Problem is that local calling is simply unprofitable. Indeed, I think I could argue that private calling is unprofitable: the big money is in business calls.
Which tends to indicate that local- and long-distance calling needs to be considered together, not separately. If the monopoly is guaranteed a profit, the profits of one can subsidize the costs of the other.
In real life, long distance charges have dropped to S.F.A., while local charges have more than doubled in the past decade.
At this rate, we're going to see per-minute or per-second charges for *all* local calling.
Of course, with cellphone usage starting to outpace copper, we're already seeing a per-minute charges...
That all constitutes a sexually repressed media scared shiftless of the bogeyman.
I think many more people are anti-violence/pro-sex than the media and politicians are willing to admit.
That was my thrust: that the whole thing is a bogeyman. We all *assume* our neighbours would be mortally offended to see us weeding the garden in the buff, but the reality is probably that they don't much care.
And it's a self-fulfilling bogeyman: because they, too, assume that their neighbour will be offended if they're not offended. So if we go wander out into the backyard in our birthday suit, the neighbour -- who would otherwise find something better to do with his time -- is going to have to get on his high horse about it, lest his neighbours think less of him.
The proof, if I can call it that, is that we've got nude beaches, nudist clubs, nudie magazines, and everything else that indicates there's a healthy population of people who don't get bent out of shape by the sight of naked bodies.
Those who are offended are in a minute minority, and should probably be sent away to Afghanistan for rehabilitation. We could air-drop them on terrorist camps, solving two problems at once.:-)
Let AT&T have its monopoly back. But this time, regulate the damn thing. Regulate hell out of it.
A consumer-regulated monopoly is a thing of beauty. The monopoly benefits: no competition, and a guaranteed profit.
More importantly, though, the consumer wins: nearly anything the consumer wants, the consumer gets. The only limiting factor is that the monopoly must be allowed a reasonable profit.
Fixed prices based on reasonable profits. Cool. You don't have to worry about your provider going tits up because they sold at a loss, and you don't have to worry about being gouged because there's only one provider.
Guaranteed service. Very cool. Make the telco responsible for the line all the way to the phone. No more $130/hr service calls.
Standardization. Also cool. We can force them to use the latest cell technology. Useful cellular service -- my god, it'd almost like living in Europe!
Infrastructure upgrades can be controlled: people in Podunk don't have to be shafted with decade-old crap pilfered from the big-city telco exchanges. Goodbye mechanical switches... at last!
Guaranteed coverage. Wouldn't that be too sweet?
Etc.
With a consumer-regulated monopoly, you don't rely on market forces to "push" the company into delivering new services or better prices. The company jumps through *our* hoops. As long as they're guaranteed a reasonable profit, they'll do anything we want.
Not to exaggerate, though, I do find that *almost* everyone -- ie. a very large majority -- of people seem to have no problem with outdoor sculpture showing nekkid bodies, with nude beaches, with non-missionary sex, with nude sunbathing, with etc.
So why the heck is there this concept that we (North Americans) live in a sexually repressed society?
I think we're hoaxing ourselves. "We" keep saying it, but not because "we" are repressed: because we think "they" must be repressed.
Well, hell, surprise folks, *THEY* are just the same as us. There is *NO* moral majority that's decrying the sin and depravity of nude beaches, porn magazines, or rockin' good sex.
Let's quit trying to not offend that mythical group of sexually repressed beings. They don't exist, unless we're teenagers living at home, and in that case, they're just our parents...
"Essentially every major world religion and culture advocates or prescribes chastity: no sexual partners until marriage, and only one after that with the intent to produce children."
I don't think the general public, nor any of the folk that Keker normally serves, has much of a clue at all about this case.
It does strike me that if everyone were to send him a buck, it would send a fairly clear message to the government that its involvement in this case has been unacceptable. The idea here isn't to make Keker rich (I don't think there'd be enough Slashdot participation to do that, and I suspect he'd end up donating it to charity): it's to show support for the cause.
Chewing gum, man, that's the ticket. Those NASA space jockeys should be spitting their gum out the window. Pretty soon, all that debris will be stuck together!
(For that matter, I've never quite understood why they don't send up a big, thick Kevlar mat. A dragnet. Scoop a clear path 'round the geostationary orbit, and send the shit to the sun...)
(Weight, perhaps? But that could have been resolved by bringing up single layers of kevlar during each shuttle flight. Layer 'em when it's time to get scooping.)
(There would, of course, need to be some way to maneuver the net around the good satellites!)
If you're going to get that fancy, then why not use the laser to disintegrate it? IIRC, there's this Star Wars fantasy in the military, involving big lasers used to destroy ICBMs.
