I'm curious why you would use quotes on the term bargain.
I was referencing your comment (which I also quoted), which said "if a company cannot keep it's part of the bargain they should not have made the deal in the first place."
I was referring to the dispute with the BBC, not your school, though your statement "I guess the point is a bit moot though, as the school went out of business before the contract had expired" makes it sound like the school too failed to live up to your ethos of "never make a commitment you can't keep." The school didn't deliver the years of training it had promised. Not their fault, I'm sure, but they probably didn't plan on going out of business when they made the deal.
My larger point about that ethos was that most companies make promises to deliver services based on a reasonable belief they can keep them. If I pre-order a game at Fred's Game Store, and the city and store get demolished by a natural disaster, Fred might have trouble delivering my game. That's not because he's a shady businessman, just that something very unexpected happened to him, so the reasonable expectation he had of delivering my game turned out badly.
A more fitting comparison to the ISP, one that has been used elsewhere in these comments, is banks. If every account holder at Washington Mutual shows up on the same day and takes out all their money, WaMu runs out of money and can't "keep their promises". This doesn't mean WaMu is an untrustworthy company, they're making the same completely reasonable assumption all the other banks are: that the chance of everyone coming in to get their money all at the same time is extremely small, so the deposited money can be used for investments, such as customer loans, and that the rate of income from those investments should match or exceed the rate of withdrawals.
Meanwhile, ISP's offer a promise that they can't really keep, in the worst of cases: "unlimited" use of a 5 Mbps Internet link, for less than what it costs them to obtain 1 Mbps. But that's because they make the completely reasonable assumption that you won't actually use it all the time. Just like it was completely reasonable for WaMu to assume that not everyone would come close out their accounts on the same day.
But now the day has come, and we're all standing in line at the bank, and we're pissed at them for failing to deliver on impossible promises.
Seriously, how many customers would you have (er, keep) if you could not get traffic from...
Right, all the customers would switch to the ISP that can provide a committed, unlimited 6 Mbps link to each of its customers for less than $50/month. Which one is that again?
It's like you found a loophole in the contact with your rental car company that says they'll rent you a shiny luxury car for $2/day. When you point this out to them, they say "I'm sorry, we can't really honor that. To rent you that Jaguar, we'll have to charge at least $100/day." They don't care that you storm off indignantly, threatening to use a different rental company. They didn't want you as a customer if they were going to be losing money on you, and they know that there's no magical company out there that does.
It's tempting to get all combative when you think the greedy evil company promised you some unlimited service, and they fail to provide it. But being indignant or combative isn't going to change the numbers or the facts. The truth is that when a restaurant sells you "All you can eat for $5", that's premised on you being a normal human being who can't consume $50 worth of their food. Companies aren't in business to provide you with $50 worth of service for $5. It just doesn't work.
Maybe this model they're proposing - special large content providers get charged some fee - won't fly. But if it doesn't, something else will have to. The money has to come from somewhere, if not this, then maybe they'll raise your home ISP prices, or throttle you more.
That's not right, if a company cannot keep it's part of the bargain they should not have made the deal in the first place. I'd wager if you read the contract they signed on that "bargain", it says they're free to change the terms whenever they like.
It wouldn't be nearly so difficult as mandating elaborate DRM on the browser side.
Simply put some vital page content within an "ad" tag, so that automated "ad" tag blocking would also block the important content. Then the automated blocking becomes unusable.
Re:Geeks do- everyone else doesn't.
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The DRM Scorecard
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... it also keeps the "moderately lazy but potentially dishonest people honest".
I think the point of the original quote is that the vast majority of "honest" people are actually "moderately lazy but potentially dishonest", as you put it. So to keep the "honest" people honest, put locks on your stuff.
Studies of white-collar crime usually point to "opportunity" as the big determining factor. It's not that there's suddenly a lot of hardcore criminals roaming around. It's just that it's so easy... A couple minor security barriers can make all the difference, they don't have to be perfectly impenetrable.
Trying to apply knowledge of the low-level architecture in high-level programming is a recipe for over-optimization, especially if that code ever gets ported to another architecture.
