Is AOL really worth the $20 billion this investment (assuming its true) would value them at? It would value them at about 1/4 the entire value of TWX. Seems kinda high to me. Then again, its not as if I'm an expert at asset valuation...
What is the install base of Minimo vs. Opera on cellphones and PDAs? Remember, unlike desktop browsers its a lot more difficult to have Joe phone owner to download a new browser on their cell phone. Almost every cellphone user is going to use the browser that comes with their phone. This means building relationships and licensing software directly to phone manufacturers and cell providers. Opera has already established a foothold in this area, and their browsers are thought of pretty highly (personally, I find Opera to be the best browser for my Zaurus; never have used it on the desktop), not to mention that, as others have pointed out, Minimo and WebCore browsers are, at this point, a hell of a lot heavier than Opera's offering.
While Google may have firefox to lean on / depend on to counter IE on the desktop, there's no equivalent on the cellphone/pda side of things (at least nothing that's being used by the big phone makers). Cellphones are going to become increasingly important in connecting to the internet, and Google probably wants to make sure they're not squeezed out by MS and PocketIE. Opera has a pretty good footprint in the PDA / Cellphone world. If Google wants them this will be why.
Re:Yet another free service that'll become useless
on
Yahoo! Buys del.icio.us
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
What's the point of this acquisition then?
Tagging, pure and simple. It has nothing (or very little) to do with how many ads Yahoo wants to throw at you. Yahoo isn't looking to simply buy eyeballs to boost their ad revenues. Yahoo believes that it can best Google by having humans tag information as opposed to algorithms tag information, which is the way (apparently) Google currently orders the web. This is why Yahoo purchased Flickr, and I suspect it will be the foremost driver of future acquisitions.
It will be interesting to see which philosophy, if any, is "better."
Didn't we pay taxes to build the roads in the first place?
Yes we do. In fact, we already pay a pretty damn effective "milage based" / SUV tax. Its called a gas tax. The more you drive, the more you pay. The bigger the gas guzzler, the more you pay. The "milage based road user fee" is a warm and fuzzy way of saying "we're going to tax you fot the same thing twice."
Again, I'm not talking about what *should* happen, I'm talking about what people will try to do. Yes, it may be unconstitutional, but municipalities will try it nevertheless, and time and money will be wasted duking it out in the court system. Look at the hulabaloo that goes on with respect to the name of "christmas trees" and what can and cannot be taught in public schools. If its controled by a government one or more group of activists will want to control how its used.
This is BS. It is completely opposite of what happened. California bought most of the energy it needed through its distributors. But the system relies on spot market (i.e. FREE MARKET) to support addtional demand spikes. Enron decided to take advantage of this situation by cornering the spot market and driving it up. Just like how some stock speculators drive up the prices by buying up shares of a company with limited float (ALL FREE MARKET STUFF).
What, are you just making stuff up now? Go read the regulations as they were circa 2000. Purchasing by the distribution companies had to be made through the state run pool. That simple. It was not a FREE MARKET by any definition of the phrase.
Since FERC rules inaugurated electricity deregulation in 1996, similar price spikes have occurred in Illinois, Ohio, and New York. Even in Pennsylvania, considered the poster child for electricity deregulation, prices hit $930 a megawatt hour for brief periods in 1999. In June 2000, on a particularly hot day in New York City when a regional nuclear power plant was experiencing an "unplanned" power outage, the wholesale price of electricity soared twentyfold to $1,000 a megawatt hour, the state-imposed cap. More than $70 million flowed from city consumers to a half dozen energy companies on a single day.
BUT, where these fraud? Or are you claiming each and every unplanned outage by any sort of industrial plant constitues malfeaseanse? (If so you're dumb as a stump) In never claimed that prices don't fluctuate, supply and demand dictate that, but how is that proof that there is a systematic fraud being perpitrated?
When you have an inelastic market, spot control of prices is inevitiable, even in a completely free market. My argument is NOT that deregulation GUARANTEES fraud, but deregulation does not mean that it is free from fraud. Fraud can happen any time when you have a very inelastic market.
