The relationship is obviously bi-directional. Determining the direction of causality is thus a difficult matter, and one that preoccupied folks in my discipline for quite some time. One method is to use an "instrumental variables" approach (see any advanced econometrics text for details), but perhaps a more accessible answer comes from my own research.
The Liberal Party was often seen as "between" the Conservative and Labour monoliths. I focused my attention on the preferences of voters who switched from one of the major parties to the Liberals between elections. (We have "panel" surveys where the same people are interviewed over time which helps to eliminate problems of misperceived past voting behavior.) Now it turns out that voters who switched to Liberals usually saw them as taking positions in opposition to the party from which the switchers came. Sometimes those views were, in fact, contrary to espoused Liberal positions. For instance, on the question of entry into the European Economic Community, the forerunner of today's EC, former Conservative voters who supported entry were more likely to switch to the Liberals, while former Labour voters who opposed entry made the same switch. This pattern recurred across a number of issues. The most parsimonious explanation is that voters who disagreed with their normal party for whatever reasons were more likely to defect to the Liberals, using them as a instrument to express displeasure regardless of the Liberals' true position. (In the case of the EC the Liberals were consistently pro-Market; the other parties tended to waver.) Voting Liberal was "easier" than moving all the way over the opposition major party. That meant that voters would tend to "project" their own views on the Liberals rather than being persuaded to support the Liberals because of agreement with that party's positions.
Most of the traditional literature on American voting behavior focuses on the role of "party identification" as a primary determinant of issue opinions rather than the other way round. Voters often seem not to tote up the various stances of parties and candidates as a method of determining which party to support. Many people have Democratic or Republican partisanships because of family and social factors. People "inherit" partisanships from their parents or adapt to conform to the social roles they adopt in adulthood. These prior partisan dispositions then color their interpretations of events and campaign issues.
Let me tell you a story about my grandmother. She emigrated from Ireland in the late 19th century and lived outside Boston for the rest of her life. Despite the fact that most Irish Catholics living around Boston voted Democrat in her lifetime, she was a stolid Republican for the entire time I knew her. Her Republicanism wasn't based on support for that party's positions; it originated in the 1928 Presidential election when the Catholic (and "Wet") Al Smith ran as the Democratic candidate. Smith lost that year because anti-Catholic "Drys" in the Southern states defected to the Republicans. My grandmother felt that the Democrats failed to work hard enough for Smith because of his Catholicism, and so she started voting Republican. She was unfazed by the rather substantial evidence that showed that the Democrats in this period supported policy positions much closer to her own views. By the way, after Kennedy was shot in 1963 she claimed she had voted for JFK in the 1960 election, but we all knew she'd voted for Nixon.
Indeed. There's considerable evidence in favor of reductions in cognitive dissonance as a motivating psychological force from other types of studies and other disciplines. For instance, in my field of political science, the evidence is pretty overwhelming that citizens systematically misperceive candidates' positions to make them more similar to the citizens' own preferences. Voters often engage in "projection," believing that candidates' they prefer hold positions like the voters' own, even when those aren't the positions the candidates actually hold. The opposite process also occurs, where voters believe that candidates they dislike hold positions those voters dislike regardless of the candidates' true preferences. My own dissertation research on voters for the British Liberal Party in the 1960's and 1970's also confirmed these hypotheses.
He's trying to store a lifetime on his laptop. He's gone on to collect images of every Web page he's ever visited, television shows he's watched, recorded phone conversations, and images and audio from conference sessions, along with his e-mail and instant messages.
What a goldmine that might be for inquisitive Customs or FBI agents.
I can see that. Maybe a "reply within 24 hours or we'll remove your material" type of message. The law as it now stands places the ISP in a contentious position relative to its customer. Discovering that your site or content have mysteriously disappeared might be a bit disconcerting for the site owner. I'm thinking particularly of businesses that might have inadvertently used a piece of allegedly infringing material. If I were a business, I'd be pretty miffed with my ISP in this situation regardless of the state of the law.