I realize you didn't make the term up, and I realize it's a problematic reality of programming, but I flinch a little whenever I see the term "over-optimization". It's an oxymoron. By definition, something cannot be over-optimized. If something isn't optimal, then it would benefit from more optimization. If it is optimal already, then no more optimizing can possibly be done.
Yeah, lable me a tin foil hat person, but I'm going to hold out as long as I can
It's not tin-foil-hat paranoia to worry about the government collecting too much personal information. The part where you ask for your shiny chapeau is:
I know you're being sarcastic, but it's not information being free - it's information being collected to control the masses
It is not information being collected to control the masses. That is not the goal, or the reasoning. That's not why the credit card companies and loyalty-card-issuing stores want to collect this info, and that's not why the government wants to see it all. The stores honestly want to market things to you better, so as to make more money. The government honestly wants to stop serious criminals.
You have some very legitimate concerns, but trying to paint the government and the corporations as fascists hungering for domaination won't get you taken seriously, and rightfully so. The big point that needs to be made here is that even with the best of intentions, this sort of centralized power leads to damaging unintended consequences. For example, the RICO act in the US was created to address a very real need to fight organized crime - specifically the Mafia. But now it's being used to fight other organizations (white supremacists, abortion protesters, etc.) And of course it is - if you were a cop trying to stop these people who you felt were doing bad things, you'd use whatever tools you had at your disposal. That's hardly the worst example, and the problem ties into selective enforcement.
With systems like the drug laws in the US, (I know we're talking about a UK story here, but I know the US laws better, so they're my examples) people come to accept that everyone breaks them. Sure, practically everyone smokes pot. It's not a big deal. No one is in a big hurry to go vote or change the laws, 'cause they're not really stopping people from doing what they want. But now, if the local authorities don't like you for some reason - maybe you dated the sheriff's daughter, maybe you protested the war, maybe you're not their favorite race, what have you - now they have something to use against you. If they find out about your pot smoking, they can bust you. Not because their intention is to crack down on drug use, and not because the crafters of the Controlled Substances Act care about the sheriff's daughter or your race, but because the imperfect law met the imperfect law enforcement.
So if you have a friend who thinks this sort of surveillance is a good idea, don't yell at them about how Bush and Blair are fascists who dream about 1984, 'cause they're not, and the only people receptive to that argument are the ones already on your side. Try to make a convincing argument about how unintended consequences in complicated situations can screw up even the best of intentions, and how most reasonably successful governments (including the US and UK ones) are based on the separation of powers. The problem isn't that this is an evil scheme. The problem is that lots of evil comes from earnest schemes.
If this can work in the U.S., presumably it would work even better in the UK with similar internet usage and a much higher population density.
Higher population density is actually an argument against wireless.
Given a particular cell on a particular frequency, there's a shared amount of bandwidth available to all users in that space (11 Mbps with 802.11b, 54 Mbps with 802.11a or 802.11g, though actual throughput is far lower than that). In a very sparse area, like a rural county, it's extremely expensive to run cables, especially fiber cables, out to each person. Meanwhile, there's only a few people to divide up the radio bandwidth. Now for the price of a well-maintained tower, you can feed 500 kbps to 20 people.
Looking at the other extreme, it's not that difficult to get access to telco lines in NYC, since there's tons of fiber and muxes and COs all over the city, and they're not far from each apartment. However, if everyone in the Wall Street area was forced to share 50 Mbps of bandwidth, they'd go crazy.
I'm obviously over-simplifying, but as a general rule, wireless becomes more compelling as population density decreases.
are all suburbs of Dallas. It'd be interesting if the list had more correlation.
I grew up there (five minutes from Carrollton) and would agree that it was a nice combination of:
-near a high population city, so there's stuff to do and good jobs -nice weather (brutal in the middle of summer, but everywhere is well air-conditioned, and the rest of the year is very nice) -low cost of living
Yes, it's the suburbs, so yes it requires a car.
I'm currently living in NYC, and have also lived in upstate New York (Troy/Albany) and in mid New-Jersey (Bloomfied), so it's not like I have no frame of reference.
It's partly the lack of market share. That's offset to a large degree by the extra l33t points accruing to the guy who manages to release the first malware to get widespread penetration into those "invulnerable" systems.
I don't find this argument convincing.
