OEM manufacturers can build firefox (or any other software they want) into their windows builds without fearing retribution from MSFT.
MS still practices discriminatory pricing, behind closed doors as trade secrets. If you sell computers, MS has you by the balls. This has not changed.
That's what the anti-trust thing was all about.
No it wasn't. It was about tying. One form of tying is called bundling. It is, in fact, the first example given. MS still bundles IE and Windows. This is still illegal.
How about the founders of many modern companies? MS, Apple, Intel, Google, Yahoo. Hewlett-Packard and many others did not start and succeed with an inheritance, but with a good idea, luck and in some cases some not so nice business practices.
Ahh the American dream. It died long ago and now all that remains is a illusion to pacify the people. It is not impossible to start with very little and become wealthy, but it is so rare that it should not really be considered in practical models. Of the super wealthy 1% of the US population which controls 50% or more of the total wealth in the country the number who did not enter that percentage due to their inheritance is in the double digits, if you're lucky. Sure there is upward mobility, but only in very small amounts and it in no way counterbalances the advantage existing wealth bring. Money accumulates into fewer and fewer hands because of the nature of capitalism.
It seems that someone who inherits a big pile of money has no incentive to do much of anything...
Okay suppose I'm a billionaire and you're a hard working genius. I start out life with 6 billion dollars. Conservatively invested by my accountants and legal advisors I'm pulling in 60 million dollars a year while I do nothing. You have a nest egg of $10,000. You have a brilliant idea for a new kind of computer so you quit your job (otherwise the patent would go to your employer) and develop it. After a year of eating only beans and day old bread you get a patent. Great, this makes you no money by itself. Now you need an R&D lab and backers to bring it to market. They will demand pretty much complete ownership of the patent or you're stuck. Further, they might just develop it anyway since they know you don't have the resources to take them to court over it and will be dead before you see a cent.
Suppose you get lucky and get a good deal with the patent. You get 1%. After a decade you end up with a nice steady income of millions of dollars every year. Wonderful, but despite your hard work and sacrifice you still aren't coming close to accumulating wealth as fast as someone born wealthy who does nothing. It takes money to make money and just having money lets you accumulate more by lending it.
You should have continue following the money as it were. How did htese[sic] people get the money? By government. Government provided them with special protections no normal person has.
Nope. Most of them inherited it. How the wealth originally concentrated is another matter, but even assuming we went to a purely libertarian government and divided all the wealth equally it would revert to the same thing. Some people would be better or luckier than others. They would have more money than others. With money, you can leverage the consolidated resources to more easily make more money. Eventually a few of these people die and their kid inherits it. They might be a useless person with no talent, but having the money to start with gives them a huge advantage. Eventually the money all accumulates into a few hand again. Then there is a revolution and the poor take it back. This has been the cycle for a long time.
The legal entity of corporations are one thing, with a lot of plusses and minuses, but don't confuse them with being the source of wealth concentration. It predates corporations by a long time.
It is a pretty good price, but not insane. Apple's cheap RAID servers cost about $1.85 per gig. (I know, Apple + low price = crazy.) Mind you, you'd need 8u not 4u to fit them. That is really where I see the the advantage here for companies that need more storage but have real space constraints.
I really don't understand where all this paranoia is coming from all of a sudden.
The telcos do whatever they can get away with and have been doing so right along. They just managed a couple rounds of successful lobbying. This resulted in:
a new FCC head
the FCC announcing they are no longer stopping telcos from differential pricing as discussed
Congress in the process of replacing the existing telecommunications act with a new one making all of this a matter of how much people care about the issue. The more vocal people are the fewer congresscritters will risk upsetting their constituents for the lobbists money. For most issues, no one cares, but this is the television and porn of America, something people will vote based upon.
Now you list a series of claims, but none of them has actually been forwarded by anyone other than yourself in this thread. Instead we discussed what is actually happening and what is likely to happen. Please take your strawman and go home.
Well, I suppose we could break this up any number of ways, and there is a lot of overlap in any classification. Lets just agree that some of the market (peering arrangements) looks like a poster child for free markets, while others, customer edge, are monopolized all to hell.
As I understand it, traffic billing from one backbone to another is based on the balance of incoming versus outgoing connections.
Actually is priced by transit (traffic from a peer going to another peer), customer (traffic from a customer to a peer), and peer (from a peer to a customer). This is a bit of an oversimplification, but still.
The solution proposed by largely end-user ISPs is that they should be able to charge the content providers themselves for preferential access to their users, and that companies that didn't pay would get lower speed access. You will note that those content providers are not customers of those ISPs. They are customers of a different ISP that peers with a backbone provider, which in turn peers with those ISPs. You should quickly see why this is silly.
If this were the case, it would be a problem, given that there is no free market and most end users can't switch to a provider that does not break their connection to Google but not Yahoo. The real problem, however, is more serious yet. It is not just the customer edge providers, but intermediate peers with whom neither the customer or content provider or even anyone they directly peer with has any business relationship. Say you go through 8 companies' networks to get your traffic from Google. While all 8 have peering agreements, the people being gouged have numerous intermediary companies between them. As a result, the market cannot effectively act. Further, these companies are not upholding their half of the common carrier bargain they made with the government. They are trying to do what amounts to differential pricing. They are slowing some packets, otherwise indistinguishable from all the others, in order to gouge richer or more needy end users/content providers.
My favorite analogy is: Dear sir. We were happy to hear that you have lost a loved one. Since we know you need to get in contact with your lawyer and your loved ones during this time of grief, we've decided to make sure none of your calls make it through our network until you pay us $500. Sincerely, the Plains area phone company with who you have no relationship but who Verizon routes your calls through.
We don't except this crap from anyone else who is a common carrier and we sure as hell shouldn't let the internet network operators get away with it. Routing different types of traffic at different prices is one thing, but routing the same traffic from different people at different prices is simply price gouging.
Ok, as a "rational" person not interested in emotive political arguments, what are you doing arguing with this guy on Slashdot?
