If you look at the amount AT&T, Comcast, Verizon spend on marketing you'll find it comaparable to what they spend on upgrades.
Comcast spends millions on TV commercials to tell you how Comcastic they are.
These companies are government sanctioned monopolies that run humongous bureaucratic hierarchies. They have diminished incentive to be efficient because entry level into the market is so high as to preclude real competition.
This is the same misguided ideology that once tried to ban the steam engine and video recorder.
I just got done reading the Times Atlas of World History and this seems like the modern equivalent of heresy -- threatening the established economic order of copyrights.
Hopefully in the annals of history this will merit just a sentence or two in the wider scope of things.
If we encrypt everything, it will simply become infeasible to perform long-term dragnet surveillance of innocent people.
Until they make encryption illegal. I think that's the next step when it doesn't work out for them.
But really, what's new? Never in the history of humanity has there not been one group of people
who felt it their god given right to tell another group of people what to say and think.
Don't be lulled into thinking these folks are here to protect you.
Just like the increased powers of search and seizure, designed to protect us from the terrorists,
are used mostly to bust people for possession of pot; so the draconian measures
enacted to save from the cyber criminals will mostly be used to bust you for downloading
your favorite music.
Not for being insightful but for merely opening up the debate.
On the one hand it's true that government regulation stifled innovation by compelling the telcos to perform to government regulated standards.
On the other hand, the FCC can be seen as being in the business of 'selling' licenses to cell phone providers irrespective of what they do with the spectrum. Perhaps licensing of the airways should be less about who can pay the most and more about who will do what with the bandwidth to benefit the community. It would be nice to see a company that couldn't 'afford' the usual $500 million to be awarded spectrum rights because they had a good idea about selling mobile IP addresses with the intention of encouraging third parties to compete in building devices for it rather than the usual one company takes all approach.
I'm no fan of big government. But the spectrum belongs to the people. Let the best ideas for the use of the spectrum be the ones that prevail. Not just the ones that have the biggest financial backing.
Obviously a virus is no more protected than slander (saying something) or libel (writing something), or yelling fire in a crowded theater. But saying you can post something on the net AND prevent others from telling people about it kinda changes the paradigm. What about, for example, images.google.com? According to this ruling, anyone who owns an image can prevent google from linking to it in a search. Don't know about you, but I think this is a pretty absurd ruling.
Not a gamer myself but this is just another rehash of the old nature vs. nature argument that's been going on ever since John Locke said "give me the child and I'll give you the man."
There's always been violent games. Ever play cops and robbers? Ever shoot a cop?
There might be a link between violent games and real life but establishing that as a scientific fact with real double-blind scientific data that precludes pseudo-scientific subjective interpretations by psychologists has always illuded researchers. I doubt this study will establish a link where others have failed.
The Bible is full of horrible violence. Many people who've read it throughtout history have been influenced to do terrible things to people. I think the CDC should look into the effects the Bible has on young children.
I side with google on this. But their "do no evil" policy may be incompatible with the legal rights of the shareholders. Ever since Dodge v. Ford it's been pretty much accepted in the US that companies cannot practice philanthropy at the expense of shareholders.
Though we all like the idea of "do no evil", when it comes to business the idea can be very subjective.
Lenders are liable for ID theft, not victims
on
Combating Identity Theft
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I was a victim of ID theft 5 years ago. A credt card company (Next Card IIRC) gave someone a credit card who had only my name and SS#, wrong date of birth and wrong address. Anyway this guy went to Vegas and ran up quite a bill. It was only when the card remained unpaid that the company bothered to track down the real me.
They wanted me to sign an affidavit. I told them I wan't signing anything, it wasn't my problem. I quoted the following from CHAP. 41, SUBCHAP VI, sections b and e of U.S. Code TITLE 15 which states:
(b) Burden of proof
In any action which involves a consumer's liability for an unauthorized electronic fund transfer,
the burden of proof is upon the financial institution to show that the electronic fund
transfer was authorized or, if the electronic fund transfer was unauthorized,
then the burden of proof is upon the financial institution to establish that the conditions of
liability set forth in subsection (a) of this section have been met, and,
if the transfer was initiated after the effective date of section 1693c of this title,
that the disclosures required to be made to the consumer under section 1693c(a)(1) and (2)
of this title were in fact made in accordance with such section.
(e) Scope of liability
Except as provided in this section, a consumer incurs no liability from an
unauthorized electronic fund transfer.
