That's sort of what happened on the copyright side with Righthaven. They ended up paying legal fees and court sanctions, which is really the only way this kind of extortion is going to stop.
To tell me how awful and pathetic I am for wanting to get unlimited data on phone plans when the cost of the running the network is miniscule and the path to upgrade is littered with egotistical claims.
Actually, the libertarians area really big on property rights, so they're not going to have a huge problem with companies managing purchased spectrum in a way that makes them the most money. And what is "... the path to upgrade is littered with egotistical claims"? What does that even mean?
I can only hope and pray that 2012 sweeps the republicans out and limits their austerity measures to the already crippled economy and that the FCC re-evaluates their rules and puts wireless internet access in the same boat as wired
Unless something drastic changes between now and next November I fear you're going to be gravely disappointed, since at this point all signs (meaning polls) indicate it's going to be more of a repeat of 2010.
Heh. That little gem made me laugh. I work for one of the big cellular companies, and we pay thousands of high-dollar-value engineers and programmers in an effort to make sure people can make a phone call when and where they want. That's after the billions we paid for spectrum, and after the many more billions we paid to site the cells.
And every few years the technology changes, so we can't just get everything working and fix equipment failures - in the last ten years we've gone through two iterations of voice technologies and four of data. Each time we spend metric assloads of money buying and installing new equipment, jumping through regulatory hoops, training techs, and developing monitoring software.
For a big company we spend money remarkably efficiently, but we spend a whole hell of a lot of it.
It all sort of raises the question of why the state needs to be involved at all when teenagers send pictures of their private parts to each other. This is something the parents ought to deal with - it doesn't require the heavy hand of the justice system.
I am not entirely familiar with the process, but he mixes mercury with water and ore with his bare hands to do... I am not sure what.
Gold and mercury form an amalgam. The idea is to crush the ore, which is something like 0.001% gold, then mix it with mercury. The gold dissolves into the mercury and the rock doesn't. After you've run enough ore through the mercury you drain it out and heat it to boil off the mercury, leaving only the gold.
And yeah, he's killing himself. When you boil off the mercury it turns into vapor and does Very Bad Things to anyone who breathes it and also pollutes the hell out of the countryside. There are 150 year old mining sites in the western US that still have unsafe levels of mercury.
For one thing, if you rent here...you pretty much count on never seeing a penny of your deposit back.
Back when I was a renter I always assumed I wouldn't get my deposit back, so when it came to moving I was finished as soon as the stuff I wanted was in the new place. I didn't clean anything. Didn't even throw away the stuff that I didn't want to move. If you're taking my deposit you can work for it.
you see they DO believe in govt regulation, just as long as it effects competitors but not themselves
Of course big companies believe in government regulation. The more the better, since the overhead of lawyers and government regulation specialists is trivial to the Exxon's of the world but enough to put small competitors out of business. It's even better when they can throw a bunch of money around in Washington and capture regulatory agencies.
Great. But since not all of us have billions of dollars to waste on a national dick-measuring contest we'll end up with software for 1% of the things we do today, and for the rest we'll be back to scribbling on paper because we can't afford anything else. This is progress?
What statistics do you have to demonstrate the cost savings "tort reform" would bring to healthcare?
How could there be evidence for something like that? The closest you get is opinions from economists, practitioners barely one step above Voodoo priests, and you can always find one that supports your position. Clearly what we have isn't working very well, and many of us who've been around long enough to see the way the system has changed over the years don't find it hard to imagine torts as a cause.
Or, did you just lazily accept what you were spoon fed by people who don't want to be responsible for their actions?
Did you just lazily accept what you were spoon fed by people who don't want to see anything upset their profitable little extortion racket? If I had to choose who to believe, between doctors and lawyers... oh, who to believe?
The vast majority of people don't follow sports at all, and of those who do NASCAR actually has the biggest audience in the US. Worldwide, soccer is the 900 lb gorilla.
Or not. If I only watch channels that the cable company gets for free or gets paid for by the broadcaster, how is the ESPN-9 watcher helping me pay? This isn't the case of fixed overhead getting split amongst the total subscriber base, since ESPN is charging the cable company to provide customers with that channel and the channels I watch are not.
So I would expect my bill to go down and that of the sports fans to go up. Which seems quite reasonable. My suspicion is ESPN (and by extension professional sports leagues) will have more trouble imposing large price increases since that cost will fall more directly on the people who watch it.
If you're a mobile force, that requires a mobile infrastructure, the best place to put that infrastructure is in space
Or you could use use high-altitude aircraft for a tenth of the price. Satellites were a lot easier to justify when they were impregnable, but that hasn't been the case for awhile now, at least for low orbit.
Are you trying to say human bodies don't burn? Bodies burn quite well once you get them started - the Romans are supposed to have lit the road from Jerusalem to Rome (partially, one would think) with the burning corpses of the city's crucified residents after its sack in 70 A.D. The Romans were assholes when you stood up to them.
