Free Market Capitalism is non-zero-sum only in your wet dreams. Capitalism of any stripe only works due to imbalances in distribution of resources which are artifical in nature. These imbalances are always due in one way or another to the use of force and/or coercion and/or deception. IOW, it's the precisely the greedy actors that make it function.
You had me going along until you tried to slip that garbage in. Nice try, though.
Minor correction (I'm surprised no-one has called me out on this, heh): The Tennessee ops centre was actually in Gray (aka Gray Station), which is a few miles north of Jonesborough. If I'm reading the map correctly, it appears that the location's been turned into a mini-mall and there's a Rite-Aid pharmacy in that building now.
The OP... is a rendition of one person's experience with how his startup addressed the question posed by the submitter.
You're making the quite possibly unwarranted assumption that this one-post wonder isn't pulling this "experience" out of his arse.
Others (including some with mod points, the possession of which is an indicator that they've been around here for some time and built up some positive karma) are not nearly so willing to take ExpertCoder's (single, unsubstantiated) post here on faith.
TL;DR version: Just because somebody says it, does not make it true.
Secondly, what do you think happens when the patent licenses are paid? Where does the money go? It doesn't go only to the department who invented the WiFi algorithms. It gets distributed throughout the CSIRO. So you'll get scientists working on rabbit control getting funded by the WiFi patents. Now, this is great - extra money for scientists, etc - but it makes no sense whatsoever from a patent perspective, if you believe in them.
WiFi patents (for those who accept the rationale) are there to promote research and justify expenditure in WiFi technology. There's no question of promoting rabbit research. In fact, doing so is a complete perversion of the patent concept, as the technology which earned the patent licenses gets penalized (it doesn't receive all the money it should) in favour of unrelated technology which hasn't anything to do with the patent.
Um, no. The purpose of a patent is to promote advances in sciences and useful arts. It's not "to promote doing more of exactly the same". Fail.
I can verify that CompuServe existed in 1983 because during that time I was eating lunch almost every day with the people who worked there.
Details: I worked for the same parent company (Sears) in 1983-84. At that time, they had two ops centres: one in Sioux Falls, SD, and the other in Jonesborough, TN. I worked for Sears Payment Systems (3rd-party CC processor) at the TN location, and the CompuServe group's cubes were right next to ours.
Please don't use *my* translation/wording in place of an actual direct quote from the Telenor guy.
I don't have a copy of the paper in front of me, and my Swedish is far from perfect.
This is why I made my post in the form of a question, and included the phrase "to the effect that...". I wasn't being rhetorical, I was asking for confirmation from someone else who actually read the article in (I think it was) Thursday's Metro.
...in a traditional telco situation they have very carefully designed that network to guarantee certain quality-of-service parameters for the voice packets.
There are very strict requirements for latency and drop rate when dealing with voice packets. Those requirements are *not* there when using skype or similar.
Which in practical terms amounts to this: I might actually have to say, "Excuse me, could you repeat that?" due to a dropout maybe once or twice during a 30-minute Skype call from Sweden to someplace on another continent. (I make regular calls to the US, China, and Australia.)
YMMV, but I think I can live with paying 0.0183 SEK (about 1/4 of one US penny at today's rate) per minute for that QOS level as opposed to paying heaps more for some "guarantee" that I'll have 0-1 such incidents instead.
funny that you mention that. there's several operators that had/have plans where you paid a free for using their msn solution.
I am ashamed to admit that I got suckered by this myself not long after I moved here, not knowing any Swedish at the time and not realising that their "MSN Messenger" was basically a trojan wrapped around the real thing--this trojan having permissions to add a separate usage charge to my bill whenever I fired up the app. Took me 3 friggin' months to get the "automatic subscription" removed, even after I uninstalled it from my phone.
This was Tele2 IIRC--I've since switched providers.
hmmh... you make it sound like divorce is the end of the world.
Ever been married? Divorced? Ever move to another country on account of marrying someone from there, then have them dump you a few years later, leaving you on your own in a foreign land (where they don't even speak your language) with no other reason to be there except the kids (who also don't speak your language, only their mother's)?
Doesn't sound like it.
Anyhow, I don't see where I've said or implied anything end-of-the-world-ish at all, and I view my own divorce as absolutely necessary and unavoidable. But I don't view marriage as something to be disposed of lightly, either.
Suggestion: You might actually consider and address the problems that such people face, instead of trying to dismiss them as unimportant, or to portray me as some sort of drama queen.
