Charter, unlike say AT&T, is usually the sole provider in their own markets for cable, and so there is no competition; it's not a matter of hey-- let's go with TW, Cox, Comcast, etc. That's not the way cable plays, although an attempt to do this years ago was tried.
That's unfortunate, but I don't see why it matters. If you're willing to sign over your privacy for internet access, then your privacy isn't that important to you. You still voluntarily agreed to the TOS. It's not like you'll die without internet access. If enough people said "I don't like the privacy invasion, I'm not using Charter, even if they're the only provider here," Charter would stop doing it.
Also, before you start crying about monopoly, realize it was probably your local government that granted Charter their local monopoly in the first place. It would be 1000x more effective to take it up with your city council or write some letters to your local politicians asking them to revoke Charter's franchise or open the market to competition. Congress isn't the right place to settle your local bullshit that 99.9% of the country doesn't care about.
Nice try, but Charter DOES have the right. It's almost certainly in the terms of service that their customers agreed to when they signed up. If the customers didn't like the terms, they shouldn't have agreed to them.
I hope they learn, and others learn by the example, and that the sum is that it slows it all down.
If you want the companies to "learn", stop buying their services when you don't like the terms they put on it. No amount of lawsuits, legislation, and congressional bullshit will ever be as effective as not buying products and services you don't want to buy.
One thing to keep in mind is that the longer oil is at $130+, the longer it will be at $70 or less.
That's the stupidest thing I've ever read on Slashdot. How exactly did you get that idea?
The best thing the government could do to get us off oil would be to set a minimum price of $100.
Government price fixing doesn't work. If it did, we could just set minimum wage to be $1 million an hour and we'd all live happily ever after as millionaires. Or we could just make everything free and be done with it.
That brings a lot of energy sources out of the woodwork when they can count on profits.
I'm sorry, but no amount of fucking around by the government is going to make alternative energy sources spring into existence and become viable. If there was a company that had an energy source that sold for the equivalent of $101 a barrel, they would be making boatloads of money right now, without the government doing anything. Do you really believe there are companies thinking "We could be making tons of money and destroying our competition right now with this new energy source, but lets not do that because it might not be as profitable in the future."?
Houses are not stocks, they don't fluctuate like that. The prices are falling because of all the foreclosures causing more supply and thus less demand, which in turn causes prices to fall.
Sorry, but you fail economics. Changes in supply and demand are independent of each other. A change in supply says nothing about demand, and the opposite is also true.
Also, house prices *do* fluctuate just like stocks.
Get a clue. The drillable sections of ANWR are artic tundra. This is ANWR. And so is this. And also this. The environmental impact of clear cutting forests on Crete is irrelevant, to say the least.
People like you reinforce my opinion that people against drilling in ANWR are idiots.
Of course, that would limit domain names to basically the corporate-only world, since how many private individuals would pay that much just to have their blog or family website at its own name?
Give me a break. Unless you're really poor or really cheap, $250 isn't that much money. Lots of people spend *way* more money than that on their hobbies. Besides, a few million MySpace users disagree with you that a personal blog even needs its own domain name.
Not that it would stop squatters. If anything the squatters would just focus on more profittable domains, and make pages that are even more difficult to tell apart from real sites.
Perhaps it's when the preloads stop (i.e. when there's a free market in Operating Systems). Unless you build your own box, you're a satisfied Microsoft customer and you paid them for their product, whether you use it or not.
Get a clue. There already is a free market for operating systems. There's Apple, for one. There are also hundreds, if not thousands, of companies that sell pre-built Linux and *BSD machines. Most people choose not to buy from those companies, and buy from companies that sell Windows PCs, like Dell and HP. Like it or not, most people choose to buy Windows PCs. There's nobody's holding people at gun point telling them to buy Dell.
The problem with Microsoft is that they use their dominant OS market share to unfairly compete in unrelated areas, like web browsers, media players, and security software.
In other news, $162 billion was just approved for the war in Iraq. Oh, and a few more billion for some congress people's pet projects.
<sarcasm>Good to see we have our priorities straight. Also good to see the democrats following through on their promise to stop funding the "war" now that they're the majority. I'd hate to think democrats and republicans were both equally useless.</sarcasm>
To the best of my knowledge there's never been a monopoly on Linux/UNIX web browsers. I think at one point Mozilla dominated, but it's never been like Windows.
Also: KHTML, Opera, and Firefox/Gecko are only three. Unless you're including ones based on those and/or text only browsers?