Contract law is all about what rights can't be signed away, so whether or not you can sue anyway probably depends on where you live. I guarantee you this isn't enforceable in California.
I have first hand experience as well, and where I worked on an average per-person basis the civil servants were doing far less than half the work the contractors were doing. A few came to work drunk every day. When Doom II came out for Sun workstations all the government employees in my organization locked themselves into their respective offices for about two weeks and left the contractors to keep the lights on. The managers were resigned to just carrying the dead wood since everyone knew trying to discipline slackers meant climbing an Everest of paperwork and in the end would result in nothing more than an official harassment complaint against the manager.
And worse, they did a lot of unnecessary travel on the taxpayer dime. We had some equipment in Subic Bay, and they were constantly dreaming up laughable reasons to go there and get a week of nights away from the wife in Olongapo. Then they cheated on their travel reimbursements.
If government employees in your organization work full days, and, you know, actually work it's not a typical civil service group. In my experience.
I'm not convince of the central postulate here. We may not be able to continually increase CPU performance by slavishly increasing the transistor count any more than we could do it by slavishly increasing the clock frequency, but that doesn't mean the Intels of the world can't maintain dominance in performance. There are all sorts of possibilities that haven't been as yet fully explored because the industry has billions (trillions?) sunk into the silicon-specific end-to-end fabrication process, and they still see incremental improvements using current technology.
It may be true, as the author says, the farthest we can push silicon is about 5nm design rules. But what about cnt and graphene? What about Diamond Age style nanoprocessors? What about fully optical processors and interconnects? That's not the kind of stuff people are going to build in their garages.
Which, of course, opens up the possibility what's on display isn't actually what went into space, and any analyst trying to divine useful information has to consider the possibility he's being played.
We do have one big advantage over robots. To make a general purpose robot that could replace a human you'd need a high precision factory with a lot of specialized materials. To make another human all you need is a man, a woman, and a Barry White CD.
The ubiquity of cheap Chinese labor has had a devastating effect on the US economy, as companies race to replace American workers.
Maybe. In the same way our 5% UE rate was driven by the bubble, much of the UE today is part of the deleveraging cycle that follows a big bubble. It's kind of hard to tease out just exactly what's structural and what isn't.
Machines will eventually take over as laborers, leaving humans unemployed. And yet, unemployed people won't have the money to purchase the robot-built products.
This seems contradictory on it's face.
But someone will benefit from that productivity. It's likely there will be a comparative handful of fabulously wealthy people buying most things and the rest of us will be buying very little. A return to feudalism.
We are at the end of the age of cheap oil and cheap energy
I doubt this is true. We have enough fissile materials to last us for millennia, and we can make synthetic fuel from coal that's only marginally more expensive than diesel fuel made from oil.
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That's sort of what happened on the copyright side with Righthaven. They ended up paying legal fees and court sanctions, which is really the only way this kind of extortion is going to stop.
Actually, the libertarians area really big on property rights, so they're not going to have a huge problem with companies managing purchased spectrum in a way that makes them the most money. And what is "... the path to upgrade is littered with egotistical claims"? What does that even mean?
Unless something drastic changes between now and next November I fear you're going to be gravely disappointed, since at this point all signs (meaning polls) indicate it's going to be more of a repeat of 2010.
Heh. That little gem made me laugh. I work for one of the big cellular companies, and we pay thousands of high-dollar-value engineers and programmers in an effort to make sure people can make a phone call when and where they want. That's after the billions we paid for spectrum, and after the many more billions we paid to site the cells.
And every few years the technology changes, so we can't just get everything working and fix equipment failures - in the last ten years we've gone through two iterations of voice technologies and four of data. Each time we spend metric assloads of money buying and installing new equipment, jumping through regulatory hoops, training techs, and developing monitoring software.
For a big company we spend money remarkably efficiently, but we spend a whole hell of a lot of it.
It all sort of raises the question of why the state needs to be involved at all when teenagers send pictures of their private parts to each other. This is something the parents ought to deal with - it doesn't require the heavy hand of the justice system.
I am not entirely familiar with the process, but he mixes mercury with water and ore with his bare hands to do... I am not sure what.
Gold and mercury form an amalgam. The idea is to crush the ore, which is something like 0.001% gold, then mix it with mercury. The gold dissolves into the mercury and the rock doesn't. After you've run enough ore through the mercury you drain it out and heat it to boil off the mercury, leaving only the gold.
And yeah, he's killing himself. When you boil off the mercury it turns into vapor and does Very Bad Things to anyone who breathes it and also pollutes the hell out of the countryside. There are 150 year old mining sites in the western US that still have unsafe levels of mercury.
Collusion? Do you have anything to back that up, or do you just know?
For one thing, if you rent here...you pretty much count on never seeing a penny of your deposit back.