I actually find quite a few people here who can present well crafted and logical arguments. I've learned a thing or two as a result and had my eyes opened to some important, differing viewpoints. Slashdot has its share of irrational, illogical, ranters, but it also has some bright and educated folks.
You used insults in your first post as well. Aren't Ad Hominem attacks also a basic logical fallacy?
Ad hominem attacks are a logical fallacy, but not all things a person takes as an insult are an ad hominem attack. I did not attack anyone's character, only drew a conclusion based upon the actual assertions. I actually did present what could be considered a false dichotomy in my first comment in this thread, but I am perfectly willing to see well backed arguments that other options are likely.
My question is this, if it's simply about building and upgrading networks and the costs will be ultimately be passed on to the customer, why not just raise rates to those that purchase bandwidth accross the board?
The network market has two components. The core is a free market with a lot of competition, although heavily government subsidized. The edge is government enforced local monopolies and in no way a free market. The edge does not really compete so they charge very high rates compared to their costs. The core players are successfully removing legislation to keep them from utilizing that edge monopoly to gouge end users as well, thus raising the already high rates, possibly beyond what the market will bear, but only for certain, rich end users.
Now, If verizon is allowed to start sending media down that fibre line, I think it should be fair that any other Company or Startup (new Media Broadcaster??) should be allowed to do the same to complete
Theoretically that is the case now. It is one of the things that they are trying hard to change. Realistically, unless you have big bucks to fight it out in court, the phone company will refuse to comply with smaller businesses requests to use the lines. After much work I had the provider I chose for DSL tell me that they just could not get access and I'd have to go with the local monopoly if I really needed a DSL.
Also, last I checked, doesn't the gov subsidise the majority of the costs to lay the initial infrastructure, so the telcos should not be whining about incuring such major costs.
Yes, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars to date.
This article was broad, but shallow. It buys into and repeats a whole lot of common misconceptions. For example, it phrases the net neutrality debate as wanting to charge different prices for "complex" and "simple" data, using VoIP and e-mail as examples. This is completely wrong. This is about charging money to people who are not your network peers for not intentionally slowing down traffic from particular, wealthy, people, groups, or organizations despite the fact that that traffic is otherwise identical to other traffic. Networks 5 peers away want to extort money from google for not intentionally crippling traffic to them and not to MSN search or Yahoo.
They also parrot the whole DRM as an anti-piracy measure. Everyone knows it fails miserably in that area. It is a content access control, so they can use differential pricing using regions and so they can charge you for the same content for different locations and devices. Anyone can point a camcorder at a TV screen and then upload it to the Web or make DVDs. Then, the masses can download it or buy it. What they can't do is easily move music they paid for from their Creative player to their iPod, car stereo, and CD player.
It is pretty sad that marketing dollars can speak loudly enough that even supposed technically competent reporters just spew out the same crap that they have heard over and over again. What ever happened to critical thinking and investigation?
Mate, I didn't define the word "cloud" either, but i don't expect to be attacked if i "assert" they exist.
When I look up "cloud" in the dictionary bI find an agreed upon definition. What you did was much more akin to referring to a "cloud freedom," which some political hacks are using as a term and which conforms to neither the definition of cloud nor freedom.
Immanuel Kant is not a "poor thinker" and he was the first to propose the possibility of positive and negative freedom.
Ahh, but he was very politically active. As far as I know he never used the terms you describe, nor translated his own works to English (please cite if you disagree). Thus, there is the distinct possibility he was trying to influence people, rather than express a truth. There is further a very good possibility that someone coined the term for other reasons and then applied it to his work, claiming it as an accurate translation. As I don't speak German, I would not hazard to say.
Please read...
No thanks. I'm not really into semantics.
It's what i was talking about when I referred to your examples. Negative freedom is the absence of rules (you can shoot a bear or a mugger)
Except that you are completely wrong. The ability to do something, such as shoot a mugger, is a perfect example of a "positive freedom" according to the absurd model. It is your having the ability to do something, as per the definition. The government or anyone else not stopping you from having a gun or using it in self defense would "negative freedoms" that enable that "positive freedom." This is why the concept is useless.
whereas positive freedom requires "control, self-mastery, self-determination or self-realization".
I don't know where you dragged this definition up from, but please send it back. Defining something based upon abstract prerequisites rather than the action or concept itself is the worst sort of circular thinking. The same acts by different people in the same situation could then be defined as positive or negative depending upon that person's subjective view. It is poor indeed.
I'm really, genuinely, very sorry it's called "negative" and not Super Happy Cool Freedom but you should get over it, as i've already said, there are numerous supporters of it, "negative" in this context IS NOT A CRITICISM
Have you ever heard of a negativity index? It is a sociology terms where for a given culture or subculture the negative connotation associated with words are rated. Speechmakers and political hacks use them all the time. In general when I see such inappropriate applications of words, my first reaction is to look at the origins of the term and see which political hack was involved and what they are trying to promote. Arguing using new terms to which one has applied well received words is, by definition, an emotive plea and not logic. For some reason you seem to find the fact that this is an illogical appeal to be negative, perhaps due to the high rating of the word "illogical" in the negativity index.
Yes, that's right. I did it for the PR.
Not you, someone more interested in changing people's minds than expressing truth. (Not that you necessarily aren't but you seem pretty oblivious.)
They are not mutually exclusive.
No, but that does not make this any more logical, rational, or useful to a rational person. This is emotive, which is fine for politics, but in no way useful to a rational person making determinations on that basis. I pointed this out, but you seem to have missed it twice now.
In those examples the American one is still negative and the European one is still positive. It's about the concept (owning a weapon), not the resulting action. i didn't invent the terms.
Why is the American one negative? According to whom? The dictionary certainly disagrees, so why should these terms be redefined as you are misapplying them?
You made the (not uncommon) mistake of assuming that was i wrote was designed to be inflammatory, when in fact i was merely trying to provide information...
No I did not. What I did was point out that the terms and logic you were writing were classic logical fallacies and whomever you were quoting seems to have either been ignoring that or been a poor thinker. What you wrote was not informative at all, but merely opinionated.