While I personally don't believe myself to be doing any wrong, I simply don't trust the court system to render correct verdicts, and worse, it's simply too easy to be driven out of business by excessive litigation even if you're completely innocent due to our lack of "loser pays" laws, so it makes perfect sense to protect your assets by shielding yourself behind an LLC.
Almost as important is that once you hire employees, you don't personally have to do anything wrong. While they're at work, the company is responsible for the employee's actions also. At least that's what the lawsuit will claim.
The cost to add the technology to a company's device is listed as US$2. The cost for a company to produce their own wall wart in China...probably less than US$2....and no licensing fees to worry about and no worries that the customer might not have a charger. This idea is going nowhere.
Then I guess people who don't care about a standardized wall wart can save $2.
In this case, I think the Chinese government actually got it right. They've forced all cell phone manufacturers to provide a USB port for charging the phones. Seems like a reasonable standard to me.
The government telling companies what to do is almost always a bad thing. Let the citizens/consumers/whatever figure out what's best for themselves by buying what they want. If people want a standardized way of charging phones, they'll pay the extra $2 for phones with a standardized way of charging. If they don't care, they shouldn't be forced to buy it. Choice is a good thing.
Besides that, companies can spend their own money developing this shit. As evidenced by the article, if people want something, companies will develop it all by themselves, without big brother telling them too.
Thanks to taxes, Chinese people who will never own a cell phone helped pay for the development their country's cell phone charging "standard". Here, we'll soon be able to get the same thing, and all we have to do is buy a phone that follows the standard. People who don't care, or don't have phones, don't pay anything extra for it.
And don't forget that China is also the country that throws people in prison for "blogging" the wrong things or visiting the wrong websites. Government control of businesses goes hand in hand with government control of the people.
Your complaint doesn't make any sense. Trolltech, the company that created Qt, is already dedicated exclusively to improving Qt. Qt is their flagship product, they're not going to let it suffer. They've created an awesome product without any help from Nokia, and that's not going to change just because Nokia chooses some other GUI toolkit..
The latter ends up being a far faster, more efficient way of spreading copyrighted works, and puts a far greater dent in demand and consequently sales.
I'm sorry to nag, but it's a pet peeve of mine. Putting Windows up on a P2P site doesn't change the demand for Windows. It increases the number of people using Windows because people who wouldn't buy it for the normal price might "buy" it for free. That doesn't mean the demand has changed, it means the equilibrium between the supply and demand (the price) has changed. The lose in sales is correct though. People who want Windows enough to pay the full price will definitely want it when they can get it for free.
Supply and demand are screwy for "intellectual property", but that much still holds.
We have this option in the UK, and it's led to the complete opposite result. The good schools get better, and the bad schools get worse.
No, I don't think you do.
This is largely a problem of image, because the parents who are well educated want their kids to have a good education, and send them to the good schools. Some will even move house to make sure they're in the right area for their kids to be accepted to the "right" school.
If the parents have to move so their kids can switch schools, the UK definitely isn't using the plan I mentioned.
The bad schools just keep getting worse, because there's no longer any smart kids in the mix. My brother is at the same school I went to, and it sounds like hell these days. Nobody there wants to learn, and the teachers are utterly demotivated, and just do the bare minimum.
If the people left purposely chose to go to a bad school, I'm not sure a great school is going to make much of a difference. If they're just not smart, or just don't give a shit, the greatest school in the world isn't going to help them. I just can't feel bad for people who are getting exactly what they asked for.
I would certainly want judge Kozinski presiding over my case. Just as if the RIAA was on my case I would want a judge who was familiar with and used bittorrent.
Why? I'm 99.999% sure the judge wouldn't have used bit torrent to pirate copyrighted music and movies, which is the actual crime in the RIAA cases. No cases that I've heard of have involved people trading entirely legal material over bit-torrent. There was the time they illegally DDOSed Revision3, but that wasn't a court case. Think about it this way: if I run somebody down with my car, the judge isn't going to be sympathetic because he's driven a car before.
Besides that, judges have to judge based on the law. If you're guilty according to the law, he's going to convict you. It's his job.
I mostly agree, except for judges as moral compasses. Morals and laws are very different things.
Laws are meant to prevent a person from infringing another person's rights. Morals are meant to tell a person what's right or wrong. The confusion comes from all the situations where the two overlap, such as murder, rape, robbery, and fraud.
I would expect a judge to be lawful. I wouldn't necessarily expect them to agree with my morals.
