Even assuming that wireless bandwidth magically expands to accommodate every American using it, a 5GB per month cap is pretty much nothing. I go through that for work in about a week. Less if I have to do some installs or backups. And satellite is only an option for consuming content very slowly. And you still need at least dial-up to issue requests.
So no, there is no competition in the Internet connection space.
Keep thinking that. I live in the heart of Silicon Valley. Granted, it's probably the cheapest place within a 5 mile radius, but it is the fucking center of Silicon Valley. No cable, too far from the DSLAM to get anything more than 1.5 Mbit down. And that's after ATT fixed their noise problem that had me throttled to half that. Yes, I could move to a more expensive place. I don't want to. I can afford it, but I don't see the point. The Internet is now a utility like water and electricity. If corporations can't be arsed to provide it in one of the densest places in the US, right where it turned from a University project into the keystone of the US economy, they need to be regulated until they do. I know that makes me a dirty commie, but American society will be better off in the long run if the telecom infrastructure is regulated until the Telcoms cry Uncle.
Umm, I hate to break it to you, but all devices use more energy than they produce. The reason that oil and gas is so effective for us is that they are the result of a few million years of energy conversion, and we just leverage the equivalent of a battery that has been charged for a few million years.
The only question that matters is whether the energy is easily storable, produces a useful amount of energy and does not result in unmanageable pollution problems.
Snicker. You don't know your history, you don't understand what it takes to be successful, lack reading comprehension, refuse to think, and are thick with irony.
Nope, that's not why there's is a certain segment of the population that doesn't pay taxes. The reason is that all of society operates better if everyone can fully participate, and that the elite across the world has learned over the last 300 years that you don't want poor people wondering why the hell they have to hand over 30% of their loaf of bread, while the elite merely decides to cut back from 3 summer houses to 2.
income from self-made successful people
Ah, right. I believe that's the protestant fundamentalist in many Americans thinking that being rich is a sign of being blessed by God. You vastly overestimate the importance of God or of your own work in how much money you have.
Well, other than recieving it in the form of "rebates" on incomes taxes they don't even pay. Half of the country. Half.
That's because they don't have any disposable income. Do you know what $40k buys you as a lifestyle in Silicon Valley? A studio in the cheapest apartment complex, healthcare, a car, food, a smidgen of retirement savings and a little emergency fund - and that's it. The people who earn 20K are operating at subsistence level and survive on ramen noodles. These are the people for whom $10 is a week's worth of food.
That's why they don't pay taxes. Because any money they'd pay in taxes would have to go right back to them in terms of food stamps, emergency room medical care and other emergencies that will happen and which they can't prepare for.
I'll leave the history lesson for later about what happens to countries to where the elite fails to take of a large and growing underclass. The last 6 months alone should have been educational in that.
Congratulations, you figured out why all these browser statistics are completely and utterly unreliable. I've seen statistics differ by as much as 15%, and that's coming from the major stats collectors. Go to specific sites, and it's even worse. I'm just amazed at how often - even people working in web development - take these numbers as pure gospel. I had a discussion at work a while ago where my boss, a very savvy web architect and developer in his own right, swore up and down that the web stats he got from w3c.com were the bees knees, and didn't just apply to that particular site. I lost a lot of respect for him that day.
That said, I like competition, I like that developers are trying to keep users happy, and all this benefits end-users. Now if mozilla can get its head of its ass regarding its release policy...
That was his plan? He might have as well tried to set up an ambush outside the White House, or Congress. This plan is so badly thought out, so badly implemented and relied so heavily on the FBI providing him with bad materials that they might as well charge him with being terminally stupid. This plan wasn't going to go anywhere, and wasn't going to do any damage. If he would have been lucky, he might have been able to shoot one or two guards on the way to "the door".
I would argue though that Goldman Sachs creating an investment tool that trades in Facebook pre-IPO shares, and having that investment tool value FB at around $50 billion is a pretty damn strong sign of an actual bubble.
Damn. I thought that Zynga's bubble was going to pop, but not this soon. There are only so many Farmville type games anyone can play, and I can't be arsed to build my life around clicking some field every 4 hours without getting paid.
Yes, this is just a year-over-year quarter comparison, and there are a few things that were playing against Zynga in the last few quarters. Not the least of all that a lot of real game companies are getting into the FB game business. Zynga won't be able to just rip-off some game mechanics and then throw some eye candy on top of it. They'll actually have to develop real games.