Hm. I thought read in yesterday's Metro a statement from a Telenor exec to the effect that they aren't planning to institute any sort of usage filtering in the foreseeable future...?
You seem to have missed the emoticon at the end. Please check your humour indicator and recalibrate as needed. (And see my posting history for guidance, you'll find easily that I'm no corporate apologist.)
As it happens, I lived for some years in Brisbane, and I'm well acquainted with Telstra's *and* Optus' shenanigans. (I've been a customer of both, and they both suck.) As well as those of the telcos in the US, where I am from originally.
(ExecSummary: "Looks like you've been whoooshed, mate.")
Förlåt mig, kompis--you are quite right to distinguish between urban and other Swedes. And it also seems that (my experience only) Swede-Swede marriages, especially when one or both partners are not from the big city, do tend to last longer.
If we wind up staying on here many more years, I would really prefer to move down to Malmö or Kalmar. The folks in Skåne and Småland are much more congenial, and they have even offered to help me get rid of that horrible Stockholm accent and learn to speak proper Swedish instead.:)
I can't say much about Africans living here, as I don't know very many of them. Most of my non-Swedish friends here are from East/Southeast Asia.
I've noticed that the Swedish man + Thai (or Chinese) woman combo is quite popular here (at least in/around Stockholm), and those marriages seem to be quite happy and long-lived. The marriages most likely to fail (again, just my observation) seem to be between Swedish women and foreign men.
As for the sex-maniac part--I wouldn't know, never having slept with a Swede. (Although I have stumbled across one or two Swedish couples in the woods round Midsommar, celebrating the event in lusty fashion, so I am pretty sure that baby Swedes are made the same way as babies in other countries.)
So no, I didn't mean imply that Sweden is a bad or ugly country or that the people are completely uncaring.
But it can be damned lonely at times, even in the city. And I personally find the extremes in the seasons here to be a bit hard to deal with sometimes.
From the stone tablet, to the scribes, to the early offset printers (and print distributors), to the Internet and its multifarious ways of data and information transmission, certain folks have found a way to horde either the means to information production, or its transmission.
You sound like one of them there Commies, to me, pal...:D
Not really angry, more like depressed. The winters are long, cold, and dark.
It is not helped by the fact that Swedes are notoriously uncommitted in their relationships, resulting in one of the highest, if not the highest percentage of 1-person households and single-parent families on the planet. Stockholm is littered with foreigners who married Swedes, moved here, then got dumped a few years later ("Ah well, this is our third argument this year, it's too much trouble to work out, I'm just divorcing you instead"--I shit you not, this actually happened to a friend of mine) and they wind up staying on so they can see their kids. And many of these ex-pats seem to spend most of their time, when not at work or visiting the kids, getting drunk and/or drug-fucked.
Don't get me wrong, I've lived here for nearly 5 years. As a resident and as a worker, I've been treated extremely well, and I'm very grateful for this. But I am really glad I met someone who's also not from here, instead of trying to hook up with a Swedish girl.
And it can be a beautiful country (especially in the summer, when it never really gets dark), and some Swedes are actually quite warm and friendly. But it's also true that about 20% of my neighbours in this building are single, live alone, don't go out much, and seem to have few if any visitors.
It's a bit sad. And if you are at all prone to depression, it can be a real struggle to make it through the winter here. This comes from one who knows all too well.
I was under the impression that the basis of this little Gedankenexperiment was that there would be no more 'hard currency', period?
And you don't need plastic to 'exchange favours'.
OTOH, if you try to offer me a blowjob in exchange for a dime bag and you're not a really hot female between the ages of, say, 25 and 35, then you're not going to be getting high anytime soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Fallacy #1: Environmental costs are not real costs, and may be safely ignored.
Thanks for playing.
Free Market Capitalism is non-zero-sum only in your wet dreams. Capitalism of any stripe only works due to imbalances in distribution of resources which are artifical in nature. These imbalances are always due in one way or another to the use of force and/or coercion and/or deception. IOW, it's the precisely the greedy actors that make it function.
You had me going along until you tried to slip that garbage in. Nice try, though.
Minor correction (I'm surprised no-one has called me out on this, heh): The Tennessee ops centre was actually in Gray (aka Gray Station), which is a few miles north of Jonesborough. If I'm reading the map correctly, it appears that the location's been turned into a mini-mall and there's a Rite-Aid pharmacy in that building now.