These days, I believe the bulk of viruses and worms and malware are created by spam and DDoS guys. Spam is big money, and DDoS is either blackmail or spite. These aren't the same adolescent guys trying to show how cool they are, these are people who want to control millions of zombies.
I'm not saying that the lack of market share is the only thing OS X has going for it, security wise, but I think market share contributes much more to the motivation of malware makers than "leet points".
Actually, as an otherwise happy FreshDirect customer, I'm also interested in this. Having browsed Amazon's selection, I see quite a few things that I like, but am unable to get from FreshDirect.
They're suggesting things like using less fossil fuels, looking into alternative energy, and reducing pollution and industry waste. I mean you cannot deny that any of these things are positive unless you're an industry shill.
Or unless you have a rudimentary knowledge of economics.
People, countries, and companies are using fossil fuels and producing pollution and waste because it's cheaper than the alternatives. By cheaper, I don't mean "consumes less arbitrary green paper". Money is simply an abstraction for real resources. If a power plant changes to a 20% less efficient generation technology or spends 20% of its productivity cleaning up its output, that's 20% less power for their consumers, which causes the price of that energy to rise until the poorest 20% of the customers can't afford it.
Using fewer fossil fuels is, in and of itself, a good thing, but it has a cost. That cost is measured in billions, if not trillions, of dollars, and represents real impact on both developed and developing nations. To make matters worse, these sort of costs - increase in expense or decrease in availability of common everyday needs like energy - usually hurt the working class more than the rich.
So if it can be shown for sure that the impact of CO2 production is a bigger cost than the "solution", and it's for sure that the proposed amount of CO2 reduction would result in avoiding the climate change problems forseen, then you can get governments on board with taking serious action. It's still going to be challenging to structure those costs and provoke those actions, but at least you'd have the sort of support you're looking for.
In the meantime, since we can't say for 95% sure that our CO2 production is causing the problem, and we can't say for 95% sure that the problem is worse than the solution, and we can't say for 95% sure that the proposed solution would really solve the problem, the people in charge keep talking about how "there's still debate, we're not sure, and we think we should proceed modestly."
1 capitalized : a congregation of the Roman curia having jurisdiction over missionary territories and related institutions
2 : the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person
3 : ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one's cause or to damage an opposing cause; also : a public action having such an effect
Seems to me like it pretty clearly is propaganda. That doesn't necessarily make it false, but it was clearly put there by people who wanted to further their cause and damage an opponent's cause. Whether or not you agree with them has no bearing on whether or not its propaganda.
I don't like the way you portray civil rights and feminist lobbiest, who are mostly out to do good by advancing society.
So are the NRA lobbies you cite. Lots of people are out to do good and end up doing harm. This isn't a "Conservative vs. Liberal" issue, try to resist turning it into one. Government agencies that want to get all Google Search results and push this new censorship law are out to do good. Many believe, however, that their attempt to do good will actually result in harm.
This is the same way the parent poster feels about the feminist and civil rights lobbies. They have only the best of intentions when they try to pass laws restricting free speech, but the parent poster and I feel that the restrictions on free speech do more harm than good.
It's possible to disagree with some group's approach and be concerned at their level of influence and power without thinking them malicious.
You're quick to claim that all regulatory activity is a failure, but using your same (flawed) reasoning, technological remedies have also failed to 'solve' ID theft, viruses, trojans, spam, keyloggers, hacking, international abuses, and so on.
Yes, clearly the unregulated (or minimally regulated) Internet has proven vastly inferior to the legally enforced areas like theft, rape, assault, and murder. It turns out that market forces don't eliminate 100% of problems, whereas clearly government regulation does.
Or, if we drop the sarcasm and extreme oversimplification, we discover that both the mostly lassez-faire world of Internet commerce and the mostly government handled law-enforcement and personal safety realms fail to solve their problems 100%. Yes, viruses exist. This doesn't mean that tech security is a failure.
Up until the big news virus/worm epidemics a year or two back (Blaster, Nachi, Sasser, MyDoom, etc) viruses and worms weren't really that big of a problem. Yes, they existed, yes they infected a couple computers. But that wasn't a big enough problem to justify spending lots of money addressing those issues.