And I was claiming that it GUARANTEES the market to be fraud free? No. But, I still stand by the statement that a free market helps mitigate anyone trying to pull it off. If California had a truely deregulated market Enron wouldn't have been able to pull off what they did; distributers would have just switched to a different producer on a proper spot market (not the convoluted version the California state gov't foisted upon the state). Also, you still haven't shown how the electrical markets is so "inelastic."
I'll tell you what. If you can find an example, I will buy you an Xbox 360. And I don't mean from ground breaking to operation, I mean decision of building a power plant to operation. Please, it takes 5+ years just to go through planning and permits for a project this size.
State the terms. When does the clock start (concept selection? permit application? ground breaking) and when does the clock end (first power? achieving nameplate capacity? handing over to "operations?)
Oh, and now you are saying all regulations are bad? Are you one of those ultra-libertarian freaks? I don't know about you but I don't want an old-style power plant that generates huge plumes of black smoke near my neighborhood. But I guess we would have no problem getting permission for where you live.
Nope. I've been saying from post one that the California power crisis was not caused by deregulation. You have yet to prove otherwise. Everything else is you just begging the question...
I've answered your questions, why don't you answer mine? Again, how could have deregulation of the power trading market could have prevented the Enron fraud?
I answered it in the parent post. To quote:
Yes, and it would have worked well if the wholesale market was actually deregulated, instead of pseudo-de-regulated (i.e. badly regulated) like in was in California. The wholesale market is quite elastic. IF distribution companies had the right to make their wholesale purchases from anyone instead of the state run "pool" when Enron pulled their "we have maintenance issues" BS and cut supply the distributors could have just given Enron the finger and purchased their power from elsewhere (lets not forget, if they weren't forced to sell their power generation in the first place they wouldn't have been so beholden to the "pool"). That is the free market at work. Instead, they were forced to purchase from the pool. Enron, et al knew everyone was dependant on them for power, thus the problem.
Regulation has NOTHING to do with limiting the elasticity of the power generation. Oil/coal prices, zoning laws, and environmental lawas etc. is what causes the inelasticity, not regulation.
Wrong, wrong and wrong. Considering that power in this country has been regulated out the wazoo for most of the electrical age any inelasticity comes directly from existing regulation. The definition of market inelasticity is that changes in price cause a relatively small change in marginal demand; go double the price of electricity and watch industrial customers shit their pants and scramble to a) find a new provider or b) build their own electrical capacity. As I said above, the power market, even the retail power market, isn't all fridges and xboxes; price changes do effect demand. Any dampning of that action is directly attributable to gov't regulation.
It takes many years to build a power plant...
Depending on the plant you can do it in as little as two years...
and most communities in US does not want power plant near their homes.
[which is caused by regulation, cough cough]
HOW THE HECK IS DEREGULATION GOING TO FIX THAT???
In California's case it would have allowed the distribution companies (i.e. the customer facing power entities) to purchase their power wholesale from somewhere other than the "pool", whose prices were mandated by (drum roll please) THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA!
Again, since you have now dodged the question three times: how do you explain the UK's 10+ years of power deregulation, PA's open power markets, et al not exploding in a California like mess? According to your theory Pittsburgh should have a power system on par with Bagdad's by now.
You have twisted my argument. I did NOT argue that deregulation will cause massive fraud. What I argued was that deregulation would not have STOPPED the massive fraud the Enron engineered.
Really? Let's take a look at what you said earlier...
You CANNOT deregulate, you CANNOT expect the "Free market" to ensure quality and low price.
So again, let me ask this very relevant question: why, if deregulation can't stop such Enron fraud, haven't we seen it reproduced in every other jurisdiction where power markets have been opened up? Why has quality not degraded (and actually improve) and prices spike?
Free market works best when there is elastic demand and supply.
Yes, and it would have worked well if the wholesale market was actually deregulated, instead of pseudo-de-regulated (i.e. badly regulated) like in was in California. The wholesale market is quite elastic. IF distribution companies had the right to make their wholesale purchases from anyone instead of the state run "pool" when Enron pulled their "we have maintenance issues" BS and cut supply the distributors could have just given Enron the finger and purchased their power from elsewhere (lets not forget, if they weren't forced to sell their power generation in the first place they wouldn't have been so beholden to the "pool"). That is the free market at work. Instead, they were forced to purchase from the pool. Enron, et al knew everyone was dependant on them for power, thus the problem.
