Typical engineer response, in that you completely missed the point of his post and went to vehicles dimensions as a nice attractive mathematical proxy. He said they take up less space on the freeway not that they are longer. Why does the difference matter, because you don't drive with your bumper touching the vehicle in front! Let's take a conservative example and assume that vehicles are travelling at 30mph on the freeway. In theory they should stay about 30 metres apart, but being realistic they're probably closer to ~10 metres apart. So the space on a freeway occupied by two cards (that are way too close to each other) travelling at low speeds is two car lengths and 20 metres. If a bus is less than 1 car length and 10 metres longer than an average car then it is taken up less space on the freeway.
These people come off as a bunch of creepy stalker nutjobs. If I was their target, I would legitimately fear for the safety of my family.
This. Whether there are some legitimate issues with what the firm he works for does or not, these protesters are way out there in their views. The only thing this guy could do to stop them would be quit working for tech firms (if he moved to another then they'd blame him for everything, nonsensical bs included, that they think that firm does.
If I was his boss or anyone senior at google then I'd hire a couple of investigators, collect all the information I could and then ruin a handful of the protesters with court fees for whatever civil or criminal charges I could accuse them of without risking a summary judgement against me.
False. Most intelligent people are smart enough to know that you can't judge intelligence based on where someone lives or the individual activities they enjoy.
Fraud, as defined in our current market, a true free market would view as creative ways to get individuals to voluntarily part with their property.
Nonsense. You may have some weird notion that a 'true' free market doesn't include the notion of fraud but that doesn't make it so. Restricting fraud has no more relevance to whether a market is free or not than restricting theft does.
It doesn't even have to be the government, rather it's an entity that has no commercial interests in the infrastructure they're providing. This can be done by making the wholesale provider a completely separate corporate entity from retail providers (and preventing the wholesale provider from being a retail provider).
This works well when there are multiple competing entities however if you have one wholesale provider then they have no reason to invest in upgrades or cut prices they charge. We have a system like this in the UK where BT wholesale manages the infrastructure and must allow anyone to use it at the same rate. The government heavily regulates both what they do and how much they can charge. There is also some limited market competition across large parts of the UK from a cable provider. The situation works but it's hard to say whether it is better than a fully government controlled infrastructure. Theoretically the lack of a profit motive would mean that they could drop prices or invest more in the best case, however it could also mean that they were wasteful because they have less direct motivation to control costs.
I'm not a libertarian, but the only person here looking 'dumb' is you.
As is usually the case it is a matter of balance. Look at the current nonsense with EULA etc in our regulated world, clearly abuse and companies gaining advantage isn't stopped by regulation (although some of the worst examples can and should be stopped that way). Fraud is a crime and very few people less regulation would suggest changing that.
Something so simple that some 'totally credible' anonymous user thinks it can be recreated for less than $1,000,000. Obviously we needed to know that because it's clearly accurate and/or worthy of note.
Yeah, because co-ops owned by the customers are so profit focused. If you can't be arsed reading the article no problem, just don't be shocked that it makes you look like an uninformed moron from time to time.
In the UK we can have unmetered internet access at perhaps 60mbps/20mbps speeds
We have that in most urban locations it certainly isn't country wide or even close. Additionally we have spent billions of government money on paying companies to lay cables in rural locations. We also have 8x the population density of the United States meaning the costs of cabling and infrastructure are massively lower. Finally, we have a heavily de-regulated market which is why BT was split into two halves and we have LLU etc.
I'm impressed you can act so proud about something you clearly know so little about.
There no competition in the region, as the article points out, because no company wants to provide internet in the region and a co-op (owned by the users) was set-up so they could actually have internet access, as again covered in the article.
This story has literally nothing to do with company abuse or overcharging. It is simply showing the true cost of providing internet access to people who live in very sparsely populated areas. If there are areas like this getting cheaper internet in other countries then they are certainly getting it cheaper because the government, and thus the population as a whole, is paying the money instead.
It's easy to sit there and be smug about what your country is offering. I'm paying $50 US for my full phone/net package which is 76mb/s with no download cap in the UK. However all that really shows is that the UK with an average population density of ~260 people/km (130 houses) is much cheaper to cable than a part of Ohio with something like 7people/km (3-4 houses).
Someone that uses 5 GB monthly, but expects 30 MB/s bandwidth during peak time
Would be using the internet for 22 peak minutes a month and not at all outside of peak hours, ie: they don't exist. Anyone expecting 30 MB/S isn't using less than 5 gigs a month. In most cases where limited caps come in the connection speed is pretty much fixed at whatever your home line can offer. The ISP wants to keep the cost down for someone who only uses the internet casually and is doing so by charging more to heavier users. If you need to get $50 per customer to cover costs then very light users will simply cancel the subscription, increasing the cost for everyone left and leaving less of the poor and elderly with internet access.
