I believe that this is largely an unintended side-effect of the democratization of the capital markets and specifically the stock markets. Before companies like Schwab opened the stock market to household investors, the ownership profile for publicly-traded companies typically included a handful of investors who as a group owned a large share of the company. Those investors could collaborate to chart a long-term course for the company. Compare that to Cisco, where no single investor owns more than 1% of the company (or thereabouts). In essence, "the market" owns Cisco. And the market has a very short-term perspective.
One of the parents was quoted as saying "[school district officials] are culpable and they have the gall to go on the record and say they haven't had any doctor's notes. Well what doctor has been schooled about the rate of microwave infections?"
A few weeks ago, a bunch of my neighbors got together to discuss a proposed T-Mobile base station on our street. The host invited someone to talk about the dangers of dirty electricity, whatever that is. Might as well have been ectoplasm.
The irony is that RF exposure may very well cause physiological effects at the exposure levels we're talking about here. Most of the studies I've read about seemed pretty lousy (small sample size, self-reporting bias, etc) but there do seem to be a handful that at least suggest possible harm. Unfortunately, most of the people who are most vocal about this issue don't bother to inform themselves and end up sounding like complete idiots. Which makes the skeptics dig their heels in even more... witness the majority of the comments posted here.
Unfortunately, fear always trumps fact. And many skeptics would do well to be more skeptical about their own assumptions.
What part of SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED do people not understand?!?!?!
"Infringed". If taken literally, that would mean that the people could keep and bear RPGs, tanks, mustard gas, sarin, cruise missiles, radiological weapons, nukes, EMPs, weaponized anthrax, etc. The framers could not have imagined the immense destruction that a single individual could wreak with modern weaponry. Most people seem to agree that the right to keep and bear arms can be infringed just a little. The question of where to draw that line is a perfectly valid one.
I'd argue that the keeping and bearing of arms can sometimes contribute to erosion of freedoms, due to the level of surveillance and control needed to prevent the crazies from misusing said arms. When people feel unsafe, they tend to grant their government wide latitude to abridge their freedoms in order to protect them. Those of you over, say, 35 or so will remember a time when you didn't have to undergo a pat-down on your way to your locker. Administrators didn't spy on kids, kids didn't get expelled for taking Tylenol, kids didn't get charged with child pornography for taking nudie pictures of themselves. I think those things are indirect results of the heightened atmosphere of fear and increased surveillance that were the popular response to school shootings.
Yes, routers can drop UDP, but the user will still be flooding the incoming links, all the way back to the DSLAM. UDP does not have source-quench based flow control.
United States Patent 5,319,542
King, Jr. , et al. June 7, 1994
System for ordering items using an electronic catalogue
The disclosed system facilitates the user in electronically ordering items from suppliers. The system is comprised of an Electronic Catlogue and an Electronic Requisition facility. The Electronic Catalogue includes a Public Catalog and a Private Catalogue. The Public Catalog is stored on a publicly available database for access by customer/Requestors. The Private Catalogue is resident on a Customer's computer system and may contain unique pricing data based on pricing agreements. The Electronic Requisition facility is used by the Customer/Requestors to electronically create purchase requisitions based upon the information provided in the catalogues and route the requisitions through the appropriate approval process within he enterprise. Requisitions are then processed through the customer's procurement system and transmitted electronically as purchase orders to Suppliers."
As anyone who's ever watched reality TV or a home sex tape knows, catching a piece of someone else's experience can resonate very powerfully. I think reality shows actually diminish (as in, degrade) the experience by trying too hard to wring a plot out of it. The moments that stick with me are the small moments that usually get edited out because they aren't dramatic enough. It's the quiet moments, the ones that aren't performed for the camera.
But what's sad about this is that our society has gotten to the point where our inherent need to connect with others is so frustrated that we're all starting to become narcissisitic exhibitionists.
Indoctrination is exactly what the early advocates of public education intended-- explicitly-- at least here in the US. Public education was conceived largely as a means of social control. Works pretty well too, up to a point.
Obviously we've come a long way since then, but perhaps not as far as you think. I think most people today would say, if you asked them the right question, that education is/can/should enable social class mobility, but that's certainly not was originally intended... and I don't know about Canada, but in the US our desire for freedom (class mobility, etc) is coupled-- in a foot-ass sort of way-- with our desire for authority (those who follow the rules will be rewarded).
Taking a breath before the federal-agency flogging begins...
I don't think the FDA's well-known malfeasance has escaped the notice the "environmental and consumer groups" who are proposing this. However, if one's goal is to get nano-whatsits that are already used in consumer products tested asap for health effects, the FDA would be the logical organization to conduct the testing-- it is, after all, what they already do.