And don't bother the in deregulated system this kind of fraud would not be possible. Again, that would be true in perfectly elastic system, but power supply, as I said before, is not elastic at all.
Pure bullshit. The power market is elastic. There's a hell of a lot more to the power game than putting juice into your fridge and XBox. Claiming otherwise is courting ignorance.
You do know what happened right? Enron and other energy producers artificially lowered supply by claiming that various power generators were "down for maintenance/fixes" forcing brownouts during the heaviest usage season.
And this was caused by that hyper-capitalistic, laissez faire deregulation that California foisted upon the state... execpt when it isn't. Let's take a look at California's "deregulated market."
a) power companies were forced to split their distribution and power generation businesses. They could keep the distribution buisness, but had to sell the generating buisness (to the like of Enron).
b) California assumed total day-to-day control of the utilities' power grid to make sure they couldn't abuse their market power.
c) Cali required new owners of the generation plants to sell their juice to a state-managed pool, whose prices were set by the state. The distribution companies were forced to purchase their electricty from this pool. They could not go else where for cheaper power.
d) no matter what they paid for the electricity from the pool, the distributers were capped on what they could charge.
So, based on your reasoning, by passing the artificially high prices directly to the consumers would have prevented this fraud from occuring?
No, real deregulation would have kept this fraud from happening . When you force everyone to purchase from a single pool that is supplied by a small subset of generators that is a recipe for total abuse. Cali was about a deregulated as Amtrack. As you say, Econ 101 stuff.
But, if you are correct and deregulation in inself will cause massive, Enron like fraud then please explain how the likes of PA, the UK and other juristictions who have opened their power markets to a much larger degree than California ever did still seem to be purring along quite nicely? Really? How do you explain it?
But there in lies the rub. It doesn't matter what you do, all that matters is that someone will. Take a look at the battles that happen at the local levels in terms of cable licenses (and what can/cannot be carried on them [i.e. Spice channel)), school board curriculum, "disinvestment" initiatives (South Africa in the 80s, Israel today), library filters, etc., etc., etc. People WILL complain, some people WILL get local laws passed restricting access to content, lawsuits WILL be filed and lots of time and money WILL be wasted in the never-ending battle of who gets to police this "community property."
People who are pro-muni wi-fi have buried their head in the sand about these types of issues. Put wi-fi access in the hands of politicians and this is what you will end up with. Mark my words.
How many families that can't honestly afford dial-up (which is all you need for access to the internet) are going to drop a few hundered dollars on a computer? If finances are that tight then dropping a couple of hundred bucks on a computer is going to low down on the "must need" list. Free Wi-Fi has little to do with closing the digital divide then it does giving the middle class a nice, new entitlement. Throwing in the Digital Divide rhetoric just makes it a little more politically paletable.
Have you not been paying attention? power was deregulated in some areas - it resulted in artificially created roving blackouts to give the impression that demand exceeded supply so that price-gouging could occur.
Apparently you haven't been paying that much attention. Most of Cali's problems came from partial deregulation. Wholesale prices were deregulated, but not consumer prices. That's a disaster waiting to happen.
Now, PA has had a much more deregulated power economy. How many rolling blackouts have you seen there? Or in the UK? Just wondering.
Yes, because the digital divide is chock-full of people who are able to afford a laptop/desktop with a wi-fi card, but can't afford basic dial-up service. And as you can imagine, that's a large, large group.
And slightly OT, but I'm going to laugh very hard and very long when the first "Municipal Wi-Fi blocking content" story hits/. Because we all know elected officials never want to block the citizens they represent from information....
well, with kids yeah. We have to protect the kids. And you know how irresposible some parents can be. So lets put a huge filter on porn coming down the pipe. Tax dollars shouldn't pay for porn anyway.
Oh, and smoking. Bad. Very bad. Lets ban any site that promotes smoking. Promotion of all things smoking over publicly financed wi-fi? I think not! You might as well just shove smokes in babies mouths.
What? This site offends the sensiblities of [fill in religious group/cult of choice]? Block them too. We're all fine, upstanding [christians, jews, muslims, hindis, scientologists] and there's no way our community should have to see this.
