, and lend 90% of it back out, have that 90% dollar redeposited, loan 90% of that out, etc.), you might see that the opposite condition becomes a real problem quick when loans default and the spiral works in the other direction. Of course, it unwinds with much greater speed than the initial winding, which makes bubble busts interesting to study.
A good example of a recent bubble was the southeast Asia Thai Bahtcurrency crisis in 1998. Kindleberger suggests that there's a "sloshing around" effect when these things hit, like waves in a bathtub. There's considerable thinking that the dot-com bust actually started due to the Thai currency bust and sloshed back to the US.
'a combination of rapidly increasing stock prices, individual speculation in stocks, and widely available venture capital.
The last item really should be referred to as highly available speculative credit. Venture capital represents an speculative equity source that has similar issues, but while VC firms during speculative frenzies may cause their investors to lose their investment, they don't cause cascading effects that expand to impact the economy like credit bubbles do.
Back in Milton's day, the King of England decided the new printing press was a pain in the ass since every time the King did something corrupt, the printers would crank out leaflets blowing the matter wide open. Kings, who remembered how they used to be gods, really didn't like little common people criticizing them. He made laws that required an official seal from the King to be permitted to own and operate a printing press, and made the penalty for being found in possession without the official seal rather severe (death). Interestingly, a printer could immediately lose a seal if he printed something the King didn't like, and the King's men could take time letting you know you no longer had that seal.
Not many printers decided to print leaflets critical to the King then.
Milton challenged this by taking the King's argument of "protecting the people from harmful falsehoods" at face value and discovered that if this was the King's value, the presses instead must be free. Truth and falsehood must be permitted to grapple if truth is to be found. Milton's essay won over the minds of men and historically has held true. Societies and religions that accept criticism and deal with the ugliness of open argumentation have thrived and rised to the top. Those that surpress truth and only permit state or religious-sanctioned speech have sunk to the bottom.
So EU... what direction are you going? All of us in every nation and society need to oppose the elites when they try to led down this status quo-preserving path of societal decay.
If it were all run by private companies, not subsidized by government's, we would pay proportional to the ability to throw the trash away.
That's really a good point. We went from socialized trash collection to having to pay for our own when we moved out to our farm a few years ago from the city.
With city pickup, they'd miss the truck half the time and leave a pile of stuff on the road to blow around, let the lids blow all over, leave trash cans in the road to get damaged and in general did a lousy job. Our city trash inspector wouldn't believe me that they were dumping so much trash on the ground (even though we filmed them) and lied, claiming all the egg cartons and 1-gallon milk containers were from the elementary kids walking home from school. Apparently raw eggs and milk are popular at that age.
Now that I pay for my own, it comes once a month so you have to think about efficiency. We recycle everything we can mostly to save on how much trash space we take up. We make runs once a month to town with a pickup bed filled with recyclables. Better yet, the private trash firm always puts the lids back on and takes care of the cans, and cleans up when they miss or have something blow out. For $20 a month I've got first class service compared to the $97 per month in estimated taxes paid for four visits.
When you make people accountable for their income, you'd be surprised at the quality you get.
after turnitin copies it, hit them with a DMCA violation
I liked the idea, but think there's a problem with who is violating the copyright. I looked through Turnitin's license agreement and related material - it looks like implied student consent attained from the teacher & institution is their argument, and in fact, they assume this consent has been attained in their contract with the institution. If not, they'll turn a legal argument against the teacher and school district. Be prepared to sue your college/school at the same time as Turnitin.
Incidentally, my wife (who's a teacher) said their district has never discussed this consent issue with the faculty. The impression was that Turnitin has "fair use" rights to material and they're the ones who have legal permission, not the district or teacher. What are the chances the district has forgotten to run this by legal and get an opinion that they can violate student copyrights at will "as long as it makes a teacher's job easier"?
What about a solution? The party that is directly benefitting is the teacher, by reducing the difficulty in screening student work for plagiarism. There is an indirect argument that the student benefits by having the quality of their degree protected from those who attain it from intellectual property theft. Turnitin definitely benefits financially.
One approach would be having districts and teachers use an optional release form with students "making it easy for the educator", or require a source attribution summary and copies of reference materials provided which requires more work for all, but provides alternate verification in the case a release is not granted. Students that do work that lacks attribution and isn't released for Turnitin review can then be given a zero. At the same time, Turnitin should be bound by an agreement that limits their use for this specific comparative purpose, and is prohibited from creating any derivative services that use the copyrighted material (e.g. "Profiles in Student Writing: Buy our new reports on student analysis by subject area." There's value in knowing how half a million college students feel about various topics, like abortion, political issues, value issues, etc. Who do you think could develop this ancillary offering?)
Incidentally, I'd love to run some professional journal articles against Turnitin. Wanna bet you might catch a few lazy profs borrowing from graduate papers in their professional submissions?
It's not fair use -- they're using the entire paper, not an excerpt
I can see an application of fair use if they were to compare a student's paper against a database they had developed through the purchasing of the rights to those papers. Using the copyrighted material and retaining it, to further expand the value of their commercial database, is problematic.
Incidentally, the University of Minnesota has a pretty clear policy about use of copyrighted student papers, discussed here. It is pretty apparent from this interpretation that they recognize student work is indeed copyrighted, and owned by the student.
Another example which might make this more clear is using the example of a music composition plagiarism database service. What if I decide I want to help college music departments check up on the composition homework, making sure it isn't plagiarized? In order to do this, I'll just need to have a database of classical music and have some clever software which compares signatures in the music. The RIAA would probably donate this software to me, as its my understanding they've used this signature approach to check MP3s for matches.
I'm sure the recording industry won't mind that I'll have to keep an unlicensed copy of all the recorded music - Beethoven symphonies, Bach organ works, etc. That I'm making a multi-million dollar profit doing this with their intellectual property won't bother them, I'm sure, because after all, I'm helping fight student piracy.
Any bets on the RIAA's cooperation with my idea - license free (and not a single dollar to them for this use)?
Thanks LaughingCoder for a good response to the "I call BS" poster. Readers who don't understand finance should be well served by your post.
One point I'd also add to your comment about returns is that this data does not include expense ratios, which are usually significantly higher than average in managed green funds. Part of this is due to the funds not getting near as much capital (due to the market's awareness that they deliver poor returns historically) as other funds, so the fund's costs are spread across less invested dollars. There may be other factors that increase the costs as well.
I work with emerging markets analysis and am careful about fund expenses as I would hope all investors would be. While the Green Century Equity Fund (GCEQX) delivers a 7% return, it has a 1.5% expense ratio PLUS taxes that are distributed to the investor (which need to be accounted for as well). Your best return is actually 5.5% pre-tax consideration, and as mutual funds pass on their tax costs from trading, you really should consider that as well.
An alternative (that has its own pros and cons) for someone who is determined to invest in clean energy is something like PowerShares Clean Energy WilderHill ETFPBW. Read up on exchange traded fundss on someplace like Morningstar if you're not familiar with index investing. While I'm not recommending the clean energy sector, I'd suggest that if you're totally determined to invest in it for your own reasons, you at least look at lower expense opportunities like an ETF (in this case, the expense ratio is 0.6%). Otherwise, you'll be paying some firm to have well paid managers delivering lousy returns which is a real shame. And if you're prudent, you won't expect a positive return on your green investments - the sector has too much new venture risk, is very exposed to crude market risk (e.g. if other energy forms become significantly cheaper again, nobody buys their products), and in most cases this leads to liquidity and ultimately solvency risk. In a nutshell, the normal volatility storms of the energy market is too much for these little boats to weather.
