Just because it is an essential service does not mean you have the right to abuse it. It does not mean everyone else should cover the cost of your Netflix addiction. If you want more then you should pay for more. In my part of the world the (monopoly) ISP is happy to provide more bandwidth, at a higher price.
I hope the effects of this ruling eventually trickles down to my country and this type of dropping a user is made illegal.
The telcos and cabelcos have divided the country up into effective monopoly regions without the oversight that public utlities normally have. They also spend more on lobbying than any other trade group. So it ain't going to happen until something extreme happens, like a pretty blonde child dies in a way that can be directly attributed to a data-cap.
Never mind that old "piracy is not theft" bit. The really funny part is the "government-authorized piracy" line - that sounds like the very definition of copyright in the first place since copyright is purely a government created exception to the natural right to freedom of expression.
We all know that Google's wifi geolocation stuff works this way - by tracking which fixed wifi base stations are in range and correlating with a GPS fix. People forget that Google can also identify other phones within range of your phone, and they know which Google accounts are attached to those devices.
While that is certainly a possibility, I doubt that it is currently happening because it requires putting the wifi nic into monitor mode in order to sniff for wifi packets from nodes that are not associated with the same access point or ad-hoc network. The vast majority of wifi nics can not transmit when in monitor mode - thus making it useless for normal networking, which would tend to tip people off pretty quickly that something wasn't kosher.
If you have documented evidence of google using monitor mode on people's phones, bring it on. That is the kind of thing that needs to be widely publicized if it is happening.
Presumably they are looking for the initial broadcast packet that starts the handshake to establish a wifi connection with a base station. Seems like you could mess with these guys if your phone had an app to dynamically change the MAC address on every handshake, you could also speed up the rate of such handshake initiations. Wander the aisles for a half hour and the store's now got a million bogus entries in their tracking database.
No, that's not what it means at all. It means they'll be able to better tailor their store to profit off of you. Generally, that's not a good thing for you.
That is worth repeating. All of this "personalization" stuff is not about making your shopping experience better, it is about maximizing the amount of money you spend. Any benefit to you is purely incidental.
Note that a cash discount is legal and permitted under all credit card companies rules. A cash discount offers a lower price for cash than credit; for example, many gasoline stations offer cash discounts. While this may merely be a loophole, it is permitted.
This one sucks and shouldn't be there. Obviously people should be able to talk about others even if it's not journalism or art.
I think the issue is more subtle than that. The question that I think is important is how those people came to have that information. Did I give it to them with the expectation that it would be used for one thing and their publishing it is using for something else. For example, showing an ID to prove my legal right to drink alcohol and get entry to a bar - I don't expect that bar to keep a record of my ID and then post a list of every customer on the bar's facebook page.
At this point I am forced to believe that your vocabulary limits your abilty to understand the concepts involved. You keep hammering on utilitarian definitions that are ultimately circular - "it doesn't happen because it can't happen" is just another form of begging the question.
This:
The results aren't something easily quantifiable and the failure rate is high.
Contradicts this:
high risk ventures with no tangible expectation of return.
Easily quantifiable does not equal tangible. I see you tried to pick words that were almost synonyms but even if they were synonyms they are contradicted by your examples of Google News and Goolge Taskbar, both easily quantifiable with basic metrics.
Just tack on a PayPal "processing fee" for anyone that wants to use that method.
Paypal terms of use forbid surcharges specifically for paypal transactions. You might be able to get away with a discount for other payment methods (I don't know for sure), that is the way people traditionally got around similar rules for credit cards - a cash discount rather than a credit card fee.
For the benefit of those who might not take it that way, I'll point out that if you actually use your car in the daytime, it's not going to be in the garage charging while the sun is up, it's going to be...elsewhere....
I don't think it was a joke, way too deadpan.
BUT, he would be correct if he were talking about a grid-tie system. Those essentially treat the grid as a battery - send surplus electricity into the grid during sunlight hours and then draw power from the grid at any point during the day.
Some states are really grid-tie friendly because they have time-of-use billing which means they pay you more for electricity generated during the mid-day than they charge for electricty consumed at night. Some even given you a further break on the price if you have an electric car - they will give you an extra discount on enough units to charge the car each night.
Like I said, you've redefined lottery. Basic survival is no more a lottery than anything else in life. It is a ridiculously utilitarian definition.
Star Trek was released to try and make a buck. For a couple people it was a labor of love, for most it was a paycheck.
Like I said the first time, your argument is circular. Just because some people working on a project are not passionate about it does not redefine the entire project as utilitarian.