What? People are going to RELIGIOUS sites? Hasn't anyone heard of the seperation of church and state? If someone wants to cyber-pray let them pay for their own access.
Hate speech. Who doesnt' hate hate speech? Of course! Its gone. ("by the way, what is hate speech?" "Ah.. the devil's in the details")
Wal Mart? Do we really want our citizens helping keep that community killing, baby eating, spawn of satan corperation in business by allowing them to purchase cheap shit over our wi-fi? I think not! If you want to destroy mom and pop shops do it on your own nickel....
Bingo. I remember when I was a spotty teenager working at a Subway the cost of a 32 ounce drink was about 5 cents (and that may be high). I would have actually been lower if instead of using subway branded cups we used Pepsi branded cups. Distributers will actually give you the cups for free if they're Pepsi (or Coke) branded cups. Soft drinks have HUGE margins. A gas station makes about as much profit off of a 32 ounce fountain soda as they do from 10 gallons of gas.
Re:Dvorak also said cable modems were stupid
on
Prepping For The 360
·
· Score: 1
Actually, he didn't predict Apple would move to the x86, he predicted that Apple would move to Intel. The Itanium to be precise.
Considering that this decline has been taking place for a while its been happening during both Republican and Democratic administrations, as well as during Republican and Democrat controlled congresses I think you can safely say this goes beyond the "recent attacks by those big, bad God worshipers". Lets not forget that the Feds don't even have all that much control over individual school districts.
I used to teach math at university and it was shocking how many incoming freshmen did even know the basics of algebra. And this was in a strong Democratic state during a Democratic administration and a Democrat controlled congress. Does that mean that I can lay the blame at the feet of the Democrats?
You want to point fingers? Point them at schools, specifically many public schools where a solid math/science curriculum, let alone a decent learning environment in general, is hard to find. And if "religion" was to blame then how do you explain away the fact that on a whole students of private Catholic schools usually get a better all round education (math and science included) than public school students?
I live in the District, where per student funding is among the highest in the nation and is certainly no hotbed of fundamentalism, but once my kids hit school age you can bet I'll be paying to send my kids to a private Catholic school (and I'm an atheist). Why? Because the schools are shit (there is no other way to put it). And it has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with bad (and corrupt) management, a stifling (not to mention corrupt) teachers' union and a useless (and did I mention corrupt) City gov't. Until recently you could graduate from a DCPS high school without ever taking a math course. And you wonder why things are getting worse?
The "big bad religious folks causing people to get dumber" is about as logical as ID theory (i.e. not) and misses the point: US primary and secondary schools just aren't that good, and some are downright awful. Until *that* changes nothing else will.
A majority of our oil comes from outside the country. Over half of our debt is held by foreign countries, with China buying up more and more each day.
And you point is.....?
So the Chineese gov't owns a lot of the US gov'ts debt. Well, the US makes up the bulk of buyers for Chineese imports. When push comes to shove who would hurt more? The US can always default on their debts (its not like countries haven't done that before) or devalue the Dollar to effectivly cut the "cost" of the debt. Costly? Yes. Economically painful? Certainly. Fatal? No.
On the other hand, cut imports from China and China is in a huge world of hurt. It would be damn near fatal.
Of course, the US Gov't debt problem could be solved if anyone had any balls about cutting the size of a completely wasteful gov't. But the Republicans have dropped all pretenses of being the party of small gov't and joined the Democrats in throwing good money after bad towards any project that'll get them votes.
I have over 1,000 CD's that I have legally ripped (since I have purchased the buggers over my lifetime). How does your software determine that they are "legal," as opposed to an mp3 that I could have illegally downloaded off of the net?
The main reason this can't work, is that Google already owns the mindshare of the internet. You can't buy what Google has going for it, IMHO. Consider the mindshare that AOL has...
Mindshare doesn't pay the bills, cold, hard cash does. MS is going after AOL's business (either through purchasing all or part of it, or giving them a sweet deal for switching their search engine to MS) mainly because it'll hurt Google's bottom line. I've seen numbers that indicate that 10% of Google's revenue comes from AOL. While losing it won't be fatal, it will hurt like hell.
