I am a staunch libertarian and advocate for personal right to privacy, but there are no valid reasons for drivers to be concerned about their privacy in this scenario. Are airline pilots in danger of having their privacy violated because the aircraft's current trajectory and speed is logged? Effective fleet management and tracking is part of the industry you're working in, folks.
That said, I inherently don't trust government, and can start to see where the passenger's rights become threatened somewhat when the government's database starts linking credit card transactions with GPS records and begin constructing logs of people's travels. I mean, they are requiring cabs implement both at the same time./Paranoid off
Also, despite his fame and fortune, William Gibson is one of the last person to be talking about predicting the future. Anyone really familiar with science fiction and Gibson's novels can tell you that other than a few buzzwords and the general tone of his one and only original novel, nothing Gibson has written about has actually come true. The metaphorical "cyberspace" (there's the buzz-word [smirk]), in his first novel if not really anything like what actually became cyberspace except in very general, symbolic outlines. And all of his further novels are just regurgitations of the same stuff. Uh... it's a little early to say whether his "predictions" about cyberspace were accurate or not, considering the Neuromancer trilogy takes place waaaay later than 2007.
I spent the last two weeks on vacation (travelling by air and rail) with my Blackberry 8830 as my only Internet connection.
I was backpacking. No room for a laptop. Wouldn't have had a reliable place to connect, anyway, even if I had brought it.
I gotta say, I was very impressed by what I was able to do with the BB's browser. It sort of felt like a blast from the past - how web browsing was in 1997.:) I was even able to download a telnet client over the air and connect to some BBSes (playing Legend of the Red Dragon while travelling by train). Cool stuff.
Was able to follow Slashdot the entire time:)
Your question should read, "how connected do we want to be?"
I, for one, greatly appreciate having Wikipedia in my pocket.
"Yes, some of my tax dollars had to be used to build the network, but with the monthly cost savings I am coming out ahead."
Yeah, you're coming out ahead of all the people don't use the service and still pay for it with their tax dollars. But I bet you didn't think of the other people that pay so you can surf.
Why don't we go ahead and put all goods and services in the hands of the government, because everything would be cheaper, right? Because they're not operating for a profit?
I don't want to pay for your broadband, or anyone else's, with my tax dollars.
Nor do I want my Internet regulated by those who brought us the PATRIOT act, the DMV, and the IRS.
The government is terrible at managing cost-effective solutions to anything because they're spending other people's money. Take this million-dollar outhouse, for example: http://www.jldr.com/oh1mill.html .
"The whole project is loaded with Park Service overhead. The agency already has spent $860,000 for design and construction supervision teams. In all, the job could end up costing taxpayers more than $6 million."
It's a four-holer outhouse with no running water.
The worst argument for municipal broadband that I've heard is that it helps the poor who can't afford Internet access. I suppose we'll be buying them laptops with WiFi, too.
The people that benefit most from municipal broadband are the people that can afford it but don't want to pay.
If you want Internet access, pay for it. It's a luxury item that didn't exist in the public's perception fifteen short years ago. Don't levy taxes on the poor who can't afford or need a MySpace page so you can read Slashdot for free.
The second big complaint was that it doesn't support more than 9 mouse buttons. I spent $100 on a fancy mouse, hoping I could control most of my GUI programs with only the mouse. Much to my surprise, any shortcuts after Button9 simply don't work. This was quite disappointing
I'm trying to figure out if that's a joke. Nine mouse buttons?
Any Mac user will tell you that one mouse button, when used in conjunction with seven funny-looking keyboard keys should be enough for anybody!
Once upon a time, back in my cowboy days, I was riding the virtual light with my Ono-Sendai cyberdeck, trying to crack the Greater Metropolitan Fission Authority, when I came across some real nasty Black Ice. The 'trodes on my forehead starting to tingle as my wetware started to sizzle. Dixie Flatline bailed me out, though, and that's how I became the only street samurai to survive braindeath.
I came back with a Kuang Grade Mark Eleven Chinese Icebreaker.
