I'm sorry, but emoticons, among other butchery of the english language in instant messaging, R&B, pop, and rap are not legitimate, and are in fact a sign of the devolution of the human species.
I find it interesting that it did not require a civilization shattering catastrophe for a dark age to begin to dawn.
We get a story about a player that is rarer than bigfoot malfunctioning, but the 5 different versions of the BD+ re-crack, PWNING the hollywood echo chamber article from earlier this month that had all the "DRM actually works" responses in its column, were ignored despite the fact that ALL of them were moded up to red.
What exactly are the virtues of proprietary software?
they have managers who are interested in interface design, and thus are more "casual friendly". I also note that, despite there being numerous nations where software patents don't apply, several proprietary formats are underdeveloped in the FOSS community as a "matter of principle", when people out there still have to deal with those formats. Small-time proprietary/shareware projects (see visualhub) don't suffer from this.
After all, OS_X is the merging of proprietary and open source as well.
I think this current example presented the way it has is a bit propagandistic.
Both OSS and Proprietary have their virtues and vices, and it's a question of the project manager's competence whether or not a project brings out more of the former or the latter.
I'll back tiered charging when you back tiered (monthly) rebates from ISPs who slowly take away benefits like usenet, the ability to run your own ports, etc. Looking at you, Comcast.
since when has 2 gigs a month been useful on usenet?
obama has all of us by the balls and we will pay through the nose for anything we need in life.
This is rather funny.
If someone came to abduct me and subject me to the horrors of my every need being catered to for the rest of my life they wouldn't need a gun or knife to make me go : )
If they were coming to abduct me and make me empty my account so they could buy weapons and drilling equipment, however, i'd take as many of them with me as possible.
Why do companies and governments not see that cheap, plentiful broadband is the only way to grow Internet adoption and the online industry as a whole? Especially now that the worldwide economy is in the shitter, the information age is poised to drag us out of it, if only self-serving companies and conrgresscritters wouldn't stifle progress to make their own quick buck.
Apparently you've missedthenews. The "information age" was stifled a long time ago, and its remains expelled from its gestation chamber in a dead bloody mess.
Given the technical knowledge of your average joe...
media sentry guy and expert witness come in and bandy about as much technical jargon as possible while connecting it with vicious invective to nefarious terms like "theft".
defense asks them questions, which they answer in the same language, which may as well be fluent korean to the jurors.
In the end, jurors make decision based on the repeated misinformation from the media of the past 10 years equating downloading to theft, which was repeated amongst the foreign language the "witnesses" happened to be speaking.
Liberals in general believe the government should be questioned at all times, and ALSO consider the corporate world to be equally corrupt and equally powerful.
Conservatives think there should be smaller government, but consider the government an entity to be blindly trusted, and corporations to be holy, blameless, saintly figures to be venerated for their charitable service to the common man.
You can call it "in bed" with the unions, I call it "support of organizations which give labor the same centralized power corporations have"
From a leftist point of view, it's not about "in bed" with the oil industry. They can serve the oil companies all they want, the issue is when it impacts some of the few tracts of unspoiled wilderness left in the US (and, arguably, the world).
Remember: these people are in the business of making money. If they can charge many times their cost to send text messages, they will. There are far too many things in this world that are governed by money, not that which is technologically possible. And as a scientist - there's a certain lack of purity in that, which I very much dislike.
Why is it evil though.
It's not prohibitively expensive like copyrighted material or pharmaceuticals.
Under a strictly purist philosophy anything which is associated with leisure or art is "unclean", and we should live a semi-mennenistic lifestyle : )
Most businesses will bail out of a business when their margins go below a certain threshold.
That threshold would be zero in established firms.
As a matter of fact, I know an entrepreneur who will not stay or go into a business that has margins below 45%.
Entry into a market is different from being an established player. You need to have higher profit potential when entering a new market because you have to establish yourself as a brand, and other rational actors will also be moving into that market, eating away at that projection as well.
Economists are still figuring a bunch of stuff out and most of the time their theories do not match reality.
I believe you are mistaking "free market fundamentalists", whose views are politically expedient for the wealthy and corrupt, for the entire economic community. For the rest of the economic community, modeling of real world data over time serves as a guideline for forecasting future trends, and, when properly conducted, can provide good indicators of bubbles (which many economists predicted long before hand). Just because businessmen, politicians, and the papers don't listen do not mean the science is flawed.