If they figure they can destroy an ICBM using a laser, then certainly them must be able to destroy smaller debris.
Hey, if *this* post isn't moderated into oblivion, click the "parent" link beside "reply to this," and then repeat. Set your filter to -1, and see what was so all-fired offensive to the moderators!
I can do you one better: if you select that post's parent and then change your settings to see -1 posts, you'll see there was an entire thread of funnier jokes that were moderated down.
Got to love moderation: it's so completely irrational.
Mmmm, s'truth there: I was assuming that most of the laid-off were highly skilled, highly trained, highly educated folk: the type of people who stand the best chance of either creating a new business, or getting hired into a new, developing company.
I was thinking along the lines of the blokes who broke off from their mothercompany and formed Transmeta; or the guys who've been able to take a software product they were designing for their employer, and turn it into a separate biz.
The ordinary rank-and-file are going to have a more difficult time. The world probably doesn't need more custodial engineers or secretaries, particularly when businesses are closing their doors.
I'm still fairly hopeful that this downturn has a silver upside. I'd like to see the pendulum start swinging back from megacorporatization back toward speciality shops.
"Realistic" was the wrong word. Obviously, if they really are deadwood, they really do need to be cut loose. What I mean more is that if the cuts were realistic, they'd have been done long ago and in small doses, not in grand swell foops.
I really suspect that the job cuts that have been happening in industries in all sectors are more opportunistic than realistic.
By which I mean that these people have been deadwood for a good long time: it's just that while the stock market was rewarding those companies unjustly during the boom, those companies couldn't cut their workforce without severely impacting their stock value.
Now that everything is in the shithole, it's real easy to trash employees: hell, it's even desirable to drop the stock price, so that the company can buy it back for resale at a far greater value once the market recovers!
In support of this, look at the number of companies writing off intangibles. They're deliberately beating down their stocks, or at the very least don't care whether the stock drops any further.
Finally, the one big question I have is this: how the fuck do you end up with thousands and tens of thousands of excess employees? You'd have to be insane to retain that many staff when they're unnecessary -- why weren't they being hired/fired in trickles and dribbles, as the company needed/didn't need them? Makes more sense than the freaking cattle-calls they must have chosen when hiring en masse.
One last note: while being fired is stressful, many of these people are skilled and creative. It may take them a few months to get over the loss, but once they do -- look out! We're going to see entrepreneurship skyrocketing!
I think that's pretty exciting. There's going to be a lot of innovation over the next few years. Gonna drive the economy to new heights!
MP3-CD car deck: $500ish. Top-end Plextor CDRW: $200ish. Spindle of CDs: $30ish.
Total cost: $750ish.
With the $250 to $1150 left over, I can buy me a shipload of good music.
And it's a helluva lot easier to burn me a CD than to dink around hauling the player carcass from the car to the cradle, connecting up the cradle, flashing the MP3 drive, deconnecting the bloody cradle, and then lugging the carcass back out to the car. Oi!
Good idea, real innovative the month it was introduced, obsoleted PDQ. (Now, make one of 'em with a Bluetooth/802.11/whatever wireless interface, so I can update the drive without even being near the car, and my interest might be piqued!)
"::pretends to think:: Oh...I could ask to be able to USE my computer freely, heh, since I've paid for it.;)"
No, no, no! You're using the old-style think, where you actually purchase the product.
You've just gotta get yourself into the new-style think, where you are purchasing a license to use the product.
Sort of like with leased cars, okay? You lease the car, and the car dealer then restricts where you can park the ca.... waittasec.
Okay, then, sort of like with a rental Bobcat loader, okay? You rent the loader, and the rental company then restricts what you can loa... um. Hold on...
I've got it! It's like hiring a carpet cleaning service, okay? You hire the guy to clean your carpets, and he decides which carpets he's gonna clea... oh.
Hmmmm.
This new-think software licensing thing is strange shit, eh?
Slashdot Mirror
Problem is that local calling is simply unprofitable. Indeed, I think I could argue that private calling is unprofitable: the big money is in business calls.
Which tends to indicate that local- and long-distance calling needs to be considered together, not separately. If the monopoly is guaranteed a profit, the profits of one can subsidize the costs of the other.
In real life, long distance charges have dropped to S.F.A., while local charges have more than doubled in the past decade.
At this rate, we're going to see per-minute or per-second charges for *all* local calling.
Of course, with cellphone usage starting to outpace copper, we're already seeing a per-minute charges...
That all constitutes a sexually repressed media scared shiftless of the bogeyman.
:-)
I think many more people are anti-violence/pro-sex than the media and politicians are willing to admit.