Given the fact that nanometer-sized particles can be very invasive in living tissues, I personally would prefer that ~someone~ check this stuff out, sooner rather than later.
Economic differentials have always been the driving force behind the environmental movement. Which is why it's so amusing when folks start jabbing fingers at their ivory-tower environmental straw men. Although the environmental lobby depends on the guilty privileged class for funding, and on the academics for both practical and theological support, the environmental movement is not, has never been, driven by the well-off, educated elite. (If it was, we'd all be taking lukewarm solar-heated showers before slowly driving our tiny cars to work.)
The privileged class, to which I admittedly and blithely belong, are dutifully outraged and sincerely frightened at (primarily) the havoc we wreak on the environment, and (secondarily) the fate of the people who have the misfortune to live in said environment. But unless you've had a strip mine opened across your backyard, or have to keep a constant ear out for the sound of sirens from the local refinery, the fear and outrage lack a certain zing. Which is why the environmental movement has always been driven by grass-roots organizing. The people with their feet on the road tend to be the ones who understand, in a very personal way, what it feels like when they, their loved ones, and their neighborhood get crapped on.
The really tasty irony is that the so-called environmentalists who so loudly oppose windmills, whose real concern is typically the delicate value of their real estate investments, who are actually the very self-centered waffle-stomping (waffle-stomping?) Harvard-graduating intellectual idiots that we keep hearing about, are sharing power lunches and country clubs with the same grizzled ole straight-talkin congressfolk who are constantly windbagging about the philosophical dishonesty of the environmental movement.
Anyway, good thing I wrote the subject line first. The point I was setting out to make here is that disassembling the large regional/national power grids would be a long step in the right direction. Get rid of the grid and you get rid of the transport mechanism for reshuffling environmental unpleasantness. If every locality was forced to cope with its own power requirements, the NIMBYs would vanish overnight, and I bet we'd see a lot more creativity, and a lot less grandstanding.... not sure why I thought that was worth saying in the first place, but there you go.
Tangent is going to have a hard time proving its case per antitrust statues. Tying is generally understood to mean that one is forcing consumers to _purchase_ related products. Microsoft could argue that they aren't forcing consumers to purchase IE, WMP, or Outlook-- they are giving it away for free. Given that everyone else gives away their browsers, media players, and email clients, that argument would be seemingly difficult to refute.
Tangent will have an even tougher battle in claiming that bundling AD is anticompetitive, given that MS does not have a de facto monopoly in the server OS market like they do in the desktop market.
On the other hand, I now know who Tangent is and have visited their website, so they've apparently accomplished something with their silly lawsuit.
A plucky little expensive robot was destroyed while saving the day recently at the White Sands missile range after gross incompetence in the fields of engineering and risk analysis manifested as a lump of highly radioactive substance becoming stuck in a tube, prompting technicians to attempt to fix the problem basically by kicking it really hard, which broke it even worse, at which point several people valiantly tried to fix the problem with a tool that was not designed for that purpose--since nobody had apparently thought of designing a tool for that purpose--while being continually subjected to blaring sirens and flashing lights, which unfortunately could not be shut off during this tense and delicate operation, leading to much silliness, such as repeatedly barbecuing various bits of plastic. Eventually, they managed to get the pesky thing unstuck while exposing only a couple of people to only a tiny bit of deadly radiation. Somebody then named the robot after a cartoon character.
The genius who spun this one off on the media is the unsung hero of this story.
What really threatens publishers is not the fact that Google is making money off their content. What they are sweating is their declining ability to claim subscribers. In the periodical market, subscriber numbers determine the value of the publication. The more subscribers they can claim, the more they can charge for ads.
The publishers don't want you skimming an article here, article there. They want you on their home page. Like every other company where the word "content" flogged to death, they want their sites to be "portals", because calling yourself a "portal" is the online equivalent to claiming a subscriber base.
Google News breaks their model. But I don't think they're simply clinging blindly to archaic business models-- that's too easy. They all have websites, they all make money off of banner ads. What they are angling for is another piece of the action:
Yahoo Inc. has a similar service, though it uses human editors and pays some news sources, including AFP and The Associated Press, for rights.
Or, if Google won't pony up, a nice chunk of settlement will do nicely...
Pointing to robots.txt or their opt-out policy isn't going to spare Google any trouble, either. Just because I don't post a sign on my front door that says "Keep Out" doesn't give you permission to wander in and help yourself to a snack.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe that this is largely an unintended side-effect of the democratization of the capital markets and specifically the stock markets. Before companies like Schwab opened the stock market to household investors, the ownership profile for publicly-traded companies typically included a handful of investors who as a group owned a large share of the company. Those investors could collaborate to chart a long-term course for the company. Compare that to Cisco, where no single investor owns more than 1% of the company (or thereabouts). In essence, "the market" owns Cisco. And the market has a very short-term perspective.