Anyway, they took care of everything after that. Including my credit rating.
And besides that, ISPs tend over estimate the amount they spend on infrastructure so they can justify higher prices. Verizon, for example, predicts$91.7 billion USD revenue for 2006 and laying fiber and installing switches is probably the least costly of all there operations. I bet they spend more on advertising than anything else. I wouldn't be surprised if this doomsday senario is a plot by the MBAs to prep consumers for price hikes even though they already have the profits to fix the problem.
Bundling Outlook with Office may be slightly closer to anti-competitive behavior, but I still think it's a BS complaint.
Seems like history repeating. Microsoft wasn't sued by 20 states' attornies general for nothing. Take a look at the findings of fact from the 1998 case. Though MS was found guilty of violating the Sherman and Clayton anti trust acts, not much really happened to them. Perhaps they were just too big and influential to punish.
Bill Gates likes to tout MS as innovative but it's really a company that bought or borrowed almost everything it ever produced. History will probably reflect on MS as a popular and ubiquitous OS. But the real innovators will be those who developed the PC, PDA, Digital Camera, Ipod, etc., not Microsoft.
Removing the neutrality requirement allows the ISP to avoid the risk that a competitor will use the ISP's increased bandwidth to compete with it.
Ideally this would work. The problem is that there's often not much competition, many people have only one choice of ISP.
I've been building IP netwroks for nearly ten years and IMHO ISPs (perhaps like the drug companies) greatly inflate the amount of their investments in infrastructure. The Internet is cheap, it's just a bunch of wires and switches. I'd much rather see the ISPs concentrate on building fat pipes and get out of the content business.
Google delists Chinese government for manipulating search results so as to put pro Chinese government "tiananmen square" results first. Oh wait, google already did that for them. Never mind. Do no evil.
Fair point about co2science.org. But to be equally fair, realscience.org's main contributors seem to be Mann et el. so I wouldn't expect objective criticisms of MBH98.
Does it matter if we read the Yadav summary at co2science or
here?
I think you misread me about MBH98 being a "cornerstone". Whatever it might not be, it certainly seems to be the cornerstone of the IPCC Report. Everything stems from MBH98. Without its 20th century anomaly there's no anthropogenic CO2 correlation.
realscience's answer to myth#1 is figure 1., of which four of the curves are other mann models so they're not from "other groups" at all. And anyway, the graph really tells us nothing about whether the temperature anomalies are natural or not.
I started out believing there was a link between warming and anthro CO2. But after I started digging a little I found it wasn't as easy to establish as I thought it would be.
I have no problem with the Vostok ice core CO2 data.
We're not denying it, we're just questioning wether it's linked to CO2.
The cornerstone to the IPCC Report is the Michael Mann (et el) "hockey stick" graph of which the model used to generate it has been found to contain errors. I'm talking about errors according to climatologists, not politicians or newpaper editors.
Two reseachers from Canada, Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, attempted to reconstruct the so-called MBH98 graph and wrote that the method used by Mann contained "collation errors, unjustifiable truncation or extrapolation of source data, obsolete data,"
AFAIK there is no more conclusive data available than what MBH98 gives. If MBH98 is fatally flawed then the whole of the IPCC's conclusions are drawn into question.
That is presuming gloabl warming is real and that it's linked to CO2.
You may be completely right and it's great for everyone to have an opinion on global warming and carbon dioxide. But is your opinion based on what you got from the media or was it formed through scientific reasoning?
Wether for or against, could any of us make a good scientific argument to support theories?
How much do you we all know about climatology?
What models did the IPCC researchers use in temperature prediction?
How were the models verified?
What's the MBH98 hockeystick graph?
What are the criticisms of the MBH98 graph?
How is temperature measured?
What's an urban heat island?
What's a microwave sounding unit?
What's the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere?
What's Hubert Peak Theory?
For anyone who's unsure, may I suggest less BBC and more science. Here's some links.
The IPCC Report
is not really a scientific study, it's a meta study, a study of studies.
The problem with this approach is it tends towards argumentum ad populum which
basically means if enough people believe in something it must be true which
is not at all how science works.
Wein's displacement law gives
Earth's radation peak in the infrared region at about 10 micrometers.
H20 makes up 2% (50 times more than CO2) of the amosphere and has a much higher reflectivity in the 10 micromenter region.