For example, economists assume markets are rational. As we have seen in the last year, they are far from it.
Economists assume this for modeling purposes, but any economist who considers this a hard and fast rule for application to reality is either incompetent or corrupt.
All prices are based on both Supply and Demand. Not one or the other. Both of you, please remember this for your economic analysis.
Supply and demand curves don't apply in markets where competition is insufficient (e.g. oligopolies, monopolies, or a few extremely dominant firms batting at the tiny flies who can't get a foothold)
If there is sufficient competition in the market profits will be driven to zero and the price of the service will approach the *actual* cost of providing it (which is close to zero, apparently). The fact that text messages cost 1000s of times more than they should indicates that there is insufficient competition in the industry, excessive barriers to entry into the market, etc.
And if you took some basic finance courses and paid close attention in your intermediate economics, Salaries are considered costs, so you could jack up salaries and make zero profit while people at the top walk away with 100 million in salary : )
Creative accounting makes economic measurement of real firms via "profit margins" quite hard, nay impossible, without regulations which no sane legislators will introduce because their "campaign contributions" will go away.
What is convenient about receiving a text, bringing it up, and finding it's SMS SPAM?!
When you count the spam to signal ratio, a good old fashioned phone call is better.
You can answer, and if it's some telemarketer you can hang up and DONT Have to clean it out of your inbox. You don't have to type it on a tiny unusable keyboard either.
If you want to text, get a subnotebook with a mobile broadband plan. After all is said and done you will pay less.
Slashdot Mirror
I know of a source for shows that won't black your screen if you attach a second monitor.
Home improvement stores, meijer, wal-mart, et-al are still open right now.
Go there, get one, get gas, bingo.
Why "next year"?
I'm sorry, but emoticons, among other butchery of the english language in instant messaging, R&B, pop, and rap are not legitimate, and are in fact a sign of the devolution of the human species.
I find it interesting that it did not require a civilization shattering catastrophe for a dark age to begin to dawn.
Barbarism should be actively curtailed though.
We get a story about a player that is rarer than bigfoot malfunctioning, but the 5 different versions of the BD+ re-crack, PWNING the hollywood echo chamber article from earlier this month that had all the "DRM actually works" responses in its column, were ignored despite the fact that ALL of them were moded up to red.
Ohh..k
I have yet to see any ludicrous videos of cops on the side of texan roads sucking at gas tanks with tubes.
So what this is is a built-in tax evasion capacity.
Very much in the texan character, but im just saying it's not a very enforceable law.
What exactly are the virtues of proprietary software?
they have managers who are interested in interface design, and thus are more "casual friendly".
I also note that, despite there being numerous nations where software patents don't apply, several proprietary formats are underdeveloped in the FOSS community as a "matter of principle", when people out there still have to deal with those formats.
Small-time proprietary/shareware projects (see visualhub) don't suffer from this.
You do know netscape was more anti-competitive than microsoft right?
They were so arrogant they were trying to remake the entire industry around themselves.
After all, OS_X is the merging of proprietary and open source as well.
I think this current example presented the way it has is a bit propagandistic.
Both OSS and Proprietary have their virtues and vices, and it's a question of the project manager's competence whether or not a project brings out more of the former or the latter.
I put on my wizard hat.
Uhuh..
Let me know when the DMCA goes away.
I'll back tiered charging when you back tiered (monthly) rebates from ISPs who slowly take away benefits like usenet, the ability to run your own ports, etc. Looking at you, Comcast.
since when has 2 gigs a month been useful on usenet?
obama has all of us by the balls and we will pay through the nose for anything we need in life.
This is rather funny.
If someone came to abduct me and subject me to the horrors of my every need being catered to for the rest of my life they wouldn't need a gun or knife to make me go : )
If they were coming to abduct me and make me empty my account so they could buy weapons and drilling equipment, however, i'd take as many of them with me as possible.
Why do companies and governments not see that cheap, plentiful broadband is the only way to grow Internet adoption and the online industry as a whole? Especially now that the worldwide economy is in the shitter, the information age is poised to drag us out of it, if only self-serving companies and conrgresscritters wouldn't stifle progress to make their own quick buck.
Apparently you've missed the news. The "information age" was stifled a long time ago, and its remains expelled from its gestation chamber in a dead bloody mess.
I'm surprised they didn't challenge them on misrepresentation.