I've seen in it Ames, Iowa for a couple of weeks now.
Yea, same in southwest Iowa. Iowa Telecom is pretty active in these things. These same crooks got a usually illegal cross-subsidy snuck through the public utilities commission a few years ago to apply a mandatory fee of $3.50 on every phone line in every home or business from their telephone monopoly that they could use to put into the coffers of their Internet and DSL operations which had competition. Imagine your electric company adding fees that they then put into their inefficient, lousy grocery store so they could drive the good stores out of town that didn't have the extra funding from a monopoly. They also had an issue with some donations of very expensive gifts to the public utilities officials at the same time that got swept under the rug.
The incumbant phone companies and cable providers don't like competition. They don't like the consumer having choice. They need that video revenue on top of Internet, voice, etc. to really clean things up. $220 a month per subscriber is a target they routinely discuss.
That they'd run false advertising is the least of their disgusting behavior. When you find out how much money they grease the political skids with (not to mention all the nice fact-finding vacations in exotic locations they're sending your congresspeople to of both parties), you'd be ill.
saider mentions some good points... There are many instances of companies going "south of the border" to get cheap labor.
My favorite comments for execs in companies that outsource is to say "Oh, you like to speculate on currencies too, eh?" The US economy is getting to where it's not easy again to manage things (companies, portfolios, hedge positions, etc.) When interest rates were at historical lows, it was pretty easy to pick stocks and not bonds, for instance. Financial management becomes much more challenging when conditions don't automatically pick the right answer for you. I'd swear this is the real reason the Fed uses its stick/carrot control of the Fed Funds Rate - more as a cue to the dumb managers out there to make the obvious decision.
Firms outsourcing labor have had an equally easy job with respect to a significant risk they're incurring due to similar currency conditions: because the dollar has been comparatively strong to the yen, euro, rupee, etc., it was easy to just assume there was no exchange issue and foreign labor was incredibly cheap. That's changing. I've built a moderate international exchange-traded fund (ETF) position in anticipation of a weakening dollar (which will probably become a major decline as soon as enough inflationary pressure collapses the "Federal treasury bubble" - a less-than-polite term for the near constant demand for US Treasuries used to back unsustainable U.S. Federal spending). When that occurs, the international assets I hold will increase in value, but efforts to buy more of them will also become more expensive.
Should U.S. firms outsourcing labor wake up and discover a moderate 10% decline in dollar, they're likely to have eliminated their outsourcing financial gain. Another risk now being realized is unmitigated outsourcing contract fee exposure - several firms I work with in the Midwest US have been surprised to learn that when they completely outsource an operation and lose that internal competency, the fees suddenly start to hike up. The company itself is no longer able to easily take that operation back in-house and the outsourcing firm that underbid the business knows this.
I have to rely on my wits and keep my skills to the point where it would do the company more harm than good to outsource me. I make it a point to subtly remind my managers of this.
That's really a critical point for all of us. If your cable TV becomes more expensive, less featured and less reliable than dish TV, people switch. The same goes for employees in companies.
FWIW, however fast wireless broadband gets here, it really will not help anyone escape from Tiered Internet.
It may, actually.
I'm the senior engineer for a 9 county fixed wireless operation. We are MPLS-based in our core, run a minimum of DS3 licensed and unlicensed point-to-point links and feed out into our small communities at a minimum of 24 Mbps. We feed with redundant fiber to diverse carriers. We really have tried to deliver a reliable network on quite a bit of a budget. Our competition is companies like Qwest and Mediacom that usually brings at most bonded T1s (3 Mbps) to a community, does not run MPLS, gets burnt alive by P2P abusers, etc.
We have notified our uplink that we will not tolerate tiered Internet offerings (our SLA prohibits it presently and is locked in for four years). I've been around the BGP peering Internet since 1993, so we were careful to make sure this crap doesn't force us into accepting someone's bastard vision of the Internet.
The bottom line is it comes down to consumers. If you are too stupid to know what you're buying, you're screwing all of us. I had a pain in the ass insurance office (virus of the week kind of nightmare customer) leave for Qwest this week - only noticed it since I hadn't heard his weekly "I'm gonna sue everyone if you don't fix my incompetent LAN" call. I finally told him his ISP is not his LAN integrator and 12 hours of comp time by a CISSP/CISA/CCSP was enough.
But if enough clueless users switch to the Qwests and Mediacoms, buying "9 Mbps download" (on a network fed with 3 Mbps - cluestick!) then the small wireless businesses that are emerging to give you all a better choice will wither and die.
Should that happen in our case, my heart won't break. We diversified two years ago into high-end security engineering for the financial industry which pays a hell of a lot more money than rural broadband. But for those of you that do want a choice:
1. quit voting for losers that screw you time after time. That means BOTH parties. Learn that the big corporations own both parties. Quit falling prey to the bait they offer of blindly blaming one party and being a shill for the other. Go take a look at the immigration votes from both parties. Do you know how many Senators from both sides voted the way they did because some $20 million per year fat cat told them they're tired of paying IT people $60K per year? I've dealt with it first-hand. Most of your large corporate CEOs would prefer us all making less than $30K per year and will outsource or illegally hire to make that happen.
2. quit supporting tired, old fat-cat companies. So what if they advertise 9 Mbps? Will they fight for you when the RIAA is coming for you like I do for our customers? Not a chance. They'll sell you out for a dollar. Ethics? Go read about Qwest's financial statement fraud or insider trading that stole from its shareholders and tell me how they're committed to all of us.
Yea, we may not have our act together all the time. Yea we may not have a 24x7 call center in India that will tell you within 2 minutes of your call to reformat your hard drive as a solution and blow you off.
It's up to you all what Internet you'll have by your decisions.
Correction: I finally got thru and read the referred-to post. Clearly "A 20 MHz slice" is what they're talking about, not/the/ 20 MHz part of the spectrum. Geesh. Let's give them a hell of a lot more than that - say 200 Ghz to 220 GHz. A whole whopping 20 gigahertz of bandwidth. Have at it boys. In fact, tell your dot-com VC that we'll let you have 1 TerraHertz and above! Unlimited! Terrabytes kick Megabytes any day and that outta make his capital raising job a whole lot easier when you freaking own a terrahertz of data.
Incidentally, I wouldn't be broadcasting that I was involved with @Home. Talk about an unhappy death and totally unsound financials. @Home's business competence was... lacking. The cable operators were wise to pull away from that mess.
If anything, this story tells us that the largest dot-com losers have found the courage to hook up with a VC once again. I guess we'll be seeing a Slashdot post about the latest and greatest online petstore in the near future.
And not to mention that 20MHz propagation carries it all over the world.
Exactly. Lots of folks don't realize we're in the bottom of the solar cycle. It's freaking dead on 10 meters (28 MHz) right now - I made a PSK-31 contact a month ago on 10m only because some other guy 40 miles from me was as curious as I was as to how dead it really was.
