I don't know about the USA, but the last time I was looking to buy a phone, my phone company was willing to give me an interest free loan for 2 years, and give me a cheaper plan than I would have gotten had I kept my old phone. It did surprise me a little, but I reckon they get to make a profit on the upfront sale, so they are happy to sell a phone to me at cost, and they probably can borrow very cheaply, so they weren't even bothered to charge interest on the upfront loan.
So it is not always as clear cut, but then again, I live in the UK where there is actual competition between the phone networks (Vodafone, O2, Orange/T-Mobile and Three).
What is clear is that it is not always the no-brainer that the article makes it out to be.
If you think buying a car and an institution buying a large number of shares in the markets are anything alike (asides from exchanging cash for an asset), then you are hopelessly misinformed.
This isn't predicting the markets. This is gaming them. If I know that a big pension fund want to buy Apple stock, having gleaned this information from unfulfilled orders on some exchanges, I can go out and quickly buy some Apple stock, and then almost immediately sell it to the fund. Why should we allow HFTers to have information before the rest of us. They should wait in line like everyone else. Why can't orders be queued so that the last to place and order is the last to have it filled. And why can't we impose a delay (even a random one) to ensure that one cannot jump ahead of the queue by going to other markets to find the same shares when they find out that someone else is looking for shares.
Yeah, because breaking the law in and of itself is never justifiable, right? As far as lives go, you'd have to offset the number of denied 911 calls that would've saved someone against the number of accidents he prevented by denying cellnet access to all those childadult accidents-waiting-to-happen. Really, it goes either way, and I'll bet the difference he made either way was negligible.
As far as critical infrastructure goes, it should be hardwired, with RF as an emergency fallback. It seems everyone, including emergency responders, politicians, and, apparently, even some technophiles here, need to realize these things are radios first, computers second, and phones/cameras/whatever a distant last. If it's important, hardwire it. If it's important and sensitive, hardwire and crypt it. If you cant hardwire it, then plan the necessary contingencies for when service is denied. Radio is not a guaranteed service. Deal with it. Frankly, the fact that so much already depends on the shitty, overpriced cell nets concerns me more than some guy with too much time on his hands. The fact he was able to do it should be a wake up call, but of course it won't. It'll just result in harsher penalties from lawyer-politicians who think the law defines reality. Meanwhile, the technologies deployed won't change one iota.
The fact that a service cannot be guaranteed does not give someone the right to sabotage it. Everything we depend on in society depends in part on society agreeing that we behave in certain ways, including not sabotaging services that we depend on as society. This is why we don't allow people to pollute rivers unnecessarily, we don't allow people to fly their aircraft without agreeing to obey the instructions of air traffic control etc.
There was a time when hard-line services would not have been considered essential - when just two people had telephones for example, and quite possibly for a long time after that. That changes when people began to depend on them, and one could argue that people now depend on wireless services in the same way.
Hardwires can also be cut (see recent tornadoes) and wireless service may be a lot easier an quicker to restore in emergency situations.
70% (and now possibly more) of emergency calls are now done using wireless devices, so the argument that we should not depend on them is incredibly silly and shortsighted at best.
Smart meters and thermometers could allow smarter uses of electricity, e.g., at peak times, if your temperature is only marginally above the set temperature, your AC could be switched off automatically. If you are way above the set temperature, the utility would let you keep using your AC until it comes down to a comfortable temperature.
You could even have peak pricing, and maybe you could instruct your AC to only turn on when the price per unit of electricity is below a certain level, unless your house is too hot.
This could be preferable to building excess capacity which will hit your bills, even when you are not using it.
A failing road car stops on the road. Not always ideal, but generally a controllable event. A failing flying car drops out of the sky. Therefore it has to be orders of magnitude more reliable than your typical car.
Countries around the world have systems in place to control the airspace. Can you imagine how difficult/impossible this task would be with a million cars potentially in the air at the same time.
A flying car belongs in the science fiction category for good reasons.