"...ICE patterns formed and reformed on the screen as he probed for gaps, skirted the most obvious traps, and mapped the route he'd take through Sense/Net's ICE. It was good ICE. Wonderful ICE......His program had reached the fifth gate. He watched as his icebreaker strobed and shifted in front of him, only faintly aware of his hands playing across the deck, making minor adjustments. Translucent planes of color shuffled like a trick deck. Take a card, he thought, any card.
The gate blurred past. He laughed. The Sense/Net ice had accepted his entry as a routine transfer from the consortium's Los Angeles complex. He was inside. Behind him, viral subprograms peeled off, meshing with the gate's code fabric, ready to deflect the real Los Angeles data when it arrived."
From Neuromancer, by William Gibson, following protagonist Henry Dorsett Case as he uses a Chinese military-made icebreaker to hack a virtual fortress...
If only computer security were really so dramatic:)
Who wants to bet that in response, Best Buy will simply raise their online prices?
This reminds me of the fiasco in Quebec concerning dry-cleaners. Women's clothes cost more to dry clean than men's, and for a good reason: there is more variety in the fabric and cut of women's clothes than men's, and therefore they require extra care. Typical nanny-state Quebec declared this was a form of sexual discrimination; so the dry cleaners simply raised the prices of cleaning men's clothes to match women's.
Who won? The cleaners. Who lost? The consumer.
Government: Please stay out of private enterprise.
"I'm guessing wireless carriers aren't going to be happy about this one."
It really won't make a difference. When you forward a call from a mobile you're still using your airtime so your provider gets what they want. Overseas roaming charges originate from the expensive roaming agreements with the overseas provider, not from your carrier. It's the provider in Thailand or where ever whose network you're using that charges your carrier for the usage.
Once had a customer come in and accuse us of selling his (physical) address information to spammers. Every time he applies for a service, he uses a different middle initial for his name, and keeps a record of what initial he used for what service. Said he used the middle initial 'K' when applying for our service, and soon starting receiving junk mail (of the snail variety) addressed to "John" K. "Doe."
As you may or may not know, customer privacy is something Verizon takes very seriously (being one of the only wireless providers that didn't hand over call records to the NSA, for instance). Every customer is automatically enrolled in the Do Not Call registry, etc.
Well, we investigated the matter, and eventually found out what happened.
The handsets we sold at the time used vendor-issued mail-in rebates, which, of course, require you to fill out and mail in a form with your name and address... and, naturally, this guy used the same middle initial for the rebate submission as he did when he established wireless service, not making a distinction between the two (can't blame him). Investigation found the vendor (or the rebate company they employed) was the one "sharing" the customer info.
We have since abandoned vendor rebates and now Verizon handles the rebates in-house.
A piece of advice: Use a unique e-mail or middle initial for any rebates you submit than you do for making a purchase or establishing service. The responsible party may not be who you think it is, nor may they be aware it's even happening.
I work in the wireless industry and I've seen plans slowly evolve from 50/mo + 35-cent-per-minute local only plans with wimpy coverage in 1990, to 40 bucks a month for nine hours of GOOD nationwide coverage with no long distance charges in 2007.
Every now and then I have a little old granny that comes in with her analog brickphone who is on one of those ancient price plans, and realize how much has changed in such a relatively short time. And your complaint about charging for 'an infrastructure already up'? Verizon spent $5 billion dollars last year on their network infrastructure.
Cell phones are still a fucking luxury, people. And there is PLENTY of competition. That still won't stop Slashdotters from clamoring for the government to force carriers to give them unlimited international calling and broadband internet for next to nothing, because it's "in the consumer's interest."
In your example, Ford would constitute a monopoly.
There is plenty of competition in the US cell phone market. Almost every retail mall in a relatively urban area has 5 or 6 different retailers hawking their version of the mobile communication device, and believe it or not, there are many many regional "mom-and-pop" cell phone providers (like Eloquoi Wireless, serving rural southern Kentucky), and there are scores of prepaid providers.
There is NO monopoly in the US wireless industry.
The two largest providers have roughly the same number of subscribers, actually.
Fortunately, the radically different wireless techologies Verizon and Cingular use prevent them from ever merging together in the forseeable future.
Compare this state of being to old Ma Bell.