That was my thrust: that the whole thing is a bogeyman. We all *assume* our neighbours would be mortally offended to see us weeding the garden in the buff, but the reality is probably that they don't much care.
And it's a self-fulfilling bogeyman: because they, too, assume that their neighbour will be offended if they're not offended. So if we go wander out into the backyard in our birthday suit, the neighbour -- who would otherwise find something better to do with his time -- is going to have to get on his high horse about it, lest his neighbours think less of him.
The proof, if I can call it that, is that we've got nude beaches, nudist clubs, nudie magazines, and everything else that indicates there's a healthy population of people who don't get bent out of shape by the sight of naked bodies.
Those who are offended are in a minute minority, and should probably be sent away to Afghanistan for rehabilitation. We could air-drop them on terrorist camps, solving two problems at once.
Let AT&T have its monopoly back. But this time, regulate the damn thing. Regulate hell out of it.
A consumer-regulated monopoly is a thing of beauty. The monopoly benefits: no competition, and a guaranteed profit.
More importantly, though, the consumer wins: nearly anything the consumer wants, the consumer gets. The only limiting factor is that the monopoly must be allowed a reasonable profit.
Fixed prices based on reasonable profits. Cool. You don't have to worry about your provider going tits up because they sold at a loss, and you don't have to worry about being gouged because there's only one provider.
Guaranteed service. Very cool. Make the telco responsible for the line all the way to the phone. No more $130/hr service calls.
Standardization. Also cool. We can force them to use the latest cell technology. Useful cellular service -- my god, it'd almost like living in Europe!
Infrastructure upgrades can be controlled: people in Podunk don't have to be shafted with decade-old crap pilfered from the big-city telco exchanges. Goodbye mechanical switches... at last!
Guaranteed coverage. Wouldn't that be too sweet?
Etc.
With a consumer-regulated monopoly, you don't rely on market forces to "push" the company into delivering new services or better prices. The company jumps through *our* hoops. As long as they're guaranteed a reasonable profit, they'll do anything we want.
It's win-win.
Not to exaggerate, though, I do find that *almost* everyone -- ie. a very large majority -- of people seem to have no problem with outdoor sculpture showing nekkid bodies, with nude beaches, with non-missionary sex, with nude sunbathing, with etc.
So why the heck is there this concept that we (North Americans) live in a sexually repressed society?
I think we're hoaxing ourselves. "We" keep saying it, but not because "we" are repressed: because we think "they" must be repressed.
Well, hell, surprise folks, *THEY* are just the same as us. There is *NO* moral majority that's decrying the sin and depravity of nude beaches, porn magazines, or rockin' good sex.
Let's quit trying to not offend that mythical group of sexually repressed beings. They don't exist, unless we're teenagers living at home, and in that case, they're just our parents...
"Essentially every major world religion and culture advocates or prescribes chastity: no sexual partners until marriage, and only one after that with the intent to produce children."
Bzzzt. False.
He also stated that *all* of Western Europe has banned it.
That doesn't leave much of a list of countries that the US would *like* to list. You're left with Africa, the Asian subcontinent, South America...
Name a country out of those that you'd like to be emulating.
I don't think the general public, nor any of the folk that Keker normally serves, has much of a clue at all about this case.
It does strike me that if everyone were to send him a buck, it would send a fairly clear message to the government that its involvement in this case has been unacceptable. The idea here isn't to make Keker rich (I don't think there'd be enough Slashdot participation to do that, and I suspect he'd end up donating it to charity): it's to show support for the cause.
Chewing gum, man, that's the ticket. Those NASA space jockeys should be spitting their gum out the window. Pretty soon, all that debris will be stuck together!
(For that matter, I've never quite understood why they don't send up a big, thick Kevlar mat. A dragnet. Scoop a clear path 'round the geostationary orbit, and send the shit to the sun...)
(Weight, perhaps? But that could have been resolved by bringing up single layers of kevlar during each shuttle flight. Layer 'em when it's time to get scooping.)
(There would, of course, need to be some way to maneuver the net around the good satellites!)
Whu?
If you're going to get that fancy, then why not use the laser to disintegrate it? IIRC, there's this Star Wars fantasy in the military, involving big lasers used to destroy ICBMs.
If they figure they can destroy an ICBM using a laser, then certainly them must be able to destroy smaller debris.
Poof. Atomized.
LOL! And then I get marked as "flamebait"!
Hey, if *this* post isn't moderated into oblivion, click the "parent" link beside "reply to this," and then repeat. Set your filter to -1, and see what was so all-fired offensive to the moderators!