One of the parents was quoted as saying "[school district officials] are culpable and they have the gall to go on the record and say they haven't had any doctor's notes. Well what doctor has been schooled about the rate of microwave infections?"
A few weeks ago, a bunch of my neighbors got together to discuss a proposed T-Mobile base station on our street. The host invited someone to talk about the dangers of dirty electricity, whatever that is. Might as well have been ectoplasm.
The irony is that RF exposure may very well cause physiological effects at the exposure levels we're talking about here. Most of the studies I've read about seemed pretty lousy (small sample size, self-reporting bias, etc) but there do seem to be a handful that at least suggest possible harm. Unfortunately, most of the people who are most vocal about this issue don't bother to inform themselves and end up sounding like complete idiots. Which makes the skeptics dig their heels in even more... witness the majority of the comments posted here.
Unfortunately, fear always trumps fact. And many skeptics would do well to be more skeptical about their own assumptions.
so the gap is on the top of the phone?
What part of SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED do people not understand?!?!?!
"Infringed". If taken literally, that would mean that the people could keep and bear RPGs, tanks, mustard gas, sarin, cruise missiles, radiological weapons, nukes, EMPs, weaponized anthrax, etc. The framers could not have imagined the immense destruction that a single individual could wreak with modern weaponry. Most people seem to agree that the right to keep and bear arms can be infringed just a little. The question of where to draw that line is a perfectly valid one.
I'd argue that the keeping and bearing of arms can sometimes contribute to erosion of freedoms, due to the level of surveillance and control needed to prevent the crazies from misusing said arms. When people feel unsafe, they tend to grant their government wide latitude to abridge their freedoms in order to protect them. Those of you over, say, 35 or so will remember a time when you didn't have to undergo a pat-down on your way to your locker. Administrators didn't spy on kids, kids didn't get expelled for taking Tylenol, kids didn't get charged with child pornography for taking nudie pictures of themselves. I think those things are indirect results of the heightened atmosphere of fear and increased surveillance that were the popular response to school shootings.
Yes, routers can drop UDP, but the user will still be flooding the incoming links, all the way back to the DSLAM. UDP does not have source-quench based flow control.
United States Patent 5,319,542
King, Jr. , et al. June 7, 1994
System for ordering items using an electronic catalogue
The disclosed system facilitates the user in electronically ordering items from suppliers. The system is comprised of an Electronic Catlogue and an Electronic Requisition facility. The Electronic Catalogue includes a Public Catalog and a Private Catalogue. The Public Catalog is stored on a publicly available database for access by customer/Requestors. The Private Catalogue is resident on a Customer's computer system and may contain unique pricing data based on pricing agreements. The Electronic Requisition facility is used by the Customer/Requestors to electronically create purchase requisitions based upon the information provided in the catalogues and route the requisitions through the appropriate approval process within he enterprise. Requisitions are then processed through the customer's procurement system and transmitted electronically as purchase orders to Suppliers."
As anyone who's ever watched reality TV or a home sex tape knows, catching a piece of someone else's experience can resonate very powerfully. I think reality shows actually diminish (as in, degrade) the experience by trying too hard to wring a plot out of it. The moments that stick with me are the small moments that usually get edited out because they aren't dramatic enough. It's the quiet moments, the ones that aren't performed for the camera.
But what's sad about this is that our society has gotten to the point where our inherent need to connect with others is so frustrated that we're all starting to become narcissisitic exhibitionists.
Nothing says "hay guys, listen up!" like a vest that goes BOOM.
Did people really mod this "insightful"?
Indoctrination is exactly what the early advocates of public education intended-- explicitly-- at least here in the US. Public education was conceived largely as a means of social control. Works pretty well too, up to a point.
Obviously we've come a long way since then, but perhaps not as far as you think. I think most people today would say, if you asked them the right question, that education is/can/should enable social class mobility, but that's certainly not was originally intended... and I don't know about Canada, but in the US our desire for freedom (class mobility, etc) is coupled-- in a foot-ass sort of way-- with our desire for authority (those who follow the rules will be rewarded).
Taking a breath before the federal-agency flogging begins...
I don't think the FDA's well-known malfeasance has escaped the notice the "environmental and consumer groups" who are proposing this. However, if one's goal is to get nano-whatsits that are already used in consumer products tested asap for health effects, the FDA would be the logical organization to conduct the testing-- it is, after all, what they already do.
