...you get a subsidy, kick part of it back to your pet senator, and sue your way into perpetual employment.
Think of all the buggy-whip manufacturers! Think of all the typewriter repairmen! And the telegraph operators! It's an assault on the wooooooooorkers!
Not really a joke. For displaced workers, it's going to be a problem, and the first things you reach for are always the lawyers and the politicians. The first thing you seek is protectionism. Career-for-life as an idea is as deeply ensconced as it is unrealistic. The problem is that it's everyone else who pays the cost (doubly so when it's a government function or "public service" job that needs to be deprecated).
In California, electrical rates are insanely high. Even with the relatively low efficiency of solar and the high associated costs, when subsidies are taken into account it may simply be the cheapest path forward.
None of this addresses why California's electrical rates are so high to begin with, of course.
Wow, there are people here actually taking this seriously. For those people I have a bridge, some prime bottom-land in Louisiana, a derivative-based mutual fund, and homeopathic medicine to sell you.
Economics? So now an agency that can't manage its budget is getting into the economics modeling biz? This is like the CDC deciding that they are authoritative and credible to make social policy on the Second Amendment.
Or Japanese politicians. Japan's "good ol' boy" network is every bit as active as the American one... moreso, perhaps, as there is a strong streak of nationalism bordering on racism... corruption is just as rampant (check out their banking system sometime and the things that the Japanese government forces banks to do, and who benefits from those "bread and circuses" policies at election-time).
Sony/RIAA also bribe (and receive legislation bought by their bribes) in Europe. Where's the outrage? This isn't an American issue at all. This issue is 100% Sony. Nationality doesn't enter into it any more than race, religion, or surprise-buttsecks.
As for doing business in the US... so what? Microsoft does business in China, but that doesn't make them a Chinese company. So, for that matter, does Sony.
IT is almost always the most underfunded department in a company. It is also the department whose requests are most frequently and easily overridden by either executive mandates or other departments. Since in most cases IT's efforts are not directly what the company produces ("we sell toasters and vitamin pills, not authentication mechanisms!"), IT spending is seen as a necessary evil, and IT intervention in company processes is met with resentment. Note: IT people saying "you're too stupid to understand why you have to do what I say" DOES NOT HELP. It is possible to be right, passive-aggressive, and unemployed all at the same time.
Within IT, security is always at the bottom of the list for allocation of resources (people and money). Expanding file servers, deploying enterprise applications, provisioning more bandwidth, getting people to work instead of hang out on Facebook (or Slashdot) all day long, and the like always come first, because spending on infrastructure and productivity results in tangible, positive, immediately-visible benefits. Spending on security does not offer tangible benefits, and they prevent negative events, which is much more difficult to prove.
Within infosec, intrusion detection is always at the bottom of the list. Antivirus software, firewalls and RFID keycards always come first, because it is possible to use analogies to explain what they do. Try explaining TKIP to an accountant. (in fairness, ask an engineer to explain what each of the items in a prospectus and quarterly statement mean... you'll get a blank stare followed by a libertarian screed and a credit card "somehow" over its limit)
And yes, there is a lot of snake oil being sold. But there are also a lot of people who simply aren't qualified to tell the difference between snake oil and a real security product, but who think they are (including sysadmins... knowing how to compile a Linux kernel does not automatically make you a security expert, but try telling a sysadmin that... most sysadmins think they are experts in everything network-related).
Twenty years ago, I worked at a company (whose name you have all heard but I'd best not mention) which, among other things, produced development tools. A major release was coming up, and the word went out: company-wide cash bounty on bugs. The more severe, the bigger the bounty.
BUT... neither Development nor QA on the product team in question were entitled to participate.
An underground economy of bugs immediately arose. QA people would find bugs and tell their tech support buddies. Developers would drop in a bug and notify the documentation people. Folks in the localization team for installers for the company's consumer productivity apps suddenly became experts on memory management defects... somehow. The rewards would be split. Over 50,000 dollars in bounties were handed out before the company got wind of this and put a quick, angry end to it.