As water vapor, H2O has a positive
feedback causing further "warming" but when it forms clouds it has a negative "cooling" affect.
So there's a least one model than suggests CO2 will cool the Earth.
Also, more clouds means more rain which means more plants which means less CO2.
So it's quite possible for the Earth to self regulate itself.
I'm not saying CO2 isn't a problem but what the IPCC has done is to take the worse
possible senario out of a whole bunch of other options.
Don't forget, CO2 makes
up only 0.04% of the atmosphere and over 90% of CO2 came from natural, non anthropogenic
sources.
There's also some evidence that about 30% of the 8 gigatons of annual CO2
can be accounted for by
forest fires
The Internet was completely funded by porn," he said from the stage of the 23rd annual AVN Awards show. And if it wasn't for the Internet, he added, "you guys would be completely out of business."
I think you have it the wrong way round, porn was completely funded by the Internet and if it wasn't for the Internet's distribution system you guys wouldn't have a medium to generate that $2.5 billion revenue, you'd still be relegated to the back rooms of selected video stores selling tapes and DVDs.
The images are wrong. The messages are wrong. And stocking it in U.S. stores is wrong.
And perhaps banning it is also wrong.
What's so different about violence in video games as opposed to violence in books, movies, TV, etc.? And what about all those shootout games kids play with toy guns? Why not ban those?
Millions of kids watch/participate in entertainment that contains violent content and millions grow up to be law abiding citizens. These guys don't have any evidence of a connection with games and real life. They just don't like the content and want to enforce their preferences on everyone else. Shameful.
Slashdot Mirror
Why was that modded troll?
If you look at the amount AT&T, Comcast, Verizon spend on marketing you'll find it comaparable to what they spend on upgrades.
Comcast spends millions on TV commercials to tell you how Comcastic they are.
These companies are government sanctioned monopolies that run humongous bureaucratic hierarchies. They have diminished incentive to be efficient because entry level into the market is so high as to preclude real competition.
This is the same misguided ideology that once tried to ban the steam engine and video recorder.
I just got done reading the Times Atlas of World History and this seems like the modern equivalent of heresy -- threatening the established economic order of copyrights.
Hopefully in the annals of history this will merit just a sentence or two in the wider scope of things.
Perhaps the news articles reflect the increasing importance of WikiPedia, and the desires of some people to control it.
Indeed. What would be the point of paying someone to change an entry unless that person could keep it locked forever?
Jeff Merkey's entry isn't locked now. I just edited it.
If we encrypt everything, it will simply become infeasible to perform long-term dragnet surveillance of innocent people.
Until they make encryption illegal. I think that's the next step when it doesn't work out for them.
But really, what's new? Never in the history of humanity has there not been one group of people who felt it their god given right to tell another group of people what to say and think.
Don't be lulled into thinking these folks are here to protect you.
Just like the increased powers of search and seizure, designed to protect us from the terrorists, are used mostly to bust people for possession of pot; so the draconian measures enacted to save from the cyber criminals will mostly be used to bust you for downloading your favorite music.
Please mod parent up.
Not for being insightful but for merely opening up the debate.
On the one hand it's true that government regulation stifled innovation by compelling the telcos to perform to government regulated standards.
On the other hand, the FCC can be seen as being in the business of 'selling' licenses to cell phone providers irrespective of what they do with the spectrum. Perhaps licensing of the airways should be less about who can pay the most and more about who will do what with the bandwidth to benefit the community. It would be nice to see a company that couldn't 'afford' the usual $500 million to be awarded spectrum rights because they had a good idea about selling mobile IP addresses with the intention of encouraging third parties to compete in building devices for it rather than the usual one company takes all approach.
I'm no fan of big government. But the spectrum belongs to the people. Let the best ideas for the use of the spectrum be the ones that prevail. Not just the ones that have the biggest financial backing.
Obviously a virus is no more protected than slander (saying something) or libel (writing something), or yelling fire in a crowded theater. But saying you can post something on the net AND prevent others from telling people about it kinda changes the paradigm. What about, for example, images.google.com? According to this ruling, anyone who owns an image can prevent google from linking to it in a search. Don't know about you, but I think this is a pretty absurd ruling.
This is for when you hack your neighbor's linksys router and you don't wanna get caught.
You claim the article contains bullshit and state:
[N]o one bought a Christmas stocking from her previously because they mistakenly believed she was a giant multinational conglomerate...
yet you offer no reason or evidence and completely fail to support your arguments. How about you tell us why you're right and the WSJ is wrong.