From the level of whining we hear here, you'd imagine that a counter-notice would be a difficult and costly proposition. Here's what's really required:
* The subscriber's name, address, phone number and physical or electronic signature * Identification of the material and its location before removal * A statement under penalty of perjury that the material was removed by mistake or misidentification * Subscriber consent to local federal court jurisdiction, or if overseas, to an appropriate judicial body.
Doesn't seem too onerous to me. Once you file the counter-notice the rightsholder has to file suit against you within 14 days in a Federal court. I'd bet many of these complaints would just fade away if the rightsholders were forced to file suit in response to counter-notices.
Instead we have people like the OP who decide the best route to contesting take-down notices is to complain in his blog and on Slashdot.
Now there are a couple of areas where the balance between the rightsholders and the alleged infringers might be improved. It appears that, for complainants, perjury only applies to the issue of whether the complainant is authorized to act on behalf of the rightsholder. For the counter-notice, perjury applies to the statement describing why the material does not infringe. If that's the correct interpretation, I'd like to see the perjury clause apply to the actual claim of supposed infringment as well as to the claimant's authorization. Forcing rightsholders to sign the claim of infringement under penalty of perjury might stave off nuisance take-down notices.
Also, while I understand the rightsholders wishes that the supposedly infringing material be removed as soon as possible, I do think it would have been better if the ISPs were required to notify the alleged infringer before the material is removed, not after.
In parliamentary democracies like most European systems, voters are casting only one, or at most a few, votes in an election. American ballots usually have a wide array of races from the presidency down to at least the state legislature and sometimes some local races as well. American ballots may also include referenda items as well as the races for the various offices.
So it's not as simple as, say, a British general election where each constituency's officials are counting votes for a single parliamentary seat. In states with a large number of referenda (California, for instance) you could be counting up votes for a couple dozen separate races.
The article summary does a poor job of representing the article itself. It suggests that a careful multi-year accounting wasn't done but simply a comparison of the costs of the new system to that of the old. In fact the article does a much better job of accounting for costs than the summary would indicate.
However, one thing I didn't see in my quick scan of the article was how much money Maryland received from the Federal Government under the "Help America Vote" act. HAVA made available something like $4 billion to the states to "improve" their voting systems. I didn't see the Federal contribution, if any, included in the accounting presented in the article.
Perhaps you might want to read the article next time.
Much of what they're talking about concerns things like embedded systems where the user is totally unaware of, and indifferent to, the platform which the device employs. Do you think people using recent Linux-based Motorola cell phones know or care that it runs Linux? How about commercial firewall routers that have an open-source OS embedded in silicon? How about those Barracuda anti-spam appliances that run a version of SpamAssassin? As I read TFA, the Gartner piece was suggesting that most every firm would have something that ran some open-source application or OS somewhere in the firm. Frankly, I doubt that's really all that far-fetched.
That's leaving aside the already-existing proprietary software that incorporates open-source code like Microsoft's use of Kerberos.
Why does everyone seem to think Microsoft introduced the various DRM components into Vista because Hollywood pointed a gun at their heads? Isn't it apparent to everyone that Microsoft is also becoming a purveyor of content as well as computer software (and a variety of other products, of course)? I wouldn't at all be surprised to see Microsoft buy a studio in the next decade assuming they could get it past the Antitrust Division.
The two of you are arguing over the definition of "digital rights management."
Your argument seems premised on the belief that DRM is something that applies primarily (solely?) to audiovisual media. His argument is having a system that requires you to re-authorize WinXP after a hardware change also constitutes "digital rights management." I tend to agree with that point of view.
Hell, even the flimsiest of "copy protection" mechanisms constitutes "digital rights management" in the broadest sense.
The end comes soon, and Microsoft is trying to delay the end. With XP, most users have all the operating system they want. Except for the built-in susceptibility to malware, Windows XP is acceptable.
You want to provide some historical basis for this claim? The American people in 1941 were largely opposed to entering the War, with large well-organized groups like America First which had Charles Lindbergh as its spokesman.