If there is a way to game the system, people will figure it out in a heartbeat. Call it... meta-testing.
disclaimer: I only heard about this after the fact. I was not at the company when the incident occurred; I was hired about two months afterward, and the stories were still circulating. Perhaps that's why the position I filled had become open...
For a for-profit company with a legal obligation to its shareholders, yeah, pretty much. If I worked for Microsoft, or had Microsoft stock, I'd be plenty upset if they did anything differently.
Sure, I'm an idiot, but my paychecks don't bounce, partly because my employer doesn't act as the welfare department for the competition.
>The US government plainly does not care about the law, or its citizens. All they care about is pleasing powerful corporations and well connected individuals.
And that has what, exactly, to do with Sony? Last time i checked, Sony wasn't an American company, and the ToS change was to be rolled out world-wide, as was the StarForce rootkit on their CDs. No Sony or StarForce people went to jail in any other country either.
Tell me again what this has to do with the US specifically? Oh, that's right, NOTHING AT ALL.
So where in any of this did I say whether I supported the FBI? This is just a prediction of what will happen, and why, not a position statement. I am not saying whether the FBI should pistolwhip the Mitnick wannabes; I am saying that they will, whether you and I want them to or not. For what it's worth I think that Western law enforcement is completely out of control, but I also recognize that when you bitchslap a lion, you get eaten... and aren't rid of the lion. Anonymous is ineffective at achieving anything but enabling more draconian monitoring laws and strengthening the FBI's hand. They're idiots.
As for this anti-US screed... go ahead, tell me which government doesn't behave exactly like this (or worse) towards internal dissidents which it considers a threat. I don't care which government you name or what YOUR country is. I guarantee that no-knock armed raids without accountability occur when YOUR government (for any and all values of "your") feels threatened enough. The extent to which you believe otherwise is the extent to which you don't understand government and the urge to power. This hypocrisy and naivete is one reason why the term "Eurotrash" exists, and why Americans often think Euros are lazy, weak fools. This "despise" thing you seem to enjoy works both ways. Hatred begets hatred, thus neatly closing the loop.
Very, very few people know anything about the relationship between Anonymous and the Hubbard cult. What they do know is that Anonymous publishes identity-theft-enabling information on ordinary citizens and has spies in the military; chances are that anyone who has heard of Anonymous has done so in the context of "millions of email addresses, names, and physical addresses stolen and published" and "espionage directed at Western governments" (were you even aware that the leaked documents cover the sordid activities of Commonwealth and NATO countries, as well as the US?). Joe Citizen won't believe that Anonymous is defending them; he will believe, and rightly so, that Anonymous is attacking him. Anonymous has royally fucked up in that regard. You can't simultaneously harm ordinary citizens and claim to be doing them a favor. From the point of view of someone who has just had their information leaked and is dealing with the cleanup, Anonymous are anything but harmless, and they will support taking down the people responsible for the leak.
Slashdotters, EFF types, etc. are a tiny majority. You, your friends, and my friends are a tiny minority. We're irrelevant compared to majority popular opinion. A bitter pill to swallow, but the opinions of Slashdotters don't mean shit in the grand scheme of things. We are not the center of the universe.
And again, as for what I want... you have no clue. You're straw-manning.
115 grain jacketed hollow point to Anonymous: Because your actions don't hurt your targets but DO hurt ordinary citizens, you will have no significant popular support; you are seen as vandals and looters, not Robin Hoods. You're dealing with people with guns, badges, prosecutorial immunity (in practice, if not in law) and a memory and unforgiving mindset far greater than your own. This isn't a game. This isn't a movie. But you fail to recognize that.
If you're going to play "Revolutionary" like the big boys do, you'd better understand what that means: secret jails, warrantless raids, and "shot while resisting arrest". That's how governments... ALL governments... deal with dissidents, particularly ones who are popularly despised.