I'm all about protecting a consumer's interests, but right now, there are plenty of options available on the market, and mobile service is VERY affordable.
Right now, if you want to use your own home-brewed device on a US wireless network, the free market allows you to choose one of the GSM carriers. The only restriction is that you must have a phone that works on their FCC-licensed frequencies.
I'm all for breaking up TRUE monopolies (monopoly != large corporation). But "protecting consumer's interests" doesn't always mean giving them everything they want.
How badly do we want those drivers? If ATI/NVidia doesn't care, should we? After all, the fact is that the bundling in the binary result is the only violation, and the source is readily available, so it's not like we don't have access to source that we could compile without the drivers if we so choose... or am I missing something?
Let the spoiled bastards do it. They will lose subscribers and create a whole new market for competitors that *aren't* assholes to provide us with better service.
...recently. I greatly enjoyed Digg, and, for a while, I actually preferred Digg's setup and variety of content to Slashdot's. Unfortunately, its rising popularity and increased 'democracy' has led to severe degradation. Any comments posted that go against the grain of popular opinion gets modded down, or even controversial ones - people aren't as likely to mod things up that they agree with as they are to mod down statements they don't like. Say ANYTHING negative of Apple gets modded down to oblivion, whether the comment is valid or not.
Additionally, more and more articles linked hide referral URLs, or link to the submitters blog instead of the actual meaty articles.
One last nitpick: the extreme sensationalism that goes into the headline writing that submitters choose, in hopes that their headline will be voted up. Unfortunately, it seems to work, as the masses mod up or down without reading the articles.
How do we know the universe is 13.7 billion years old?
It was recently discovered that the universe's expansion is accelerating as time goes by. Assuming this change in acceleration has been the case all along, doesn't that really fudge with the numbers we used to estimate the universe's age?
Why wasn't there a Slashdot headline when Yahoo did this long ago?
More importantly, does Slashdot get kickbacks from Google for incessantly reporting on every little move Google makes?
Slashdot Mirror
I am a staunch libertarian and advocate for personal right to privacy, but there are no valid reasons for drivers to be concerned about their privacy in this scenario. Are airline pilots in danger of having their privacy violated because the aircraft's current trajectory and speed is logged? Effective fleet management and tracking is part of the industry you're working in, folks.
/Paranoid off
That said, I inherently don't trust government, and can start to see where the passenger's rights become threatened somewhat when the government's database starts linking credit card transactions with GPS records and begin constructing logs of people's travels. I mean, they are requiring cabs implement both at the same time.
I spent the last two weeks on vacation (travelling by air and rail) with my Blackberry 8830 as my only Internet connection. I was backpacking. No room for a laptop. Wouldn't have had a reliable place to connect, anyway, even if I had brought it. I gotta say, I was very impressed by what I was able to do with the BB's browser. It sort of felt like a blast from the past - how web browsing was in 1997. :) I was even able to download a telnet client over the air and connect to some BBSes (playing Legend of the Red Dragon while travelling by train). Cool stuff.
Was able to follow Slashdot the entire time :)
Your question should read, "how connected do we want to be?"
I, for one, greatly appreciate having Wikipedia in my pocket.
"Yes, some of my tax dollars had to be used to build the network, but with the monthly cost savings I am coming out ahead." Yeah, you're coming out ahead of all the people don't use the service and still pay for it with their tax dollars. But I bet you didn't think of the other people that pay so you can surf.
Why don't we go ahead and put all goods and services in the hands of the government, because everything would be cheaper, right? Because they're not operating for a profit? I don't want to pay for your broadband, or anyone else's, with my tax dollars. Nor do I want my Internet regulated by those who brought us the PATRIOT act, the DMV, and the IRS. The government is terrible at managing cost-effective solutions to anything because they're spending other people's money. Take this million-dollar outhouse, for example: http://www.jldr.com/oh1mill.html . "The whole project is loaded with Park Service overhead. The agency already has spent $860,000 for design and construction supervision teams. In all, the job could end up costing taxpayers more than $6 million." It's a four-holer outhouse with no running water. The worst argument for municipal broadband that I've heard is that it helps the poor who can't afford Internet access. I suppose we'll be buying them laptops with WiFi, too. The people that benefit most from municipal broadband are the people that can afford it but don't want to pay. If you want Internet access, pay for it. It's a luxury item that didn't exist in the public's perception fifteen short years ago. Don't levy taxes on the poor who can't afford or need a MySpace page so you can read Slashdot for free.