I had mentioned this in a previous MS/Google thread. A lot of the posturing by both companies has more to do with "How do I disrupt my competitor's cashflow" than "how do I make more business for myself."
Slashdot Mirror
Is AOL really worth the $20 billion this investment (assuming its true) would value them at? It would value them at about 1/4 the entire value of TWX. Seems kinda high to me. Then again, its not as if I'm an expert at asset valuation...
What is the install base of Minimo vs. Opera on cellphones and PDAs? Remember, unlike desktop browsers its a lot more difficult to have Joe phone owner to download a new browser on their cell phone. Almost every cellphone user is going to use the browser that comes with their phone. This means building relationships and licensing software directly to phone manufacturers and cell providers. Opera has already established a foothold in this area, and their browsers are thought of pretty highly (personally, I find Opera to be the best browser for my Zaurus; never have used it on the desktop), not to mention that, as others have pointed out, Minimo and WebCore browsers are, at this point, a hell of a lot heavier than Opera's offering.
One word: cellphones.
While Google may have firefox to lean on / depend on to counter IE on the desktop, there's no equivalent on the cellphone/pda side of things (at least nothing that's being used by the big phone makers). Cellphones are going to become increasingly important in connecting to the internet, and Google probably wants to make sure they're not squeezed out by MS and PocketIE. Opera has a pretty good footprint in the PDA / Cellphone world. If Google wants them this will be why.
What's the point of this acquisition then?
Tagging, pure and simple. It has nothing (or very little) to do with how many ads Yahoo wants to throw at you. Yahoo isn't looking to simply buy eyeballs to boost their ad revenues. Yahoo believes that it can best Google by having humans tag information as opposed to algorithms tag information, which is the way (apparently) Google currently orders the web. This is why Yahoo purchased Flickr, and I suspect it will be the foremost driver of future acquisitions.
It will be interesting to see which philosophy, if any, is "better."
Didn't we pay taxes to build the roads in the first place?
Yes we do. In fact, we already pay a pretty damn effective "milage based" / SUV tax. Its called a gas tax. The more you drive, the more you pay. The bigger the gas guzzler, the more you pay. The "milage based road user fee" is a warm and fuzzy way of saying "we're going to tax you fot the same thing twice."
Again, I'm not talking about what *should* happen, I'm talking about what people will try to do. Yes, it may be unconstitutional, but municipalities will try it nevertheless, and time and money will be wasted duking it out in the court system. Look at the hulabaloo that goes on with respect to the name of "christmas trees" and what can and cannot be taught in public schools. If its controled by a government one or more group of activists will want to control how its used.
This is BS. It is completely opposite of what happened. California bought most of the energy it needed through its distributors. But the system relies on spot market (i.e. FREE MARKET) to support addtional demand spikes. Enron decided to take advantage of this situation by cornering the spot market and driving it up. Just like how some stock speculators drive up the prices by buying up shares of a company with limited float (ALL FREE MARKET STUFF).
What, are you just making stuff up now? Go read the regulations as they were circa 2000. Purchasing by the distribution companies had to be made through the state run pool. That simple. It was not a FREE MARKET by any definition of the phrase.
Since FERC rules inaugurated electricity deregulation in 1996, similar price spikes have occurred in Illinois, Ohio, and New York. Even in Pennsylvania, considered the poster child for electricity deregulation, prices hit $930 a megawatt hour for brief periods in 1999. In June 2000, on a particularly hot day in New York City when a regional nuclear power plant was experiencing an "unplanned" power outage, the wholesale price of electricity soared twentyfold to $1,000 a megawatt hour, the state-imposed cap. More than $70 million flowed from city consumers to a half dozen energy companies on a single day.
BUT, where these fraud? Or are you claiming each and every unplanned outage by any sort of industrial plant constitues malfeaseanse? (If so you're dumb as a stump) In never claimed that prices don't fluctuate, supply and demand dictate that, but how is that proof that there is a systematic fraud being perpitrated?
When you have an inelastic market, spot control of prices is inevitiable, even in a completely free market. My argument is NOT that deregulation GUARANTEES fraud, but deregulation does not mean that it is free from fraud. Fraud can happen any time when you have a very inelastic market.