After the big news problems hit, companies started taking computer security more seriously, without govermnent regulation having to tell them to. The very large goverment organization where I work established a Chief Security Officer position and a whole department that hadn't been there before. Even Microsoft started massive pushes to hire better security-conscious programmers and prioritize security. Yes, it will take a while for these things to bear fruit, but large government programs don't move any faster than private ones.
Neither extreme is perfect. Free market security behaviors don't completely eliminate viruses and worms and identity theft, just as government law enforcement doesn't completely eliminate crime. But both approaches do quite well, and as dada points out, the self-instituted corporate responses to computer security flaws have been quite impressive. The number of zero-day exploits remains small. Recent studies show that the vast majority of identity theft never leads to any actual harm. I don't think goverment regulation would significantly improve this area, and would perhaps make it worse.
That doesn't mean that the complete lassez-faire approach solves all problems, but a mostly lassez-faire approach does mostly solve some problems, and it appears that this is one of them.
43 Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, "I tell you the truth, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others.
44 They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything-- all she had to live on."
I hate to disagree with Jesus, but if I was the starving person who relied on those alms to get by, I'd rather have what the rich guy gave.
Selflessness doesn't feed people. Selflessness doesn't clothe people. Selflessness doesn't shelter people.
Economic production does.
A vast engine of production driven by someone only moderately selfless does far more good for the world than a single dollar given by someone already poor.
"How can someone be elected when the majority of people voted against him?"
"Well, it's a republic not a democracy!"
No, this is two separate distinctions. The distinction between Republic and Democracy is:
Democracy - The people make the decisions about how to run the country. These decisions are reflected in votes.
Republic - The people elect the officials who then make decisions without the necessity of further voting by the people.
The distinction you're citing has to do with the electoral college, which is a sort of Republic once-removed, in that the officials aren't even elected directly, but rather indirectly by other elected officials. Since the electoral college has almost no discretion, (if a state voted 90% Democrat, the electors can't just vote Republican because they feel like it) the removal isn't very significant. The discrete sampling is the bigger problem.
You're no longer resolving the vote with a granularity of one. The tiered aggregation of votes allows for many votes to be discarded in the summarization of states. This is indeed a problem, but has nothing to do with republic vs. democracy, nor with left vs. right.
Whether or not they are legally or contractually obliged to doesn't change my observation that the act of going public isn't suddenly the moment when (and not before), magically, the people running the company are suddenly profit-driven and interested in rewarding their investors' good faith.
But it still is.
Sure, it's not 100% pure idealism converted to 100% sociopathic greed instantly, but it's a big difference. With investors, you can do whatever you want, so long as you make enough to repay the investment. You could theoretically make that money back, repay your investors, then spend the rest of the year's profit on ice cream for the children of your employees. With a public company, once you've made a lot of profit, you have a legal obligation to keep trying to make more.
Sure, some private companies can be money grubbing-dicks, and some public companies can be really generous and friendly (so long as they can justify it as a strategy to build long term brand-image and customer loyalty), but the structure governing those two companies is very different, and very significant.
Why do people assume that this is true of publicly held companies, but not true of pre-public companies working off of venture capital and private investment (even, Mom's cash)?
Because that's between you and whoever gave you the cash. If your mom is okay with you sacrificing profitability in order to achiveve philanthropy/enjoyment/cheese, then more power to you. If it's your money to begin with, then spend it however you like. If you got a loan from someone you don't know (say a bank or venture capitalist), then any power they have over you is made explicit in that loan agreement, and it's possible (however unlikely) that you could get such an agreement without the obligation to focus your company on profit.
With public companies, you don't specifically negotiate your responsibilities with your investors. You have implicit responsibilities to your shareholders and they are codified in law, not just in your specific contracts.
The latter two are excellent points, but I take issue with the first:
It can always borrow against the State, then recoup through taxes, so it doesn't need the money in advance. A private hospital can't do that.
Sure it can. Private companies that are useful but currently losing money can borrow money and repay later when their profits improve. It happens all the time.
Welcome to customer service. Some customers are jerks, and you have to put up with them. That's why the customer is paying, and you're being paid. If Indian CSRs don't want to take the calls, they should go find other jobs, and the jerk American customers will be talking to expensive American workers again.