If any of those companies are from delaware i'll eat my hat, and my dram chips.
Given the technical knowledge of your average joe...
media sentry guy and expert witness come in and bandy about as much technical jargon as possible while connecting it with vicious invective to nefarious terms like "theft".
defense asks them questions, which they answer in the same language, which may as well be fluent korean to the jurors.
In the end, jurors make decision based on the repeated misinformation from the media of the past 10 years equating downloading to theft, which was repeated amongst the foreign language the "witnesses" happened to be speaking.
The end.
Not true.
Liberals in general believe the government should be questioned at all times, and ALSO consider the corporate world to be equally corrupt and equally powerful.
Conservatives think there should be smaller government, but consider the government an entity to be blindly trusted, and corporations to be holy, blameless, saintly figures to be venerated for their charitable service to the common man.
You can call it "in bed" with the unions, I call it "support of organizations which give labor the same centralized power corporations have"
From a leftist point of view, it's not about "in bed" with the oil industry. They can serve the oil companies all they want, the issue is when it impacts some of the few tracts of unspoiled wilderness left in the US (and, arguably, the world).
Remember: these people are in the business of making money. If they can charge many times their cost to send text messages, they will. There are far too many things in this world that are governed by money, not that which is technologically possible. And as a scientist - there's a certain lack of purity in that, which I very much dislike.
Why is it evil though.
It's not prohibitively expensive like copyrighted material or pharmaceuticals.
Under a strictly purist philosophy anything which is associated with leisure or art is "unclean", and we should live a semi-mennenistic lifestyle : )
Most businesses will bail out of a business when their margins go below a certain threshold.
That threshold would be zero in established firms.
As a matter of fact, I know an entrepreneur who will not stay or go into a business that has margins below 45%.
Entry into a market is different from being an established player. You need to have higher profit potential when entering a new market because you have to establish yourself as a brand, and other rational actors will also be moving into that market, eating away at that projection as well.
Economists are still figuring a bunch of stuff out and most of the time their theories do not match reality.
I believe you are mistaking "free market fundamentalists", whose views are politically expedient for the wealthy and corrupt, for the entire economic community.
For the rest of the economic community, modeling of real world data over time serves as a guideline for forecasting future trends, and, when properly conducted, can provide good indicators of bubbles (which many economists predicted long before hand). Just because businessmen, politicians, and the papers don't listen do not mean the science is flawed.
For example, economists assume markets are rational. As we have seen in the last year, they are far from it.
Economists assume this for modeling purposes, but any economist who considers this a hard and fast rule for application to reality is either incompetent or corrupt.
All prices are based on both Supply and Demand. Not one or the other. Both of you, please remember this for your economic analysis.
Supply and demand curves don't apply in markets where competition is insufficient (e.g. oligopolies, monopolies, or a few extremely dominant firms batting at the tiny flies who can't get a foothold)
No, apparently you failed economics.
If there is sufficient competition in the market profits will be driven to zero and the price of the service will approach the *actual* cost of providing it (which is close to zero, apparently). The fact that text messages cost 1000s of times more than they should indicates that there is insufficient competition in the industry, excessive barriers to entry into the market, etc.
And if you took some basic finance courses and paid close attention in your intermediate economics, Salaries are considered costs, so you could jack up salaries and make zero profit while people at the top walk away with 100 million in salary : )
Creative accounting makes economic measurement of real firms via "profit margins" quite hard, nay impossible, without regulations which no sane legislators will introduce because their "campaign contributions" will go away.
And Republicans think their government isn't utterly corrupt...
Quote fixed, and karma burned.
Why should the population of the US prop up an industry which has had many many decades to compete on the world market.
I really don't know
Actually, it's caffeine.
It doesn't matter what else is in there.
They could fill it with cow diarrhea and if there's caffeine in there people will continue to drink it.
That's the beauty of selling something with an addictive substance as a component.
Convenient? really?
What is convenient about receiving a text, bringing it up, and finding it's SMS SPAM?!
When you count the spam to signal ratio, a good old fashioned phone call is better.
You can answer, and if it's some telemarketer you can hang up and DONT Have to clean it out of your inbox. You don't have to type it on a tiny unusable keyboard either.
If you want to text, get a subnotebook with a mobile broadband plan. After all is said and done you will pay less.
Increasingly, calling plans are including long distance in the blanket fee, hence the compulsion to milk texting.