Or is it more likely that rather than having a company commit very-easily-provable felonies, the person who claims he was "raided by Apple security pretending to be cops" is just plain lying, and that he dug up Apple security's phone somewhere to attempt to lend credibility to an otherwise unbelievable story?
"The free market is not remotely interested in R&D of new technologies."
The statement made was a blanket statement about the entire free market; that there was no unsubsidized R&D going on. THAT was absurd, and just plain false. And your point that green energy and (in this case) high speed networking are different just supports my initial point further: that the current state of green tech IS a market failure, precisely because other high tech fields are succeeding but Solyndra couldn't make it even with hundreds of millions of "free" dollars.
Someday companies like Solyndra... well, in the same market as Solyndra anyway... will be able to make it on their own merits. That's a good thing. But we are currently fooling ourselves that the state of solar electric is more market-ready than it is. Forcing a product to market before it is ready dooms the product and the company, creates backlash, and if subsidies are involved wastes everyone's money. My original point, however smartassedly said, remains valid: you can't pass a law or use subsidies to force a technology into existence, nor vote a product into viability. In the end, Solyndra was a half-billion-dollar photo op. Perhaps the rest of the industry will learn from Solyndra's mistakes, but it's a mighty expensive lesson, and one that comes directly at the expense of people who don't have a choice in whether to pay for that lesson.
And as for comparison to an oil and coal industry that receives subsidies: irrelevant. We'd be replacing one subsidized industry with another. How is that an improvement? New political cronies sucking at the public teat are better than old ones how? The difference is that if subsidies for fossil fuel companies ended today, the industry would get along fine. Mass-market solar couldn't.
There will be solar panels on my roof when it makes financial sense without subsidies or tax credits and not one day before. That's an economic reality that no amount of green bluster can force aside.
Oh wait, you were serious, let me laugh even harder.
The free market is not remotely interested in R&D of new technologies. It will be there like a barnacle when it's all worked out and profitable though, which will be never unless it is funded by other sources.
The free market is why the stock in the high tech company I work for is worth what it is. We develop new technologies. We sell it to customers who like it and save money because they bought our product. We make profits from selling what our R&D created. And we are doing it without the government subsidizing us or trying to crush our competition or forcing taxpayers into being investors.
Companies that fail do so for a reason. Solyndra is not exempt because it's "green" or has presidents parading in front of it.
I'm very serious, and have a whole lot of proof it works.
And you know I don't feel this way... how? Assume much?
I am anti-subsidy, anti-protectionist, PERIOD. The industries you refer to would get along fine without subsidies, and those subsidies should be cut too.
The story was about Solyndra, and my comment was about His Obamaness parading it (and literally parading in front of it) as his Green Energy Subsidy poster child. I drive by Solyndra every day, and remember the black SUV invasion when he was there. Obama was completely wrong about Solyndra. The bankruptcy is an existence-proof.
Betamax died for two reasons neither of them technical:
1. Beta units were more expensive than VHS, and the VCR buying market was more price-sensitive than Sony had estimated. Their market research was wrong.
2. Sony refused to license Betamax units for adult content. The hard, cold, indisbutable fact is that early VCR sales were driven largely by porn. Just like video game consoles, it's the library that is available to the console, not the merits of the console itself, that drives sales.
So your example is actually a good example of the market working. Beta was not feasible because of cost and artificially-applied constraints.
Slashdot Mirror
Dear OnStar (and anybody AT&T else thinking GOOGLE about doing FACEBOOK something similar):
Did you really think we wouldn't notice?
Love,
The People Who Are Watching Your Smug Privacy-Raping Asses
...you get a subsidy, kick part of it back to your pet senator, and sue your way into perpetual employment.
Think of all the buggy-whip manufacturers! Think of all the typewriter repairmen! And the telegraph operators! It's an assault on the wooooooooorkers!