What possible reason could there be for needing a new law in less than 90 days? We've gone 230 years, but suddenly we need this new law *right* *now*? Give me a break.
If it's that important, maybe they should've planned ahead more than 90 days.
Wait... your initial point made sense... but your last half is some ridiculous rant against environmentalism. What says we can't save the Spotted Owl AND Increase our industry. We can be environmentally conscious as well as industrially advanced. The problem is that industry is lazy and would gladly steamroll the environment to save a buck.
The problem I have with your argument is that, like most people, you're just arguing it, you're not actually finding inovative ways to promote industry and save the environment. You're expecting somebody else to do all the work, and refusing to believe them when they explain why it can't be done or is really expensive. You're quick to point out how "lazy" all the industry people are, but you're not actually offering a solution either. Wanting something really bad doesn't make it possible.
We shouldn't trash the environment for every petty luxury, but there has to be some point where we say "In this case we're going to harm the environment because the benefits outweigh the environmental cost."
I consider myself to be an environmentalist... MOST environmentalist don't say "Don't chop down trees" they say "Chop down what you need and reseed the forest, using technology that limits the impact on the surrounding earth". We can have both strong environmental policy as well as a powerful industry.
And what's your solution for something important, like oil? I don't think I've heard the environmental conditions that would satisfy environmentalists for drilling in ANWR or off the coasts. As much as I like paying $4 for a gallon of gas, it'd be really nice if we'd let oil companies pump more oil right about now.
Who's vote does ACTA satisfy? Why are you trying to blame the victims?
It doesn't have to satisfy anybody, it just has to not piss off the people who vote. The "victims" don't vote and that means the politicians don't care.
I'm blaming the victims because the victims brought it on themselves. The funniest part is, the people impacted negatively by this probably won't vote next time either.
With an approval rating lower than Nixon, GWB is only doing what about 15% of the country wants. The vast majority of that 15% are simply ignorant. The remainder are people who work in or own oil, telco, broadcast and other corrupt business that depends on "intellectual property" and government protection. His rubber stamp congress is not much better. Please don't pretend that voting matters when crap like ACTA is floating by.
Get a clue. There was 60% voter turnout in 2004. Of that, Bush got 50.8% of the votes. That means Bush started this term thanks to about 30% of the voting public. If anything, that just shows why it's so important to vote. It doesn't matter if they're ignorant, if they vote they matter to politicians.
Yelling about corruption conspiracy theories just make you look silly. I lol'd though.
As much as I dislike Microsoft, sometimes I really wonder about the unthinking Microsoft bashing on Slashdot. Here you've more or less assumed Firefox's non-standard feature will become a standard. But what justification is there for that? IE doesn't have a similar feature in this case, but there are several areas where IE does things differently than Firefox or has features that aren't in Firefox, so why are those never added as standards?. Why does the Firefox implementation get a free pass at standardization, while Microsoft's implementation gets demonized? If a specific implementation gets to set the standard, why Firefox? It's not the reference implentation. It's not the most standards compliant browser. It's not even the best open source browser.
The government only represents the people when the people vote. Guess which age group is least likely to vote? It's exactly the same age group that's most likely to use P2P and play WoW.
99.999% of politicians aren't politicians because they love helping people and doing the right thing. They're in it for the money and the power. As far as politicians are concerned, people who don't vote don't exist. Non-voters have no say in whether the politicians keep their cushy jobs, so why cater to them when they can cater to actual voters and keep their jobs? If you ignore politicians, the politicians will ignore you.
Even if the corporations are buying off politicians left and right, the voters are still ultimately responsible for continually re-electing the corrupt politicians.
It's really hard to feel bad about all of this political bitching when the people most upset are also the ones least like to vote.
Slashdot Mirror
That's unfortunate, but I don't see why it matters. If you're willing to sign over your privacy for internet access, then your privacy isn't that important to you. You still voluntarily agreed to the TOS. It's not like you'll die without internet access. If enough people said "I don't like the privacy invasion, I'm not using Charter, even if they're the only provider here," Charter would stop doing it.
Also, before you start crying about monopoly, realize it was probably your local government that granted Charter their local monopoly in the first place. It would be 1000x more effective to take it up with your city council or write some letters to your local politicians asking them to revoke Charter's franchise or open the market to competition. Congress isn't the right place to settle your local bullshit that 99.9% of the country doesn't care about.
I'm sorry, don't let pesky facts get in your way.
If people feel cheated, it's their own fault for agreeing to the terms they didn't really agree with.
In any case, it's a 5 minute phone call to cancel your service, so why waste everybody's tax money by getting congress involved?