Not a gamer myself but this is just another rehash of the old nature vs. nature argument that's been going on ever since John Locke said "give me the child and I'll give you the man."
There's always been violent games. Ever play cops and robbers? Ever shoot a cop?
There might be a link between violent games and real life but establishing that as a scientific fact with real double-blind scientific data that precludes pseudo-scientific subjective interpretations by psychologists has always illuded researchers. I doubt this study will establish a link where others have failed.
The Bible is full of horrible violence. Many people who've read it throughtout history have been influenced to do terrible things to people. I think the CDC should look into the effects the Bible has on young children.
At the the very least Bibles should come with a graphic violence warning.
A year after the FBI first learned of the larger leak, they have also failed to issue any public warnings.
Yeah, because it's porn related. You can bet if this happened to Disney online they'd be maxim publicity.
I side with google on this. But their "do no evil" policy may be incompatible with the legal rights of the shareholders. Ever since Dodge v. Ford it's been pretty much accepted in the US that companies cannot practice philanthropy at the expense of shareholders.
Though we all like the idea of "do no evil", when it comes to business the idea can be very subjective.
I was a victim of ID theft 5 years ago. A credt card company (Next Card IIRC) gave someone a credit card who had only my name and SS#, wrong date of birth and wrong address. Anyway this guy went to Vegas and ran up quite a bill. It was only when the card remained unpaid that the company bothered to track down the real me.
They wanted me to sign an affidavit. I told them I wan't signing anything, it wasn't my problem. I quoted the following from CHAP. 41, SUBCHAP VI, sections b and e of U.S. Code TITLE 15 which states:
(b) Burden of proof
In any action which involves a consumer's liability for an unauthorized electronic fund transfer, the burden of proof is upon the financial institution to show that the electronic fund transfer was authorized or, if the electronic fund transfer was unauthorized, then the burden of proof is upon the financial institution to establish that the conditions of liability set forth in subsection (a) of this section have been met, and, if the transfer was initiated after the effective date of section 1693c of this title, that the disclosures required to be made to the consumer under section 1693c(a)(1) and (2) of this title were in fact made in accordance with such section.
(e) Scope of liability
Except as provided in this section, a consumer incurs no liability from an unauthorized electronic fund transfer.
Anyway, they took care of everything after that. Including my credit rating.
And besides that, ISPs tend over estimate the amount they spend on infrastructure so they can justify higher prices. Verizon, for example, predicts$91.7 billion USD revenue for 2006 and laying fiber and installing switches is probably the least costly of all there operations. I bet they spend more on advertising than anything else. I wouldn't be surprised if this doomsday senario is a plot by the MBAs to prep consumers for price hikes even though they already have the profits to fix the problem.
Doc Searls had an interesting article about this a while back.
Let's hope I'm completely wrong and the ISPs intentions are good and noble.
Bundling Outlook with Office may be slightly closer to anti-competitive behavior, but I still think it's a BS complaint.
Seems like history repeating. Microsoft wasn't sued by 20 states' attornies general for nothing. Take a look at the findings of fact from the 1998 case. Though MS was found guilty of violating the Sherman and Clayton anti trust acts, not much really happened to them. Perhaps they were just too big and influential to punish.
Bill Gates likes to tout MS as innovative but it's really a company that bought or borrowed almost everything it ever produced. History will probably reflect on MS as a popular and ubiquitous OS. But the real innovators will be those who developed the PC, PDA, Digital Camera, Ipod, etc., not Microsoft.
From your article:
Removing the neutrality requirement allows the ISP to avoid the risk that a competitor will use the ISP's increased bandwidth to compete with it.
Ideally this would work. The problem is that there's often not much competition, many people have only one choice of ISP.
I've been building IP netwroks for nearly ten years and IMHO ISPs (perhaps like the drug companies) greatly inflate the amount of their investments in infrastructure. The Internet is cheap, it's just a bunch of wires and switches. I'd much rather see the ISPs concentrate on building fat pipes and get out of the content business.
Google delists Chinese government for manipulating search results so as to put pro Chinese government "tiananmen square" results first. Oh wait, google already did that for them. Never mind. Do no evil.
Fair point about co2science.org. But to be equally fair, realscience.org's main contributors seem to be Mann et el. so I wouldn't expect objective criticisms of MBH98.