Please read:
Your link is very broken.
According to wikipedia's write up of negative and positive freedoms, your application is wholly wrong. It defines a "negative freedom" as the lack of a constraint and a "positive freedom" as an ability to act. Of course sense the lack of a constraint is one factor necessary to provide an ability to act, every single "positive" freedom must also be accompanied by a "negative" freedom. Personally, I find the entire concept ridiculous and and attempt to hijack the popular term "freedom" and apply to proactive entitlement in such a way as to promote that concept for some particular purpose.
...i hoped would stimulate peoples ability to THINK and CONSIDER, rather than dumbly argue based on an already decided political agenda.
Why is it that every politician mention who supports this nomenclature was primarily a political one from the last few decades who shuns the classical, rhetorical method? Oh yeah, it is because they are interested in swaying people's opinions rather than in logically determining "truth." Sorry, but it reads to me as a PR attack rather than true logic. I'm not interested in political ramifications and this is indeed politics, not philosophy.
So you have formed the opinion that integrated suites are more efficient than disparate components based upon a sample size of one? Even though having read the article in question you see the test results were very close even while the testers admitted that they misused some software by applying it incorrectly in a way the documentation told them not to and in which no one in their right mind would do?
I think you might need to rethink your decision making process.
I am not pretending to know anything about this. All I see is a face of better performance, and although I am not so idiotic as to think that is the whole story (contrary to your opinion) there are many people who do.
So you formed a belief without real evidence and you contend others will also. Okay, I think we all knew that. Why is that of any interest to anyone? Why do we care if you and others will form beliefs without any scientific of logical basis?
I don't know a damn thing about any of this but it says to me from a layman's point of view that invidually maintained and installed components are just not as efficient as a completely integrated suite of applications...
What are you basing this belief upon? Is there some logic and data to back up your belief or is it just what you believe because the Bible says so somewhere?
I'm being a little facetious here, but it is pretty obvious to any critical thinker that no one aspect of any software will determine efficiency. For example, much of the software MS creates is very inefficient simply because they can more easily make money by using their monopoly than by making better software. Just look at multitasking on a Windows server versus a Linux one. That said, if you rely upon a single suite of integrated applications, then if any one component of that suite is inferior you are screwed. If, however, you rely upon open standards between components then you can pick the best of breed for each application and you don't have to worry about one being a bottleneck, because you can always replace it. Logically, if not empirically then, the latter seems a better choice.
Now I'm not an efficiency expert, but even a cursory look at this study reveals that they have published some very vague numbers, with little detail into what they are even claiming. Further they compared one commercial solution against one particular combination of noncommercial solutions ignoring all other, both commercial and not. From most administers' experience a combination of commercial and free software is what results in both the most commonly used and most efficient solution. Why not compare the integrated Windows suite against the most common alternative? Why not specify an exact task and then publish how well both did at accomplishing that task, rather than artificial benchmarks with dozens of non-normalized variables?
As I said, I'm not an efficiency expert, but I am a scientist and I believe in using the scientific method to make logical decisions, rather than emotive ones. Whatever else this is, it is very poor science and useless for making predictive statements. It is, however, a talking point for those interested in public relations or trying to sway opinions without providing hard facts.
If you're interested in this, i believe what you are referring to is the difference between "negative" and "positive" freedom.
Ahh, but the determination as to what is 'negative' and what is 'positive' is wholly subjective. If you can't see that your perspective is very limited, indeed.
America -historically and culturally- tends to value negative freedom (the freedom to own a gun), whereas the Europeans tend towards positive freedoms (the freedom to not get shot).
Or Americans prefer the positive freedom (freedom to not be eaten by a bear or mugged by a criminal) while the Europeans prefer the negative freedom (freedom to tell other people they can't have a gun). Truthfully the right to carry a gun is a freedom. The right to tell other people they can't carry guns is not a freedom at all (negative or positive or neutral). Similarly the freedom to gamble or choose what type of hat to wear, if any, is freedom, while laws saying you can't gamble and you must wear a hat are not freedoms at all, but restrictions on freedom. That does not make them evil or wrong, but they simply are not freedoms by definition. Your attempts to characterize them otherwise are simply semantic attacks that attempt to redefine the term freedom. It is a classic logical fallacy and just a way to capitalize on the negativity ratings of various words by appealing to emotive attachments to words, rather than real, logical arguments.
For even further information about negative and positive freedom the journalist, author and philosopher Julian Baggini has written about it in numerous books and articles
Either you've horribly misrepresented him, or he's a moron. I'll have to look him up to see which. My suspicion is the latter, since you're referring to him as both a philosopher and journalist, which usually translates to a rabble rouser who represents shallow, obviously illogical concepts to sell papers.
If the really hate gambling that much, they may as well set up blockades around all Indian reservations to prevent people from going there as well.
Hey kids, I'm going to tell you how a bill is created and how it becomes a law. First, a powerful special interest, in this case US casinos, invites some politicians and politicians aids to a free, paid vacation where they are educated on a particular topic, like the evils of internet gambling. Then, those lobbyist hired by the casinos hand over drafts of legislation they'd like. Aids read through it while lobbyists quietly talk about campaign contributions and contributions to organizations that provide kickbacks to the politicians. Then, when their price is met, politicians introduce and vote for said legislation regardless of whether or not it is constitutional (it isn't) or if it violates our free trade agreements (it does) usually having never even read the proposed new law.
This of course has nothing to do with hating gambling, but insuring that particular US businesses don't have to compete while making sure US politicians get theirs. You'll see barricades around indian casinos just as soon as Las Vegas and foreign casinos can bribe politicians enough to do it, while still making themselves more money than the bribes.
hat I don't understand is... why is gambling deemed such a big deal in the USA? You allow people to drink, smoke, carry guns and prostitute themselves (in some states, at least), but not to bet on certain outcomes.
FYI, gambling is legal in the US. Have you never heard of Las Vegas? Gambling is illegal in many states, although many have exceptions.