But the old hams talk about when the cycle wakes up. I mentioned in a previous post about working 17m (18 MHz) two nights ago for a 800+ mile contact. I picked up CW (morse code) from southern Mexico about 1300 miles south of me this weekend on 15m (21 MHz - just above the proposed frequency). I deal with wifi broadband engineering as part of my job and have enough to contend with in 802.11n/g/b/a, contention, collisions, etc. - spread my signal out and give it an occasional atmospheric skip and my network would be hell.
The point some of the "RF aware" are making is that taking a slice of 20 MHz isn't like taking a slice of 2400 MHz, or 20,000 MHz (which was what I originally thought they were talking about - great frequency for this, but requires *massive* cellular infrastructure - literally tens of billions of dollars to get decent national coverage).
Under 1,000 MHz, signals tend to start doing non-line-of-sight things, and depending upon how active the sun is, the lower you get, the more things get unpredictable.
Consider this: tonight we've got a storm system moving in. We were picking up solid traffic on 145 MHz (again, higher than the proposed 20 and less prone to these problems) from 300+ miles away. This is called tropospheric ducting - it has to do with warm air near the ground and frequencies travelling in a trapped manner within that warm air mass. This 20 MHz proposal would be amusing to watch it fail if it wasn't for the failure occuring during an abuse of the public commons.
They are definitely wrong; 20 MHz really isn't any good for the type of bandwidth they want, unless they took a huge swath of spectrum.
It's an interesting band as well. I'd love to see how they deal with it during more active cycles. Your 1 MHz slice might suddenly propegate for a few hundred miles - not exactly the kind of frequency you want for cell-based coverage (unless that is their plan - to only use a couple of nodes per state for "384" divided by tens of thousands of customers. I've been working 17 MHz an increasing amount as the solar cycle begins to wake up a little bit - from the middle of the USA, I had a long PSK-31 contact in Pittsburg PA. It works when your protocol is 31 baud (remember 300 baud modems? or 1200? Yea... that slow). Sharing 1 MHz over a thousand mile radius when the band is open would truly demonstrate some fascinating issues (and you wanna talk about problems with hidden nodes or implementing polling mechanisms over a 1000 mile radius?).
I'm mostly surprised that there are still believers in the dot-com model. Capacity gets paid for regardless of how you fudge the numbers. Either you buy the backbone capacity to feed it or you don't - and towers, trunking, engineering, licensing, compliance all cost real money. Ask a Level3 exec if they ever considered giving free dialup to "pay" for their national fiber rollout and watch their reaction.
This seems more like a frequency givaway scam in search of an engineering solution than anything. Remember that Internet CP80 Port stuff that was so unworkable and absurd to anyone that actually understands anything about IP engineering? Our US house representative has indicated those people are still pushing and they claim their engineers have looked it over and haven't had a credible complaint about their proposal. (Note: The CP80 people haven't gone away and have enough Congressmen that actually think their proposal is a good idea - good time for some followup!)
And if the discussions of the bandwidth utilization were correct, I'm curious where all that higher capacity stuff will come from that is necessary to revenue-share with the FCC. Or is that going to be an oops after the frequency gets allocated - guess we didn't have any left to sell and share. Thanks for the free frequency givaway for a single company. Now there's a scheme I can believe. Just send your Senator a few thousand dollars and get it earmarked. One of our own Senators was kind enough to find $50 million for a rainforest in the middle of flyover USA for a couple thousand dollar donation, so anything's really possible.
The story makes some good points, but blames the wrong people.
Exactly. Senior management (aka the "C level positions" like CFO, COO, CEO) just refuse to integrate information assurance, integrity and control into their practices. It is no different than rejecting GAAP and instead using creative accounting ala Worldcom and Enron. Yea, this stuff is hard and complex. But so is the world of finance, and yet we are required to figure it out there.
I work for a firm that consults to smaller financial institutions for their IT audits, security and risk management areas. These smaller organizations lack a lot in resources but the senior managers are usually committed to improvement (it helps that they're regulated to do so).
But regulation doesn't always help. I just turned down a job offer for the senior information security position for a large insurance company in our area after going through several interviews. I discovered that they wanted someone to sit in an office, use a proprietary security suite to generate reports to make sure they were in the file when the regulators come, and otherwise leave things alone. Zero access to C people. They were shocked (and the headhunter pissed since he thought he was getting a commission out of this one) but I refuse to be the certified auditor who signs off on a broken system with unaccountable senior managers.
I asked the Senior VP of Operations what he thought information security was, and as expected, I got a technical answer - "managing firewalls, IDS, making sure people are using good passwords, staying on top of the directory services, etc." Not a single comment about the administrative area, let alone risk issues. If we security professionals are remiss, it is in accepting a paycheck from firms that refuse to operate ethically in this area.
No house calls, ever. Verizon DSL has tech support- they can bug them.
Thanks. As the senior net tech for an ISP, I really appreciate you dumping these people my way. As if I didn't have enough "Your damn Internet service caused my Microsoft Word to have weird font problems" issues.
Actually, you had a pretty good post and the feature creep issue is very serious. Best of all, your mention of the 5% troublemakers is dead on.
We're a smaller non-incumbant broadband provider with 2500 subscribers in a portion of our state. We struggled with growth at first but discovered that by isolating the loser customers from the winners (and encouraging the losers to go to the DSL competition), it totally freed us up to take care of good customers.
I still get the occasional nasty emails from customers who threaten to leave us because we won't go solve their complicated VPN issue for free or rid their Windows 98 that never saw an antivirus package in its life of great malware nastiness for free. The great thing about my job is that I have the liberty to make the judgment call. I'll actually give the losers the phone number of Qwest or Direcway and tell them I'll even waive the early termination penalty and help them go to the other provider. The shock I get from them being shown the door is incredible. Some quiet down and become more realistic in their expectations, but the majority of that dead-weight 5% storms off and becomes someone elses liability. If you troll the business shelves in Barnes and Noble, you'll find quite a few firms (like Nordstroms) known for exceptional customer service that quickly separate the winners from the deadbeats, and show the latter the door.
My recommendation to every slashdotter: Ask yourself in every situation you are in as a customer if you are a good customer or a liability to that firm. They have to make at least 12% to 15% on you to pay their creditors, shareholders, the tax man and stay in business. I've left extra money on the table many times to make sure my vendor stayed around and didn't think of me as nothing but a drain. Don't ever be a parasite! If your vendor doesn't do know how to separate good from bad, they're destined for failure.
I concur that the cable companies might not be the bad guys here, even though I would have shot myself for saying so 10 years ago when they were just plain stupid. Dealing with Cox via a fiber connection, I have to say that I'm repeatedly surprised at how much they try to get it. No, they're not UUNET at its peak - not even close - but they're making progress in MPLS and really delivering some pretty reliable enterprise service. Yes, they still seem to do things I disagree with on the resi side, like screw with L2TP ("commercial service" my ass - anybody paying $55 a month should be able to RAS into work).
Working with them, they clearly do not have the culture of a RBOC (Qwest, BellSouth, SBC, etc.). RBOCs are a world of entitlement - it's way worse than union attitude. The ethics there are just awol - look at Qwest's restatements and "oops, we'll be firing our CEO now" issues per insider trading. That place was sick in 1985 and it hasn't gotten better with time. When corrupt behavior dominates at the top, the disease is throughout. Like people here say: Qwest, the next Worldcom.