Does it matter if we read the Yadav summary at co2science or here?
I think you misread me about MBH98 being a "cornerstone". Whatever it might not be, it certainly seems to be the cornerstone of the IPCC Report. Everything stems from MBH98. Without its 20th century anomaly there's no anthropogenic CO2 correlation.
realscience's answer to myth#1 is figure 1., of which four of the curves are other mann models so they're not from "other groups" at all. And anyway, the graph really tells us nothing about whether the temperature anomalies are natural or not.
I started out believing there was a link between warming and anthro CO2. But after I started digging a little I found it wasn't as easy to establish as I thought it would be.
I have no problem with the Vostok ice core CO2 data.
We're not denying it, we're just questioning wether it's linked to CO2.
The cornerstone to the IPCC Report is the Michael Mann (et el) "hockey stick" graph of which the model used to generate it has been found to contain errors. I'm talking about errors according to climatologists, not politicians or newpaper editors.
Here's a wiki article that mentions it.
More info and details here.
Two reseachers from Canada, Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, attempted to reconstruct the so-called MBH98 graph and wrote that the method used by Mann contained "collation errors, unjustifiable truncation or extrapolation of source data, obsolete data,"
AFAIK there is no more conclusive data available than what MBH98 gives. If MBH98 is fatally flawed then the whole of the IPCC's conclusions are drawn into question.
That is presuming gloabl warming is real and that it's linked to CO2.
You may be completely right and it's great for everyone to have an opinion on global warming and carbon dioxide. But is your opinion based on what you got from the media or was it formed through scientific reasoning?
Wether for or against, could any of us make a good scientific argument to support theories?
How much do you we all know about climatology?
What models did the IPCC researchers use in temperature prediction?
How were the models verified?
What's the MBH98 hockeystick graph?
What are the criticisms of the MBH98 graph?
How is temperature measured?
What's an urban heat island?
What's a microwave sounding unit?
What's the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere?
What's Hubert Peak Theory?
For anyone who's unsure, may I suggest less BBC and more science. Here's some links.
IPCC Report
realclimate
CO2 science
Temp for last 100 years
The IPCC Report is not really a scientific study, it's a meta study, a study of studies.
The problem with this approach is it tends towards argumentum ad populum which basically means if enough people believe in something it must be true which is not at all how science works.
Wein's displacement law gives Earth's radation peak in the infrared region at about 10 micrometers. H20 makes up 2% (50 times more than CO2) of the amosphere and has a much higher reflectivity in the 10 micromenter region.
As water vapor, H2O has a positive feedback causing further "warming" but when it forms clouds it has a negative "cooling" affect. So there's a least one model than suggests CO2 will cool the Earth. Also, more clouds means more rain which means more plants which means less CO2. So it's quite possible for the Earth to self regulate itself.
I'm not saying CO2 isn't a problem but what the IPCC has done is to take the worse possible senario out of a whole bunch of other options.
Don't forget, CO2 makes up only 0.04% of the atmosphere and over 90% of CO2 came from natural, non anthropogenic sources.
There's also some evidence that about 30% of the 8 gigatons of annual CO2 can be accounted for by forest fires
Let's not even get into volcanic activity.
The Internet was completely funded by porn," he said from the stage of the 23rd annual AVN Awards show. And if it wasn't for the Internet, he added, "you guys would be completely out of business."
I think you have it the wrong way round, porn was completely funded by the Internet and if it wasn't for the Internet's distribution system you guys wouldn't have a medium to generate that $2.5 billion revenue, you'd still be relegated to the back rooms of selected video stores selling tapes and DVDs.
The images are wrong. The messages are wrong. And stocking it in U.S. stores is wrong.
And perhaps banning it is also wrong.
What's so different about violence in video games as opposed to violence in books, movies, TV, etc.? And what about all those shootout games kids play with toy guns? Why not ban those?
Millions of kids watch/participate in entertainment that contains violent content and millions grow up to be law abiding citizens. These guys don't have any evidence of a connection with games and real life. They just don't like the content and want to enforce their preferences on everyone else. Shameful.
Brady wrote that he had expected criticism of The Post on the site but that the public had violated rules against personal attacks and profanity.
Profanity? Wow, that's fucking serious.
What did he expect? Rather than shutting down why not set up a rating system like slashdot's so that trolls can be modded out of sight?
Will Windows ever be secure?