My take on this issue is it is a clear violation of our free trade agreements. The powerful gambling lobbies in the US simply don't want to compete with offshore operations, so they want to make it illegal to gamble there (especially since online gambling would be much less lucrative for them as they can't get you to a location, give you free booze, heavily oxygenated air, no clocks and endlessly looping music to ensure you gamble away a significant amount.
Why is it so demonized over there?
This is just about money. The US has a lot of it and politicians and US casinos want to keep it there. They run PR campaigns trying to make all online gambling sites look crooked (which some admittedly are) and basically do anything to discredit them.
Personally, I don't care much about the gambling part of this. I think we should uphold our treaties (although many of those the people have been bound to were never voted on and are unconstitutional). The part of this that is blatantly unconstitutional is the part requiring ISPs to censor Websites that link to online gambling sites. This is government censorship on behalf of corporate interests and violates our freedom of speech. I'm sure every congressperson voting knows this, but it sure won't stop them. We need political reform badly so that we can stop this process of constantly passing unconstitutional laws and then having to deal with the mess for a decade before the issue makes it through the courts and is struck down.
No one questions Walmart's right to do this. The problem is the power that Walmart has in this market where they control up to 40% of the sales. You don't have to sell to Walmart. Then again, you don't have to afford rent or food either.
Actually, quite a few smart businessmen don't do business with Walmart, because the way Walmart does business with others is just too unprofitable. The basic formula is something like, offer a short term contract that requires a business to take out big loans to ramp up sales to the level required usually quadrupling sales and making Walmart the lion's share of those sales. Make money. Next, realize Walmart wants you to cut your margins razor thin in order to continue that contract. Now you have big loans you have to keep paying. You either lose more than half of your sales while still having to pay for the enormous production capability you no longer need or you have to agree to those terms. If you survive four or five years or this your margins will be to the point where you have to outsource all manufacturing to the cheapest location possible, and cut quality so your support, warranties, and materials are all worthless junk. You're now running a small outsourcing operation for Walmart contracting out to companies overseas. They buy your devalued stock for a low price and you are part of Walmart.
Alternatively, at some point Walmart demands too much or you can't outsource cheaply enough and you go out of business (this has happened to a number of big, formerly successful companies). Then you die and Walmart either buys your ashes for a song or offers contracts to your competitors.
Or, you bite the bullet and write off your mistake. You stop doing business with Walmart and hopefully the huge chunk of money you spent on manufacturing facilities does not bankrupt you.
Having watched this happen to dozens of companies by now, executives who want to run their own, successful business, that isn't a shell company lending its name to cheap imports, and who aren't looking for a quick payoff before moving to another company, well they tell Walmart "no thanks."
Maybe you already knew all this, but your post implied that you have to do business with Walmart, while in reality, the opposite is often true. The MPAA for example, has a cartel to leverage and can easily tell Walmart to go fly a kite or stop selling mainstream movies.There is some risk from the indies, but not really much.
Your brother doesn't have a lot of self-control, does he?
Ever hear of freedom of speech? He didn't threaten them, he merely asked how they thought this security measure was supposed to do anything at all.
Seriously, that is a DUMB FUCKING THING TO SAY.
Only if you live in a repressive society, where you have to fear speaking your mind. We do, in many ways live in such a society, but as a police officer he was more or less immune to that oppression (being above the law in many ways).
what about ones that use an installer script (.pkg,.mpkg)?
Half of those install in places other than the Applications folder and tie into the BSD-like environment. The others can install files in the Library folders, and some do and some don't.
I was comparing the entirety of a program installation across the platforms.
Yes, but most OS X applications do not create any files in the Library directories upon installation, instead they do so the first time the program is used and saves setting/preferences information.
It's illegal to make handgun ammunition availible to persons under 21, just as it's illegal to make handguns availible to them.
This all depends upon the state, and certainly does not apply in mine. I had a legally registered handgun at the age of 19 and it was perfectly legal for both me to own it and to buy ammunition for it. Further, there are plenty of rounds that fit in both pistols and rifles. I used to hunt with a.44 mag rifle, a round uncommon for rifles but very common for pistols. The.41 caliber is very common for both pistols and survival guns (rifle). I've seen a 7.62 mm AK-47 with a short stock classified as a pistol. Since there is no way of knowing what type of firearm a bullet will be used in, such state laws (wherever might be moronic enough to have them) are pointless and unenforceable.
Oh, they absolutely want to look at both. Squeezing Google and EBay is one goal, certainly, but for the phone companies I suspect the primary goal is preventing their revenues from being eaten alive by voice over IP.
Ahh, but they all want to offer their own VoIP service. Thus, they don't want to break all VoIP service, just VoIP from everyone else, thus they are discriminating based upon who is sending the data, not on what it is.
The only way around that paradox is to stop being neutral about packet content: if data stream A comes from a video game and stream B is a VoIP connection, they want to degrade the quality of B until you've paid extra for it.
They already do this. What they want to do, is look at data stream A from video game X and data stream B from video game Y and charge both companies for not degrading their service under threat of not degrading their competitor's service. Imagine if no one could stay connected to WoW, because Blizzard did not pay up, but everyone could stay connected to their competitors who did pay an extra fee to every ISP (even ones with whom they never do business directly). Users can't really switch to another service and for the most part would blame Blizzard not all the ISPs between them and Blizzard's servers. After all, the other MMORPGs work, so it must be Blizzard's fault.
I agree to that almost completely. It is very, very stupid, but when you're playing a game with stupid rules you still have to follow them to win.
Ahh, but obviously they did not properly train the employee that he was following stupid rules instead of trying to accomplish some real task. Otherwise, what is the point of calling the cops? I mean he already followed the rules. All he accomplished was to draw unnecessary attention to another potential incident should they be sued later on and waste time he could have been doing something useful.
And I think we can all agree that Walmart is doing pretty well from the money standpoint.
It is sad that anyone can consider this justification. Sure maybe he killed a bunch of children and ate them, but seeing how well his novel is selling I think we can agree he's doing pretty well from a money standpoint. I hope that some day people will wake up and realize that a culture of greed is a culture of unhappiness and lost opportunities.