If the telephone companies can extort the content providers, are the cable companies far behind?
Look at the culture and competitive position of the company. Sure, give cable providers market dominance and 20-30 years and they'll probably get FDH (fat, dumb & happy) like the RBOCs. But you gotta pick an ally to take them on. My dad used to always fly and rent cars from the "other guy" to keep the big boys honest - it's probably not a bad idea for broadband either.
Fee for your consumer eyeballs? Black hole the bastards!
Slashdot Mirror
and just a minor correction... Queeg was obsessed with the theft of strawberries, to which he overturned the entire ship, not ice cream as I previously indicated.
A great movie if you've never seen it.
I've participated on Groklaw since the beginning, and would suggest that SCO is very troubled if this is all its legal team is left to manifest on.
It's comparable to Captain Queeg's determined investigation of the theft of ice cream in the classic Bogart film, The Caine Mutiny. Lacking anything else of substance to confirm his paranoid belief of mass insubordination, Captain Queeg becomes consumed with the delusion that a conspiracy is involved in the disappearance of ice cream on his ship. Unfortunately, this paranoia and further indecision under crisis results in his being relieved of duty.
SCO's relief of duty isn't far away, from reviewing their financials (absent third party financing at this point, 2007 should be their last as an operating concern). Pursuing delusions of a grand IBM conspiracy through the proxy of Pamela is unfortunate. I can certainly understand the absolute frustration some of Salt Lake City's finest socialites must feel in being beaten by unworthy middle class losers, open source geeks and an old money company like IBM. They were confident that political connections, "contributions" to candidates like dear Senator Hatch, ownership of the state judicial system and other entitlements the Salt Lake City elite expect on their home turf would extend to this litigation. Those born with the proverbial silver spoon affixed to their rear egress-orifice simply can't conceive that those from lessor social classes could ever best them.
Having closed at $1.01 today, SCO investors (even those who have shorted the stock) need to remember that when this security stresses, liquidity will be impossible to come by. Expect some real fireworks soon when shareholders discover liquidity necessary to exit is gone and a "bank run" occurs. Those considering shareholder action need to move before the management team constructs their parachutes in the next month or so, leaving nothing for creditors and litigants.
Time's running out...
dave writes...
:) As sort of indicated in my post, I also think loser-pays has issues, and concur it won't inhibit patent-trolls (but it will probably impact their risk taking by limiting the entity to a single effort and then liquidation either upon successful or unsuccessful outcomes, which would have a positive effect overall).
the underdog never has an advantage
Sort of the definition of underdog, right?
Regarding bonding and your comment that it too impairs the little inventor, you've got to compare it to the status quo for perspective. I've dealt first-hand with litigation where one side was dead wrong and yet they were well funded with very large law firms. They'll wear all but another equal opponent out.
I don't know that there's an effective solution today for the little guy in either scenario - he's little, lacks any real financial assets to leverage against well funded opponents, and is in most cases simply screwed. What I believe could be dealt with is the well funded trust-fund baby patent troll vehicle. It's a speculative investment game they play at the expense of honest inventors, and represents a much more significant threat (as they are financed for high risk, unlike larger corporations which are usually very risk averse).
Maybe required use of patents or they expire much more quickly.
Some sort of system that only recognizes the intellectual property if it is successfully placed into production might be better. Thinking up unique ideas is nothing - what matters is actually figuring how to execute your ideas in the marketplace. That's what the patent system should recognize, but then, the markets already recognize them financially. Perhaps patents really don't serve a useful purpose given an efficient market?
Is it just me or does this speak so clearly to the culture we have developed in the US?
Not really. Parasites exist in most systems and represent a legitimate (though culturally reprehensible) strategy in game theory, economics, etc. "Patent trolls" exemplify parasitic behavior by trying to obtain resources (cash, reputation) without being responsible for original productive work. They live off of others efforts through a less-than-equitable exchange.
Think about how long criminal organizations have coerced others through various rackets - Mafia "insurance" rackets (e.g. pay me for fire insurance so Tony here won't burn your business down tonight). To many, this behavior is wrong (it certainly introduces greater inefficiencies), but at a minimal level, it provides the benefit of killing off the weak. Economies really want to see the weak removed as it punishes bad strategy and allows those who made better decisions to attain their reward. Parasitism is also a moderate risk strategy for those that speculate on the patent troll organizations as their capital invested to pay the legal bills is very much at total risk.
It just sounds like this corporation exists only to gather every patent it can get it's hands on
The real disappointment is that the U.S. legal system does not provide an opportunity for greater risk than the invested capital paid into these speculative patent troll firms. For example, if this firm loses in the joystick litigation and goes bankrupt, all those who invested in it only lose their capital they intentionally placed at risk. If you put in $100K for your shares, you're out $100K. A "loser pays" judicial system would help reduce repeat behavior as a troll firm once successful would likely rather liquidate and take the gains after one win, rather than expose it all to a second, so this type of reform would not really address the core problem.
I'd advocate a personal liability provision similar to the attestation liability that public corporation executives now have due to Sarbanes Oxley (e.g. they are personally at risk to significant criminal penalties for the integrity of their company's financial statements). If you really believe in your claims and seek to litigate on the patent issue, you'll be required to place a $500K bond with the court which will be forfeit if your case is determined to be frivolous. Combine this exposure with dramatically increased sanctions against attorneys for polluting the system with this junk (e.g. one year suspension of their license for the first offense) and you'll reduce this parasitism to a more normal frequency.
This puts Google in the league of "Common Carriers."
Not quite, though unlike the previous poster's criticism of your reference, I think it may be more suitable as a model that illustrates the implied expectation of Google's customers respective to their detrimental manipulation of their brand.
Consumers use Google because it is considered to be a relatively accurate, comprehensive and consistent source of search information that appears to be mostly objective. Consider all the people who search for neutral car information, objective prices on electronics, directions to get to a destination, and mostly unbiased links to information.
The moment the consumer discovers they're being given distorted information (due to either political or commercial bias), Google is no longer a credible source. That happened to many this last election year when Google would irrationally block conservative blogs from listing but link the most extreme liberal blogs. Google News is no longer considered by many to be a useful source for news searches because it has no credibility any longer to the uncovering of its employment as a political weapon, not as an objective, impartial source for its consumers.
This unfortunately appears to be a trend with the placement of searches issue and will likely get worse. Imagine if you searched for directions and Google and got sent on a longer path so Google could direct you past a fast food advertiser's shop? Would you keep using Google or use another source? Seeking information on one company and get an unusually negative search result (because the company's competitor paid Google to present them in a negative light)? Still a consumer of Google?
Google has shown it has no objective standard and lacks ethics from the top down (this is also found in their creativity in their financial statements, which I expect will eventually bite them). The more they dillute their brand with garbage information that misleads their consumer, the more they will struggle.
If the house is more then 30-40 years old (which is common in the north east), I don't think one small heat source in the basement will cut it either
/real/ cold in the winter. I wouldn't expect it to heat the house to a balmy 80 degrees, but it certainly kept it from freezing. Actually we found our primary furnace (which was 30+ years old, tired and very inefficient) hardly running during normal mild winter days.
Actually, the house was 60+ years old, very poorly insulated at first, had drafty windows and was located in Nebraska where we have
I'd call a plumber and have him "winterize" the water and drain systems
That's great when you can spare several hundred dollars to do that and the inconvenience, and can schedule it in advance. But what do you do when you lose power for several days and the pipes freeze? Either way, you'll find a power-free heating source bails you out as we've found.