There is a nominal cost to increased data within an ISP, but it isn't enough to be relevant to this.
The point that people claiming that charging by the bit is 'profit-taking' seem to be incapable of getting is that profit-taking is inherently the taking of profit. When the company is a small co-op in Ohio it clearly isn't profit taking. Even if it was a commercial entity the method of charging doesn't define whether it is profit taking or not.
Try and take a step back and consider two things. Firstly, that there is clearly a correlation between quantity of data and use of bandwidth so pretending that they are somehow entirely alien to each other is disingenuous. Secondly if the company is making a reasonable profit, and being efficient, then it isn't abusive to have a charging model that gives people with limited usage a lower price by giving high users a higher price.
You're right that it doesn't relate to this individual case: a small co-op in Ohio. However, I assume it was mentioned because if providers can drop your free bandwidth cap and allow web companies to pay so their content doesn't count (as has been reported on here before) then there might be a move towards this on other larger ISPs.
If operating your ISP costs $10,000 a month then you need to make, more than, $10,000 from your customers to keep the lights on. If you have 100 customers you could charge a flat rate of $100 each or you could tier it so that the amount customers pay is related to the level of use.
You can debate the pricing all you want, and it seems pretty ludicrous, but there's nothing wrong with charging customers based on consumption rather than charging everyone the same amount.
Amazon has played the sales tax dodging game for long enough now and it's going to end. With physical sales falling and web sales increasing it just isn't plausible to expect it to carry on. Amazon doesn't really care. They'll milk it as long as they can then move on.
Alternately, if they sent email saying "Hey, we see you've ordered JK Rowling books in the past; did you know there's a new one coming soon? Click here to preorder", theyd' get a lot of extra sales.
Welcome to the year 2014, a wondrous place, where Amazon have been doing that and untold other things like it for around a decade.
If you're going to dismiss an idea then it might reflect better on you if you do even a modicum of research on it before hand.
We know you don't like patents. But please have a point to argue next time. Would an on die cache tell the CPU it fetched some predictive instructions that it doesn't need but might like?
Don't some browsers pre-fetch pages they think you are likely to visit? Don't some operating systems load programs into RAM before you ask for them to decrease loading times?
I know they aren't the same mechanism that he was suggesting but at the same time I'm not really sure how this is innovative. Hell some speciality shops will order things because they know a certain customer is bound to want it and may mail them to let them know. The innovation is in how you implement this in a large supply chain and how you accurately predict purchase decisions; which are both analytical/mathematical questions and shouldn't imo be covered by patents.
It's only inefficient if you don't consider the bigger picture or screw up the implementation. Amazon wants to make shops irrelevant and part of that, as they see it, is getting product to customers as fast or faster than they could get it from shops. If they have a local courier depot serving a city and can say with 99% confidence that they will order 50 or more copies of a new book on Monday then they can send the books to the city depot before the orders come in with a high confidence that the orders will come and they can be split off into delivery vehicles and delivered same day. The negligible number of returns is a small price to pay to be able to offer a same day delivery service while using far fewer priority delivery vehicles to provide it.
Utilities should be public, and not operated for profit. Since they're in the public good
It's a pretty simplistic position. Why should gas infrastructure be public when surely it isn't as critical, or at least no more so, than food, water, medicine, logistics, drilling for oil?
The argument that giving something to the government magically makes it safe is nonsense. Give something to a government department with the wrong targets and insufficient funding and you'll end up with a mess regardless of their motive.
To be fair even if you only got 50ltr a minute through the device that would considerably decrease the amount of tank air you were using when 30m+ below the surface.
Not quite. My recollection from my diving course is that 'normal' diving is done with normal air pressurised in the tank. That air will be about 21% oxygen which is fine for the human body, however as the air is pressurised then the amount of air and thus the amount of oxygen you breathe in increases. In theory at 30 metres you're breathing in 4x as much oxygen as at the surface. You're normally fine down at that level but as you get to 40 metres or deeper the amount of oxygen becomes a more immediate issue.
The bit you got wrong is Nitrox which actually increases the risk of oxygen poisoning if not managed properly; Nitrox (where air includes more oxygen but less nitrogen) is used to allow people to dive for longer because they absorb less nitrogen which is a danger if it releases as "bubbles" back out of your body into your blood.
Exactly. The people raging against this don't see the futility in fighting against people doing what is best for themselves. It makes no sense for me not to use my cashback credit card if I would get charged the same amount in cash. Yes, theoretically if everyone used cards with lower fees then prices could be cheaper for everyone but they don't.
Personally I think there is a clear failure of the market. In most countries there are only 2-3 common card companies (Visa, Mastercard and Amex being most common in my experience). In the UK the vast majority is Visa/Mastercard and you basically get whichever type your bank uses so there's very little need for them to compete to keep prices to merchants down.
