Number of slots is not limited. Unless it's just impossible to increase the size of student bodies and/or build more universities, which it isn't. There is no doubt foreign students consume some taxpayer funded services while in the country. They also pay taxes in the form of the sales tax and property tax (including if they rent) and inject money into the economy (whey they, say, buy food and pay tuition) that wouldn't otherwise have been there. I'm not the H1-B visa program's biggest fan, namely because it's temporary labor. I want highly educated, hard-working immigrants on a path to full citizenship instead of just here for 3-6 years.
Sure. Eventually. My suggestion was that many graphs that show an asymptotic spike in oil prices may not have taken into account the existence of large slightly-more-expensive reserves we just haven't bothered to extract. Yet. If these reserves are large enough we might just enter a new phase where the price of oil is stable, just at a slightly higher level.
I can only speak to my own experience in graduate school. Master's students in my program (C.S.) did not get fellowships; only the Ph.D. seekers did. The most lucrative fellowship in a related program (Computational and Applied Mathematics), which was significantly more generous than the one I had, was limited to U.S. citizens only. One could argue foreign students displace citizens, but that's only true if the number of spots is static. It needn't be.
Don't have exact numbers, I was led to believe that, as the price of oil increases, it would become cost-effective to extract large amounts of oil from currently known locations that are simply not cost-effective to extract at today's prices.
Definitely. There is also such huge demand for a limited number of slots that the govt. could, if it wanted, auction them and make even *more* money off foreign students.
Hosting top foreign students is about as close to "win/win" as you get, depending on how it's managed. They pay tuition. They do research. They spend money on basic necessities while here (rent, food, etc.). Sometimes, if we're lucky, they stay here after graduating and become citizens. Highly paid citizens who are likely to contribute more in tax revenue and economic activity than they consume in govt. services. That is to say, the exact type of citizen we want to attract.
I'm not an attorney, but as I understand it prosecutors generally don't have input on sentencing. What they do have input on is which sort of conviction to try for, which obviously has implications for the severity of sentence the convicted eventually receives. I can charge you with X or I can charge you with Y. If I think it's harder for me to prove X then I may go with Y, with the understanding that the range of sentences for Y are less severe.
The law may be bad and the sentencing guidelines overly punitive, but given they're on the books, I'm not seeing what the DOJ did wrong here. Prosecutor seeks the max sentence he thinks he can get. Defense seeks the minimum sentence it thinks it can get. They meet in the middle. That's the way it generally works, no?
Its primary strength is as a server OS. This guy's specific complaints seem to center around desktop usage. If he thought of it purely as a headless server OS he might view it more favorably.
My personal experience is the opposite. I highly suspect there's some music I would have purchased had it not been available for free in digital form at little effort and with negligible legal risk. (i.e. borrowing a friend's CD and ripping it.) It's entirely possible I'm not representative of most people, but I suspect I'm not the only one like this either.
People who want music will get what they can online and buy the rest. People who don't care to own their own music just listen the radio or stream Pandora. It's no surprise that people who listen to music and want to own some of their own are both more likely to purchase music *and* more likely to acquire it illegally. The $64,000 question is how much music this group of folks would be purchasing if file-sharing were somehow no longer an option.
Also, these users aren't "getting more out of it". They are using a service they *paid for*. As in what they were contracted to receive. Now some providers want to change the deal because they didn't have the forsight to anticipate how their agreement would be utilized. What's the point of having a contract then?
In this context contracts usually cover some period of time. Like "one year" or "two years". If we're talking about someone who contracted for a period of time and then had the quality of service changed (e.g. caps introduced) then I agree that person has a legitimate gripe. But, as far as I know, that's not how residential internet service typically works. For instance, I signed up for 6Mb/s DSL at $N/month. There was no mention of a bandwidth cap or throttling, but by the same token there was no guarantee of unlimited bandwidth or the absence of a throttle. If my provider were to say, "Hey, we're going to start charging for bandwidth over 100GB/month. This will be effective starting next month, since you've already paid for this month. If that's not going to work for you, then you're free to sever your relationship with us at no penalty," then they would not have breached any contract that I'm aware of.
Look, they can change their future pricing models any time they wish. Fine. But don't sit there like an obtuse Slashdot user and pretend that the industry didn't outright lie to the FCC to get the changes approved.