Given the fact that nanometer-sized particles can be very invasive in living tissues, I personally would prefer that ~someone~ check this stuff out, sooner rather than later.
Economic differentials have always been the driving force behind the environmental movement. Which is why it's so amusing when folks start jabbing fingers at their ivory-tower environmental straw men. Although the environmental lobby depends on the guilty privileged class for funding, and on the academics for both practical and theological support, the environmental movement is not, has never been, driven by the well-off, educated elite. (If it was, we'd all be taking lukewarm solar-heated showers before slowly driving our tiny cars to work.)
... not sure why I thought that was worth saying in the first place, but there you go.
The privileged class, to which I admittedly and blithely belong, are dutifully outraged and sincerely frightened at (primarily) the havoc we wreak on the environment, and (secondarily) the fate of the people who have the misfortune to live in said environment. But unless you've had a strip mine opened across your backyard, or have to keep a constant ear out for the sound of sirens from the local refinery, the fear and outrage lack a certain zing. Which is why the environmental movement has always been driven by grass-roots organizing. The people with their feet on the road tend to be the ones who understand, in a very personal way, what it feels like when they, their loved ones, and their neighborhood get crapped on.
The really tasty irony is that the so-called environmentalists who so loudly oppose windmills, whose real concern is typically the delicate value of their real estate investments, who are actually the very self-centered waffle-stomping (waffle-stomping?) Harvard-graduating intellectual idiots that we keep hearing about, are sharing power lunches and country clubs with the same grizzled ole straight-talkin congressfolk who are constantly windbagging about the philosophical dishonesty of the environmental movement.
Anyway, good thing I wrote the subject line first. The point I was setting out to make here is that disassembling the large regional/national power grids would be a long step in the right direction. Get rid of the grid and you get rid of the transport mechanism for reshuffling environmental unpleasantness. If every locality was forced to cope with its own power requirements, the NIMBYs would vanish overnight, and I bet we'd see a lot more creativity, and a lot less grandstanding.
Tangent is going to have a hard time proving its case per antitrust statues. Tying is generally understood to mean that one is forcing consumers to _purchase_ related products. Microsoft could argue that they aren't forcing consumers to purchase IE, WMP, or Outlook-- they are giving it away for free. Given that everyone else gives away their browsers, media players, and email clients, that argument would be seemingly difficult to refute.
Tangent will have an even tougher battle in claiming that bundling AD is anticompetitive, given that MS does not have a de facto monopoly in the server OS market like they do in the desktop market.
On the other hand, I now know who Tangent is and have visited their website, so they've apparently accomplished something with their silly lawsuit.
A plucky little expensive robot was destroyed while saving the day recently at the White Sands missile range after gross incompetence in the fields of engineering and risk analysis manifested as a lump of highly radioactive substance becoming stuck in a tube, prompting technicians to attempt to fix the problem basically by kicking it really hard, which broke it even worse, at which point several people valiantly tried to fix the problem with a tool that was not designed for that purpose--since nobody had apparently thought of designing a tool for that purpose--while being continually subjected to blaring sirens and flashing lights, which unfortunately could not be shut off during this tense and delicate operation, leading to much silliness, such as repeatedly barbecuing various bits of plastic. Eventually, they managed to get the pesky thing unstuck while exposing only a couple of people to only a tiny bit of deadly radiation. Somebody then named the robot after a cartoon character.
The genius who spun this one off on the media is the unsung hero of this story.
Ew.
http://www.skinema.com/
I made one of these too, but mine works a little different. See, what you do is you get in, stick your feet through holes in the bottom, and walk.
Mine provides a smoother ride. And I didn't need no fancy composites to build it either...
What really threatens publishers is not the fact that Google is making money off their content. What they are sweating is their declining ability to claim subscribers. In the periodical market, subscriber numbers determine the value of the publication. The more subscribers they can claim, the more they can charge for ads.
The publishers don't want you skimming an article here, article there. They want you on their home page. Like every other company where the word "content" flogged to death, they want their sites to be "portals", because calling yourself a "portal" is the online equivalent to claiming a subscriber base.
Google News breaks their model. But I don't think they're simply clinging blindly to archaic business models-- that's too easy. They all have websites, they all make money off of banner ads. What they are angling for is another piece of the action:
Or, if Google won't pony up, a nice chunk of settlement will do nicely...
Pointing to robots.txt or their opt-out policy isn't going to spare Google any trouble, either. Just because I don't post a sign on my front door that says "Keep Out" doesn't give you permission to wander in and help yourself to a snack.
What is confusing to people here is probably the word "culture", which, in the US, is understood to be something that grows in the back of the fridge.