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I was referencing your comment (which I also quoted), which said "if a company cannot keep it's part of the bargain they should not have made the deal in the first place."
I was referring to the dispute with the BBC, not your school, though your statement "I guess the point is a bit moot though, as the school went out of business before the contract had expired" makes it sound like the school too failed to live up to your ethos of "never make a commitment you can't keep." The school didn't deliver the years of training it had promised. Not their fault, I'm sure, but they probably didn't plan on going out of business when they made the deal.
My larger point about that ethos was that most companies make promises to deliver services based on a reasonable belief they can keep them. If I pre-order a game at Fred's Game Store, and the city and store get demolished by a natural disaster, Fred might have trouble delivering my game. That's not because he's a shady businessman, just that something very unexpected happened to him, so the reasonable expectation he had of delivering my game turned out badly.
A more fitting comparison to the ISP, one that has been used elsewhere in these comments, is banks. If every account holder at Washington Mutual shows up on the same day and takes out all their money, WaMu runs out of money and can't "keep their promises". This doesn't mean WaMu is an untrustworthy company, they're making the same completely reasonable assumption all the other banks are: that the chance of everyone coming in to get their money all at the same time is extremely small, so the deposited money can be used for investments, such as customer loans, and that the rate of income from those investments should match or exceed the rate of withdrawals.
Meanwhile, ISP's offer a promise that they can't really keep, in the worst of cases: "unlimited" use of a 5 Mbps Internet link, for less than what it costs them to obtain 1 Mbps. But that's because they make the completely reasonable assumption that you won't actually use it all the time. Just like it was completely reasonable for WaMu to assume that not everyone would come close out their accounts on the same day.
But now the day has come, and we're all standing in line at the bank, and we're pissed at them for failing to deliver on impossible promises.
Right, all the customers would switch to the ISP that can provide a committed, unlimited 6 Mbps link to each of its customers for less than $50/month. Which one is that again?
It's like you found a loophole in the contact with your rental car company that says they'll rent you a shiny luxury car for $2/day. When you point this out to them, they say "I'm sorry, we can't really honor that. To rent you that Jaguar, we'll have to charge at least $100/day." They don't care that you storm off indignantly, threatening to use a different rental company. They didn't want you as a customer if they were going to be losing money on you, and they know that there's no magical company out there that does.
It's tempting to get all combative when you think the greedy evil company promised you some unlimited service, and they fail to provide it. But being indignant or combative isn't going to change the numbers or the facts. The truth is that when a restaurant sells you "All you can eat for $5", that's premised on you being a normal human being who can't consume $50 worth of their food. Companies aren't in business to provide you with $50 worth of service for $5. It just doesn't work.
Maybe this model they're proposing - special large content providers get charged some fee - won't fly. But if it doesn't, something else will have to. The money has to come from somewhere, if not this, then maybe they'll raise your home ISP prices, or throttle you more.
It wouldn't be nearly so difficult as mandating elaborate DRM on the browser side.
Simply put some vital page content within an "ad" tag, so that automated "ad" tag blocking would also block the important content. Then the automated blocking becomes unusable.
... it also keeps the "moderately lazy but potentially dishonest people honest".I think the point of the original quote is that the vast majority of "honest" people are actually "moderately lazy but potentially dishonest", as you put it. So to keep the "honest" people honest, put locks on your stuff.
Studies of white-collar crime usually point to "opportunity" as the big determining factor. It's not that there's suddenly a lot of hardcore criminals roaming around. It's just that it's so easy... A couple minor security barriers can make all the difference, they don't have to be perfectly impenetrable.
Trying to apply knowledge of the low-level architecture in high-level programming is a recipe for over-optimization, especially if that code ever gets ported to another architecture.
I realize you didn't make the term up, and I realize it's a problematic reality of programming, but I flinch a little whenever I see the term "over-optimization". It's an oxymoron. By definition, something cannot be over-optimized. If something isn't optimal, then it would benefit from more optimization. If it is optimal already, then no more optimizing can possibly be done.