The OP ... is a rendition of one person's experience with how his startup addressed the question posed by the submitter.
You're making the quite possibly unwarranted assumption that this one-post wonder isn't pulling this "experience" out of his arse.
Others (including some with mod points, the possession of which is an indicator that they've been around here for some time and built up some positive karma) are not nearly so willing to take ExpertCoder's (single, unsubstantiated) post here on faith.
TL;DR version: Just because somebody says it, does not make it true.
Secondly, what do you think happens when the patent licenses are paid? Where does the money go? It doesn't go only to the department who invented the WiFi algorithms. It gets distributed throughout the CSIRO. So you'll get scientists working on rabbit control getting funded by the WiFi patents. Now, this is great - extra money for scientists, etc - but it makes no sense whatsoever from a patent perspective, if you believe in them.
WiFi patents (for those who accept the rationale) are there to promote research and justify expenditure in WiFi technology. There's no question of promoting rabbit research. In fact, doing so is a complete perversion of the patent concept, as the technology which earned the patent licenses gets penalized (it doesn't receive all the money it should) in favour of unrelated technology which hasn't anything to do with the patent.
Um, no. The purpose of a patent is to promote advances in sciences and useful arts. It's not "to promote doing more of exactly the same". Fail.
Gee, I could copy-paste from Ars comments, too, but I prefer to actually write something when I post here.
McGrew is absolutely not wrong.
I can verify that CompuServe existed in 1983 because during that time I was eating lunch almost every day with the people who worked there.
Details: I worked for the same parent company (Sears) in 1983-84. At that time, they had two ops centres: one in Sioux Falls, SD, and the other in Jonesborough, TN. I worked for Sears Payment Systems (3rd-party CC processor) at the TN location, and the CompuServe group's cubes were right next to ours.
Enjoy the butt-hurt, bonehead.
Zontar also holds the rant in high regard, and also relinquishes his chance to moderate this discussion in honour of said rant.
Please don't use *my* translation/wording in place of an actual direct quote from the Telenor guy.
I don't have a copy of the paper in front of me, and my Swedish is far from perfect.
This is why I made my post in the form of a question, and included the phrase "to the effect that...". I wasn't being rhetorical, I was asking for confirmation from someone else who actually read the article in (I think it was) Thursday's Metro.
(P.S. Nice sig.)
...in a traditional telco situation they have very carefully designed that network to guarantee certain quality-of-service parameters for the voice packets.
There are very strict requirements for latency and drop rate when dealing with voice packets. Those requirements are *not* there when using skype or similar.
Which in practical terms amounts to this: I might actually have to say, "Excuse me, could you repeat that?" due to a dropout maybe once or twice during a 30-minute Skype call from Sweden to someplace on another continent. (I make regular calls to the US, China, and Australia.)
In addition, you seem to forget that voice communication between humans is highly fault-tolerant. We do not hear every word that is uttered, nor do we need to (recent example where someone didn't say the whole word, but people still heard it clearly).
YMMV, but I think I can live with paying 0.0183 SEK (about 1/4 of one US penny at today's rate) per minute for that QOS level as opposed to paying heaps more for some "guarantee" that I'll have 0-1 such incidents instead.
funny that you mention that. there's several operators that had/have plans where you paid a free for using their msn solution.
I am ashamed to admit that I got suckered by this myself not long after I moved here, not knowing any Swedish at the time and not realising that their "MSN Messenger" was basically a trojan wrapped around the real thing--this trojan having permissions to add a separate usage charge to my bill whenever I fired up the app. Took me 3 friggin' months to get the "automatic subscription" removed, even after I uninstalled it from my phone.
This was Tele2 IIRC--I've since switched providers.
hmmh... you make it sound like divorce is the end of the world.
Ever been married? Divorced? Ever move to another country on account of marrying someone from there, then have them dump you a few years later, leaving you on your own in a foreign land (where they don't even speak your language) with no other reason to be there except the kids (who also don't speak your language, only their mother's)?
Doesn't sound like it.
Anyhow, I don't see where I've said or implied anything end-of-the-world-ish at all, and I view my own divorce as absolutely necessary and unavoidable. But I don't view marriage as something to be disposed of lightly, either.
Suggestion: You might actually consider and address the problems that such people face, instead of trying to dismiss them as unimportant, or to portray me as some sort of drama queen.