You also fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of google's 20% self-directed time. It isn't about a trade-off between "public demand" or what the company "needs" versus "passion" - its about recognizing that top-down structure is not sufficient for a creative enterprise. They fully expect to reap financial results from that 20% time - the company "needs" 100% of their time.
And I obviously have no problem with that. But does it really have to completely preclude any thinking or rationality?
You realize you are complaining about what an AC said? There is no preclusion here, just one guy making a response in the spirit of the post he was responding to. Jesus.
Why do Slashdotters keep supporting government abuses?
Yes, slashdotters are all about supporting government abuses. If you think statements like that are a basis for "thinking and rationality," no wonder you can't grasp what's going on here.
Look at the lives of people who follow their passion and pursue art, music, modelling, acting, sports, etc, it's a much bigger lottery than the business world.
Huh? Success as a CEO is measured in money. Success as an artist is not. The only way you can say that a profession in the arts is a lottery is if you take the MBA perspective that success is measured in money.
Individuals benefit when they do something they are passionate about, society benefits when people do something that is wanted.
That's just begging the question. Society benefits from artistic and philosophical endeavors all of the time. Look at the original Star Trek - a labor of love (and ego) that was a financial failure but inspired all kinds of scientific and engineering progress, as well as social progress (first on-screen interracial kiss, etc).
Because who needs thinking and reasoning and reading and understanding? You want to bash someone for "libertarian-style flamebait" and it's bashin time!!!
Is this really hard to understand? You throw bombs, people are going to throw bombs back at you. "Or are we still just a few more government programs away from living in a utopia -- this time for sure?" is just as much of an off-topic canard as the AC's response.
I don't understand. Who makes the laws? It is the government. If the legal codebase is so large, vague, and complex, that every person commits a Federal felony every day, and the government made that law, how is the government not to blame?
You, like the OP, are confusing the existence of government with corruption of government. It is a fatalistic view which surrenders our civilization to the worst actors. Government will never be perfect, but that doesn't mean it can't be good enough.
You know what, maybe instead of bringing out this offtopic canard about libertarians, you should read the article.
Come on, the OP's post was 75% libertarian-style flamebait. He shouldn't have written that crap if he didn't want to get called on it. The paper may well be the perfect model of even-keeled objective reporting - despite the author being the owner of well-known libertarian blog instapundit - but you can't blame a guy for shooting the messenger when the messenger showed up guns-a-blazin.
That's partly because it was made illegal in 2006 or 2007 (indirectly, they defunded the government inspectors of horsemeat so, no inspection, no sale). That caused a lot of horsemeat to be shipped to other countries. However, back in 2011 the horsemeat inspectors got funded again so now you can eat a horse if you are hungry enough.
FWIW, the absolute best piece of meat I've ever eaten was horse - in the italian part of switzerland, I ordered it as a lark. They served it so rare it was bloody and I could barely take the first bite. But it was amazingly tender and not gamy at all. Better than the best filet mignon. However I've been told my experience is not the norm, the stuff is usually stringy.
But the world definitely would NOT be a better place if all businesses were run like you suggest. Many of the achievements of the modern world required hard nosed business decisions based on purely on profit and without those people the world would grind to a crawl.
That logic is weak sauce all around. The best you can say using that line of reasoning is that the world would not exist the way it does today if not for the decisions that made it that way. There is no way you can say the world would be better or worse using that logic. For all you know, those hard-nosed business decisions killed off a line of research that would have produced cold fusion in the 1900s that would have averted all the world wars and made today a utopia of essentially zero-cost unlimited energy.
That is exactly the approach people should be taking in business, it is great if you enjoy what you do but ultimately a business is exists to make money otherwise you are a charity not a business.
It ain't black and white. There is all kinds of room for grey in the middle.
Personally I would rather the world were filled with millions of minor-league businesses of passion that were only sufficiently profitable to support their employees and founders in moderately prosperous lifestyles than the one we have now dominated by a relatively few amoral megacorps with no passion for anything besides money and a lottery mentality of management and investors.
Note, the OP is part of a VC club. Venture capital is antithetical to the idea of businesses of passion, its all about the business of business - product is irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because it is an essential service does not mean you have the right to abuse it. It does not mean everyone else should cover the cost of your Netflix addiction. If you want more then you should pay for more. In my part of the world the (monopoly) ISP is happy to provide more bandwidth, at a higher price.
The typical ISP has a 95% gross margin on bandwidth.
The only abuse here is by the ISPs.