And I was claiming that it GUARANTEES the market to be fraud free? No. But, I still stand by the statement that a free market helps mitigate anyone trying to pull it off. If California had a truely deregulated market Enron wouldn't have been able to pull off what they did; distributers would have just switched to a different producer on a proper spot market (not the convoluted version the California state gov't foisted upon the state). Also, you still haven't shown how the electrical markets is so "inelastic."
I'll tell you what. If you can find an example, I will buy you an Xbox 360. And I don't mean from ground breaking to operation, I mean decision of building a power plant to operation. Please, it takes 5+ years just to go through planning and permits for a project this size.
State the terms. When does the clock start (concept selection? permit application? ground breaking) and when does the clock end (first power? achieving nameplate capacity? handing over to "operations?)
Oh, and now you are saying all regulations are bad? Are you one of those ultra-libertarian freaks? I don't know about you but I don't want an old-style power plant that generates huge plumes of black smoke near my neighborhood. But I guess we would have no problem getting permission for where you live.
Nope. I've been saying from post one that the California power crisis was not caused by deregulation. You have yet to prove otherwise. Everything else is you just begging the question...
Pathetic...
You took the words right out of my mouth.
I answered it in the parent post. To quote:
Regulation has NOTHING to do with limiting the elasticity of the power generation. Oil/coal prices, zoning laws, and environmental lawas etc. is what causes the inelasticity, not regulation.
Wrong, wrong and wrong. Considering that power in this country has been regulated out the wazoo for most of the electrical age any inelasticity comes directly from existing regulation. The definition of market inelasticity is that changes in price cause a relatively small change in marginal demand; go double the price of electricity and watch industrial customers shit their pants and scramble to a) find a new provider or b) build their own electrical capacity. As I said above, the power market, even the retail power market, isn't all fridges and xboxes; price changes do effect demand. Any dampning of that action is directly attributable to gov't regulation.
It takes many years to build a power plant...
Depending on the plant you can do it in as little as two years...
and most communities in US does not want power plant near their homes.
[which is caused by regulation, cough cough]
HOW THE HECK IS DEREGULATION GOING TO FIX THAT???
In California's case it would have allowed the distribution companies (i.e. the customer facing power entities) to purchase their power wholesale from somewhere other than the "pool", whose prices were mandated by (drum roll please) THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA!
Again, since you have now dodged the question three times: how do you explain the UK's 10+ years of power deregulation, PA's open power markets, et al not exploding in a California like mess? According to your theory Pittsburgh should have a power system on par with Bagdad's by now.
You have twisted my argument. I did NOT argue that deregulation will cause massive fraud. What I argued was that deregulation would not have STOPPED the massive fraud the Enron engineered.
Really? Let's take a look at what you said earlier...
You CANNOT deregulate, you CANNOT expect the "Free market" to ensure quality and low price.
So again, let me ask this very relevant question: why, if deregulation can't stop such Enron fraud, haven't we seen it reproduced in every other jurisdiction where power markets have been opened up? Why has quality not degraded (and actually improve) and prices spike?
Free market works best when there is elastic demand and supply.
Yes, and it would have worked well if the wholesale market was actually deregulated, instead of pseudo-de-regulated (i.e. badly regulated) like in was in California. The wholesale market is quite elastic. IF distribution companies had the right to make their wholesale purchases from anyone instead of the state run "pool" when Enron pulled their "we have maintenance issues" BS and cut supply the distributors could have just given Enron the finger and purchased their power from elsewhere (lets not forget, if they weren't forced to sell their power generation in the first place they wouldn't have been so beholden to the "pool"). That is the free market at work. Instead, they were forced to purchase from the pool. Enron, et al knew everyone was dependant on them for power, thus the problem.
And don't bother the in deregulated system this kind of fraud would not be possible. Again, that would be true in perfectly elastic system, but power supply, as I said before, is not elastic at all.
Pure bullshit. The power market is elastic. There's a hell of a lot more to the power game than putting juice into your fridge and XBox. Claiming otherwise is courting ignorance.
You do know what happened right? Enron and other energy producers artificially lowered supply by claiming that various power generators were "down for maintenance/fixes" forcing brownouts during the heaviest usage season.