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OEM manufacturers can build firefox (or any other software they want) into their windows builds without fearing retribution from MSFT.
MS still practices discriminatory pricing, behind closed doors as trade secrets. If you sell computers, MS has you by the balls. This has not changed.
That's what the anti-trust thing was all about.
No it wasn't. It was about tying. One form of tying is called bundling. It is, in fact, the first example given. MS still bundles IE and Windows. This is still illegal.
Not always true.
What part of, "Most of" were you unclear on?
How about the founders of many modern companies? MS, Apple, Intel, Google, Yahoo. Hewlett-Packard and many others did not start and succeed with an inheritance, but with a good idea, luck and in some cases some not so nice business practices.
Ahh the American dream. It died long ago and now all that remains is a illusion to pacify the people. It is not impossible to start with very little and become wealthy, but it is so rare that it should not really be considered in practical models. Of the super wealthy 1% of the US population which controls 50% or more of the total wealth in the country the number who did not enter that percentage due to their inheritance is in the double digits, if you're lucky. Sure there is upward mobility, but only in very small amounts and it in no way counterbalances the advantage existing wealth bring. Money accumulates into fewer and fewer hands because of the nature of capitalism.
It seems that someone who inherits a big pile of money has no incentive to do much of anything...
Okay suppose I'm a billionaire and you're a hard working genius. I start out life with 6 billion dollars. Conservatively invested by my accountants and legal advisors I'm pulling in 60 million dollars a year while I do nothing. You have a nest egg of $10,000. You have a brilliant idea for a new kind of computer so you quit your job (otherwise the patent would go to your employer) and develop it. After a year of eating only beans and day old bread you get a patent. Great, this makes you no money by itself. Now you need an R&D lab and backers to bring it to market. They will demand pretty much complete ownership of the patent or you're stuck. Further, they might just develop it anyway since they know you don't have the resources to take them to court over it and will be dead before you see a cent.
Suppose you get lucky and get a good deal with the patent. You get 1%. After a decade you end up with a nice steady income of millions of dollars every year. Wonderful, but despite your hard work and sacrifice you still aren't coming close to accumulating wealth as fast as someone born wealthy who does nothing. It takes money to make money and just having money lets you accumulate more by lending it.
You should have continue following the money as it were. How did htese[sic] people get the money? By government. Government provided them with special protections no normal person has.
Nope. Most of them inherited it. How the wealth originally concentrated is another matter, but even assuming we went to a purely libertarian government and divided all the wealth equally it would revert to the same thing. Some people would be better or luckier than others. They would have more money than others. With money, you can leverage the consolidated resources to more easily make more money. Eventually a few of these people die and their kid inherits it. They might be a useless person with no talent, but having the money to start with gives them a huge advantage. Eventually the money all accumulates into a few hand again. Then there is a revolution and the poor take it back. This has been the cycle for a long time.
The legal entity of corporations are one thing, with a lot of plusses and minuses, but don't confuse them with being the source of wealth concentration. It predates corporations by a long time.
$42,000 for 24TB is dirt cheap.
It is a pretty good price, but not insane. Apple's cheap RAID servers cost about $1.85 per gig. (I know, Apple + low price = crazy.) Mind you, you'd need 8u not 4u to fit them. That is really where I see the the advantage here for companies that need more storage but have real space constraints.
I really don't understand where all this paranoia is coming from all of a sudden.
The telcos do whatever they can get away with and have been doing so right along. They just managed a couple rounds of successful lobbying. This resulted in:
Now you list a series of claims, but none of them has actually been forwarded by anyone other than yourself in this thread. Instead we discussed what is actually happening and what is likely to happen. Please take your strawman and go home.
Not at all. The market has three components.
Well, I suppose we could break this up any number of ways, and there is a lot of overlap in any classification. Lets just agree that some of the market (peering arrangements) looks like a poster child for free markets, while others, customer edge, are monopolized all to hell.
As I understand it, traffic billing from one backbone to another is based on the balance of incoming versus outgoing connections.
Actually is priced by transit (traffic from a peer going to another peer), customer (traffic from a customer to a peer), and peer (from a peer to a customer). This is a bit of an oversimplification, but still.
The solution proposed by largely end-user ISPs is that they should be able to charge the content providers themselves for preferential access to their users, and that companies that didn't pay would get lower speed access. You will note that those content providers are not customers of those ISPs. They are customers of a different ISP that peers with a backbone provider, which in turn peers with those ISPs. You should quickly see why this is silly.
If this were the case, it would be a problem, given that there is no free market and most end users can't switch to a provider that does not break their connection to Google but not Yahoo. The real problem, however, is more serious yet. It is not just the customer edge providers, but intermediate peers with whom neither the customer or content provider or even anyone they directly peer with has any business relationship. Say you go through 8 companies' networks to get your traffic from Google. While all 8 have peering agreements, the people being gouged have numerous intermediary companies between them. As a result, the market cannot effectively act. Further, these companies are not upholding their half of the common carrier bargain they made with the government. They are trying to do what amounts to differential pricing. They are slowing some packets, otherwise indistinguishable from all the others, in order to gouge richer or more needy end users/content providers.
My favorite analogy is: Dear sir. We were happy to hear that you have lost a loved one. Since we know you need to get in contact with your lawyer and your loved ones during this time of grief, we've decided to make sure none of your calls make it through our network until you pay us $500. Sincerely, the Plains area phone company with who you have no relationship but who Verizon routes your calls through.
We don't except this crap from anyone else who is a common carrier and we sure as hell shouldn't let the internet network operators get away with it. Routing different types of traffic at different prices is one thing, but routing the same traffic from different people at different prices is simply price gouging.
Ok, as a "rational" person not interested in emotive political arguments, what are you doing arguing with this guy on Slashdot?
I actually find quite a few people here who can present well crafted and logical arguments. I've learned a thing or two as a result and had my eyes opened to some important, differing viewpoints. Slashdot has its share of irrational, illogical, ranters, but it also has some bright and educated folks.