I hope the effects of this ruling eventually trickles down to my country and this type of dropping a user is made illegal.
The telcos and cabelcos have divided the country up into effective monopoly regions without the oversight that public utlities normally have. They also spend more on lobbying than any other trade group. So it ain't going to happen until something extreme happens, like a pretty blonde child dies in a way that can be directly attributed to a data-cap.
If Abrams is running the show, they are going to have to rename it to Lens-Flare Wars!
Never mind that old "piracy is not theft" bit. The really funny part is the "government-authorized piracy" line - that sounds like the very definition of copyright in the first place since copyright is purely a government created exception to the natural right to freedom of expression.
But what cools the laser?
The frickin' sharks attached to the lasers!
I am all for better, more targeted ads. They will just make my search for relevant goods more accurate and efficient.
Sure they do.
Ah, you people who think you are randian ubermen are the easiest to manipulate of them all.
We all know that Google's wifi geolocation stuff works this way - by tracking which fixed wifi base stations are in range and correlating with a GPS fix. People forget that Google can also identify other phones within range of your phone, and they know which Google accounts are attached to those devices.
While that is certainly a possibility, I doubt that it is currently happening because it requires putting the wifi nic into monitor mode in order to sniff for wifi packets from nodes that are not associated with the same access point or ad-hoc network. The vast majority of wifi nics can not transmit when in monitor mode - thus making it useless for normal networking, which would tend to tip people off pretty quickly that something wasn't kosher.
If you have documented evidence of google using monitor mode on people's phones, bring it on. That is the kind of thing that needs to be widely publicized if it is happening.
Presumably they are looking for the initial broadcast packet that starts the handshake to establish a wifi connection with a base station. Seems like you could mess with these guys if your phone had an app to dynamically change the MAC address on every handshake, you could also speed up the rate of such handshake initiations. Wander the aisles for a half hour and the store's now got a million bogus entries in their tracking database.
No, that's not what it means at all. It means they'll be able to better tailor their store to profit off of you. Generally, that's not a good thing for you.
That is worth repeating. All of this "personalization" stuff is not about making your shopping experience better, it is about maximizing the amount of money you spend. Any benefit to you is purely incidental.
the way credit card 'rules' (contracts/master agreements/etc) are written, a "cash discount" is also prohibited.
FALSE
Note that a cash discount is legal and permitted under all credit card companies rules. A cash discount offers a lower price for cash than credit; for example, many gasoline stations offer cash discounts. While this may merely be a loophole, it is permitted.
This one sucks and shouldn't be there. Obviously people should be able to talk about others even if it's not journalism or art.
I think the issue is more subtle than that. The question that I think is important is how those people came to have that information. Did I give it to them with the expectation that it would be used for one thing and their publishing it is using for something else. For example, showing an ID to prove my legal right to drink alcohol and get entry to a bar - I don't expect that bar to keep a record of my ID and then post a list of every customer on the bar's facebook page.
If people can't survive it's not going to happen.
At this point I am forced to believe that your vocabulary limits your abilty to understand the concepts involved. You keep hammering on utilitarian definitions that are ultimately circular - "it doesn't happen because it can't happen" is just another form of begging the question.
This:
The results aren't something easily quantifiable and the failure rate is high.
Contradicts this:
high risk ventures with no tangible expectation of return.
Easily quantifiable does not equal tangible. I see you tried to pick words that were almost synonyms but even if they were synonyms they are contradicted by your examples of Google News and Goolge Taskbar, both easily quantifiable with basic metrics.
Just tack on a PayPal "processing fee" for anyone that wants to use that method.
Paypal terms of use forbid surcharges specifically for paypal transactions. You might be able to get away with a discount for other payment methods (I don't know for sure), that is the way people traditionally got around similar rules for credit cards - a cash discount rather than a credit card fee.
For the benefit of those who might not take it that way, I'll point out that if you actually use your car in the daytime, it's not going to be in the garage charging while the sun is up, it's going to be...elsewhere....
I don't think it was a joke, way too deadpan.
BUT, he would be correct if he were talking about a grid-tie system. Those essentially treat the grid as a battery - send surplus electricity into the grid during sunlight hours and then draw power from the grid at any point during the day.
Some states are really grid-tie friendly because they have time-of-use billing which means they pay you more for electricity generated during the mid-day than they charge for electricty consumed at night. Some even given you a further break on the price if you have an electric car - they will give you an extra discount on enough units to charge the car each night.
Preaching to the choir has never converrted a single soul. With friends like you, libertarians don' t need any enemies.