If you take a more scientific approach to this problem, consider the BTUs being outputted. A nice wall-mount blue-flame heater (don't ever consider this with a non-mounted unit) puts out 30,000 BTUs with 100% efficiency (meaning 100% of the heat is going to heat your house, unlike older furnaces). 30,000 BTUs is estimated to fully heat 1,000 square feet, so a home with a 30x30 main floor will be taken care of for regular heating. Placed in a basement, you'll certainly maintain 50 degrees or more in an emergency (we held in the 60s with drafty windows, no wall insulation but new attic insulation).
You can go up to 50,000 BTUs with gas-operated fireplaces but I'd check into the safety of running those unattended first.
If you're worried about bursting pipes (which you should be - it's an incredible expense if it goes and runs for days or weeks). The best solution is to keep it heated and you can do that easily without electricity, assuming you have either natural gas or propane.
Buy a blue-flame wall-mount heater and have it professionally installed by a plumber. It is a 100% efficient heater that runs off of propane or natural gas and uses a manually-sparked pilot light. You can adjust the manual thermostat mostly which is pretty unsophisticated - e.g. low to high - and it'll cycle on and off depending upon need.
We've done that ever since a bad ice storm took our power out for a week and now that we live on a farm, it's even more important. Plus, the 100% efficient heating is a nice supplement to less efficient furnaces. Put them on the lowest level of a home - e.g. the basement - as heat rises. It makes a nice supplement for heating basements too incidentally.
The small versions are well under $100 and don't take a lot of time to install if you're going into an unfinished basement. For not much more, the big units really cut your electric heating costs and pay for themselves usually in 1-2 years since your regular forced air furnace has to run a lot less (and at best, they're less efficient).
"Cross-specialization" actually hurts a candidate in the American market nowadays.
It can, but for the companies that make this an issue: screw them.
I was contacted by headhunters for a position at one of the two largest railroads in the US not so long ago. In addition to the finance (4.0 GPA) and IT background, I've got the CISSP, CISA, CIA and various tech certs (e.g. Cisco, Solaris, etc.) plus risk management certification and a CFA in process. I'm no slouch. I decided to go thru the interview process at this railroad as they've got serious management turnover and it'd be a great opportunity.
In my first interview in the second round, I got accosted by some finance director for not "being in the bubble" (WTF?!!). She showed me a diagram of the company org chart and made it clear that I wasn't someone who fit inside one of those bubbles. "You see, people here FIT inside one of those bubbles. Not many of them. I'm having a HARD time right now understanding which bubble you fit into. It sounds as if you fit in many bubbles, and that just doesn't make sense to me."
I spanned across bubbles. Apparently at a Fortune 25 company, having cross-functional expertise is prohibited. God forbid executive management thinks that way... if they do, it's time to run, not walk, from their stock.
Besides the fact that her observation was absurd (my younger brother is the cross-functional manager between marketing and IT for a Fortune 25 company and can attest to the fact that cross-functional people either occur in companies or they fail), it pointed out that that the railroad she worked for would be in chapter 11 except for the fact they're a protected monopoly.
So if you're able to be cross-functional in your expertise, don't give it up. Screw the companies that don't appreciate it - trust me on the fact that 5-10 years of management underperformance in those firms will result in those executives being shown the door. And even if not, who cares? If you're cross-functional, you're worth something, and you deserve to work for a firm that has a clue. Let the others become part of the food cycle or whatever. The point is that the problems we're dealing with are in this area, and critically need people to look outside their cubical to solve them.
Don't forget how the US saved Europe's butts in WW-II and WW-I (as my grandfather pointed out many times). American GIs were able to fight, fix jeeps, dig trenches and handle any task thrown at them. They didn't over-specialized and become rigid, useless individuals.
Grapeape - excellent comments. In particular:
it is more from people who were forced out during the "offshoring" boom and the waves of layoffs due to "restructuring".
And to add to that, it's also due to the segmented, "pigeon-hole" strategy that most larger corporations use with their IT (which, incidentally, is even worse with off-shore IT workers).
I was a telecom engineer and manager who experienced the dot-com bust, worked as an infosec consultant for banks for several years while I went back and got a finance and risk management education. I'm now contracting to one of the larger international firms in critical infosec projects. I was brought on to accelerate lagging and failing infosec systems due to client and compliance issues - in spite of over 2,000 IT workers worldwide, serious problems were developing. Logs were being ignored, policies not implemented, and basic infosec systems falling apart. Production system hardening was being done poorly and risks were being assumed all over the place.
Outsourcing work the past 4 years for this firm made things even more of a disaster. The result was a segmentation IT environment where everyone just focused on their own specific area and nobody thought about interdependencies, broader operational and infosec issues, etc. When it got outsourced, the remaining internal people couldn't communicate with the outsourcing firms and nobody took ownership for understanding how things worked.
This is the real IT problem, and our educational systems do very little to address it. Cross-specialization is critical but ignored. H1Bs make this worse, not better, as the cultural/caste issues inherent in many of the outsourcing target nations make it less likely that people will speak up about potential items outside of their speciality. I deal with that aspect nearly daily.
So why is the Bush administration and the Democratic congresspersons so eager to blame US IT workers? They pursue the same myth the previous executive management of the firm I'm working with believed (previous as in their mismanagement led to across-the-board pink slips for the execs - something that is unfortunately too infrequent given how poorly many run their firms). Rather than develop a cross-functional culture (which is not easy), they seek the 1920s assembly-line, replacable cheap worker dreams where IT people only handle a single function and nobody is made responsible for the larger picture. Those people are difficult to replace for half the wages.
So what's the difference between economic growth and a bubble?
There's an exceptional (though very long and occasionally dry) book called "Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises" on this specific issue by the noted historical economist Charles Kindleberger, Robert Aliber and Robert Solow.
In a nutshell, bubbles are unsustainable excessive growth not explained by underlying fundamentals. Kindleberger's historical analysis strongly suggests that excessive speculative credit is usually the best method for creating bubbles. When credit gets loose and easy, credit quality also degrades quickly and it becomes a highly elastic dynamic like a slingshot that snaps back very quickly when it is finally realized that the underlying fundamentals don't provide for the credit environment.
If you've taken an economics course, you learn about the multiplier effects that banks have due to reserve requirements being a fraction of what they can lend (e.g. receive a dollar from a depositor, and lend 90% of it back out, have that 90% dollar redeposited, loan 90% of that out, etc.), you might see that the opposite condition becomes a real problem quick when loans default and the spiral works in the other direction. Of course, it unwinds with much greater speed than the initial winding, which makes bubble busts interesting to study.
A good example of a recent bubble was the southeast Asia Thai Bahtcurrency crisis in 1998. Kindleberger suggests that there's a "sloshing around" effect when these things hit, like waves in a bathtub. There's considerable thinking that the dot-com bust actually started due to the Thai currency bust and sloshed back to the US.
'a combination of rapidly increasing stock prices, individual speculation in stocks, and widely available venture capital.
The last item really should be referred to as highly available speculative credit. Venture capital represents an speculative equity source that has similar issues, but while VC firms during speculative frenzies may cause their investors to lose their investment, they don't cause cascading effects that expand to impact the economy like credit bubbles do.