The use of the word "rights" really bugs me. There are universal rights which most people agree to, and which, for the most part, do not require third parties to recognise to give effect to them. Free speech is one such. You speak, and the state may not stop you. Freedom is another. The state may not take you and throw you in Guantanamo without due cause.
Everything else is a privilege bestowed by society.
A demotion can also be a constructive dismissal as well. Very few, CEOs accept demotions that they are pressured into. Even without taking away a cent in his salary, bonus and benefits, you may still have the conditions for constructive dismissal.
The employees knowingly put their own company in a difficult position by demanding, on twitter, for the resignation of their CEO. Of course you can't just fire the CEO. But you can make his position untenable, which is what this employee did.
Many powerful people may now use this as a way to get rid of the rules around funding for political causes because there will now be evidence that people can be "persecuted" for possessing contrary views in a political debate. And I can see judges agreeing with it.
So the end result will be that in the future billionaires like the Koch brothers will be able to anonymously fund their pet political causes. And this WILL happen because someone took advantage of a rule that was intended to stop the wealthy from subverting the political process. Now we have evidence that those rules can now be used to suppress dissenting opinion and therefore they are fair game to be challenged.
If I was an ultra right-wing lawyer, I might just be going to the Supreme Court to demand that wealthy people be allowed to anonymously commit unlimited amounts of money to political causes of their choosing.
Reductio ad absurdum (yes I know what that means, and it applies here). You charged that Baidu choosing to "censor" (in quotes because the word doesn't really apply here) blocks access to information. I applied your reasoning to a situation in which another person might choose not to provide information (theoretical person being quizzed by a Nazi).
Both are refusing to provide information to fulfil the request (one using technical means, and the other by refusing to remember). In a free society, unless you have a very selective value system, you cannot call one censorship and the other, well, whatever you decide to call it.
Freedom of speech means exactly what if says. You are free to say what you want. You cannot be compelled to say what you don't want to say. You can't have "freedom of speech" if you are not free to not speak. Therefore Baidu can't be accused of censorship because they are not preventing any speech. They are just choosing not to provide a platform for certain "speeches" and those speakers are free to speak on any other platform of their choosing.
Baidu cannot be accused of censorship any more than Fox News or MSNBC could be accused of censorship.
I just commented on your use of the word bigot. I am having "fun" reading the comments. I couldn't care less what the CEO of Mozilla says or thinks and what causes he chooses to donate to. It's not going to stop using the Mozilla browser any less than the fact that Tim Cook is (allegedly) gay could cause me to abandon Apple products (it won't).
So I guess that make me rather tolerant, or maybe just indifferent. But I don't go around calling people bigots. Maybe I just have better manners. Or maybe I don't think hiding behind a keyboard gives me license to be uncivil.
If I was the CEO, I would contact the said employee and let him/her know that if they couldn't work for Mozilla because I was the CEO, then I would gladly accept their resignations.
Let us assume that he is let go because of this. Why stop at the CEO? Why not the COO, the CIO and the CFO? And the management level below that? Soon, maybe we are demanding that companies audit their employees to make sure there are none whose views you find objectionable.
Why not go down all the way to the janitor? Basically, if anyone ever expresses a thought that is at odds with the contemporary thinking, they should be barred from any job, because, well, you don't want to support a company that employs bigots right? Because the CEO is just a job holder. He is doing a job which he was given, not because he passes some litmus test on his personal political views.
Why end there? Why not ask every potential employee what their views on every topic you might find objectionable to ensure that you don't employ the wrong sort of people?
I'd hate to live in a country where I am only allowed to earn a living if I have the correct thoughts and the correct political affiliations.
Sometimes I think "bigot" is the new "communist". Anyone who disagrees with the now accepted position is a bigot (which incidentally means you can't have a reasoned discussion with them).
MEPs are not only for election periods. They represent UK constituents throughout their term of office. While the UK populace may feel the EU parliament to be an irrelevancy and a nuisance, the representation of UKIP on air is entirely consistent with their electoral mandate. I for one would not want the BBC to be deciding on our behalf (or on anyone else's behalf) than the EU is irrelevant, and thus it is not necessary to give airtime to the UK's representatives to the EU.