Nice try, but Charter DOES have the right. It's almost certainly in the terms of service that their customers agreed to when they signed up. If the customers didn't like the terms, they shouldn't have agreed to them.
If you want the companies to "learn", stop buying their services when you don't like the terms they put on it. No amount of lawsuits, legislation, and congressional bullshit will ever be as effective as not buying products and services you don't want to buy.
I'm not sure what your point is.
Why would the investors be concerned? Because it would drive away customers. Same fucking thing.
The section of ANWR where drilling would take place is less than 150 miles from the existing Trans-Alaska Pipeline.
That's the stupidest thing I've ever read on Slashdot. How exactly did you get that idea?
Government price fixing doesn't work. If it did, we could just set minimum wage to be $1 million an hour and we'd all live happily ever after as millionaires. Or we could just make everything free and be done with it.
I'm sorry, but no amount of fucking around by the government is going to make alternative energy sources spring into existence and become viable. If there was a company that had an energy source that sold for the equivalent of $101 a barrel, they would be making boatloads of money right now, without the government doing anything. Do you really believe there are companies thinking "We could be making tons of money and destroying our competition right now with this new energy source, but lets not do that because it might not be as profitable in the future."?
Sorry, but you fail economics. Changes in supply and demand are independent of each other. A change in supply says nothing about demand, and the opposite is also true.
Also, house prices *do* fluctuate just like stocks.
Get a clue. The drillable sections of ANWR are artic tundra. This is ANWR. And so is this. And also this. The environmental impact of clear cutting forests on Crete is irrelevant, to say the least.
People like you reinforce my opinion that people against drilling in ANWR are idiots.
Give me a break. Unless you're really poor or really cheap, $250 isn't that much money. Lots of people spend *way* more money than that on their hobbies. Besides, a few million MySpace users disagree with you that a personal blog even needs its own domain name.
Not that it would stop squatters. If anything the squatters would just focus on more profittable domains, and make pages that are even more difficult to tell apart from real sites.
Get a clue. There already is a free market for operating systems. There's Apple, for one. There are also hundreds, if not thousands, of companies that sell pre-built Linux and *BSD machines. Most people choose not to buy from those companies, and buy from companies that sell Windows PCs, like Dell and HP. Like it or not, most people choose to buy Windows PCs. There's nobody's holding people at gun point telling them to buy Dell.
The problem with Microsoft is that they use their dominant OS market share to unfairly compete in unrelated areas, like web browsers, media players, and security software.
In other news, $162 billion was just approved for the war in Iraq. Oh, and a few more billion for some congress people's pet projects.
<sarcasm>Good to see we have our priorities straight. Also good to see the democrats following through on their promise to stop funding the "war" now that they're the majority. I'd hate to think democrats and republicans were both equally useless.</sarcasm>
To the best of my knowledge there's never been a monopoly on Linux/UNIX web browsers. I think at one point Mozilla dominated, but it's never been like Windows.
Also: KHTML, Opera, and Firefox/Gecko are only three. Unless you're including ones based on those and/or text only browsers?
Almost as important is that once you hire employees, you don't personally have to do anything wrong. While they're at work, the company is responsible for the employee's actions also. At least that's what the lawsuit will claim.
Then I guess people who don't care about a standardized wall wart can save $2.
The government telling companies what to do is almost always a bad thing. Let the citizens/consumers/whatever figure out what's best for themselves by buying what they want. If people want a standardized way of charging phones, they'll pay the extra $2 for phones with a standardized way of charging. If they don't care, they shouldn't be forced to buy it. Choice is a good thing.
Besides that, companies can spend their own money developing this shit. As evidenced by the article, if people want something, companies will develop it all by themselves, without big brother telling them too.
Thanks to taxes, Chinese people who will never own a cell phone helped pay for the development their country's cell phone charging "standard". Here, we'll soon be able to get the same thing, and all we have to do is buy a phone that follows the standard. People who don't care, or don't have phones, don't pay anything extra for it.
And don't forget that China is also the country that throws people in prison for "blogging" the wrong things or visiting the wrong websites. Government control of businesses goes hand in hand with government control of the people.
Your complaint doesn't make any sense. Trolltech, the company that created Qt, is already dedicated exclusively to improving Qt. Qt is their flagship product, they're not going to let it suffer. They've created an awesome product without any help from Nokia, and that's not going to change just because Nokia chooses some other GUI toolkit..