Not really a joke. For displaced workers, it's going to be a problem, and the first things you reach for are always the lawyers and the politicians. The first thing you seek is protectionism. Career-for-life as an idea is as deeply ensconced as it is unrealistic. The problem is that it's everyone else who pays the cost (doubly so when it's a government function or "public service" job that needs to be deprecated).
In California, electrical rates are insanely high. Even with the relatively low efficiency of solar and the high associated costs, when subsidies are taken into account it may simply be the cheapest path forward.
None of this addresses why California's electrical rates are so high to begin with, of course.
Wow, there are people here actually taking this seriously. For those people I have a bridge, some prime bottom-land in Louisiana, a derivative-based mutual fund, and homeopathic medicine to sell you.
For the rest of us: Bah! This is old news! John Cleese had a better proposal. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2PyeXRwhCE
Economics? So now an agency that can't manage its budget is getting into the economics modeling biz? This is like the CDC deciding that they are authoritative and credible to make social policy on the Second Amendment.
Or Japanese politicians. Japan's "good ol' boy" network is every bit as active as the American one... moreso, perhaps, as there is a strong streak of nationalism bordering on racism... corruption is just as rampant (check out their banking system sometime and the things that the Japanese government forces banks to do, and who benefits from those "bread and circuses" policies at election-time).
Sony/RIAA also bribe (and receive legislation bought by their bribes) in Europe. Where's the outrage? This isn't an American issue at all. This issue is 100% Sony. Nationality doesn't enter into it any more than race, religion, or surprise-buttsecks.
As for doing business in the US... so what? Microsoft does business in China, but that doesn't make them a Chinese company. So, for that matter, does Sony.
IT is almost always the most underfunded department in a company. It is also the department whose requests are most frequently and easily overridden by either executive mandates or other departments. Since in most cases IT's efforts are not directly what the company produces ("we sell toasters and vitamin pills, not authentication mechanisms!"), IT spending is seen as a necessary evil, and IT intervention in company processes is met with resentment. Note: IT people saying "you're too stupid to understand why you have to do what I say" DOES NOT HELP. It is possible to be right, passive-aggressive, and unemployed all at the same time.
Within IT, security is always at the bottom of the list for allocation of resources (people and money). Expanding file servers, deploying enterprise applications, provisioning more bandwidth, getting people to work instead of hang out on Facebook (or Slashdot) all day long, and the like always come first, because spending on infrastructure and productivity results in tangible, positive, immediately-visible benefits. Spending on security does not offer tangible benefits, and they prevent negative events, which is much more difficult to prove.
Within infosec, intrusion detection is always at the bottom of the list. Antivirus software, firewalls and RFID keycards always come first, because it is possible to use analogies to explain what they do. Try explaining TKIP to an accountant. (in fairness, ask an engineer to explain what each of the items in a prospectus and quarterly statement mean... you'll get a blank stare followed by a libertarian screed and a credit card "somehow" over its limit)
And yes, there is a lot of snake oil being sold. But there are also a lot of people who simply aren't qualified to tell the difference between snake oil and a real security product, but who think they are (including sysadmins... knowing how to compile a Linux kernel does not automatically make you a security expert, but try telling a sysadmin that... most sysadmins think they are experts in everything network-related).
Yeah. It's difficult.
Nothing new to this.
Twenty years ago, I worked at a company (whose name you have all heard but I'd best not mention) which, among other things, produced development tools. A major release was coming up, and the word went out: company-wide cash bounty on bugs. The more severe, the bigger the bounty.
BUT... neither Development nor QA on the product team in question were entitled to participate.
An underground economy of bugs immediately arose. QA people would find bugs and tell their tech support buddies. Developers would drop in a bug and notify the documentation people. Folks in the localization team for installers for the company's consumer productivity apps suddenly became experts on memory management defects... somehow. The rewards would be split. Over 50,000 dollars in bounties were handed out before the company got wind of this and put a quick, angry end to it.
If there is a way to game the system, people will figure it out in a heartbeat. Call it... meta-testing.
disclaimer: I only heard about this after the fact. I was not at the company when the incident occurred; I was hired about two months afterward, and the stories were still circulating. Perhaps that's why the position I filled had become open...