In reality, FDR was committed to supporting Britain as early as 1940, but he knew he wouldn't be able to pass a declaration of war though the isolationist Congress. Lend-Lease was one method of obviating public opposition; FDR knew that eventually some of our ships would be sunk by German subs which might have resulted in another "sinking of the Lusitania" event and generate more public support for the War. As it happens, the Japanese took it upon themselves to bring the US into the war.
Passing a declaration of war; seems like such a quaint notion these days, doesn't it?
From TFA: TRUSTe notes that this attitude presents a conundrum for advertisers, who are simultaneously being told that consumers want to see more relevant ads but don't want to have their activities tracked in order to make those ads relevant.
Until the web gave advertisers the ability to track individuals (even if anonymously), the standard way of making advertising relevant to consumers was to advertise in media that reach your target audience. Magazines have sold themselves to advertisers for decades by offering the ability to reach tiny slices of the population collected together by shared interests. What advertisers now want is the ability to target you, not "18-29 yo males with an interest in technology."
You can continue to make advertising relevant by placing the ads where the target audience is likely to be found. You don't need to track me to preserve relevance.
I'm guessing that the upper management of McDonalds doesn't eat there regularly and the Waltons don't shop at Wal-mart, those companies have bad reputations for quality.
I spent a bit of time in the television industry in the early 80's. I was always amused by the fact that TV executives don't actually watch much television at all. If they were all forced to spend two or three hours a night for a month of two watching what they put out there, maybe we'd see some improvement in the quality of programming.
Right now FiOS doesn't have SLAs, but Verizon says on its website that they may offer such a product in the future. I presume it would be more expensive than the service I have.
I should add that $20 of that fee is the cost of having a static IP. Without one, the price is $79/month.
How times change.... My first full-time connection was a dialup line in 1994. The ISP threw in a entire class-C address block for free! I think we were paying $29/month or so.
I pay Verizon $99/month for a 20/5 MBit FiOS business connection with essentially no limits. Sure it's about double what I might pay for a residential account with limits and dynamic addressing, but it's still an incredibly good deal compared to other business ISP services. I have a client with a T1 from AT&T; it costs about four times what Verizon's charging me and has about one-fourth the upstream bandwidth.
One of the elements of its defense is probably that the people who were arrested were not just innocent bystanders caught up in the spur of the moment, but had planned and coordinated their effort. And, that's most easily discovered by subpoenaing records of that planning and coordination. Perfectly legitimate.
Why is "planning and coordinating" a protest somehow illegitimate? Are only "spontaneous" protests protected by the First Amendment? I think not.
Frankly I don't see how it matters if the protesters coordinated their actions or not. If the issue is whether the City of New York violated the civil rights of these 62 individuals, either it did or it didn't. How or why these individuals chose to communicate among themselves seems irrelevant to me.
It was the Epilepsy Foundation site, not some random locations around the Internet.
Perhaps I'm just too old to understand any of this, but if this kind of idiocy is the future of the Internet, I'll have to disconnect.
And, to the person above who said, "we do what we do because we want to," that sort of juvenile attitude went out of fashion about, oh, three or millennia ago.
I once wrote an application for a small manufacturing client that managed their process of handling returned goods. There wasn't anything especially nifty about this; it was simply a bunch of PHP scripts backed up by a PG database. That's the kind of application that makes sense to share if it can be generalized outside the specific business involved. There must be thousands of similar, non-critical custom applications out in the world. These are the types of applications that aren't likely to come from the usual OSS coders since the apps address rather boring problems. Unfortunately, most important business processes that could be improved by IT are fundamentally "boring" in that sense.
I just recently had a conversation with a client about why they were adopting Office 2007 and giving no consideration to OpenOffice. The reason? Their primary clients use Office 2007, and documents between my clients and its clients must appear identical whenever exchanged.
Oh, and the other part of the argument is that spending $200 or so to buy new machines with Office 2007 is a lot less expensive than the opportunity costs of having employees deal with inconsistencies between formats and software.
This is the reality facing businesses today, not ideological disputes about openness, long-term access to documents, clarity of standards, or whatnot. Office 2007 is what others use so it's what we need to use.