And this was caused by that hyper-capitalistic, laissez faire deregulation that California foisted upon the state... execpt when it isn't. Let's take a look at California's "deregulated market."
a) power companies were forced to split their distribution and power generation businesses. They could keep the distribution buisness, but had to sell the generating buisness (to the like of Enron).
b) California assumed total day-to-day control of the utilities' power grid to make sure they couldn't abuse their market power.
c) Cali required new owners of the generation plants to sell their juice to a state-managed pool, whose prices were set by the state. The distribution companies were forced to purchase their electricty from this pool. They could not go else where for cheaper power.
d) no matter what they paid for the electricity from the pool, the distributers were capped on what they could charge.
So, based on your reasoning, by passing the artificially high prices directly to the consumers would have prevented this fraud from occuring?
No, real deregulation would have kept this fraud from happening . When you force everyone to purchase from a single pool that is supplied by a small subset of generators that is a recipe for total abuse. Cali was about a deregulated as Amtrack. As you say, Econ 101 stuff.
But, if you are correct and deregulation in inself will cause massive, Enron like fraud then please explain how the likes of PA, the UK and other juristictions who have opened their power markets to a much larger degree than California ever did still seem to be purring along quite nicely? Really? How do you explain it?
but I'm not going to complain about it
But there in lies the rub. It doesn't matter what you do, all that matters is that someone will. Take a look at the battles that happen at the local levels in terms of cable licenses (and what can/cannot be carried on them [i.e. Spice channel)), school board curriculum, "disinvestment" initiatives (South Africa in the 80s, Israel today), library filters, etc., etc., etc. People WILL complain, some people WILL get local laws passed restricting access to content, lawsuits WILL be filed and lots of time and money WILL be wasted in the never-ending battle of who gets to police this "community property."
People who are pro-muni wi-fi have buried their head in the sand about these types of issues. Put wi-fi access in the hands of politicians and this is what you will end up with. Mark my words.
How many families that can't honestly afford dial-up (which is all you need for access to the internet) are going to drop a few hundered dollars on a computer? If finances are that tight then dropping a couple of hundred bucks on a computer is going to low down on the "must need" list. Free Wi-Fi has little to do with closing the digital divide then it does giving the middle class a nice, new entitlement. Throwing in the Digital Divide rhetoric just makes it a little more politically paletable.
Have you not been paying attention? power was deregulated in some areas - it resulted in artificially created roving blackouts to give the impression that demand exceeded supply so that price-gouging could occur.
Apparently you haven't been paying that much attention. Most of Cali's problems came from partial deregulation. Wholesale prices were deregulated, but not consumer prices. That's a disaster waiting to happen.
Now, PA has had a much more deregulated power economy. How many rolling blackouts have you seen there? Or in the UK? Just wondering.
But it FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELS good. And that's all that really matters anyway.
Yes, because the digital divide is chock-full of people who are able to afford a laptop/desktop with a wi-fi card, but can't afford basic dial-up service. And as you can imagine, that's a large, large group.
/. Because we all know elected officials never want to block the citizens they represent from information....
...
And slightly OT, but I'm going to laugh very hard and very long when the first "Municipal Wi-Fi blocking content" story hits
well, with kids yeah. We have to protect the kids. And you know how irresposible some parents can be. So lets put a huge filter on porn coming down the pipe. Tax dollars shouldn't pay for porn anyway.
Oh, and smoking. Bad. Very bad. Lets ban any site that promotes smoking. Promotion of all things smoking over publicly financed wi-fi? I think not! You might as well just shove smokes in babies mouths.
What? This site offends the sensiblities of [fill in religious group/cult of choice]? Block them too. We're all fine, upstanding [christians, jews, muslims, hindis, scientologists] and there's no way our community should have to see this.
What? People are going to RELIGIOUS sites? Hasn't anyone heard of the seperation of church and state? If someone wants to cyber-pray let them pay for their own access.
Hate speech. Who doesnt' hate hate speech? Of course! Its gone. ("by the way, what is hate speech?" "Ah.. the devil's in the details")
Wal Mart? Do we really want our citizens helping keep that community killing, baby eating, spawn of satan corperation in business by allowing them to purchase cheap shit over our wi-fi? I think not! If you want to destroy mom and pop shops do it on your own nickel.