I think George Orwell may just have been before his time...
Actually you can go all the way back to 1644 with John Milton's rather important essay called Areopagitica -- "A speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing to the parliament of England." (Wikipedia entry here)
Back in Milton's day, the King of England decided the new printing press was a pain in the ass since every time the King did something corrupt, the printers would crank out leaflets blowing the matter wide open. Kings, who remembered how they used to be gods, really didn't like little common people criticizing them. He made laws that required an official seal from the King to be permitted to own and operate a printing press, and made the penalty for being found in possession without the official seal rather severe (death). Interestingly, a printer could immediately lose a seal if he printed something the King didn't like, and the King's men could take time letting you know you no longer had that seal.
Not many printers decided to print leaflets critical to the King then.
Milton challenged this by taking the King's argument of "protecting the people from harmful falsehoods" at face value and discovered that if this was the King's value, the presses instead must be free. Truth and falsehood must be permitted to grapple if truth is to be found. Milton's essay won over the minds of men and historically has held true. Societies and religions that accept criticism and deal with the ugliness of open argumentation have thrived and rised to the top. Those that surpress truth and only permit state or religious-sanctioned speech have sunk to the bottom.
So EU... what direction are you going? All of us in every nation and society need to oppose the elites when they try to led down this status quo-preserving path of societal decay.
If it were all run by private companies, not subsidized by government's, we would pay proportional to the ability to throw the trash away.
That's really a good point. We went from socialized trash collection to having to pay for our own when we moved out to our farm a few years ago from the city.
With city pickup, they'd miss the truck half the time and leave a pile of stuff on the road to blow around, let the lids blow all over, leave trash cans in the road to get damaged and in general did a lousy job. Our city trash inspector wouldn't believe me that they were dumping so much trash on the ground (even though we filmed them) and lied, claiming all the egg cartons and 1-gallon milk containers were from the elementary kids walking home from school. Apparently raw eggs and milk are popular at that age.
Now that I pay for my own, it comes once a month so you have to think about efficiency. We recycle everything we can mostly to save on how much trash space we take up. We make runs once a month to town with a pickup bed filled with recyclables. Better yet, the private trash firm always puts the lids back on and takes care of the cans, and cleans up when they miss or have something blow out. For $20 a month I've got first class service compared to the $97 per month in estimated taxes paid for four visits.
When you make people accountable for their income, you'd be surprised at the quality you get.
after turnitin copies it, hit them with a DMCA violation
I liked the idea, but think there's a problem with who is violating the copyright. I looked through Turnitin's license agreement and related material - it looks like implied student consent attained from the teacher & institution is their argument, and in fact, they assume this consent has been attained in their contract with the institution. If not, they'll turn a legal argument against the teacher and school district. Be prepared to sue your college/school at the same time as Turnitin.
Incidentally, my wife (who's a teacher) said their district has never discussed this consent issue with the faculty. The impression was that Turnitin has "fair use" rights to material and they're the ones who have legal permission, not the district or teacher. What are the chances the district has forgotten to run this by legal and get an opinion that they can violate student copyrights at will "as long as it makes a teacher's job easier"?
What about a solution? The party that is directly benefitting is the teacher, by reducing the difficulty in screening student work for plagiarism. There is an indirect argument that the student benefits by having the quality of their degree protected from those who attain it from intellectual property theft. Turnitin definitely benefits financially.
One approach would be having districts and teachers use an optional release form with students "making it easy for the educator", or require a source attribution summary and copies of reference materials provided which requires more work for all, but provides alternate verification in the case a release is not granted. Students that do work that lacks attribution and isn't released for Turnitin review can then be given a zero. At the same time, Turnitin should be bound by an agreement that limits their use for this specific comparative purpose, and is prohibited from creating any derivative services that use the copyrighted material (e.g. "Profiles in Student Writing: Buy our new reports on student analysis by subject area." There's value in knowing how half a million college students feel about various topics, like abortion, political issues, value issues, etc. Who do you think could develop this ancillary offering?)
Incidentally, I'd love to run some professional journal articles against Turnitin. Wanna bet you might catch a few lazy profs borrowing from graduate papers in their professional submissions?
It's not fair use -- they're using the entire paper, not an excerpt
I can see an application of fair use if they were to compare a student's paper against a database they had developed through the purchasing of the rights to those papers. Using the copyrighted material and retaining it, to further expand the value of their commercial database, is problematic.
Incidentally, the University of Minnesota has a pretty clear policy about use of copyrighted student papers, discussed here. It is pretty apparent from this interpretation that they recognize student work is indeed copyrighted, and owned by the student.
Another example which might make this more clear is using the example of a music composition plagiarism database service. What if I decide I want to help college music departments check up on the composition homework, making sure it isn't plagiarized? In order to do this, I'll just need to have a database of classical music and have some clever software which compares signatures in the music. The RIAA would probably donate this software to me, as its my understanding they've used this signature approach to check MP3s for matches.
I'm sure the recording industry won't mind that I'll have to keep an unlicensed copy of all the recorded music - Beethoven symphonies, Bach organ works, etc. That I'm making a multi-million dollar profit doing this with their intellectual property won't bother them, I'm sure, because after all, I'm helping fight student piracy.
Any bets on the RIAA's cooperation with my idea - license free (and not a single dollar to them for this use)?
Thanks LaughingCoder for a good response to the "I call BS" poster. Readers who don't understand finance should be well served by your post.
One point I'd also add to your comment about returns is that this data does not include expense ratios, which are usually significantly higher than average in managed green funds. Part of this is due to the funds not getting near as much capital (due to the market's awareness that they deliver poor returns historically) as other funds, so the fund's costs are spread across less invested dollars. There may be other factors that increase the costs as well.
I work with emerging markets analysis and am careful about fund expenses as I would hope all investors would be. While the Green Century Equity Fund (GCEQX) delivers a 7% return, it has a 1.5% expense ratio PLUS taxes that are distributed to the investor (which need to be accounted for as well). Your best return is actually 5.5% pre-tax consideration, and as mutual funds pass on their tax costs from trading, you really should consider that as well.
An alternative (that has its own pros and cons) for someone who is determined to invest in clean energy is something like PowerShares Clean Energy WilderHill ETF PBW. Read up on exchange traded fundss on someplace like Morningstar if you're not familiar with index investing. While I'm not recommending the clean energy sector, I'd suggest that if you're totally determined to invest in it for your own reasons, you at least look at lower expense opportunities like an ETF (in this case, the expense ratio is 0.6%). Otherwise, you'll be paying some firm to have well paid managers delivering lousy returns which is a real shame. And if you're prudent, you won't expect a positive return on your green investments - the sector has too much new venture risk, is very exposed to crude market risk (e.g. if other energy forms become significantly cheaper again, nobody buys their products), and in most cases this leads to liquidity and ultimately solvency risk. In a nutshell, the normal volatility storms of the energy market is too much for these little boats to weather.
I've seen in it Ames, Iowa for a couple of weeks now.