For a for-profit company with a legal obligation to its shareholders, yeah, pretty much. If I worked for Microsoft, or had Microsoft stock, I'd be plenty upset if they did anything differently.
Sure, I'm an idiot, but my paychecks don't bounce, partly because my employer doesn't act as the welfare department for the competition.
Microsoft can't pay their bills with "Free". Neither can you.
Why SHOULD they promote non-Microsoft platforms?
So PETA thinks it's smart to mix snuff and porn. Nice going guys, promoting the combination of sex and animal torture.
I really, REALLY hope they run afoul of snuff-porn/"crush" video laws and have some folks getting 25-to-life.
>The US government plainly does not care about the law, or its citizens. All they care about is pleasing powerful corporations and well connected individuals.
And that has what, exactly, to do with Sony? Last time i checked, Sony wasn't an American company, and the ToS change was to be rolled out world-wide, as was the StarForce rootkit on their CDs. No Sony or StarForce people went to jail in any other country either.
Tell me again what this has to do with the US specifically? Oh, that's right, NOTHING AT ALL.
Where are you going to find a good judge?
Depends. How much are you willing to spend?
So where in any of this did I say whether I supported the FBI? This is just a prediction of what will happen, and why, not a position statement. I am not saying whether the FBI should pistolwhip the Mitnick wannabes; I am saying that they will, whether you and I want them to or not. For what it's worth I think that Western law enforcement is completely out of control, but I also recognize that when you bitchslap a lion, you get eaten... and aren't rid of the lion. Anonymous is ineffective at achieving anything but enabling more draconian monitoring laws and strengthening the FBI's hand. They're idiots.
As for this anti-US screed... go ahead, tell me which government doesn't behave exactly like this (or worse) towards internal dissidents which it considers a threat. I don't care which government you name or what YOUR country is. I guarantee that no-knock armed raids without accountability occur when YOUR government (for any and all values of "your") feels threatened enough. The extent to which you believe otherwise is the extent to which you don't understand government and the urge to power. This hypocrisy and naivete is one reason why the term "Eurotrash" exists, and why Americans often think Euros are lazy, weak fools. This "despise" thing you seem to enjoy works both ways. Hatred begets hatred, thus neatly closing the loop.
Very, very few people know anything about the relationship between Anonymous and the Hubbard cult. What they do know is that Anonymous publishes identity-theft-enabling information on ordinary citizens and has spies in the military; chances are that anyone who has heard of Anonymous has done so in the context of "millions of email addresses, names, and physical addresses stolen and published" and "espionage directed at Western governments" (were you even aware that the leaked documents cover the sordid activities of Commonwealth and NATO countries, as well as the US?). Joe Citizen won't believe that Anonymous is defending them; he will believe, and rightly so, that Anonymous is attacking him. Anonymous has royally fucked up in that regard. You can't simultaneously harm ordinary citizens and claim to be doing them a favor. From the point of view of someone who has just had their information leaked and is dealing with the cleanup, Anonymous are anything but harmless, and they will support taking down the people responsible for the leak.
Slashdotters, EFF types, etc. are a tiny majority. You, your friends, and my friends are a tiny minority. We're irrelevant compared to majority popular opinion. A bitter pill to swallow, but the opinions of Slashdotters don't mean shit in the grand scheme of things. We are not the center of the universe.
And again, as for what I want... you have no clue. You're straw-manning.
115 grain jacketed hollow point to Anonymous: Because your actions don't hurt your targets but DO hurt ordinary citizens, you will have no significant popular support; you are seen as vandals and looters, not Robin Hoods. You're dealing with people with guns, badges, prosecutorial immunity (in practice, if not in law) and a memory and unforgiving mindset far greater than your own. This isn't a game. This isn't a movie. But you fail to recognize that.