Yeah, lable me a tin foil hat person, but I'm going to hold out as long as I can
It's not tin-foil-hat paranoia to worry about the government collecting too much personal information. The part where you ask for your shiny chapeau is:
I know you're being sarcastic, but it's not information being free - it's information being collected to control the masses
It is not information being collected to control the masses. That is not the goal, or the reasoning. That's not why the credit card companies and loyalty-card-issuing stores want to collect this info, and that's not why the government wants to see it all. The stores honestly want to market things to you better, so as to make more money. The government honestly wants to stop serious criminals.
You have some very legitimate concerns, but trying to paint the government and the corporations as fascists hungering for domaination won't get you taken seriously, and rightfully so. The big point that needs to be made here is that even with the best of intentions, this sort of centralized power leads to damaging unintended consequences. For example, the RICO act in the US was created to address a very real need to fight organized crime - specifically the Mafia. But now it's being used to fight other organizations (white supremacists, abortion protesters, etc.) And of course it is - if you were a cop trying to stop these people who you felt were doing bad things, you'd use whatever tools you had at your disposal. That's hardly the worst example, and the problem ties into selective enforcement.
With systems like the drug laws in the US, (I know we're talking about a UK story here, but I know the US laws better, so they're my examples) people come to accept that everyone breaks them. Sure, practically everyone smokes pot. It's not a big deal. No one is in a big hurry to go vote or change the laws, 'cause they're not really stopping people from doing what they want. But now, if the local authorities don't like you for some reason - maybe you dated the sheriff's daughter, maybe you protested the war, maybe you're not their favorite race, what have you - now they have something to use against you. If they find out about your pot smoking, they can bust you. Not because their intention is to crack down on drug use, and not because the crafters of the Controlled Substances Act care about the sheriff's daughter or your race, but because the imperfect law met the imperfect law enforcement.
So if you have a friend who thinks this sort of surveillance is a good idea, don't yell at them about how Bush and Blair are fascists who dream about 1984, 'cause they're not, and the only people receptive to that argument are the ones already on your side. Try to make a convincing argument about how unintended consequences in complicated situations can screw up even the best of intentions, and how most reasonably successful governments (including the US and UK ones) are based on the separation of powers. The problem isn't that this is an evil scheme. The problem is that lots of evil comes from earnest schemes.
If this can work in the U.S., presumably it would work even better in the UK with similar internet usage and a much higher population density.
Higher population density is actually an argument against wireless.
Given a particular cell on a particular frequency, there's a shared amount of bandwidth available to all users in that space (11 Mbps with 802.11b, 54 Mbps with 802.11a or 802.11g, though actual throughput is far lower than that). In a very sparse area, like a rural county, it's extremely expensive to run cables, especially fiber cables, out to each person. Meanwhile, there's only a few people to divide up the radio bandwidth. Now for the price of a well-maintained tower, you can feed 500 kbps to 20 people.
Looking at the other extreme, it's not that difficult to get access to telco lines in NYC, since there's tons of fiber and muxes and COs all over the city, and they're not far from each apartment. However, if everyone in the Wall Street area was forced to share 50 Mbps of bandwidth, they'd go crazy.
I'm obviously over-simplifying, but as a general rule, wireless becomes more compelling as population density decreases.
Interestingly enough:
11. Plano, TX 250,100
15. Richardson, TX 99,200
19. Carrollton, TX 124,700
are all suburbs of Dallas.
It'd be interesting if the list had more correlation.
I grew up there (five minutes from Carrollton) and would agree that it was a nice combination of:
-near a high population city, so there's stuff to do and good jobs
-nice weather (brutal in the middle of summer, but everywhere is well air-conditioned, and the rest of the year is very nice)
-low cost of living
Yes, it's the suburbs, so yes it requires a car.
I'm currently living in NYC, and have also lived in upstate New York (Troy/Albany) and in mid New-Jersey (Bloomfied), so it's not like I have no frame of reference.
I don't find this argument convincing.
These days, I believe the bulk of viruses and worms and malware are created by spam and DDoS guys. Spam is big money, and DDoS is either blackmail or spite. These aren't the same adolescent guys trying to show how cool they are, these are people who want to control millions of zombies.
I'm not saying that the lack of market share is the only thing OS X has going for it, security wise, but I think market share contributes much more to the motivation of malware makers than "leet points".
If the director had a secure password then it would not have been a big deal.
Nope.
It was a table of hashes. Dictionary attack is fast, but a rainbow table wouldn't have taken much longer.