Secondly, as I explained, UKIP chooses to have one strong personality representing their views on air. That is their prerogative. And if Question Time is going to represent politicians fairly, somewhat in proportion to their mandate, you are going to see Nigel Farage more frequently than other for the simple reason that his party chooses him to attend Question Time rather than any of their other MEPs.
I am not a UKIP supporter. But they do have more MEPs than the Greens. And they also have one really recognisable face, so you are going to see him more than you see an average MP from other parties.
I don't know who views a phone as a status symbol any more. It sounds to me like you are projecting your biases onto people who own these phones and who you think consider them to be status symbols.
Apple sold in excess of 150m iPhones last year. That might be more than the total number of Mercedes Benz, BMW and Audi cars ever produced. iPhones are everywhere one looks. No one, even the most rabid fans, considers them to be status symbols. People might consider them to be fashionable, but that is very different from being a status symbol.
Yes, built by black people with painstaking effort.
So disproved your rubbish claim with just two examples from Zimbabwe alone. There are lots of examples from Zimbabwe, and I would bet there are lots more elsewhere in Africa.
So, you are not only racist, but ignorant as well. Actually, I think the last statement was _almost_ a tautology.
Not if the thief is caught. The insurer does blame the victim, The insurer just incentivises safer and more secure behaviour as a way to keep premiums down among other things. Insurers couldn't care less if stuff gets stolen, as long as the premium rates reflect the actual level of risk.
The truth is 99% of the population understand the word "hacker" to mean some nefarious nerd (or Angelina Jolie) sitting in some basement somewhere doing bad stuff remotely on other people's systems. So you either educate the 99%, or you just figure this is not a battle worth fighting.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about the USA, but the last time I was looking to buy a phone, my phone company was willing to give me an interest free loan for 2 years, and give me a cheaper plan than I would have gotten had I kept my old phone. It did surprise me a little, but I reckon they get to make a profit on the upfront sale, so they are happy to sell a phone to me at cost, and they probably can borrow very cheaply, so they weren't even bothered to charge interest on the upfront loan.
So it is not always as clear cut, but then again, I live in the UK where there is actual competition between the phone networks (Vodafone, O2, Orange/T-Mobile and Three).
What is clear is that it is not always the no-brainer that the article makes it out to be.
If you think buying a car and an institution buying a large number of shares in the markets are anything alike (asides from exchanging cash for an asset), then you are hopelessly misinformed.
This isn't predicting the markets. This is gaming them. If I know that a big pension fund want to buy Apple stock, having gleaned this information from unfulfilled orders on some exchanges, I can go out and quickly buy some Apple stock, and then almost immediately sell it to the fund. Why should we allow HFTers to have information before the rest of us. They should wait in line like everyone else. Why can't orders be queued so that the last to place and order is the last to have it filled. And why can't we impose a delay (even a random one) to ensure that one cannot jump ahead of the queue by going to other markets to find the same shares when they find out that someone else is looking for shares.
Yeah, because breaking the law in and of itself is never justifiable, right? As far as lives go, you'd have to offset the number of denied 911 calls that would've saved someone against the number of accidents he prevented by denying cellnet access to all those childadult accidents-waiting-to-happen. Really, it goes either way, and I'll bet the difference he made either way was negligible.
As far as critical infrastructure goes, it should be hardwired, with RF as an emergency fallback. It seems everyone, including emergency responders, politicians, and, apparently, even some technophiles here, need to realize these things are radios first, computers second, and phones/cameras/whatever a distant last. If it's important, hardwire it. If it's important and sensitive, hardwire and crypt it. If you cant hardwire it, then plan the necessary contingencies for when service is denied. Radio is not a guaranteed service. Deal with it. Frankly, the fact that so much already depends on the shitty, overpriced cell nets concerns me more than some guy with too much time on his hands. The fact he was able to do it should be a wake up call, but of course it won't. It'll just result in harsher penalties from lawyer-politicians who think the law defines reality. Meanwhile, the technologies deployed won't change one iota.