And if it wasn't worth paying then they wouldn't accept the cards. I don't like the agreements that state companies have to charge the same price for cash that credit card companies require businesses to agree to. I think those should be stopped, but I doubt many firms would change and have different prices even if it did. Typically in the UK it isn't unusual for companies to require a minimum spend before allowing you to use card payments (typically around $8 or $16) but they virtually never (except on very high value goods) charge a premium for using cards.
Slashdot Mirror
Typical engineer response, in that you completely missed the point of his post and went to vehicles dimensions as a nice attractive mathematical proxy. He said they take up less space on the freeway not that they are longer. Why does the difference matter, because you don't drive with your bumper touching the vehicle in front! Let's take a conservative example and assume that vehicles are travelling at 30mph on the freeway. In theory they should stay about 30 metres apart, but being realistic they're probably closer to ~10 metres apart. So the space on a freeway occupied by two cards (that are way too close to each other) travelling at low speeds is two car lengths and 20 metres. If a bus is less than 1 car length and 10 metres longer than an average car then it is taken up less space on the freeway.
This. Whether there are some legitimate issues with what the firm he works for does or not, these protesters are way out there in their views. The only thing this guy could do to stop them would be quit working for tech firms (if he moved to another then they'd blame him for everything, nonsensical bs included, that they think that firm does.
If I was his boss or anyone senior at google then I'd hire a couple of investigators, collect all the information I could and then ruin a handful of the protesters with court fees for whatever civil or criminal charges I could accuse them of without risking a summary judgement against me.
False. Most intelligent people are smart enough to know that you can't judge intelligence based on where someone lives or the individual activities they enjoy.
Nonsense. You may have some weird notion that a 'true' free market doesn't include the notion of fraud but that doesn't make it so. Restricting fraud has no more relevance to whether a market is free or not than restricting theft does.
This works well when there are multiple competing entities however if you have one wholesale provider then they have no reason to invest in upgrades or cut prices they charge. We have a system like this in the UK where BT wholesale manages the infrastructure and must allow anyone to use it at the same rate. The government heavily regulates both what they do and how much they can charge. There is also some limited market competition across large parts of the UK from a cable provider. The situation works but it's hard to say whether it is better than a fully government controlled infrastructure. Theoretically the lack of a profit motive would mean that they could drop prices or invest more in the best case, however it could also mean that they were wasteful because they have less direct motivation to control costs.
I'm not a libertarian, but the only person here looking 'dumb' is you.
As is usually the case it is a matter of balance. Look at the current nonsense with EULA etc in our regulated world, clearly abuse and companies gaining advantage isn't stopped by regulation (although some of the worst examples can and should be stopped that way). Fraud is a crime and very few people less regulation would suggest changing that.
Something so simple that some 'totally credible' anonymous user thinks it can be recreated for less than $1,000,000. Obviously we needed to know that because it's clearly accurate and/or worthy of note.
And doesn't care because they weren't paying users ;)
Yeah, because co-ops owned by the customers are so profit focused. If you can't be arsed reading the article no problem, just don't be shocked that it makes you look like an uninformed moron from time to time.
We have that in most urban locations it certainly isn't country wide or even close. Additionally we have spent billions of government money on paying companies to lay cables in rural locations. We also have 8x the population density of the United States meaning the costs of cabling and infrastructure are massively lower. Finally, we have a heavily de-regulated market which is why BT was split into two halves and we have LLU etc.
I'm impressed you can act so proud about something you clearly know so little about.
There no competition in the region, as the article points out, because no company wants to provide internet in the region and a co-op (owned by the users) was set-up so they could actually have internet access, as again covered in the article.
This story has literally nothing to do with company abuse or overcharging. It is simply showing the true cost of providing internet access to people who live in very sparsely populated areas. If there are areas like this getting cheaper internet in other countries then they are certainly getting it cheaper because the government, and thus the population as a whole, is paying the money instead. It's easy to sit there and be smug about what your country is offering. I'm paying $50 US for my full phone/net package which is 76mb/s with no download cap in the UK. However all that really shows is that the UK with an average population density of ~260 people/km (130 houses) is much cheaper to cable than a part of Ohio with something like 7people/km (3-4 houses).
He had nothing to say and a need to be snarky ;)
Would be using the internet for 22 peak minutes a month and not at all outside of peak hours, ie: they don't exist. Anyone expecting 30 MB/S isn't using less than 5 gigs a month. In most cases where limited caps come in the connection speed is pretty much fixed at whatever your home line can offer. The ISP wants to keep the cost down for someone who only uses the internet casually and is doing so by charging more to heavier users. If you need to get $50 per customer to cover costs then very light users will simply cancel the subscription, increasing the cost for everyone left and leaving less of the poor and elderly with internet access.