"I'll never enter another AT&T store again. And I already can't wait until my 2 year service contract is up."
June 29, 2009. Enjoy your crappy service! Hope the phone you paid full retail for was worth the 2-year contract you signed for it.
I'm still shaking my head at this behavior.
The second big complaint was that it doesn't support more than 9 mouse buttons. I spent $100 on a fancy mouse, hoping I could control most of my GUI programs with only the mouse. Much to my surprise, any shortcuts after Button9 simply don't work. This was quite disappointing
I'm trying to figure out if that's a joke. Nine mouse buttons?
Any Mac user will tell you that one mouse button, when used in conjunction with seven funny-looking keyboard keys should be enough for anybody!
Once upon a time, back in my cowboy days, I was riding the virtual light with my Ono-Sendai cyberdeck, trying to crack the Greater Metropolitan Fission Authority, when I came across some real nasty Black Ice. The 'trodes on my forehead starting to tingle as my wetware started to sizzle. Dixie Flatline bailed me out, though, and that's how I became the only street samurai to survive braindeath.
I came back with a Kuang Grade Mark Eleven Chinese Icebreaker.
I think you meant 'Jacking Out' there, chief.
"...ICE patterns formed and reformed on the screen as he probed for gaps, skirted the most obvious traps, and mapped the route he'd take through Sense/Net's ICE. It was good ICE. Wonderful ICE... ...His program had reached the fifth gate. He watched as his icebreaker strobed and shifted in front of him, only faintly aware of his hands playing across the deck, making minor adjustments. Translucent planes of color shuffled like a trick deck. Take a card, he thought, any card.
:)
The gate blurred past. He laughed. The Sense/Net ice had accepted his entry as a routine transfer from the consortium's Los Angeles complex. He was inside. Behind him, viral subprograms peeled off, meshing with the gate's code fabric, ready to deflect the real Los Angeles data when it arrived."
From Neuromancer, by William Gibson, following protagonist Henry Dorsett Case as he uses a Chinese military-made icebreaker to hack a virtual fortress...
If only computer security were really so dramatic
Who wants to bet that in response, Best Buy will simply raise their online prices?
This reminds me of the fiasco in Quebec concerning dry-cleaners. Women's clothes cost more to dry clean than men's, and for a good reason: there is more variety in the fabric and cut of women's clothes than men's, and therefore they require extra care. Typical nanny-state Quebec declared this was a form of sexual discrimination; so the dry cleaners simply raised the prices of cleaning men's clothes to match women's.
Who won? The cleaners. Who lost? The consumer.
Government: Please stay out of private enterprise.
"I'm guessing wireless carriers aren't going to be happy about this one."
It really won't make a difference. When you forward a call from a mobile you're still using your airtime so your provider gets what they want. Overseas roaming charges originate from the expensive roaming agreements with the overseas provider, not from your carrier. It's the provider in Thailand or where ever whose network you're using that charges your carrier for the usage.
Cool product, btw.
That requires the universe to possess awareness. A rock doesn't 'know' of my existence, yet I remain...
I work for a Verizon Wireless retailer.
Once had a customer come in and accuse us of selling his (physical) address information to spammers. Every time he applies for a service, he uses a different middle initial for his name, and keeps a record of what initial he used for what service. Said he used the middle initial 'K' when applying for our service, and soon starting receiving junk mail (of the snail variety) addressed to "John" K. "Doe."
As you may or may not know, customer privacy is something Verizon takes very seriously (being one of the only wireless providers that didn't hand over call records to the NSA, for instance). Every customer is automatically enrolled in the Do Not Call registry, etc.
Well, we investigated the matter, and eventually found out what happened.
The handsets we sold at the time used vendor-issued mail-in rebates, which, of course, require you to fill out and mail in a form with your name and address... and, naturally, this guy used the same middle initial for the rebate submission as he did when he established wireless service, not making a distinction between the two (can't blame him). Investigation found the vendor (or the rebate company they employed) was the one "sharing" the customer info.