This isn't a description of my habits, but a good example of what a hard sell any non-Microsoft products continue to be.
I don't disagree with this point of view, but the gamma ray burst is actually quite appropriate for the man who wrote, The Star, which received the Hugo for best short story in 1956. It remains one of the most memorable stories by Clarke that I've ever read.
By classifying them as "information services" the FCC placed ISPs in the "enhanced services" category defined long ago in the Computer I and Computer II inquiries. From a telecom regulation perspective that makes them the equivalent of voice mail and call forwarding. As the parent says, enhanced services are not regulated as common carriers.
Because of how broadly enhanced services are defined, I'm not convinced Comcast will lose this fight. It could make the argument that its internal methods to manage traffic constitute part of the information service it's providing, and how that's managed is none of the FCC's business. If customers don't like how Comcast manages its network, they'll switch to other providers.* The FCC can't tell Comcast how to runs its enhanced service any more than the Commission can tell the proprietor of 900-number sextalk line how to run that business.
_____
*Obviously there are monopoly issues in some locales that make changing providers more problematic, but the FCC has generally taken the view that there is competition in the provision of Internet services. I'm not arguing about whether monopoly exists, only whether Comcast has reasonable grounds to believe the FCC doesn't have jurisdiction over their network-management policies. Comcast might be right.
Wouldn't a good analyst pay lots of attention to things like the executives' 10b5-1 plans? As others have observed, the cancellation of a scheduled sale suggests the insider believes his or her holdings will appreciate. Jagolinzer's study, cited by Wikileaks, suggests that a good strategy for outsiders would be to sell stocks when key insiders announce they've set up plans and buy stocks when insiders cancel sales. His research indicates plans are adopted to lock in current asset values in anticipation of a falling stock price, while cancellations occur when insiders expect the stock to appreciate.
Slashdot Mirror
An excellent question!
The relationship is obviously bi-directional. Determining the direction of causality is thus a difficult matter, and one that preoccupied folks in my discipline for quite some time. One method is to use an "instrumental variables" approach (see any advanced econometrics text for details), but perhaps a more accessible answer comes from my own research.
The Liberal Party was often seen as "between" the Conservative and Labour monoliths. I focused my attention on the preferences of voters who switched from one of the major parties to the Liberals between elections. (We have "panel" surveys where the same people are interviewed over time which helps to eliminate problems of misperceived past voting behavior.) Now it turns out that voters who switched to Liberals usually saw them as taking positions in opposition to the party from which the switchers came. Sometimes those views were, in fact, contrary to espoused Liberal positions. For instance, on the question of entry into the European Economic Community, the forerunner of today's EC, former Conservative voters who supported entry were more likely to switch to the Liberals, while former Labour voters who opposed entry made the same switch. This pattern recurred across a number of issues. The most parsimonious explanation is that voters who disagreed with their normal party for whatever reasons were more likely to defect to the Liberals, using them as a instrument to express displeasure regardless of the Liberals' true position. (In the case of the EC the Liberals were consistently pro-Market; the other parties tended to waver.) Voting Liberal was "easier" than moving all the way over the opposition major party. That meant that voters would tend to "project" their own views on the Liberals rather than being persuaded to support the Liberals because of agreement with that party's positions.
Most of the traditional literature on American voting behavior focuses on the role of "party identification" as a primary determinant of issue opinions rather than the other way round. Voters often seem not to tote up the various stances of parties and candidates as a method of determining which party to support. Many people have Democratic or Republican partisanships because of family and social factors. People "inherit" partisanships from their parents or adapt to conform to the social roles they adopt in adulthood. These prior partisan dispositions then color their interpretations of events and campaign issues.