You used insults in your first post as well. Aren't Ad Hominem attacks also a basic logical fallacy?
Ad hominem attacks are a logical fallacy, but not all things a person takes as an insult are an ad hominem attack. I did not attack anyone's character, only drew a conclusion based upon the actual assertions. I actually did present what could be considered a false dichotomy in my first comment in this thread, but I am perfectly willing to see well backed arguments that other options are likely.
My question is this, if it's simply about building and upgrading networks and the costs will be ultimately be passed on to the customer, why not just raise rates to those that purchase bandwidth accross the board?
The network market has two components. The core is a free market with a lot of competition, although heavily government subsidized. The edge is government enforced local monopolies and in no way a free market. The edge does not really compete so they charge very high rates compared to their costs. The core players are successfully removing legislation to keep them from utilizing that edge monopoly to gouge end users as well, thus raising the already high rates, possibly beyond what the market will bear, but only for certain, rich end users.
Now, If verizon is allowed to start sending media down that fibre line, I think it should be fair that any other Company or Startup (new Media Broadcaster??) should be allowed to do the same to complete
Theoretically that is the case now. It is one of the things that they are trying hard to change. Realistically, unless you have big bucks to fight it out in court, the phone company will refuse to comply with smaller businesses requests to use the lines. After much work I had the provider I chose for DSL tell me that they just could not get access and I'd have to go with the local monopoly if I really needed a DSL.
Also, last I checked, doesn't the gov subsidise the majority of the costs to lay the initial infrastructure, so the telcos should not be whining about incuring such major costs.
Yes, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars to date.
This article was broad, but shallow. It buys into and repeats a whole lot of common misconceptions. For example, it phrases the net neutrality debate as wanting to charge different prices for "complex" and "simple" data, using VoIP and e-mail as examples. This is completely wrong. This is about charging money to people who are not your network peers for not intentionally slowing down traffic from particular, wealthy, people, groups, or organizations despite the fact that that traffic is otherwise identical to other traffic. Networks 5 peers away want to extort money from google for not intentionally crippling traffic to them and not to MSN search or Yahoo.
They also parrot the whole DRM as an anti-piracy measure. Everyone knows it fails miserably in that area. It is a content access control, so they can use differential pricing using regions and so they can charge you for the same content for different locations and devices. Anyone can point a camcorder at a TV screen and then upload it to the Web or make DVDs. Then, the masses can download it or buy it. What they can't do is easily move music they paid for from their Creative player to their iPod, car stereo, and CD player.
It is pretty sad that marketing dollars can speak loudly enough that even supposed technically competent reporters just spew out the same crap that they have heard over and over again. What ever happened to critical thinking and investigation?
Wow, you are absolutely, one-hundred percent full of yourself.
True. That says nothing, however, that invalidates my argument.
Mate, I didn't define the word "cloud" either, but i don't expect to be attacked if i "assert" they exist.
When I look up "cloud" in the dictionary bI find an agreed upon definition. What you did was much more akin to referring to a "cloud freedom," which some political hacks are using as a term and which conforms to neither the definition of cloud nor freedom.
Immanuel Kant is not a "poor thinker" and he was the first to propose the possibility of positive and negative freedom.
Ahh, but he was very politically active. As far as I know he never used the terms you describe, nor translated his own works to English (please cite if you disagree). Thus, there is the distinct possibility he was trying to influence people, rather than express a truth. There is further a very good possibility that someone coined the term for other reasons and then applied it to his work, claiming it as an accurate translation. As I don't speak German, I would not hazard to say.Please read...
No thanks. I'm not really into semantics.
It's what i was talking about when I referred to your examples. Negative freedom is the absence of rules (you can shoot a bear or a mugger)
Except that you are completely wrong. The ability to do something, such as shoot a mugger, is a perfect example of a "positive freedom" according to the absurd model. It is your having the ability to do something, as per the definition. The government or anyone else not stopping you from having a gun or using it in self defense would "negative freedoms" that enable that "positive freedom." This is why the concept is useless.
whereas positive freedom requires "control, self-mastery, self-determination or self-realization".
I don't know where you dragged this definition up from, but please send it back. Defining something based upon abstract prerequisites rather than the action or concept itself is the worst sort of circular thinking. The same acts by different people in the same situation could then be defined as positive or negative depending upon that person's subjective view. It is poor indeed.
I'm really, genuinely, very sorry it's called "negative" and not Super Happy Cool Freedom but you should get over it, as i've already said, there are numerous supporters of it, "negative" in this context IS NOT A CRITICISM
Have you ever heard of a negativity index? It is a sociology terms where for a given culture or subculture the negative connotation associated with words are rated. Speechmakers and political hacks use them all the time. In general when I see such inappropriate applications of words, my first reaction is to look at the origins of the term and see which political hack was involved and what they are trying to promote. Arguing using new terms to which one has applied well received words is, by definition, an emotive plea and not logic. For some reason you seem to find the fact that this is an illogical appeal to be negative, perhaps due to the high rating of the word "illogical" in the negativity index.
Yes, that's right. I did it for the PR.
Not you, someone more interested in changing people's minds than expressing truth. (Not that you necessarily aren't but you seem pretty oblivious.)
They are not mutually exclusive.
No, but that does not make this any more logical, rational, or useful to a rational person. This is emotive, which is fine for politics, but in no way useful to a rational person making determinations on that basis. I pointed this out, but you seem to have missed it twice now.
No, it's not. It's been clearly defined.
You did not define it, only assert it.
In those examples the American one is still negative and the European one is still positive. It's about the concept (owning a weapon), not the resulting action. i didn't invent the terms.
Why is the American one negative? According to whom? The dictionary certainly disagrees, so why should these terms be redefined as you are misapplying them?
You made the (not uncommon) mistake of assuming that was i wrote was designed to be inflammatory, when in fact i was merely trying to provide information...
No I did not. What I did was point out that the terms and logic you were writing were classic logical fallacies and whomever you were quoting seems to have either been ignoring that or been a poor thinker. What you wrote was not informative at all, but merely opinionated.