We have since abandoned vendor rebates and now Verizon handles the rebates in-house.
A piece of advice: Use a unique e-mail or middle initial for any rebates you submit than you do for making a purchase or establishing service. The responsible party may not be who you think it is, nor may they be aware it's even happening.
Horseshit.
I work in the wireless industry and I've seen plans slowly evolve from 50/mo + 35-cent-per-minute local only plans with wimpy coverage in 1990, to 40 bucks a month for nine hours of GOOD nationwide coverage with no long distance charges in 2007.
Every now and then I have a little old granny that comes in with her analog brickphone who is on one of those ancient price plans, and realize how much has changed in such a relatively short time. And your complaint about charging for 'an infrastructure already up'? Verizon spent $5 billion dollars last year on their network infrastructure.
Cell phones are still a fucking luxury, people. And there is PLENTY of competition. That still won't stop Slashdotters from clamoring for the government to force carriers to give them unlimited international calling and broadband internet for next to nothing, because it's "in the consumer's interest."
In your example, Ford would constitute a monopoly.
There is plenty of competition in the US cell phone market. Almost every retail mall in a relatively urban area has 5 or 6 different retailers hawking their version of the mobile communication device, and believe it or not, there are many many regional "mom-and-pop" cell phone providers (like Eloquoi Wireless, serving rural southern Kentucky), and there are scores of prepaid providers.
There is NO monopoly in the US wireless industry.
The two largest providers have roughly the same number of subscribers, actually.
Fortunately, the radically different wireless techologies Verizon and Cingular use prevent them from ever merging together in the forseeable future.
Compare this state of being to old Ma Bell.
I'm all about protecting a consumer's interests, but right now, there are plenty of options available on the market, and mobile service is VERY affordable.
Right now, if you want to use your own home-brewed device on a US wireless network, the free market allows you to choose one of the GSM carriers. The only restriction is that you must have a phone that works on their FCC-licensed frequencies.
I'm all for breaking up TRUE monopolies (monopoly != large corporation). But "protecting consumer's interests" doesn't always mean giving them everything they want.
How badly do we want those drivers? If ATI/NVidia doesn't care, should we? After all, the fact is that the bundling in the binary result is the only violation, and the source is readily available, so it's not like we don't have access to source that we could compile without the drivers if we so choose... or am I missing something?
Let the spoiled bastards do it. They will lose subscribers and create a whole new market for competitors that *aren't* assholes to provide us with better service.
I was, of course, being sarcastic.
...nuff said.
...recently. I greatly enjoyed Digg, and, for a while, I actually preferred Digg's setup and variety of content to Slashdot's. Unfortunately, its rising popularity and increased 'democracy' has led to severe degradation. Any comments posted that go against the grain of popular opinion gets modded down, or even controversial ones - people aren't as likely to mod things up that they agree with as they are to mod down statements they don't like. Say ANYTHING negative of Apple gets modded down to oblivion, whether the comment is valid or not.
r onicle_Article_on_Social_News_Sites . Who wants to go to Digg to read about how great Digg is?
Additionally, more and more articles linked hide referral URLs, or link to the submitters blog instead of the actual meaty articles.
I've also grown weary of self-masturbatory articles, such as http://digg.com/technology/Digg_Featured_in_SF_Ch
One last nitpick: the extreme sensationalism that goes into the headline writing that submitters choose, in hopes that their headline will be voted up. Unfortunately, it seems to work, as the masses mod up or down without reading the articles.
Is that sarcasm? It's one heckuva browser, that's why.
How do we know the universe is 13.7 billion years old? It was recently discovered that the universe's expansion is accelerating as time goes by. Assuming this change in acceleration has been the case all along, doesn't that really fudge with the numbers we used to estimate the universe's age?
Why wasn't there a Slashdot headline when Yahoo did this long ago? More importantly, does Slashdot get kickbacks from Google for incessantly reporting on every little move Google makes?
I am posting this message in order to pre-empt and prevent any lame beowulf cluster cliches. Thank you, that is all.