Welcome to the real world, Zynga. No one except your founders is going to make bank on your stock.
"Don't make me think" is fine if there's indeed only one plausible action. But FB is not the passport for the Internet, no matter how many people keep saying that. As a result, putting in one action that doesn't apply to a significant chunk of people is worse than giving them options they don't need.
Not to mention: do you REALLY want FB to be the defacto passport for the Internet? Especially as a company whose only ability to hold on to people is their user preferences, which are now shared with FB?
If it would be just to create a seamless user experience, they would do the standard "here are the 6 most common platform sign-ins, go pick your favorite". The fact that they require FB points to either your guess, or to FB directly paying Spotify for this move. Either which way, go suck it, Spotify. I'll stick to Pandora and, for as long as Pandora isn't on Xbox, Last.fm.
Yep, damn climate scientists, living it up with all their hoes and their bling and their giant mansions and pimped out cars... yep, truly they're living the life of the rich and famous.
Yes, because one AC == The Left, roads are useful == roads are the best at everything, reducing car use == forcing people out of cars, Climate Change == scam for scientists to line their pocket with money.
Did I miss any wild exaggerations, strawmen and other fabrications that you managed to sneak in your single sentence?
Rework your assumption that having studied law allows you to charge $50 for reading my email while on the John. I forked over about $60k to have a lawyer help me with the intricacies of overseas inheritances. In practice, it amounted to little more than telling me what documents I needed to have, and then forwarding them to the IRS. I always felt weird wearing shorts and t-shirt to the face-to-face meetings. Then I figured that they were the same as the $2k suit that the lawyer was wearing - after all, I was paying him the money that allowed him to dress the way he did, and that meant that I couldn't spend those on the same suit.
As others have pointed out, it means that jobs that are basically expensive bayesian inference engines need to change how much they charge for their services, and how much the industry charges for teaching the knowledge. There will always be a place at the top for smart people, or at least at the bottom servicing the machines.
To some extent, I suspect that quantum computing might well end up with the same problem that quantum mechanics is facing now: it works awesomely great on a very, very small scale, but cannot be used to explain the large scale force of gravity. Similarly, quantum computing might very well work with a few dozen to hundred qbits, but will fall apart at a larger scale where the number of error correcting mechanisms required to overcome decoherence will be too much.
Attitude and culturing certainly have something to do with it. To some extent, what I call schmoozing is at least partially attitude, and somewhat tied to cultural environment. I'm also dead-sure I could never be a CEO, for the exact reasons you mentioned: nerds make terrible CEOs. Woz knew it, Jobs knew it, and that's why Jobs was CEO and Woz is the whiz. The other part that spells CEO-material is also definitely what you mentioned: enjoying the fact that there is a metric ton of work that knows no time or space boundaries.
But whether you are CEO material and whether you are CEO are two different things. Random encounters and general environments have a huge impact on where exactly you end up. Bill Gates would have never been Bill Gates had he been born 10 years earlier or 10 years later. The particular skill sets that enabled him to reach the top would have been either largely useless, or a dime a dozen.
But that's the point: it's two particles colliding, one moving in one direction in time, the other in the other direction in time, but with the same charge. Charge would not be conserved, unless things work differently once you have time moving backwards. But again, as this is way above my paygrade in terms of the physics and math involved, I'll just stop here.
I won't even pretend to think I would ever be at this level, but I would love to sit in a room and watch how they work one day as a fly on the wall. Just what does set these people apart?
Newsflash: they're people like you and me, and eat and shit the exact same way we do. They even work the same way we do. The difference? They were at the right time, the right place to use their particular skills (marketing/design/direction in the case of Jobs, identification of long-term market trends in the case of Gerstner, etc). Most of them are smart - some even scary smart. But not 1:1000000 smart, and certainly not that exceedingly knowledgeable. From what I've seen, what sets CEOs apart from others is that they are very, very good at schmoozing. 1:1000000 good. Otherwise, they'd never have been in the right place at the right time.
Dunno, while I was there, he made plenty of sensible decisions. Yes, quite a bit was cut, but I didn't see any egregious cuts that jettisoned core products or teams. All in all, morale was actually doing quite well under Hurd. Granted, it was easy to do better than Carly, but still - I had the impression that HP was actually stabilizing under Hurd. Now.... it's the insane asylum run by the insane.
As for the compensation quip by the GP: that was actually established in a few studies that compared work outcome to compensation. Once compensation reached absurd levels for the work required, work output actually dropped. The researchers didn't have a ready cause available, but speculated it might be either that people try to hard to justify their income, or try not at all because the pay is so ludicrous that they don't care about keeping the job.