The fact that a service cannot be guaranteed does not give someone the right to sabotage it. Everything we depend on in society depends in part on society agreeing that we behave in certain ways, including not sabotaging services that we depend on as society. This is why we don't allow people to pollute rivers unnecessarily, we don't allow people to fly their aircraft without agreeing to obey the instructions of air traffic control etc.
There was a time when hard-line services would not have been considered essential - when just two people had telephones for example, and quite possibly for a long time after that. That changes when people began to depend on them, and one could argue that people now depend on wireless services in the same way.
Hardwires can also be cut (see recent tornadoes) and wireless service may be a lot easier an quicker to restore in emergency situations.
70% (and now possibly more) of emergency calls are now done using wireless devices, so the argument that we should not depend on them is incredibly silly and shortsighted at best.
You are not thinking far enough.
Smart meters and thermometers could allow smarter uses of electricity, e.g., at peak times, if your temperature is only marginally above the set temperature, your AC could be switched off automatically. If you are way above the set temperature, the utility would let you keep using your AC until it comes down to a comfortable temperature.
You could even have peak pricing, and maybe you could instruct your AC to only turn on when the price per unit of electricity is below a certain level, unless your house is too hot.
This could be preferable to building excess capacity which will hit your bills, even when you are not using it.
Don't know if you are serious...
A failing road car stops on the road. Not always ideal, but generally a controllable event. A failing flying car drops out of the sky. Therefore it has to be orders of magnitude more reliable than your typical car.
Countries around the world have systems in place to control the airspace. Can you imagine how difficult/impossible this task would be with a million cars potentially in the air at the same time.
A flying car belongs in the science fiction category for good reasons.
The use of the word "rights" really bugs me. There are universal rights which most people agree to, and which, for the most part, do not require third parties to recognise to give effect to them. Free speech is one such. You speak, and the state may not stop you. Freedom is another. The state may not take you and throw you in Guantanamo without due cause.
Everything else is a privilege bestowed by society.
A demotion can also be a constructive dismissal as well. Very few, CEOs accept demotions that they are pressured into. Even without taking away a cent in his salary, bonus and benefits, you may still have the conditions for constructive dismissal.
...No.
(What was the question again?)
That is sophistry.
The employees knowingly put their own company in a difficult position by demanding, on twitter, for the resignation of their CEO. Of course you can't just fire the CEO. But you can make his position untenable, which is what this employee did.
The ramifications could be even worse.
Many powerful people may now use this as a way to get rid of the rules around funding for political causes because there will now be evidence that people can be "persecuted" for possessing contrary views in a political debate. And I can see judges agreeing with it.
So the end result will be that in the future billionaires like the Koch brothers will be able to anonymously fund their pet political causes. And this WILL happen because someone took advantage of a rule that was intended to stop the wealthy from subverting the political process. Now we have evidence that those rules can now be used to suppress dissenting opinion and therefore they are fair game to be challenged.
If I was an ultra right-wing lawyer, I might just be going to the Supreme Court to demand that wealthy people be allowed to anonymously commit unlimited amounts of money to political causes of their choosing.
Reductio ad absurdum (yes I know what that means, and it applies here). You charged that Baidu choosing to "censor" (in quotes because the word doesn't really apply here) blocks access to information. I applied your reasoning to a situation in which another person might choose not to provide information (theoretical person being quizzed by a Nazi).
Both are refusing to provide information to fulfil the request (one using technical means, and the other by refusing to remember). In a free society, unless you have a very selective value system, you cannot call one censorship and the other, well, whatever you decide to call it.
Freedom of speech means exactly what if says. You are free to say what you want. You cannot be compelled to say what you don't want to say. You can't have "freedom of speech" if you are not free to not speak. Therefore Baidu can't be accused of censorship because they are not preventing any speech. They are just choosing not to provide a platform for certain "speeches" and those speakers are free to speak on any other platform of their choosing.
Baidu cannot be accused of censorship any more than Fox News or MSNBC could be accused of censorship.