Actually, as an otherwise happy FreshDirect customer, I'm also interested in this. Having browsed Amazon's selection, I see quite a few things that I like, but am unable to get from FreshDirect.
They're suggesting things like using less fossil fuels, looking into alternative energy, and reducing pollution and industry waste. I mean you cannot deny that any of these things are positive unless you're an industry shill.
Or unless you have a rudimentary knowledge of economics.
People, countries, and companies are using fossil fuels and producing pollution and waste because it's cheaper than the alternatives. By cheaper, I don't mean "consumes less arbitrary green paper". Money is simply an abstraction for real resources. If a power plant changes to a 20% less efficient generation technology or spends 20% of its productivity cleaning up its output, that's 20% less power for their consumers, which causes the price of that energy to rise until the poorest 20% of the customers can't afford it.
Using fewer fossil fuels is, in and of itself, a good thing, but it has a cost. That cost is measured in billions, if not trillions, of dollars, and represents real impact on both developed and developing nations. To make matters worse, these sort of costs - increase in expense or decrease in availability of common everyday needs like energy - usually hurt the working class more than the rich.
So if it can be shown for sure that the impact of CO2 production is a bigger cost than the "solution", and it's for sure that the proposed amount of CO2 reduction would result in avoiding the climate change problems forseen, then you can get governments on board with taking serious action. It's still going to be challenging to structure those costs and provoke those actions, but at least you'd have the sort of support you're looking for.
In the meantime, since we can't say for 95% sure that our CO2 production is causing the problem, and we can't say for 95% sure that the problem is worse than the solution, and we can't say for 95% sure that the proposed solution would really solve the problem, the people in charge keep talking about how "there's still debate, we're not sure, and we think we should proceed modestly."
Because UWB is better and higher-bandwidth than 802.11a/b/g.
If Kerry looks better than Bush on Wikipedia, it likely isn't due to "propaganda".
Propaganda. noun.
1 capitalized : a congregation of the Roman curia having jurisdiction over missionary territories and related institutions
2 : the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person
3 : ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one's cause or to damage an opposing cause; also : a public action having such an effect
Seems to me like it pretty clearly is propaganda. That doesn't necessarily make it false, but it was clearly put there by people who wanted to further their cause and damage an opponent's cause. Whether or not you agree with them has no bearing on whether or not its propaganda.
I don't like the way you portray civil rights and feminist lobbiest, who are mostly out to do good by advancing society.
So are the NRA lobbies you cite. Lots of people are out to do good and end up doing harm. This isn't a "Conservative vs. Liberal" issue, try to resist turning it into one. Government agencies that want to get all Google Search results and push this new censorship law are out to do good. Many believe, however, that their attempt to do good will actually result in harm.
This is the same way the parent poster feels about the feminist and civil rights lobbies. They have only the best of intentions when they try to pass laws restricting free speech, but the parent poster and I feel that the restrictions on free speech do more harm than good.
It's possible to disagree with some group's approach and be concerned at their level of influence and power without thinking them malicious.
You're quick to claim that all regulatory activity is a failure, but using your same (flawed) reasoning, technological remedies have also failed to 'solve' ID theft, viruses, trojans, spam, keyloggers, hacking, international abuses, and so on.
Yes, clearly the unregulated (or minimally regulated) Internet has proven vastly inferior to the legally enforced areas like theft, rape, assault, and murder. It turns out that market forces don't eliminate 100% of problems, whereas clearly government regulation does.
Or, if we drop the sarcasm and extreme oversimplification, we discover that both the mostly lassez-faire world of Internet commerce and the mostly government handled law-enforcement and personal safety realms fail to solve their problems 100%. Yes, viruses exist. This doesn't mean that tech security is a failure.
Up until the big news virus/worm epidemics a year or two back (Blaster, Nachi, Sasser, MyDoom, etc) viruses and worms weren't really that big of a problem. Yes, they existed, yes they infected a couple computers. But that wasn't a big enough problem to justify spending lots of money addressing those issues.
After the big news problems hit, companies started taking computer security more seriously, without govermnent regulation having to tell them to. The very large goverment organization where I work established a Chief Security Officer position and a whole department that hadn't been there before. Even Microsoft started massive pushes to hire better security-conscious programmers and prioritize security. Yes, it will take a while for these things to bear fruit, but large government programs don't move any faster than private ones.