Another interesting aspect - by messing with signs, you can see that positrons could actually be electrons traveling back in time. All kinds of fun ensues. Doesn't work with matter-antimatter annihilation (unless we work out what that means in terms of time-anti-time annihilation), but it was an interesting revelation in physics class.
I'll start looking into the link once people are a) controlling for economic environments, and b) able to define what a race is.
Apparently, a) has happened and reduced the difference to be almost within sampling error, and b) is nearly impossible, so I'm not holding my breath. In the meantime, I'll tag crap like this at least off-topic, and most likely flamebait.
Apparently, people don't understand the difference between an open source development model, where the money is in support, and that of closed source development, where the money is in... development and support.
In essence, what's happening here is that Valve is getting done work for free because... I don't know. People think that Valve will think they're awesome and hire them? In the case of some rarer languages like Basque or Woloof, I can see that this would be a welcome labor of love. But what about Tagalog? What about Portuguese? Plenty of people there who can afford to buy the game, and probably will.
Now, the real question is whether the games subjected to this translation effort are Valve's own games, or games offered through its storefront. If it's the former, Valve is opening itself up to some fun litigation, not to mention grade-A cheap-skate status. If it's the latter.... well, take it up with the developers. They're responsible for the status of their game, including what languages are supported. If people want to support those developers and work for free, good job. But they better not kid themselves that this gives them some sort of leg up in the game world. Translation is a weird job where the basic skill is often learned through an accident of geography, and is shared among millions. The real skill is in live translations and translating so that the intent, rather than the content, is transmitted. Nneither of which will be demonstrated by doing store front translations.
Seems the cycle is swinging back to more corporate power. Corporations were knocked down a peg or two during and after WW2, when they were essentially forced to operate at the whim of the government. They were further knocked down a peg with the introduction of the EPA, and other regulatory agencies.
Now, we have regulatory capture (see the Mining Commission scandal), corporations as people and an entire group of people who quite literally worship corporations. It's gonna be awhile before it gets better.
Slashdot Mirror
(I assume your "dial up" is DSL).
I'm surprised no one has beaten you to death with a router for uttering something so moronic.
Even assuming that wireless bandwidth magically expands to accommodate every American using it, a 5GB per month cap is pretty much nothing. I go through that for work in about a week. Less if I have to do some installs or backups. And satellite is only an option for consuming content very slowly. And you still need at least dial-up to issue requests.
So no, there is no competition in the Internet connection space.
Keep thinking that. I live in the heart of Silicon Valley. Granted, it's probably the cheapest place within a 5 mile radius, but it is the fucking center of Silicon Valley. No cable, too far from the DSLAM to get anything more than 1.5 Mbit down. And that's after ATT fixed their noise problem that had me throttled to half that. Yes, I could move to a more expensive place. I don't want to. I can afford it, but I don't see the point. The Internet is now a utility like water and electricity. If corporations can't be arsed to provide it in one of the densest places in the US, right where it turned from a University project into the keystone of the US economy, they need to be regulated until they do. I know that makes me a dirty commie, but American society will be better off in the long run if the telecom infrastructure is regulated until the Telcoms cry Uncle.
Umm, I hate to break it to you, but all devices use more energy than they produce. The reason that oil and gas is so effective for us is that they are the result of a few million years of energy conversion, and we just leverage the equivalent of a battery that has been charged for a few million years.
The only question that matters is whether the energy is easily storable, produces a useful amount of energy and does not result in unmanageable pollution problems.
Snicker. You don't know your history, you don't understand what it takes to be successful, lack reading comprehension, refuse to think, and are thick with irony.
Yep, standard pretend libertarian.
Nope, that's not why there's is a certain segment of the population that doesn't pay taxes. The reason is that all of society operates better if everyone can fully participate, and that the elite across the world has learned over the last 300 years that you don't want poor people wondering why the hell they have to hand over 30%
of their loaf of bread, while the elite merely decides to cut back from 3 summer houses to 2.
income from self-made successful people
Ah, right. I believe that's the protestant fundamentalist in many Americans thinking that being rich is a sign of being blessed by God. You vastly overestimate the importance of God or of your own work in how much money you have.
Well, other than recieving it in the form of "rebates" on incomes taxes they don't even pay. Half of the country. Half.