Yea, same in southwest Iowa. Iowa Telecom is pretty active in these things. These same crooks got a usually illegal cross-subsidy snuck through the public utilities commission a few years ago to apply a mandatory fee of $3.50 on every phone line in every home or business from their telephone monopoly that they could use to put into the coffers of their Internet and DSL operations which had competition. Imagine your electric company adding fees that they then put into their inefficient, lousy grocery store so they could drive the good stores out of town that didn't have the extra funding from a monopoly. They also had an issue with some donations of very expensive gifts to the public utilities officials at the same time that got swept under the rug.
The incumbant phone companies and cable providers don't like competition. They don't like the consumer having choice. They need that video revenue on top of Internet, voice, etc. to really clean things up. $220 a month per subscriber is a target they routinely discuss.
That they'd run false advertising is the least of their disgusting behavior. When you find out how much money they grease the political skids with (not to mention all the nice fact-finding vacations in exotic locations they're sending your congresspeople to of both parties), you'd be ill.
saider mentions some good points...
There are many instances of companies going "south of the border" to get cheap labor.
My favorite comments for execs in companies that outsource is to say "Oh, you like to speculate on currencies too, eh?" The US economy is getting to where it's not easy again to manage things (companies, portfolios, hedge positions, etc.) When interest rates were at historical lows, it was pretty easy to pick stocks and not bonds, for instance. Financial management becomes much more challenging when conditions don't automatically pick the right answer for you. I'd swear this is the real reason the Fed uses its stick/carrot control of the Fed Funds Rate - more as a cue to the dumb managers out there to make the obvious decision.
Firms outsourcing labor have had an equally easy job with respect to a significant risk they're incurring due to similar currency conditions: because the dollar has been comparatively strong to the yen, euro, rupee, etc., it was easy to just assume there was no exchange issue and foreign labor was incredibly cheap. That's changing. I've built a moderate international exchange-traded fund (ETF) position in anticipation of a weakening dollar (which will probably become a major decline as soon as enough inflationary pressure collapses the "Federal treasury bubble" - a less-than-polite term for the near constant demand for US Treasuries used to back unsustainable U.S. Federal spending). When that occurs, the international assets I hold will increase in value, but efforts to buy more of them will also become more expensive.
Should U.S. firms outsourcing labor wake up and discover a moderate 10% decline in dollar, they're likely to have eliminated their outsourcing financial gain. Another risk now being realized is unmitigated outsourcing contract fee exposure - several firms I work with in the Midwest US have been surprised to learn that when they completely outsource an operation and lose that internal competency, the fees suddenly start to hike up. The company itself is no longer able to easily take that operation back in-house and the outsourcing firm that underbid the business knows this.
I have to rely on my wits and keep my skills to the point where it would do the company more harm than good to outsource me. I make it a point to subtly remind my managers of this.
That's really a critical point for all of us. If your cable TV becomes more expensive, less featured and less reliable than dish TV, people switch. The same goes for employees in companies.
*scoove*
FWIW, however fast wireless broadband gets here, it really will not help anyone escape from Tiered Internet.
It may, actually.
I'm the senior engineer for a 9 county fixed wireless operation. We are MPLS-based in our core, run a minimum of DS3 licensed and unlicensed point-to-point links and feed out into our small communities at a minimum of 24 Mbps. We feed with redundant fiber to diverse carriers. We really have tried to deliver a reliable network on quite a bit of a budget. Our competition is companies like Qwest and Mediacom that usually brings at most bonded T1s (3 Mbps) to a community, does not run MPLS, gets burnt alive by P2P abusers, etc.
We have notified our uplink that we will not tolerate tiered Internet offerings (our SLA prohibits it presently and is locked in for four years). I've been around the BGP peering Internet since 1993, so we were careful to make sure this crap doesn't force us into accepting someone's bastard vision of the Internet.
The bottom line is it comes down to consumers. If you are too stupid to know what you're buying, you're screwing all of us. I had a pain in the ass insurance office (virus of the week kind of nightmare customer) leave for Qwest this week - only noticed it since I hadn't heard his weekly "I'm gonna sue everyone if you don't fix my incompetent LAN" call. I finally told him his ISP is not his LAN integrator and 12 hours of comp time by a CISSP/CISA/CCSP was enough.
But if enough clueless users switch to the Qwests and Mediacoms, buying "9 Mbps download" (on a network fed with 3 Mbps - cluestick!) then the small wireless businesses that are emerging to give you all a better choice will wither and die.
Should that happen in our case, my heart won't break. We diversified two years ago into high-end security engineering for the financial industry which pays a hell of a lot more money than rural broadband. But for those of you that do want a choice:
1. quit voting for losers that screw you time after time. That means BOTH parties. Learn that the big corporations own both parties. Quit falling prey to the bait they offer of blindly blaming one party and being a shill for the other. Go take a look at the immigration votes from both parties. Do you know how many Senators from both sides voted the way they did because some $20 million per year fat cat told them they're tired of paying IT people $60K per year? I've dealt with it first-hand. Most of your large corporate CEOs would prefer us all making less than $30K per year and will outsource or illegally hire to make that happen.
2. quit supporting tired, old fat-cat companies. So what if they advertise 9 Mbps? Will they fight for you when the RIAA is coming for you like I do for our customers? Not a chance. They'll sell you out for a dollar. Ethics? Go read about Qwest's financial statement fraud or insider trading that stole from its shareholders and tell me how they're committed to all of us.
Yea, we may not have our act together all the time. Yea we may not have a 24x7 call center in India that will tell you within 2 minutes of your call to reformat your hard drive as a solution and blow you off.
It's up to you all what Internet you'll have by your decisions.
*scoove*
Correction: I finally got thru and read the referred-to post. Clearly "A 20 MHz slice" is what they're talking about, not /the/ 20 MHz part of the spectrum. Geesh. Let's give them a hell of a lot more than that - say 200 Ghz to 220 GHz. A whole whopping 20 gigahertz of bandwidth. Have at it boys. In fact, tell your dot-com VC that we'll let you have 1 TerraHertz and above! Unlimited! Terrabytes kick Megabytes any day and that outta make his capital raising job a whole lot easier when you freaking own a terrahertz of data.
Incidentally, I wouldn't be broadcasting that I was involved with @Home. Talk about an unhappy death and totally unsound financials. @Home's business competence was... lacking. The cable operators were wise to pull away from that mess.
If anything, this story tells us that the largest dot-com losers have found the courage to hook up with a VC once again. I guess we'll be seeing a Slashdot post about the latest and greatest online petstore in the near future.
Sockpuppet rules!
*scoove*
And not to mention that 20MHz propagation carries it all over the world.
Exactly. Lots of folks don't realize we're in the bottom of the solar cycle. It's freaking dead on 10 meters (28 MHz) right now - I made a PSK-31 contact a month ago on 10m only because some other guy 40 miles from me was as curious as I was as to how dead it really was.
But the old hams talk about when the cycle wakes up. I mentioned in a previous post about working 17m (18 MHz) two nights ago for a 800+ mile contact. I picked up CW (morse code) from southern Mexico about 1300 miles south of me this weekend on 15m (21 MHz - just above the proposed frequency). I deal with wifi broadband engineering as part of my job and have enough to contend with in 802.11n/g/b/a, contention, collisions, etc. - spread my signal out and give it an occasional atmospheric skip and my network would be hell.
The point some of the "RF aware" are making is that taking a slice of 20 MHz isn't like taking a slice of 2400 MHz, or 20,000 MHz (which was what I originally thought they were talking about - great frequency for this, but requires *massive* cellular infrastructure - literally tens of billions of dollars to get decent national coverage).