ER, yah. Ol' Dubya "Oil Baron" Bush is sure to go for that plan. a-yup.
I can do you one better: if you select that post's parent and then change your settings to see -1 posts, you'll see there was an entire thread of funnier jokes that were moderated down.
Got to love moderation: it's so completely irrational.
Ooooh, I just *knew* that someone would be offended at "66, the favoured sexual position of the beast." Got meself a "-1, Troll." [rolls eyes]
Because, obviously, it must refer to... er, um. Anal sex? Doggy style? A position that no god-fearing person could abide with?
Or could it just be meaningless: read into the numbers whatever you want, because it's just silly.
66, the favoured sexual position of the beast.
It's network television. Yawn.
Er, yah.
Only if compliant with Red Book...
...until Philips finds it more profitable to discard that rule.
Mmmm, s'truth there: I was assuming that most of the laid-off were highly skilled, highly trained, highly educated folk: the type of people who stand the best chance of either creating a new business, or getting hired into a new, developing company.
I was thinking along the lines of the blokes who broke off from their mothercompany and formed Transmeta; or the guys who've been able to take a software product they were designing for their employer, and turn it into a separate biz.
The ordinary rank-and-file are going to have a more difficult time. The world probably doesn't need more custodial engineers or secretaries, particularly when businesses are closing their doors.
I'm still fairly hopeful that this downturn has a silver upside. I'd like to see the pendulum start swinging back from megacorporatization back toward speciality shops.
"Realistic" was the wrong word. Obviously, if they really are deadwood, they really do need to be cut loose. What I mean more is that if the cuts were realistic, they'd have been done long ago and in small doses, not in grand swell foops.
I really suspect that the job cuts that have been happening in industries in all sectors are more opportunistic than realistic.
By which I mean that these people have been deadwood for a good long time: it's just that while the stock market was rewarding those companies unjustly during the boom, those companies couldn't cut their workforce without severely impacting their stock value.
Now that everything is in the shithole, it's real easy to trash employees: hell, it's even desirable to drop the stock price, so that the company can buy it back for resale at a far greater value once the market recovers!
In support of this, look at the number of companies writing off intangibles. They're deliberately beating down their stocks, or at the very least don't care whether the stock drops any further.
Finally, the one big question I have is this: how the fuck do you end up with thousands and tens of thousands of excess employees? You'd have to be insane to retain that many staff when they're unnecessary -- why weren't they being hired/fired in trickles and dribbles, as the company needed/didn't need them? Makes more sense than the freaking cattle-calls they must have chosen when hiring en masse.
One last note: while being fired is stressful, many of these people are skilled and creative. It may take them a few months to get over the loss, but once they do -- look out! We're going to see entrepreneurship skyrocketing!
I think that's pretty exciting. There's going to be a lot of innovation over the next few years. Gonna drive the economy to new heights!
You know, for the 15m of silence one might have to "suffer," that $1900 would sure outfit one's home rig quite nicely.
No shit.
MP3-CD car deck: $500ish. Top-end Plextor CDRW: $200ish. Spindle of CDs: $30ish.
Total cost: $750ish.
With the $250 to $1150 left over, I can buy me a shipload of good music.
And it's a helluva lot easier to burn me a CD than to dink around hauling the player carcass from the car to the cradle, connecting up the cradle, flashing the MP3 drive, deconnecting the bloody cradle, and then lugging the carcass back out to the car. Oi!
Good idea, real innovative the month it was introduced, obsoleted PDQ. (Now, make one of 'em with a Bluetooth/802.11/whatever wireless interface, so I can update the drive without even being near the car, and my interest might be piqued!)
As of this year, Canadians use debit cards more often than cash. Add in the use of credit cards, and cash is a dying breed.
"::pretends to think:: Oh...I could ask to be able to USE my computer freely, heh, since I've paid for it. ;)"
No, no, no! You're using the old-style think, where you actually purchase the product.
You've just gotta get yourself into the new-style think, where you are purchasing a license to use the product.
Sort of like with leased cars, okay? You lease the car, and the car dealer then restricts where you can park the ca.... waittasec.
Okay, then, sort of like with a rental Bobcat loader, okay? You rent the loader, and the rental company then restricts what you can loa... um. Hold on...
I've got it! It's like hiring a carpet cleaning service, okay? You hire the guy to clean your carpets, and he decides which carpets he's gonna clea... oh.
Hmmmm.
This new-think software licensing thing is strange shit, eh?
"Fundamentally, it is a pyramidal design with two edges rounded to accommodate and orientate the palms of the user's hands."
WTF do people have to make up words like "orientate" when perfectly servicable words (like "orient") already exist?