Please read:
Your link is very broken.
According to wikipedia's write up of negative and positive freedoms, your application is wholly wrong. It defines a "negative freedom" as the lack of a constraint and a "positive freedom" as an ability to act. Of course sense the lack of a constraint is one factor necessary to provide an ability to act, every single "positive" freedom must also be accompanied by a "negative" freedom. Personally, I find the entire concept ridiculous and and attempt to hijack the popular term "freedom" and apply to proactive entitlement in such a way as to promote that concept for some particular purpose.
Why is it that every politician mention who supports this nomenclature was primarily a political one from the last few decades who shuns the classical, rhetorical method? Oh yeah, it is because they are interested in swaying people's opinions rather than in logically determining "truth." Sorry, but it reads to me as a PR attack rather than true logic. I'm not interested in political ramifications and this is indeed politics, not philosophy.
On the perceived results.
So you have formed the opinion that integrated suites are more efficient than disparate components based upon a sample size of one? Even though having read the article in question you see the test results were very close even while the testers admitted that they misused some software by applying it incorrectly in a way the documentation told them not to and in which no one in their right mind would do?
I think you might need to rethink your decision making process.
I am not pretending to know anything about this. All I see is a face of better performance, and although I am not so idiotic as to think that is the whole story (contrary to your opinion) there are many people who do.
So you formed a belief without real evidence and you contend others will also. Okay, I think we all knew that. Why is that of any interest to anyone? Why do we care if you and others will form beliefs without any scientific of logical basis?
I don't know a damn thing about any of this but it says to me from a layman's point of view that invidually maintained and installed components are just not as efficient as a completely integrated suite of applications...
What are you basing this belief upon? Is there some logic and data to back up your belief or is it just what you believe because the Bible says so somewhere?
I'm being a little facetious here, but it is pretty obvious to any critical thinker that no one aspect of any software will determine efficiency. For example, much of the software MS creates is very inefficient simply because they can more easily make money by using their monopoly than by making better software. Just look at multitasking on a Windows server versus a Linux one. That said, if you rely upon a single suite of integrated applications, then if any one component of that suite is inferior you are screwed. If, however, you rely upon open standards between components then you can pick the best of breed for each application and you don't have to worry about one being a bottleneck, because you can always replace it. Logically, if not empirically then, the latter seems a better choice.
Now I'm not an efficiency expert, but even a cursory look at this study reveals that they have published some very vague numbers, with little detail into what they are even claiming. Further they compared one commercial solution against one particular combination of noncommercial solutions ignoring all other, both commercial and not. From most administers' experience a combination of commercial and free software is what results in both the most commonly used and most efficient solution. Why not compare the integrated Windows suite against the most common alternative? Why not specify an exact task and then publish how well both did at accomplishing that task, rather than artificial benchmarks with dozens of non-normalized variables?
As I said, I'm not an efficiency expert, but I am a scientist and I believe in using the scientific method to make logical decisions, rather than emotive ones. Whatever else this is, it is very poor science and useless for making predictive statements. It is, however, a talking point for those interested in public relations or trying to sway opinions without providing hard facts.
If you're interested in this, i believe what you are referring to is the difference between "negative" and "positive" freedom.
Ahh, but the determination as to what is 'negative' and what is 'positive' is wholly subjective. If you can't see that your perspective is very limited, indeed.
America -historically and culturally- tends to value negative freedom (the freedom to own a gun), whereas the Europeans tend towards positive freedoms (the freedom to not get shot).
Or Americans prefer the positive freedom (freedom to not be eaten by a bear or mugged by a criminal) while the Europeans prefer the negative freedom (freedom to tell other people they can't have a gun). Truthfully the right to carry a gun is a freedom. The right to tell other people they can't carry guns is not a freedom at all (negative or positive or neutral). Similarly the freedom to gamble or choose what type of hat to wear, if any, is freedom, while laws saying you can't gamble and you must wear a hat are not freedoms at all, but restrictions on freedom. That does not make them evil or wrong, but they simply are not freedoms by definition. Your attempts to characterize them otherwise are simply semantic attacks that attempt to redefine the term freedom. It is a classic logical fallacy and just a way to capitalize on the negativity ratings of various words by appealing to emotive attachments to words, rather than real, logical arguments.
For even further information about negative and positive freedom the journalist, author and philosopher Julian Baggini has written about it in numerous books and articles
Either you've horribly misrepresented him, or he's a moron. I'll have to look him up to see which. My suspicion is the latter, since you're referring to him as both a philosopher and journalist, which usually translates to a rabble rouser who represents shallow, obviously illogical concepts to sell papers.
If the really hate gambling that much, they may as well set up blockades around all Indian reservations to prevent people from going there as well.
Hey kids, I'm going to tell you how a bill is created and how it becomes a law. First, a powerful special interest, in this case US casinos, invites some politicians and politicians aids to a free, paid vacation where they are educated on a particular topic, like the evils of internet gambling. Then, those lobbyist hired by the casinos hand over drafts of legislation they'd like. Aids read through it while lobbyists quietly talk about campaign contributions and contributions to organizations that provide kickbacks to the politicians. Then, when their price is met, politicians introduce and vote for said legislation regardless of whether or not it is constitutional (it isn't) or if it violates our free trade agreements (it does) usually having never even read the proposed new law.
This of course has nothing to do with hating gambling, but insuring that particular US businesses don't have to compete while making sure US politicians get theirs. You'll see barricades around indian casinos just as soon as Las Vegas and foreign casinos can bribe politicians enough to do it, while still making themselves more money than the bribes.
hat I don't understand is... why is gambling deemed such a big deal in the USA? You allow people to drink, smoke, carry guns and prostitute themselves (in some states, at least), but not to bet on certain outcomes.
FYI, gambling is legal in the US. Have you never heard of Las Vegas? Gambling is illegal in many states, although many have exceptions.