There is a nominal cost to increased data within an ISP, but it isn't enough to be relevant to this.
The point that people claiming that charging by the bit is 'profit-taking' seem to be incapable of getting is that profit-taking is inherently the taking of profit. When the company is a small co-op in Ohio it clearly isn't profit taking. Even if it was a commercial entity the method of charging doesn't define whether it is profit taking or not.
Try and take a step back and consider two things. Firstly, that there is clearly a correlation between quantity of data and use of bandwidth so pretending that they are somehow entirely alien to each other is disingenuous. Secondly if the company is making a reasonable profit, and being efficient, then it isn't abusive to have a charging model that gives people with limited usage a lower price by giving high users a higher price.
You're right that it doesn't relate to this individual case: a small co-op in Ohio. However, I assume it was mentioned because if providers can drop your free bandwidth cap and allow web companies to pay so their content doesn't count (as has been reported on here before) then there might be a move towards this on other larger ISPs.
Bollocks.
If operating your ISP costs $10,000 a month then you need to make, more than, $10,000 from your customers to keep the lights on. If you have 100 customers you could charge a flat rate of $100 each or you could tier it so that the amount customers pay is related to the level of use.
You can debate the pricing all you want, and it seems pretty ludicrous, but there's nothing wrong with charging customers based on consumption rather than charging everyone the same amount.
Amazon has played the sales tax dodging game for long enough now and it's going to end. With physical sales falling and web sales increasing it just isn't plausible to expect it to carry on. Amazon doesn't really care. They'll milk it as long as they can then move on.
Welcome to the year 2014, a wondrous place, where Amazon have been doing that and untold other things like it for around a decade.
If you're going to dismiss an idea then it might reflect better on you if you do even a modicum of research on it before hand.
Don't some browsers pre-fetch pages they think you are likely to visit? Don't some operating systems load programs into RAM before you ask for them to decrease loading times?
I know they aren't the same mechanism that he was suggesting but at the same time I'm not really sure how this is innovative. Hell some speciality shops will order things because they know a certain customer is bound to want it and may mail them to let them know. The innovation is in how you implement this in a large supply chain and how you accurately predict purchase decisions; which are both analytical/mathematical questions and shouldn't imo be covered by patents.
It's only inefficient if you don't consider the bigger picture or screw up the implementation. Amazon wants to make shops irrelevant and part of that, as they see it, is getting product to customers as fast or faster than they could get it from shops. If they have a local courier depot serving a city and can say with 99% confidence that they will order 50 or more copies of a new book on Monday then they can send the books to the city depot before the orders come in with a high confidence that the orders will come and they can be split off into delivery vehicles and delivered same day. The negligible number of returns is a small price to pay to be able to offer a same day delivery service while using far fewer priority delivery vehicles to provide it.
It's a pretty simplistic position. Why should gas infrastructure be public when surely it isn't as critical, or at least no more so, than food, water, medicine, logistics, drilling for oil?
The argument that giving something to the government magically makes it safe is nonsense. Give something to a government department with the wrong targets and insufficient funding and you'll end up with a mess regardless of their motive.
To be fair even if you only got 50ltr a minute through the device that would considerably decrease the amount of tank air you were using when 30m+ below the surface.
Not quite. My recollection from my diving course is that 'normal' diving is done with normal air pressurised in the tank. That air will be about 21% oxygen which is fine for the human body, however as the air is pressurised then the amount of air and thus the amount of oxygen you breathe in increases. In theory at 30 metres you're breathing in 4x as much oxygen as at the surface. You're normally fine down at that level but as you get to 40 metres or deeper the amount of oxygen becomes a more immediate issue.
The bit you got wrong is Nitrox which actually increases the risk of oxygen poisoning if not managed properly; Nitrox (where air includes more oxygen but less nitrogen) is used to allow people to dive for longer because they absorb less nitrogen which is a danger if it releases as "bubbles" back out of your body into your blood.
Exactly. The people raging against this don't see the futility in fighting against people doing what is best for themselves. It makes no sense for me not to use my cashback credit card if I would get charged the same amount in cash. Yes, theoretically if everyone used cards with lower fees then prices could be cheaper for everyone but they don't. Personally I think there is a clear failure of the market. In most countries there are only 2-3 common card companies (Visa, Mastercard and Amex being most common in my experience). In the UK the vast majority is Visa/Mastercard and you basically get whichever type your bank uses so there's very little need for them to compete to keep prices to merchants down.
And if it wasn't worth paying then they wouldn't accept the cards. I don't like the agreements that state companies have to charge the same price for cash that credit card companies require businesses to agree to. I think those should be stopped, but I doubt many firms would change and have different prices even if it did. Typically in the UK it isn't unusual for companies to require a minimum spend before allowing you to use card payments (typically around $8 or $16) but they virtually never (except on very high value goods) charge a premium for using cards.