Hm. I thought read in yesterday's Metro a statement from a Telenor exec to the effect that they aren't planning to institute any sort of usage filtering in the foreseeable future...?
You seem to have missed the emoticon at the end. Please check your humour indicator and recalibrate as needed. (And see my posting history for guidance, you'll find easily that I'm no corporate apologist.)
As it happens, I lived for some years in Brisbane, and I'm well acquainted with Telstra's *and* Optus' shenanigans. (I've been a customer of both, and they both suck.) As well as those of the telcos in the US, where I am from originally.
(ExecSummary: "Looks like you've been whoooshed, mate.")
Förlåt mig, kompis--you are quite right to distinguish between urban and other Swedes. And it also seems that (my experience only) Swede-Swede marriages, especially when one or both partners are not from the big city, do tend to last longer.
If we wind up staying on here many more years, I would really prefer to move down to Malmö or Kalmar. The folks in Skåne and Småland are much more congenial, and they have even offered to help me get rid of that horrible Stockholm accent and learn to speak proper Swedish instead. :)
I can't say much about Africans living here, as I don't know very many of them. Most of my non-Swedish friends here are from East/Southeast Asia.
I've noticed that the Swedish man + Thai (or Chinese) woman combo is quite popular here (at least in/around Stockholm), and those marriages seem to be quite happy and long-lived. The marriages most likely to fail (again, just my observation) seem to be between Swedish women and foreign men.
As for the sex-maniac part--I wouldn't know, never having slept with a Swede. (Although I have stumbled across one or two Swedish couples in the woods round Midsommar, celebrating the event in lusty fashion, so I am pretty sure that baby Swedes are made the same way as babies in other countries.)
So no, I didn't mean imply that Sweden is a bad or ugly country or that the people are completely uncaring.
But it can be damned lonely at times, even in the city. And I personally find the extremes in the seasons here to be a bit hard to deal with sometimes.
Bra så... tack för samtalet (och rättningen)!
From the stone tablet, to the scribes, to the early offset printers (and print distributors), to the Internet and its multifarious ways of data and information transmission, certain folks have found a way to horde either the means to information production, or its transmission.
You sound like one of them there Commies, to me, pal... :D
Not really angry, more like depressed. The winters are long, cold, and dark.
It is not helped by the fact that Swedes are notoriously uncommitted in their relationships, resulting in one of the highest, if not the highest percentage of 1-person households and single-parent families on the planet. Stockholm is littered with foreigners who married Swedes, moved here, then got dumped a few years later ("Ah well, this is our third argument this year, it's too much trouble to work out, I'm just divorcing you instead"--I shit you not, this actually happened to a friend of mine) and they wind up staying on so they can see their kids. And many of these ex-pats seem to spend most of their time, when not at work or visiting the kids, getting drunk and/or drug-fucked.
Don't get me wrong, I've lived here for nearly 5 years. As a resident and as a worker, I've been treated extremely well, and I'm very grateful for this. But I am really glad I met someone who's also not from here, instead of trying to hook up with a Swedish girl.
And it can be a beautiful country (especially in the summer, when it never really gets dark), and some Swedes are actually quite warm and friendly. But it's also true that about 20% of my neighbours in this building are single, live alone, don't go out much, and seem to have few if any visitors.
It's a bit sad. And if you are at all prone to depression, it can be a real struggle to make it through the winter here. This comes from one who knows all too well.
Aw, damn, and well before my 60th birthday, too.
Any Stockholm-area Slashdotters who want to collect can meet me this Friday night during Happy Hour at Akkurat for their complimentary starköl. :(
Har vi fått äkta Unicode-stöd??
Eh what?
I was under the impression that the basis of this little Gedankenexperiment was that there would be no more 'hard currency', period?
And you don't need plastic to 'exchange favours'.
OTOH, if you try to offer me a blowjob in exchange for a dime bag and you're not a really hot female between the ages of, say, 25 and 35, then you're not going to be getting high anytime soon.
1. You can always create a new account.
2. Paragraph breaks are your friend.
3. Dude. You *really* need to put down that bong for a while. Getting outdoors every so often might also help.
Rocket fuels hasn't probably ever been coal and oil based, i very much doubt they ever were...
You can imagine all you like, but you'd still be wrong.
But---you use the apostrophe to form the plural, so you're still in. Congrats.
Let me control the banks, and I don't care who makes the laws.
You were saying?
Your facts are largely *irrelevant*, as AC makes so abundantly clear. Wish I'd posted it myself.