Bingo. I remember when I was a spotty teenager working at a Subway the cost of a 32 ounce drink was about 5 cents (and that may be high). I would have actually been lower if instead of using subway branded cups we used Pepsi branded cups. Distributers will actually give you the cups for free if they're Pepsi (or Coke) branded cups. Soft drinks have HUGE margins. A gas station makes about as much profit off of a 32 ounce fountain soda as they do from 10 gallons of gas.
Actually, he didn't predict Apple would move to the x86, he predicted that Apple would move to Intel. The Itanium to be precise.
... all replies in this thread should be in Esperanto!
Considering that this decline has been taking place for a while its been happening during both Republican and Democratic administrations, as well as during Republican and Democrat controlled congresses I think you can safely say this goes beyond the "recent attacks by those big, bad God worshipers". Lets not forget that the Feds don't even have all that much control over individual school districts.
I used to teach math at university and it was shocking how many incoming freshmen did even know the basics of algebra. And this was in a strong Democratic state during a Democratic administration and a Democrat controlled congress. Does that mean that I can lay the blame at the feet of the Democrats?
You want to point fingers? Point them at schools, specifically many public schools where a solid math/science curriculum, let alone a decent learning environment in general, is hard to find. And if "religion" was to blame then how do you explain away the fact that on a whole students of private Catholic schools usually get a better all round education (math and science included) than public school students?
I live in the District, where per student funding is among the highest in the nation and is certainly no hotbed of fundamentalism, but once my kids hit school age you can bet I'll be paying to send my kids to a private Catholic school (and I'm an atheist). Why? Because the schools are shit (there is no other way to put it). And it has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with bad (and corrupt) management, a stifling (not to mention corrupt) teachers' union and a useless (and did I mention corrupt) City gov't. Until recently you could graduate from a DCPS high school without ever taking a math course. And you wonder why things are getting worse?
The "big bad religious folks causing people to get dumber" is about as logical as ID theory (i.e. not) and misses the point: US primary and secondary schools just aren't that good, and some are downright awful. Until *that* changes nothing else will.
A majority of our oil comes from outside the country. Over half of our debt is held by foreign countries, with China buying up more and more each day.
And you point is.....?
So the Chineese gov't owns a lot of the US gov'ts debt. Well, the US makes up the bulk of buyers for Chineese imports. When push comes to shove who would hurt more? The US can always default on their debts (its not like countries haven't done that before) or devalue the Dollar to effectivly cut the "cost" of the debt. Costly? Yes. Economically painful? Certainly. Fatal? No.
On the other hand, cut imports from China and China is in a huge world of hurt. It would be damn near fatal.
Of course, the US Gov't debt problem could be solved if anyone had any balls about cutting the size of a completely wasteful gov't. But the Republicans have dropped all pretenses of being the party of small gov't and joined the Democrats in throwing good money after bad towards any project that'll get them votes.
b.) They (the UN) has the RIGHT to control those dns servers in the first place NOT the USA?
News to me. Where are those rights enumerated and by which body were they passed?
don't think you understand.
You're right, but now I do. Not-so-clever (nor really appropriate) snarkisms posing as deep, intellectual commentary.
There is no such thing as legally ripped.
Well, until the fair-use clause is overturned by law or by court that's going to be a hard arguement to make.
I have over 1,000 CD's that I have legally ripped (since I have purchased the buggers over my lifetime). How does your software determine that they are "legal," as opposed to an mp3 that I could have illegally downloaded off of the net?
The main reason this can't work, is that Google already owns the mindshare of the internet. You can't buy what Google has going for it, IMHO. Consider the mindshare that AOL has...
Mindshare doesn't pay the bills, cold, hard cash does. MS is going after AOL's business (either through purchasing all or part of it, or giving them a sweet deal for switching their search engine to MS) mainly because it'll hurt Google's bottom line. I've seen numbers that indicate that 10% of Google's revenue comes from AOL. While losing it won't be fatal, it will hurt like hell.
I had mentioned this in a previous MS/Google thread. A lot of the posturing by both companies has more to do with "How do I disrupt my competitor's cashflow" than "how do I make more business for myself."