That's because they don't have any disposable income. Do you know what $40k buys you as a lifestyle in Silicon Valley? A studio in the cheapest apartment complex, healthcare, a car, food, a smidgen of retirement savings and a little emergency fund - and that's it. The people who earn 20K are operating at subsistence level and survive on ramen noodles. These are the people for whom $10 is a week's worth of food.
That's why they don't pay taxes. Because any money they'd pay in taxes would have to go right back to them in terms of food stamps, emergency room medical care and other emergencies that will happen and which they can't prepare for.
I'll leave the history lesson for later about what happens to countries to where the elite fails to take of a large and growing underclass. The last 6 months alone should have been educational in that.
Congratulations, you figured out why all these browser statistics are completely and utterly unreliable. I've seen statistics differ by as much as 15%, and that's coming from the major stats collectors. Go to specific sites, and it's even worse. I'm just amazed at how often - even people working in web development - take these numbers as pure gospel. I had a discussion at work a while ago where my boss, a very savvy web architect and developer in his own right, swore up and down that the web stats he got from w3c.com were the bees knees, and didn't just apply to that particular site. I lost a lot of respect for him that day.
That said, I like competition, I like that developers are trying to keep users happy, and all this benefits end-users. Now if mozilla can get its head of its ass regarding its release policy...
That was his plan? He might have as well tried to set up an ambush outside the White House, or Congress. This plan is so badly thought out, so badly implemented and relied so heavily on the FBI providing him with bad materials that they might as well charge him with being terminally stupid. This plan wasn't going to go anywhere, and wasn't going to do any damage. If he would have been lucky, he might have been able to shoot one or two guards on the way to "the door".
I would argue though that Goldman Sachs creating an investment tool that trades in Facebook pre-IPO shares, and having that investment tool value FB at around $50 billion is a pretty damn strong sign of an actual bubble.
Damn. I thought that Zynga's bubble was going to pop, but not this soon. There are only so many Farmville type games anyone can play, and I can't be arsed to build my life around clicking some field every 4 hours without getting paid.
Yes, this is just a year-over-year quarter comparison, and there are a few things that were playing against Zynga in the last few quarters. Not the least of all that a lot of real game companies are getting into the FB game business. Zynga won't be able to just rip-off some game mechanics and then throw some eye candy on top of it. They'll actually have to develop real games.
Welcome to the real world, Zynga. No one except your founders is going to make bank on your stock.
"Don't make me think" is fine if there's indeed only one plausible action. But FB is not the passport for the Internet, no matter how many people keep saying that. As a result, putting in one action that doesn't apply to a significant chunk of people is worse than giving them options they don't need.
Not to mention: do you REALLY want FB to be the defacto passport for the Internet? Especially as a company whose only ability to hold on to people is their user preferences, which are now shared with FB?
If it would be just to create a seamless user experience, they would do the standard "here are the 6 most common platform sign-ins, go pick your favorite". The fact that they require FB points to either your guess, or to FB directly paying Spotify for this move. Either which way, go suck it, Spotify. I'll stick to Pandora and, for as long as Pandora isn't on Xbox, Last.fm.
Yep, damn climate scientists, living it up with all their hoes and their bling and their giant mansions and pimped out cars... yep, truly they're living the life of the rich and famous.
Yes, because one AC == The Left, roads are useful == roads are the best at everything, reducing car use == forcing people out of cars, Climate Change == scam for scientists to line their pocket with money.
Did I miss any wild exaggerations, strawmen and other fabrications that you managed to sneak in your single sentence?
Rework your assumption that having studied law allows you to charge $50 for reading my email while on the John. I forked over about $60k to have a lawyer help me with the intricacies of overseas inheritances. In practice, it amounted to little more than telling me what documents I needed to have, and then forwarding them to the IRS. I always felt weird wearing shorts and t-shirt to the face-to-face meetings. Then I figured that they were the same as the $2k suit that the lawyer was wearing - after all, I was paying him the money that allowed him to dress the way he did, and that meant that I couldn't spend those on the same suit.
As others have pointed out, it means that jobs that are basically expensive bayesian inference engines need to change how much they charge for their services, and how much the industry charges for teaching the knowledge. There will always be a place at the top for smart people, or at least at the bottom servicing the machines.
To some extent, I suspect that quantum computing might well end up with the same problem that quantum mechanics is facing now: it works awesomely great on a very, very small scale, but cannot be used to explain the large scale force of gravity. Similarly, quantum computing might very well work with a few dozen to hundred qbits, but will fall apart at a larger scale where the number of error correcting mechanisms required to overcome decoherence will be too much.