I just commented on your use of the word bigot. I am having "fun" reading the comments. I couldn't care less what the CEO of Mozilla says or thinks and what causes he chooses to donate to. It's not going to stop using the Mozilla browser any less than the fact that Tim Cook is (allegedly) gay could cause me to abandon Apple products (it won't).
So I guess that make me rather tolerant, or maybe just indifferent. But I don't go around calling people bigots. Maybe I just have better manners. Or maybe I don't think hiding behind a keyboard gives me license to be uncivil.
And so you prove my point.
Anyone who calls the person they are debating with a bigot doesn't really want a debate or a discussion.
Are gay people who oppose polygamy and polyandry bigots?
By your reasoning, anyone who refused to tell the Nazis where any Jews were hiding was practicing censorship.
If I was the CEO, I would contact the said employee and let him/her know that if they couldn't work for Mozilla because I was the CEO, then I would gladly accept their resignations.
Well, that is up to you, but where does it end?
Let us assume that he is let go because of this. Why stop at the CEO? Why not the COO, the CIO and the CFO? And the management level below that? Soon, maybe we are demanding that companies audit their employees to make sure there are none whose views you find objectionable.
Why not go down all the way to the janitor? Basically, if anyone ever expresses a thought that is at odds with the contemporary thinking, they should be barred from any job, because, well, you don't want to support a company that employs bigots right? Because the CEO is just a job holder. He is doing a job which he was given, not because he passes some litmus test on his personal political views.
Why end there? Why not ask every potential employee what their views on every topic you might find objectionable to ensure that you don't employ the wrong sort of people?
I'd hate to live in a country where I am only allowed to earn a living if I have the correct thoughts and the correct political affiliations.
Your views are scary.
Sometimes I think "bigot" is the new "communist". Anyone who disagrees with the now accepted position is a bigot (which incidentally means you can't have a reasoned discussion with them).
MEPs are not only for election periods. They represent UK constituents throughout their term of office. While the UK populace may feel the EU parliament to be an irrelevancy and a nuisance, the representation of UKIP on air is entirely consistent with their electoral mandate. I for one would not want the BBC to be deciding on our behalf (or on anyone else's behalf) than the EU is irrelevant, and thus it is not necessary to give airtime to the UK's representatives to the EU.
Secondly, as I explained, UKIP chooses to have one strong personality representing their views on air. That is their prerogative. And if Question Time is going to represent politicians fairly, somewhat in proportion to their mandate, you are going to see Nigel Farage more frequently than other for the simple reason that his party chooses him to attend Question Time rather than any of their other MEPs.
I am not a UKIP supporter. But they do have more MEPs than the Greens. And they also have one really recognisable face, so you are going to see him more than you see an average MP from other parties.
No conspiracy here.
I don't know who views a phone as a status symbol any more. It sounds to me like you are projecting your biases onto people who own these phones and who you think consider them to be status symbols.
Apple sold in excess of 150m iPhones last year. That might be more than the total number of Mercedes Benz, BMW and Audi cars ever produced. iPhones are everywhere one looks. No one, even the most rabid fans, considers them to be status symbols. People might consider them to be fashionable, but that is very different from being a status symbol.
I don't know why I am doing this, but:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... (Great Zimbabwe Ruins)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K... (Khami Ruins)
Yes, built by black people with painstaking effort.
So disproved your rubbish claim with just two examples from Zimbabwe alone. There are lots of examples from Zimbabwe, and I would bet there are lots more elsewhere in Africa.
So, you are not only racist, but ignorant as well. Actually, I think the last statement was _almost_ a tautology.
Not if the thief is caught. The insurer does blame the victim, The insurer just incentivises safer and more secure behaviour as a way to keep premiums down among other things. Insurers couldn't care less if stuff gets stolen, as long as the premium rates reflect the actual level of risk.
The truth is 99% of the population understand the word "hacker" to mean some nefarious nerd (or Angelina Jolie) sitting in some basement somewhere doing bad stuff remotely on other people's systems. So you either educate the 99%, or you just figure this is not a battle worth fighting.