If you're going to play "Revolutionary" like the big boys do, you'd better understand what that means: secret jails, warrantless raids, and "shot while resisting arrest". That's how governments... ALL governments... deal with dissidents, particularly ones who are popularly despised.
Yeah, because Apple staged this crash, it never really happened, and those people aren't really dead. Glad you saw through that, Grissom.
Typical governmental waste; building something new when we already have have the same thing.
Why not just use Detroit?
Or is it more likely that rather than having a company commit very-easily-provable felonies, the person who claims he was "raided by Apple security pretending to be cops" is just plain lying, and that he dug up Apple security's phone somewhere to attempt to lend credibility to an otherwise unbelievable story?
"The free market is not remotely interested in R&D of new technologies."
The statement made was a blanket statement about the entire free market; that there was no unsubsidized R&D going on. THAT was absurd, and just plain false. And your point that green energy and (in this case) high speed networking are different just supports my initial point further: that the current state of green tech IS a market failure, precisely because other high tech fields are succeeding but Solyndra couldn't make it even with hundreds of millions of "free" dollars.
Someday companies like Solyndra... well, in the same market as Solyndra anyway... will be able to make it on their own merits. That's a good thing. But we are currently fooling ourselves that the state of solar electric is more market-ready than it is. Forcing a product to market before it is ready dooms the product and the company, creates backlash, and if subsidies are involved wastes everyone's money. My original point, however smartassedly said, remains valid: you can't pass a law or use subsidies to force a technology into existence, nor vote a product into viability. In the end, Solyndra was a half-billion-dollar photo op. Perhaps the rest of the industry will learn from Solyndra's mistakes, but it's a mighty expensive lesson, and one that comes directly at the expense of people who don't have a choice in whether to pay for that lesson.
And as for comparison to an oil and coal industry that receives subsidies: irrelevant. We'd be replacing one subsidized industry with another. How is that an improvement? New political cronies sucking at the public teat are better than old ones how? The difference is that if subsidies for fossil fuel companies ended today, the industry would get along fine. Mass-market solar couldn't.
There will be solar panels on my roof when it makes financial sense without subsidies or tax credits and not one day before. That's an economic reality that no amount of green bluster can force aside.
Market forces. hahahahahaha.
Oh wait, you were serious, let me laugh even harder.
The free market is not remotely interested in R&D of new technologies. It will be there like a barnacle when it's all worked out and profitable though, which will be never unless it is funded by other sources.
The free market is why the stock in the high tech company I work for is worth what it is. We develop new technologies. We sell it to customers who like it and save money because they bought our product. We make profits from selling what our R&D created. And we are doing it without the government subsidizing us or trying to crush our competition or forcing taxpayers into being investors.
Companies that fail do so for a reason. Solyndra is not exempt because it's "green" or has presidents parading in front of it.
I'm very serious, and have a whole lot of proof it works.
I am anti-subsidy, anti-protectionist, PERIOD. The industries you refer to would get along fine without subsidies, and those subsidies should be cut too.
The story was about Solyndra, and my comment was about His Obamaness parading it (and literally parading in front of it) as his Green Energy Subsidy poster child. I drive by Solyndra every day, and remember the black SUV invasion when he was there. Obama was completely wrong about Solyndra. The bankruptcy is an existence-proof.
Betamax died for two reasons neither of them technical:
1. Beta units were more expensive than VHS, and the VCR buying market was more price-sensitive than Sony had estimated. Their market research was wrong.
2. Sony refused to license Betamax units for adult content. The hard, cold, indisbutable fact is that early VCR sales were driven largely by porn. Just like video game consoles, it's the library that is available to the console, not the merits of the console itself, that drives sales.
So your example is actually a good example of the market working. Beta was not feasible because of cost and artificially-applied constraints.
Mule, not ass.
I noticed you didn't refute a single point raised.
As for your own education and social skills... YouTube troll, self-styled Something Awful "goon", or XBox360 Halo chat?
You do understand how the government makes money, right?
They print it in election years and seize it in non-election years.