Attitude and culturing certainly have something to do with it. To some extent, what I call schmoozing is at least partially attitude, and somewhat tied to cultural environment. I'm also dead-sure I could never be a CEO, for the exact reasons you mentioned: nerds make terrible CEOs. Woz knew it, Jobs knew it, and that's why Jobs was CEO and Woz is the whiz. The other part that spells CEO-material is also definitely what you mentioned: enjoying the fact that there is a metric ton of work that knows no time or space boundaries.
But whether you are CEO material and whether you are CEO are two different things. Random encounters and general environments have a huge impact on where exactly you end up. Bill Gates would have never been Bill Gates had he been born 10 years earlier or 10 years later. The particular skill sets that enabled him to reach the top would have been either largely useless, or a dime a dozen.
But that's the point: it's two particles colliding, one moving in one direction in time, the other in the other direction in time, but with the same charge. Charge would not be conserved, unless things work differently once you have time moving backwards. But again, as this is way above my paygrade in terms of the physics and math involved, I'll just stop here.
I won't even pretend to think I would ever be at this level, but I would love to sit in a room and watch how they work one day as a fly on the wall. Just what does set these people apart?
Newsflash: they're people like you and me, and eat and shit the exact same way we do. They even work the same way we do. The difference? They were at the right time, the right place to use their particular skills (marketing/design/direction in the case of Jobs, identification of long-term market trends in the case of Gerstner, etc). Most of them are smart - some even scary smart. But not 1:1000000 smart, and certainly not that exceedingly knowledgeable. From what I've seen, what sets CEOs apart from others is that they are very, very good at schmoozing. 1:1000000 good. Otherwise, they'd never have been in the right place at the right time.
Dunno, while I was there, he made plenty of sensible decisions. Yes, quite a bit was cut, but I didn't see any egregious cuts that jettisoned core products or teams. All in all, morale was actually doing quite well under Hurd. Granted, it was easy to do better than Carly, but still - I had the impression that HP was actually stabilizing under Hurd. Now.... it's the insane asylum run by the insane.
As for the compensation quip by the GP: that was actually established in a few studies that compared work outcome to compensation. Once compensation reached absurd levels for the work required, work output actually dropped. The researchers didn't have a ready cause available, but speculated it might be either that people try to hard to justify their income, or try not at all because the pay is so ludicrous that they don't care about keeping the job.
Another interesting aspect - by messing with signs, you can see that positrons could actually be electrons traveling back in time. All kinds of fun ensues. Doesn't work with matter-antimatter annihilation (unless we work out what that means in terms of time-anti-time annihilation), but it was an interesting revelation in physics class.
I'll start looking into the link once people are a) controlling for economic environments, and b) able to define what a race is.
Apparently, a) has happened and reduced the difference to be almost within sampling error, and b) is nearly impossible, so I'm not holding my breath. In the meantime, I'll tag crap like this at least off-topic, and most likely flamebait.
Apparently, people don't understand the difference between an open source development model, where the money is in support, and that of closed source development, where the money is in... development and support.
In essence, what's happening here is that Valve is getting done work for free because... I don't know. People think that Valve will think they're awesome and hire them? In the case of some rarer languages like Basque or Woloof, I can see that this would be a welcome labor of love. But what about Tagalog? What about Portuguese? Plenty of people there who can afford to buy the game, and probably will.
Now, the real question is whether the games subjected to this translation effort are Valve's own games, or games offered through its storefront. If it's the former, Valve is opening itself up to some fun litigation, not to mention grade-A cheap-skate status. If it's the latter.... well, take it up with the developers. They're responsible for the status of their game, including what languages are supported. If people want to support those developers and work for free, good job. But they better not kid themselves that this gives them some sort of leg up in the game world. Translation is a weird job where the basic skill is often learned through an accident of geography, and is shared among millions. The real skill is in live translations and translating so that the intent, rather than the content, is transmitted. Nneither of which will be demonstrated by doing store front translations.
Seems the cycle is swinging back to more corporate power. Corporations were knocked down a peg or two during and after WW2, when they were essentially forced to operate at the whim of the government. They were further knocked down a peg with the introduction of the EPA, and other regulatory agencies.
Now, we have regulatory capture (see the Mining Commission scandal), corporations as people and an entire group of people who quite literally worship corporations. It's gonna be awhile before it gets better.