Let me tell you a story about my grandmother. She emigrated from Ireland in the late 19th century and lived outside Boston for the rest of her life. Despite the fact that most Irish Catholics living around Boston voted Democrat in her lifetime, she was a stolid Republican for the entire time I knew her. Her Republicanism wasn't based on support for that party's positions; it originated in the 1928 Presidential election when the Catholic (and "Wet") Al Smith ran as the Democratic candidate. Smith lost that year because anti-Catholic "Drys" in the Southern states defected to the Republicans. My grandmother felt that the Democrats failed to work hard enough for Smith because of his Catholicism, and so she started voting Republican. She was unfazed by the rather substantial evidence that showed that the Democrats in this period supported policy positions much closer to her own views. By the way, after Kennedy was shot in 1963 she claimed she had voted for JFK in the 1960 election, but we all knew she'd voted for Nixon.
Indeed. There's considerable evidence in favor of reductions in cognitive dissonance as a motivating psychological force from other types of studies and other disciplines. For instance, in my field of political science, the evidence is pretty overwhelming that citizens systematically misperceive candidates' positions to make them more similar to the citizens' own preferences. Voters often engage in "projection," believing that candidates' they prefer hold positions like the voters' own, even when those aren't the positions the candidates actually hold. The opposite process also occurs, where voters believe that candidates they dislike hold positions those voters dislike regardless of the candidates' true preferences. My own dissertation research on voters for the British Liberal Party in the 1960's and 1970's also confirmed these hypotheses.
He's trying to store a lifetime on his laptop. He's gone on to collect images of every Web page he's ever visited, television shows he's watched, recorded phone conversations, and images and audio from conference sessions, along with his e-mail and instant messages.
What a goldmine that might be for inquisitive Customs or FBI agents.
I can see that. Maybe a "reply within 24 hours or we'll remove your material" type of message. The law as it now stands places the ISP in a contentious position relative to its customer. Discovering that your site or content have mysteriously disappeared might be a bit disconcerting for the site owner. I'm thinking particularly of businesses that might have inadvertently used a piece of allegedly infringing material. If I were a business, I'd be pretty miffed with my ISP in this situation regardless of the state of the law.
From the level of whining we hear here, you'd imagine that a counter-notice would be a difficult and costly proposition. Here's what's really required:
* The subscriber's name, address, phone number and physical or electronic signature
* Identification of the material and its location before removal
* A statement under penalty of perjury that the material was removed by mistake or misidentification
* Subscriber consent to local federal court jurisdiction, or if overseas, to an appropriate judicial body.
Doesn't seem too onerous to me. Once you file the counter-notice the rightsholder has to file suit against you within 14 days in a Federal court. I'd bet many of these complaints would just fade away if the rightsholders were forced to file suit in response to counter-notices.
Instead we have people like the OP who decide the best route to contesting take-down notices is to complain in his blog and on Slashdot.
Now there are a couple of areas where the balance between the rightsholders and the alleged infringers might be improved. It appears that, for complainants, perjury only applies to the issue of whether the complainant is authorized to act on behalf of the rightsholder. For the counter-notice, perjury applies to the statement describing why the material does not infringe. If that's the correct interpretation, I'd like to see the perjury clause apply to the actual claim of supposed infringment as well as to the claimant's authorization. Forcing rightsholders to sign the claim of infringement under penalty of perjury might stave off nuisance take-down notices.
Also, while I understand the rightsholders wishes that the supposedly infringing material be removed as soon as possible, I do think it would have been better if the ISPs were required to notify the alleged infringer before the material is removed, not after.
In parliamentary democracies like most European systems, voters are casting only one, or at most a few, votes in an election. American ballots usually have a wide array of races from the presidency down to at least the state legislature and sometimes some local races as well. American ballots may also include referenda items as well as the races for the various offices.
So it's not as simple as, say, a British general election where each constituency's officials are counting votes for a single parliamentary seat. In states with a large number of referenda (California, for instance) you could be counting up votes for a couple dozen separate races.
The article summary does a poor job of representing the article itself. It suggests that a careful multi-year accounting wasn't done but simply a comparison of the costs of the new system to that of the old. In fact the article does a much better job of accounting for costs than the summary would indicate.
However, one thing I didn't see in my quick scan of the article was how much money Maryland received from the Federal Government under the "Help America Vote" act. HAVA made available something like $4 billion to the states to "improve" their voting systems. I didn't see the Federal contribution, if any, included in the accounting presented in the article.