Neither extreme is perfect. Free market security behaviors don't completely eliminate viruses and worms and identity theft, just as government law enforcement doesn't completely eliminate crime. But both approaches do quite well, and as dada points out, the self-instituted corporate responses to computer security flaws have been quite impressive. The number of zero-day exploits remains small. Recent studies show that the vast majority of identity theft never leads to any actual harm. I don't think goverment regulation would significantly improve this area, and would perhaps make it worse.
That doesn't mean that the complete lassez-faire approach solves all problems, but a mostly lassez-faire approach does mostly solve some problems, and it appears that this is one of them.
43 Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, "I tell you the truth, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others.
44 They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything-- all she had to live on."
I hate to disagree with Jesus, but if I was the starving person who relied on those alms to get by, I'd rather have what the rich guy gave.
Selflessness doesn't feed people. Selflessness doesn't clothe people. Selflessness doesn't shelter people.
Economic production does.
A vast engine of production driven by someone only moderately selfless does far more good for the world than a single dollar given by someone already poor.
"How can someone be elected when the majority of people voted against him?"
"Well, it's a republic not a democracy!"
No, this is two separate distinctions. The distinction between Republic and Democracy is:
Democracy - The people make the decisions about how to run the country. These decisions are reflected in votes.
Republic - The people elect the officials who then make decisions without the necessity of further voting by the people.
The distinction you're citing has to do with the electoral college, which is a sort of Republic once-removed, in that the officials aren't even elected directly, but rather indirectly by other elected officials. Since the electoral college has almost no discretion, (if a state voted 90% Democrat, the electors can't just vote Republican because they feel like it) the removal isn't very significant. The discrete sampling is the bigger problem.
You're no longer resolving the vote with a granularity of one. The tiered aggregation of votes allows for many votes to be discarded in the summarization of states. This is indeed a problem, but has nothing to do with republic vs. democracy, nor with left vs. right.
Whether or not they are legally or contractually obliged to doesn't change my observation that the act of going public isn't suddenly the moment when (and not before), magically, the people running the company are suddenly profit-driven and interested in rewarding their investors' good faith.
But it still is.
Sure, it's not 100% pure idealism converted to 100% sociopathic greed instantly, but it's a big difference. With investors, you can do whatever you want, so long as you make enough to repay the investment. You could theoretically make that money back, repay your investors, then spend the rest of the year's profit on ice cream for the children of your employees. With a public company, once you've made a lot of profit, you have a legal obligation to keep trying to make more.
Sure, some private companies can be money grubbing-dicks, and some public companies can be really generous and friendly (so long as they can justify it as a strategy to build long term brand-image and customer loyalty), but the structure governing those two companies is very different, and very significant.
Why do people assume that this is true of publicly held companies, but not true of pre-public companies working off of venture capital and private investment (even, Mom's cash)?
Because that's between you and whoever gave you the cash. If your mom is okay with you sacrificing profitability in order to achiveve philanthropy/enjoyment/cheese, then more power to you. If it's your money to begin with, then spend it however you like. If you got a loan from someone you don't know (say a bank or venture capitalist), then any power they have over you is made explicit in that loan agreement, and it's possible (however unlikely) that you could get such an agreement without the obligation to focus your company on profit.
With public companies, you don't specifically negotiate your responsibilities with your investors. You have implicit responsibilities to your shareholders and they are codified in law, not just in your specific contracts.
Please post again when it's a platform at Yahoo, rather than a platform decision.
Or name another huge website running PHP right now. Either method should be valid.
The latter two are excellent points, but I take issue with the first:
It can always borrow against the State, then recoup through taxes, so it doesn't need the money in advance. A private hospital can't do that.
Sure it can. Private companies that are useful but currently losing money can borrow money and repay later when their profits improve. It happens all the time.
the map in question.
its ok. they dont want to take your calls either.
Welcome to customer service. Some customers are jerks, and you have to put up with them. That's why the customer is paying, and you're being paid. If Indian CSRs don't want to take the calls, they should go find other jobs, and the jerk American customers will be talking to expensive American workers again.