Under 1,000 MHz, signals tend to start doing non-line-of-sight things, and depending upon how active the sun is, the lower you get, the more things get unpredictable.
Consider this: tonight we've got a storm system moving in. We were picking up solid traffic on 145 MHz (again, higher than the proposed 20 and less prone to these problems) from 300+ miles away. This is called tropospheric ducting - it has to do with warm air near the ground and frequencies travelling in a trapped manner within that warm air mass. This 20 MHz proposal would be amusing to watch it fail if it wasn't for the failure occuring during an abuse of the public commons.
They are definitely wrong; 20 MHz really isn't any good for the type of bandwidth they want, unless they took a huge swath of spectrum.
It's an interesting band as well. I'd love to see how they deal with it during more active cycles. Your 1 MHz slice might suddenly propegate for a few hundred miles - not exactly the kind of frequency you want for cell-based coverage (unless that is their plan - to only use a couple of nodes per state for "384" divided by tens of thousands of customers. I've been working 17 MHz an increasing amount as the solar cycle begins to wake up a little bit - from the middle of the USA, I had a long PSK-31 contact in Pittsburg PA. It works when your protocol is 31 baud (remember 300 baud modems? or 1200? Yea... that slow). Sharing 1 MHz over a thousand mile radius when the band is open would truly demonstrate some fascinating issues (and you wanna talk about problems with hidden nodes or implementing polling mechanisms over a 1000 mile radius?).
I'm mostly surprised that there are still believers in the dot-com model. Capacity gets paid for regardless of how you fudge the numbers. Either you buy the backbone capacity to feed it or you don't - and towers, trunking, engineering, licensing, compliance all cost real money. Ask a Level3 exec if they ever considered giving free dialup to "pay" for their national fiber rollout and watch their reaction.
This seems more like a frequency givaway scam in search of an engineering solution than anything. Remember that Internet CP80 Port stuff that was so unworkable and absurd to anyone that actually understands anything about IP engineering? Our US house representative has indicated those people are still pushing and they claim their engineers have looked it over and haven't had a credible complaint about their proposal. (Note: The CP80 people haven't gone away and have enough Congressmen that actually think their proposal is a good idea - good time for some followup!)
And if the discussions of the bandwidth utilization were correct, I'm curious where all that higher capacity stuff will come from that is necessary to revenue-share with the FCC. Or is that going to be an oops after the frequency gets allocated - guess we didn't have any left to sell and share. Thanks for the free frequency givaway for a single company. Now there's a scheme I can believe. Just send your Senator a few thousand dollars and get it earmarked. One of our own Senators was kind enough to find $50 million for a rainforest in the middle of flyover USA for a couple thousand dollar donation, so anything's really possible.
no moby jokes yet???
Nuts. ibaggednatalieportman.mobi is already registered.
*sigh*
The story makes some good points, but blames the wrong people.
Exactly. Senior management (aka the "C level positions" like CFO, COO, CEO) just refuse to integrate information assurance, integrity and control into their practices. It is no different than rejecting GAAP and instead using creative accounting ala Worldcom and Enron. Yea, this stuff is hard and complex. But so is the world of finance, and yet we are required to figure it out there.
I work for a firm that consults to smaller financial institutions for their IT audits, security and risk management areas. These smaller organizations lack a lot in resources but the senior managers are usually committed to improvement (it helps that they're regulated to do so).
But regulation doesn't always help. I just turned down a job offer for the senior information security position for a large insurance company in our area after going through several interviews. I discovered that they wanted someone to sit in an office, use a proprietary security suite to generate reports to make sure they were in the file when the regulators come, and otherwise leave things alone. Zero access to C people. They were shocked (and the headhunter pissed since he thought he was getting a commission out of this one) but I refuse to be the certified auditor who signs off on a broken system with unaccountable senior managers.
I asked the Senior VP of Operations what he thought information security was, and as expected, I got a technical answer - "managing firewalls, IDS, making sure people are using good passwords, staying on top of the directory services, etc." Not a single comment about the administrative area, let alone risk issues. If we security professionals are remiss, it is in accepting a paycheck from firms that refuse to operate ethically in this area.
No house calls, ever. Verizon DSL has tech support- they can bug them.
Thanks. As the senior net tech for an ISP, I really appreciate you dumping these people my way. As if I didn't have enough "Your damn Internet service caused my Microsoft Word to have weird font problems" issues.
Actually, you had a pretty good post and the feature creep issue is very serious. Best of all, your mention of the 5% troublemakers is dead on.
We're a smaller non-incumbant broadband provider with 2500 subscribers in a portion of our state. We struggled with growth at first but discovered that by isolating the loser customers from the winners (and encouraging the losers to go to the DSL competition), it totally freed us up to take care of good customers.
I still get the occasional nasty emails from customers who threaten to leave us because we won't go solve their complicated VPN issue for free or rid their Windows 98 that never saw an antivirus package in its life of great malware nastiness for free. The great thing about my job is that I have the liberty to make the judgment call. I'll actually give the losers the phone number of Qwest or Direcway and tell them I'll even waive the early termination penalty and help them go to the other provider. The shock I get from them being shown the door is incredible. Some quiet down and become more realistic in their expectations, but the majority of that dead-weight 5% storms off and becomes someone elses liability. If you troll the business shelves in Barnes and Noble, you'll find quite a few firms (like Nordstroms) known for exceptional customer service that quickly separate the winners from the deadbeats, and show the latter the door.
My recommendation to every slashdotter: Ask yourself in every situation you are in as a customer if you are a good customer or a liability to that firm. They have to make at least 12% to 15% on you to pay their creditors, shareholders, the tax man and stay in business. I've left extra money on the table many times to make sure my vendor stayed around and didn't think of me as nothing but a drain. Don't ever be a parasite! If your vendor doesn't do know how to separate good from bad, they're destined for failure.
*scoove*
I concur that the cable companies might not be the bad guys here, even though I would have shot myself for saying so 10 years ago when they were just plain stupid. Dealing with Cox via a fiber connection, I have to say that I'm repeatedly surprised at how much they try to get it. No, they're not UUNET at its peak - not even close - but they're making progress in MPLS and really delivering some pretty reliable enterprise service. Yes, they still seem to do things I disagree with on the resi side, like screw with L2TP ("commercial service" my ass - anybody paying $55 a month should be able to RAS into work).
Working with them, they clearly do not have the culture of a RBOC (Qwest, BellSouth, SBC, etc.). RBOCs are a world of entitlement - it's way worse than union attitude. The ethics there are just awol - look at Qwest's restatements and "oops, we'll be firing our CEO now" issues per insider trading. That place was sick in 1985 and it hasn't gotten better with time. When corrupt behavior dominates at the top, the disease is throughout. Like people here say: Qwest, the next Worldcom.
If the telephone companies can extort the content providers, are the cable companies far behind?
Look at the culture and competitive position of the company. Sure, give cable providers market dominance and 20-30 years and they'll probably get FDH (fat, dumb & happy) like the RBOCs. But you gotta pick an ally to take them on. My dad used to always fly and rent cars from the "other guy" to keep the big boys honest - it's probably not a bad idea for broadband either.
Fee for your consumer eyeballs? Black hole the bastards!
*scoove*