Perhaps you might want to read the article next time.
Much of what they're talking about concerns things like embedded systems where the user is totally unaware of, and indifferent to, the platform which the device employs. Do you think people using recent Linux-based Motorola cell phones know or care that it runs Linux? How about commercial firewall routers that have an open-source OS embedded in silicon? How about those Barracuda anti-spam appliances that run a version of SpamAssassin? As I read TFA, the Gartner piece was suggesting that most every firm would have something that ran some open-source application or OS somewhere in the firm. Frankly, I doubt that's really all that far-fetched.
That's leaving aside the already-existing proprietary software that incorporates open-source code like Microsoft's use of Kerberos.
Why does everyone seem to think Microsoft introduced the various DRM components into Vista because Hollywood pointed a gun at their heads? Isn't it apparent to everyone that Microsoft is also becoming a purveyor of content as well as computer software (and a variety of other products, of course)? I wouldn't at all be surprised to see Microsoft buy a studio in the next decade assuming they could get it past the Antitrust Division.
The two of you are arguing over the definition of "digital rights management."
Your argument seems premised on the belief that DRM is something that applies primarily (solely?) to audiovisual media. His argument is having a system that requires you to re-authorize WinXP after a hardware change also constitutes "digital rights management." I tend to agree with that point of view.
Hell, even the flimsiest of "copy protection" mechanisms constitutes "digital rights management" in the broadest sense.
The end comes soon, and Microsoft is trying to delay the end. With XP, most users have all the operating system they want. Except for the built-in susceptibility to malware, Windows XP is acceptable.
You forgot the now-mandatory DRM bits.
Thanks for that excellent reply! I'd mod you up if I could.
From TFA:
In England, Phorm is expected in the coming weeks to launch its monitoring service with BT, Britain's largest Internet broadband provider.
Last I heard the United Kingdom was a member of the European Union. Perhaps BT's attorneys have a different interpretation of the laws than you?
You want to provide some historical basis for this claim? The American people in 1941 were largely opposed to entering the War, with large well-organized groups like America First which had Charles Lindbergh as its spokesman.
In reality, FDR was committed to supporting Britain as early as 1940, but he knew he wouldn't be able to pass a declaration of war though the isolationist Congress. Lend-Lease was one method of obviating public opposition; FDR knew that eventually some of our ships would be sunk by German subs which might have resulted in another "sinking of the Lusitania" event and generate more public support for the War. As it happens, the Japanese took it upon themselves to bring the US into the war.
Passing a declaration of war; seems like such a quaint notion these days, doesn't it?
From TFA:
TRUSTe notes that this attitude presents a conundrum for advertisers, who are simultaneously being told that consumers want to see more relevant ads but don't want to have their activities tracked in order to make those ads relevant.
Until the web gave advertisers the ability to track individuals (even if anonymously), the standard way of making advertising relevant to consumers was to advertise in media that reach your target audience. Magazines have sold themselves to advertisers for decades by offering the ability to reach tiny slices of the population collected together by shared interests. What advertisers now want is the ability to target you, not "18-29 yo males with an interest in technology."
You can continue to make advertising relevant by placing the ads where the target audience is likely to be found. You don't need to track me to preserve relevance.
I'm guessing that the upper management of McDonalds doesn't eat there regularly and the Waltons don't shop at Wal-mart, those companies have bad reputations for quality.
I spent a bit of time in the television industry in the early 80's. I was always amused by the fact that TV executives don't actually watch much television at all. If they were all forced to spend two or three hours a night for a month of two watching what they put out there, maybe we'd see some improvement in the quality of programming.
Right now FiOS doesn't have SLAs, but Verizon says on its website that they may offer such a product in the future. I presume it would be more expensive than the service I have.
I should add that $20 of that fee is the cost of having a static IP. Without one, the price is $79/month.
How times change.... My first full-time connection was a dialup line in 1994. The ISP threw in a entire class-C address block for free! I think we were paying $29/month or so.
Parent speaketh the truth here.