My take on this issue is it is a clear violation of our free trade agreements. The powerful gambling lobbies in the US simply don't want to compete with offshore operations, so they want to make it illegal to gamble there (especially since online gambling would be much less lucrative for them as they can't get you to a location, give you free booze, heavily oxygenated air, no clocks and endlessly looping music to ensure you gamble away a significant amount.
Why is it so demonized over there?
This is just about money. The US has a lot of it and politicians and US casinos want to keep it there. They run PR campaigns trying to make all online gambling sites look crooked (which some admittedly are) and basically do anything to discredit them.
Personally, I don't care much about the gambling part of this. I think we should uphold our treaties (although many of those the people have been bound to were never voted on and are unconstitutional). The part of this that is blatantly unconstitutional is the part requiring ISPs to censor Websites that link to online gambling sites. This is government censorship on behalf of corporate interests and violates our freedom of speech. I'm sure every congressperson voting knows this, but it sure won't stop them. We need political reform badly so that we can stop this process of constantly passing unconstitutional laws and then having to deal with the mess for a decade before the issue makes it through the courts and is struck down.
No one questions Walmart's right to do this. The problem is the power that Walmart has in this market where they control up to 40% of the sales. You don't have to sell to Walmart. Then again, you don't have to afford rent or food either.
Actually, quite a few smart businessmen don't do business with Walmart, because the way Walmart does business with others is just too unprofitable. The basic formula is something like, offer a short term contract that requires a business to take out big loans to ramp up sales to the level required usually quadrupling sales and making Walmart the lion's share of those sales. Make money. Next, realize Walmart wants you to cut your margins razor thin in order to continue that contract. Now you have big loans you have to keep paying. You either lose more than half of your sales while still having to pay for the enormous production capability you no longer need or you have to agree to those terms. If you survive four or five years or this your margins will be to the point where you have to outsource all manufacturing to the cheapest location possible, and cut quality so your support, warranties, and materials are all worthless junk. You're now running a small outsourcing operation for Walmart contracting out to companies overseas. They buy your devalued stock for a low price and you are part of Walmart.
Alternatively, at some point Walmart demands too much or you can't outsource cheaply enough and you go out of business (this has happened to a number of big, formerly successful companies). Then you die and Walmart either buys your ashes for a song or offers contracts to your competitors.
Or, you bite the bullet and write off your mistake. You stop doing business with Walmart and hopefully the huge chunk of money you spent on manufacturing facilities does not bankrupt you.
Having watched this happen to dozens of companies by now, executives who want to run their own, successful business, that isn't a shell company lending its name to cheap imports, and who aren't looking for a quick payoff before moving to another company, well they tell Walmart "no thanks."
Maybe you already knew all this, but your post implied that you have to do business with Walmart, while in reality, the opposite is often true. The MPAA for example, has a cartel to leverage and can easily tell Walmart to go fly a kite or stop selling mainstream movies.There is some risk from the indies, but not really much.
Your brother doesn't have a lot of self-control, does he?
Ever hear of freedom of speech? He didn't threaten them, he merely asked how they thought this security measure was supposed to do anything at all.
Seriously, that is a DUMB FUCKING THING TO SAY.
Only if you live in a repressive society, where you have to fear speaking your mind. We do, in many ways live in such a society, but as a police officer he was more or less immune to that oppression (being above the law in many ways).
what about ones that use an installer script (.pkg, .mpkg)?
Half of those install in places other than the Applications folder and tie into the BSD-like environment. The others can install files in the Library folders, and some do and some don't.
I was comparing the entirety of a program installation across the platforms.
Yes, but most OS X applications do not create any files in the Library directories upon installation, instead they do so the first time the program is used and saves setting/preferences information.
It's illegal to make handgun ammunition availible to persons under 21, just as it's illegal to make handguns availible to them.
This all depends upon the state, and certainly does not apply in mine. I had a legally registered handgun at the age of 19 and it was perfectly legal for both me to own it and to buy ammunition for it. Further, there are plenty of rounds that fit in both pistols and rifles. I used to hunt with a .44 mag rifle, a round uncommon for rifles but very common for pistols. The .41 caliber is very common for both pistols and survival guns (rifle). I've seen a 7.62 mm AK-47 with a short stock classified as a pistol. Since there is no way of knowing what type of firearm a bullet will be used in, such state laws (wherever might be moronic enough to have them) are pointless and unenforceable.
Oh, they absolutely want to look at both. Squeezing Google and EBay is one goal, certainly, but for the phone companies I suspect the primary goal is preventing their revenues from being eaten alive by voice over IP.
Ahh, but they all want to offer their own VoIP service. Thus, they don't want to break all VoIP service, just VoIP from everyone else, thus they are discriminating based upon who is sending the data, not on what it is.
The only way around that paradox is to stop being neutral about packet content: if data stream A comes from a video game and stream B is a VoIP connection, they want to degrade the quality of B until you've paid extra for it.
They already do this. What they want to do, is look at data stream A from video game X and data stream B from video game Y and charge both companies for not degrading their service under threat of not degrading their competitor's service. Imagine if no one could stay connected to WoW, because Blizzard did not pay up, but everyone could stay connected to their competitors who did pay an extra fee to every ISP (even ones with whom they never do business directly). Users can't really switch to another service and for the most part would blame Blizzard not all the ISPs between them and Blizzard's servers. After all, the other MMORPGs work, so it must be Blizzard's fault.
I agree to that almost completely. It is very, very stupid, but when you're playing a game with stupid rules you still have to follow them to win.
Ahh, but obviously they did not properly train the employee that he was following stupid rules instead of trying to accomplish some real task. Otherwise, what is the point of calling the cops? I mean he already followed the rules. All he accomplished was to draw unnecessary attention to another potential incident should they be sued later on and waste time he could have been doing something useful.
And I think we can all agree that Walmart is doing pretty well from the money standpoint.
It is sad that anyone can consider this justification. Sure maybe he killed a bunch of children and ate them, but seeing how well his novel is selling I think we can agree he's doing pretty well from a money standpoint. I hope that some day people will wake up and realize that a culture of greed is a culture of unhappiness and lost opportunities.