The most basic measure of success is survival.
Like I said, you've redefined lottery. Basic survival is no more a lottery than anything else in life. It is a ridiculously utilitarian definition.
Star Trek was released to try and make a buck. For a couple people it was a labor of love, for most it was a paycheck.
Like I said the first time, your argument is circular. Just because some people working on a project are not passionate about it does not redefine the entire project as utilitarian.
You also fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of google's 20% self-directed time. It isn't about a trade-off between "public demand" or what the company "needs" versus "passion" - its about recognizing that top-down structure is not sufficient for a creative enterprise. They fully expect to reap financial results from that 20% time - the company "needs" 100% of their time.
And I obviously have no problem with that. But does it really have to completely preclude any thinking or rationality?
You realize you are complaining about what an AC said? There is no preclusion here, just one guy making a response in the spirit of the post he was responding to. Jesus.
Why do Slashdotters keep supporting government abuses?
Yes, slashdotters are all about supporting government abuses. If you think statements like that are a basis for "thinking and rationality," no wonder you can't grasp what's going on here.
Look at the lives of people who follow their passion and pursue art, music, modelling, acting, sports, etc, it's a much bigger lottery than the business world.
Huh? Success as a CEO is measured in money. Success as an artist is not. The only way you can say that a profession in the arts is a lottery is if you take the MBA perspective that success is measured in money.
Individuals benefit when they do something they are passionate about, society benefits when people do something that is wanted.
That's just begging the question. Society benefits from artistic and philosophical endeavors all of the time. Look at the original Star Trek - a labor of love (and ego) that was a financial failure but inspired all kinds of scientific and engineering progress, as well as social progress (first on-screen interracial kiss, etc).
Because who needs thinking and reasoning and reading and understanding? You want to bash someone for "libertarian-style flamebait" and it's bashin time!!!
Is this really hard to understand? You throw bombs, people are going to throw bombs back at you. "Or are we still just a few more government programs away from living in a utopia -- this time for sure?" is just as much of an off-topic canard as the AC's response.
I don't understand. Who makes the laws? It is the government. If the legal codebase is so large, vague, and complex, that every person commits a Federal felony every day, and the government made that law, how is the government not to blame?
You, like the OP, are confusing the existence of government with corruption of government. It is a fatalistic view which surrenders our civilization to the worst actors. Government will never be perfect, but that doesn't mean it can't be good enough.
You know what, maybe instead of bringing out this offtopic canard about libertarians, you should read the article.
Come on, the OP's post was 75% libertarian-style flamebait. He shouldn't have written that crap if he didn't want to get called on it. The paper may well be the perfect model of even-keeled objective reporting - despite the author being the owner of well-known libertarian blog instapundit - but you can't blame a guy for shooting the messenger when the messenger showed up guns-a-blazin.
That's partly because it was made illegal in 2006 or 2007 (indirectly, they defunded the government inspectors of horsemeat so, no inspection, no sale). That caused a lot of horsemeat to be shipped to other countries. However, back in 2011 the horsemeat inspectors got funded again so now you can eat a horse if you are hungry enough.
FWIW, the absolute best piece of meat I've ever eaten was horse - in the italian part of switzerland, I ordered it as a lark. They served it so rare it was bloody and I could barely take the first bite. But it was amazingly tender and not gamy at all. Better than the best filet mignon. However I've been told my experience is not the norm, the stuff is usually stringy.
But the world definitely would NOT be a better place if all businesses were run like you suggest. Many of the achievements of the modern world required hard nosed business decisions based on purely on profit and without those people the world would grind to a crawl.
That logic is weak sauce all around. The best you can say using that line of reasoning is that the world would not exist the way it does today if not for the decisions that made it that way. There is no way you can say the world would be better or worse using that logic. For all you know, those hard-nosed business decisions killed off a line of research that would have produced cold fusion in the 1900s that would have averted all the world wars and made today a utopia of essentially zero-cost unlimited energy.
That is exactly the approach people should be taking in business, it is great if you enjoy what you do but ultimately a business is exists to make money otherwise you are a charity not a business.
It ain't black and white. There is all kinds of room for grey in the middle.
Personally I would rather the world were filled with millions of minor-league businesses of passion that were only sufficiently profitable to support their employees and founders in moderately prosperous lifestyles than the one we have now dominated by a relatively few amoral megacorps with no passion for anything besides money and a lottery mentality of management and investors.
Note, the OP is part of a VC club. Venture capital is antithetical to the idea of businesses of passion, its all about the business of business - product is irrelevant.