Back when I was a renter I always assumed I wouldn't get my deposit back, so when it came to moving I was finished as soon as the stuff I wanted was in the new place. I didn't clean anything. Didn't even throw away the stuff that I didn't want to move. If you're taking my deposit you can work for it.
Of course big companies believe in government regulation. The more the better, since the overhead of lawyers and government regulation specialists is trivial to the Exxon's of the world but enough to put small competitors out of business. It's even better when they can throw a bunch of money around in Washington and capture regulatory agencies.
Great. But since not all of us have billions of dollars to waste on a national dick-measuring contest we'll end up with software for 1% of the things we do today, and for the rest we'll be back to scribbling on paper because we can't afford anything else. This is progress?
How could there be evidence for something like that? The closest you get is opinions from economists, practitioners barely one step above Voodoo priests, and you can always find one that supports your position. Clearly what we have isn't working very well, and many of us who've been around long enough to see the way the system has changed over the years don't find it hard to imagine torts as a cause.
Did you just lazily accept what you were spoon fed by people who don't want to see anything upset their profitable little extortion racket? If I had to choose who to believe, between doctors and lawyers... oh, who to believe?
The vast majority of people don't follow sports at all, and of those who do NASCAR actually has the biggest audience in the US. Worldwide, soccer is the 900 lb gorilla.
Or not. If I only watch channels that the cable company gets for free or gets paid for by the broadcaster, how is the ESPN-9 watcher helping me pay? This isn't the case of fixed overhead getting split amongst the total subscriber base, since ESPN is charging the cable company to provide customers with that channel and the channels I watch are not.
So I would expect my bill to go down and that of the sports fans to go up. Which seems quite reasonable. My suspicion is ESPN (and by extension professional sports leagues) will have more trouble imposing large price increases since that cost will fall more directly on the people who watch it.
Or you could use use high-altitude aircraft for a tenth of the price. Satellites were a lot easier to justify when they were impregnable, but that hasn't been the case for awhile now, at least for low orbit.
Are you trying to say human bodies don't burn? Bodies burn quite well once you get them started - the Romans are supposed to have lit the road from Jerusalem to Rome (partially, one would think) with the burning corpses of the city's crucified residents after its sack in 70 A.D. The Romans were assholes when you stood up to them.
Contract law is all about what rights can't be signed away, so whether or not you can sue anyway probably depends on where you live. I guarantee you this isn't enforceable in California.
I have first hand experience as well, and where I worked on an average per-person basis the civil servants were doing far less than half the work the contractors were doing. A few came to work drunk every day. When Doom II came out for Sun workstations all the government employees in my organization locked themselves into their respective offices for about two weeks and left the contractors to keep the lights on. The managers were resigned to just carrying the dead wood since everyone knew trying to discipline slackers meant climbing an Everest of paperwork and in the end would result in nothing more than an official harassment complaint against the manager.
And worse, they did a lot of unnecessary travel on the taxpayer dime. We had some equipment in Subic Bay, and they were constantly dreaming up laughable reasons to go there and get a week of nights away from the wife in Olongapo. Then they cheated on their travel reimbursements.
If government employees in your organization work full days, and, you know, actually work it's not a typical civil service group. In my experience.
I'm not convince of the central postulate here. We may not be able to continually increase CPU performance by slavishly increasing the transistor count any more than we could do it by slavishly increasing the clock frequency, but that doesn't mean the Intels of the world can't maintain dominance in performance. There are all sorts of possibilities that haven't been as yet fully explored because the industry has billions (trillions?) sunk into the silicon-specific end-to-end fabrication process, and they still see incremental improvements using current technology.
It may be true, as the author says, the farthest we can push silicon is about 5nm design rules. But what about cnt and graphene? What about Diamond Age style nanoprocessors? What about fully optical processors and interconnects? That's not the kind of stuff people are going to build in their garages.
Sell spectrum where? North Dakota? AT&T is already out of spectrum in some of the larger markets.
You might try reading the article.
Which, of course, opens up the possibility what's on display isn't actually what went into space, and any analyst trying to divine useful information has to consider the possibility he's being played.
I don't know where you live, but in my state it's definitely the Democrats that are the busybodies.
We do have one big advantage over robots. To make a general purpose robot that could replace a human you'd need a high precision factory with a lot of specialized materials. To make another human all you need is a man, a woman, and a Barry White CD.
Maybe. In the same way our 5% UE rate was driven by the bubble, much of the UE today is part of the deleveraging cycle that follows a big bubble. It's kind of hard to tease out just exactly what's structural and what isn't.
But someone will benefit from that productivity. It's likely there will be a comparative handful of fabulously wealthy people buying most things and the rest of us will be buying very little. A return to feudalism.
That's true for some fraction of manufacturing. But since the '70s the real drain in manufacturing jobs in the US has been automation.
We are at the end of the age of cheap oil and cheap energy
I doubt this is true. We have enough fissile materials to last us for millennia, and we can make synthetic fuel from coal that's only marginally more expensive than diesel fuel made from oil.