I'm sorry to nag, but it's a pet peeve of mine. Putting Windows up on a P2P site doesn't change the demand for Windows. It increases the number of people using Windows because people who wouldn't buy it for the normal price might "buy" it for free. That doesn't mean the demand has changed, it means the equilibrium between the supply and demand (the price) has changed. The lose in sales is correct though. People who want Windows enough to pay the full price will definitely want it when they can get it for free.
Supply and demand are screwy for "intellectual property", but that much still holds.
Here. You make it sound like patents are a big secret or something.
No, I don't think you do.
If the parents have to move so their kids can switch schools, the UK definitely isn't using the plan I mentioned.
If the people left purposely chose to go to a bad school, I'm not sure a great school is going to make much of a difference. If they're just not smart, or just don't give a shit, the greatest school in the world isn't going to help them. I just can't feel bad for people who are getting exactly what they asked for.
Why? I'm 99.999% sure the judge wouldn't have used bit torrent to pirate copyrighted music and movies, which is the actual crime in the RIAA cases. No cases that I've heard of have involved people trading entirely legal material over bit-torrent. There was the time they illegally DDOSed Revision3, but that wasn't a court case. Think about it this way: if I run somebody down with my car, the judge isn't going to be sympathetic because he's driven a car before.
Besides that, judges have to judge based on the law. If you're guilty according to the law, he's going to convict you. It's his job.
I mostly agree, except for judges as moral compasses. Morals and laws are very different things.
Laws are meant to prevent a person from infringing another person's rights. Morals are meant to tell a person what's right or wrong. The confusion comes from all the situations where the two overlap, such as murder, rape, robbery, and fraud.
I would expect a judge to be lawful. I wouldn't necessarily expect them to agree with my morals.
What possible reason could there be for needing a new law in less than 90 days? We've gone 230 years, but suddenly we need this new law *right* *now*? Give me a break.
If it's that important, maybe they should've planned ahead more than 90 days.
The problem I have with your argument is that, like most people, you're just arguing it, you're not actually finding inovative ways to promote industry and save the environment. You're expecting somebody else to do all the work, and refusing to believe them when they explain why it can't be done or is really expensive. You're quick to point out how "lazy" all the industry people are, but you're not actually offering a solution either. Wanting something really bad doesn't make it possible.
We shouldn't trash the environment for every petty luxury, but there has to be some point where we say "In this case we're going to harm the environment because the benefits outweigh the environmental cost."
And what's your solution for something important, like oil? I don't think I've heard the environmental conditions that would satisfy environmentalists for drilling in ANWR or off the coasts. As much as I like paying $4 for a gallon of gas, it'd be really nice if we'd let oil companies pump more oil right about now.
It doesn't have to satisfy anybody, it just has to not piss off the people who vote. The "victims" don't vote and that means the politicians don't care.
I'm blaming the victims because the victims brought it on themselves. The funniest part is, the people impacted negatively by this probably won't vote next time either.
Get a clue. There was 60% voter turnout in 2004. Of that, Bush got 50.8% of the votes. That means Bush started this term thanks to about 30% of the voting public. If anything, that just shows why it's so important to vote. It doesn't matter if they're ignorant, if they vote they matter to politicians.
Yelling about corruption conspiracy theories just make you look silly. I lol'd though.
This isn't a standard.
As much as I dislike Microsoft, sometimes I really wonder about the unthinking Microsoft bashing on Slashdot. Here you've more or less assumed Firefox's non-standard feature will become a standard. But what justification is there for that? IE doesn't have a similar feature in this case, but there are several areas where IE does things differently than Firefox or has features that aren't in Firefox, so why are those never added as standards?. Why does the Firefox implementation get a free pass at standardization, while Microsoft's implementation gets demonized? If a specific implementation gets to set the standard, why Firefox? It's not the reference implentation. It's not the most standards compliant browser. It's not even the best open source browser.
The government only represents the people when the people vote. Guess which age group is least likely to vote? It's exactly the same age group that's most likely to use P2P and play WoW.
99.999% of politicians aren't politicians because they love helping people and doing the right thing. They're in it for the money and the power. As far as politicians are concerned, people who don't vote don't exist. Non-voters have no say in whether the politicians keep their cushy jobs, so why cater to them when they can cater to actual voters and keep their jobs? If you ignore politicians, the politicians will ignore you.
Even if the corporations are buying off politicians left and right, the voters are still ultimately responsible for continually re-electing the corrupt politicians.
It's really hard to feel bad about all of this political bitching when the people most upset are also the ones least like to vote.