I pay Verizon $99/month for a 20/5 MBit FiOS business connection with essentially no limits. Sure it's about double what I might pay for a residential account with limits and dynamic addressing, but it's still an incredibly good deal compared to other business ISP services. I have a client with a T1 from AT&T; it costs about four times what Verizon's charging me and has about one-fourth the upstream bandwidth.
One of the elements of its defense is probably that the people who were arrested were not just innocent bystanders caught up in the spur of the moment, but had planned and coordinated their effort. And, that's most easily discovered by subpoenaing records of that planning and coordination. Perfectly legitimate.
Why is "planning and coordinating" a protest somehow illegitimate? Are only "spontaneous" protests protected by the First Amendment? I think not.
Frankly I don't see how it matters if the protesters coordinated their actions or not. If the issue is whether the City of New York violated the civil rights of these 62 individuals, either it did or it didn't. How or why these individuals chose to communicate among themselves seems irrelevant to me.
Sure, let's blame the victims.
It was the Epilepsy Foundation site, not some random locations around the Internet.
Perhaps I'm just too old to understand any of this, but if this kind of idiocy is the future of the Internet, I'll have to disconnect.
And, to the person above who said, "we do what we do because we want to," that sort of juvenile attitude went out of fashion about, oh, three or millennia ago.
I once wrote an application for a small manufacturing client that managed their process of handling returned goods. There wasn't anything especially nifty about this; it was simply a bunch of PHP scripts backed up by a PG database. That's the kind of application that makes sense to share if it can be generalized outside the specific business involved. There must be thousands of similar, non-critical custom applications out in the world. These are the types of applications that aren't likely to come from the usual OSS coders since the apps address rather boring problems. Unfortunately, most important business processes that could be improved by IT are fundamentally "boring" in that sense.
I just recently had a conversation with a client about why they were adopting Office 2007 and giving no consideration to OpenOffice. The reason? Their primary clients use Office 2007, and documents between my clients and its clients must appear identical whenever exchanged.
Oh, and the other part of the argument is that spending $200 or so to buy new machines with Office 2007 is a lot less expensive than the opportunity costs of having employees deal with inconsistencies between formats and software.
This is the reality facing businesses today, not ideological disputes about openness, long-term access to documents, clarity of standards, or whatnot. Office 2007 is what others use so it's what we need to use.
This isn't a description of my habits, but a good example of what a hard sell any non-Microsoft products continue to be.
I don't disagree with this point of view, but the gamma ray burst is actually quite appropriate for the man who wrote, The Star, which received the Hugo for best short story in 1956. It remains one of the most memorable stories by Clarke that I've ever read.
By classifying them as "information services" the FCC placed ISPs in the "enhanced services" category defined long ago in the Computer I and Computer II inquiries. From a telecom regulation perspective that makes them the equivalent of voice mail and call forwarding. As the parent says, enhanced services are not regulated as common carriers.
Because of how broadly enhanced services are defined, I'm not convinced Comcast will lose this fight. It could make the argument that its internal methods to manage traffic constitute part of the information service it's providing, and how that's managed is none of the FCC's business. If customers don't like how Comcast manages its network, they'll switch to other providers.* The FCC can't tell Comcast how to runs its enhanced service any more than the Commission can tell the proprietor of 900-number sextalk line how to run that business.
_____
*Obviously there are monopoly issues in some locales that make changing providers more problematic, but the FCC has generally taken the view that there is competition in the provision of Internet services. I'm not arguing about whether monopoly exists, only whether Comcast has reasonable grounds to believe the FCC doesn't have jurisdiction over their network-management policies. Comcast might be right.
Wouldn't a good analyst pay lots of attention to things like the executives' 10b5-1 plans? As others have observed, the cancellation of a scheduled sale suggests the insider believes his or her holdings will appreciate. Jagolinzer's study, cited by Wikileaks, suggests that a good strategy for outsiders would be to sell stocks when key insiders announce they've set up plans and buy stocks when insiders cancel sales. His research indicates plans are adopted to lock in current asset values in anticipation of a falling stock price, while cancellations occur when insiders expect the stock to appreciate.