What changes are we talking about? I didn't read the original article and haven't followed the FCC saga closely. Mainly because I'm a low-bandwidth user who actually stands to benefit from a tiered pricing model. Were providers previously forbidden from using this pricing model and then subsequently allowed to?
Choice of consumer level provider (if it exists at all in your area) is limited because everyone has colluded to offer the same plans with some slightly different window dressing.
For what it's worth, in my area, I've got DSL (AT&T), U-verse (AT&T), Cable (Time Warner). There's also a smaller provider that (I think) shares Time Warner's cable lines. They don't serve my home, but they do serve many others in the city where I live. They also offer a plan with more bandwidth (110 Mbps) than Time Warner's highest plan (50 Mbps). That seems like more than window dressing. Given the amount of junk mail I get from AT&T and Time Warner trying to get me to switch from one to the other, it sure seems as if there's competition happening.
Back to my example, though. I'll posit that the business model I described (i.e. catering to heavy users) is fairly limited because there just aren't that many heavy users. A generous estimate might be 5% of all users. If I cater to them by offering a fixed-price model with no caps, throttling or overages, I would necessarily have to charge a higher base rate than my competition. Not because heavy users incur more cost, per se, but because my lack of tiered pricing means I'm not extracting huge margins from my heavy users in order to subsidize my normal users. So, ignoring the folks who'll switch to my company for philosophical reasons alone, the only rational consumers who'll switch are the heavy users. They should switch en masse since my model offers them a much, much better deal. That gives me instant 5% market share, but little room to grow past that. Maybe that's enough? Hard to say.
And, of course, the big providers can always alter their pricing schemes such that a higher percentage of their customers pay the "base rate". Maybe they structure it so that only the top 1% of users end up paying extra. That shrinks my potential market share from 5% to 1%. Though, I suppose that to the extent I would have forced the big providers to inch closer to a fixed-price model that could be considered a "win".
They may have initially chosen all-you-can-eat, but it's entirely their prerogative to change that at any point in time (barring regulation by the FCC). If they think they can increase profits by going to a tiered model then I applaud them for doing so. Certainly their shareholders do. At the end of the day, the heavy users derive more utility from the service being provided, so I don't have much sympathy when they're required to pay more for it. They are, after all, getting more out of it. From the provider's point of view, his job is to ensure that the price for each individual customer is as high as possible without motivating that customer to forgo the product altogether (grandma stays on dial-up) or take his business elsewhere (heavy user migrates to a competitor whose service is purely flat-rate with no caps).
It seems that if bandwidth has very little cost to the provider then a given provider could differentiate itself as the haven for heavy users, moving to a flat-rate pricing model that's moderately more expensive than what its competitors is charging for "normal use" but significantly cheaper than what a "heavy user" would pay once he goes over the competition's bandwidth caps and starts paying by-the-byte. All heavy users would migrate to this provider. His cost to provide all the extra bandwidth would be only marginally higher than if all his users were "normal", but each one of them would be paying premium over what his competitors end up charging to 99% of their customers (who are not "heavy users").
Tiered pricing is nothing new, no is it anything sinister. When you have some customers deriving vastly more utility from your fixed-cost service those customers are understandably willing to pay more for it. So you charge them more. You'd be a fool not to. Charging every customer the same price means the base price has to go up in order to cover the fixed costs. The base price going up means some customers at the margins (of low use) will simply not bother to pay for your service, i.e. fewer overall customers. You get grandma off dialup by making it artificially inexpensive for her to purchase broadband. You recoup the discount you gave to grandma by charging "guy who streams hundreds of movies every month" more.
My personal preference would be to have broadband companies charge a base price for some reasonable amount of bandwidth that would cover, say, 90% of their users, then charge a per-unit-bandwidth rate for usage over that base threshold. Set the per-unit rate at some reasonable level such that heavy users pay approx. 2x or 3x the base cost as opposed to some astronomically higher price.
1. They price in externalities when comparing against fossil fuels. How to price those in is highly subjective. And, recall, they're not currently priced in and don't look to be any time soon.
2. Pretty sure they extrapolate future price decreases in green tech and price increases in fossil fuels. This is by nature somewhat speculative. Past doesn't always predict future. The prices could shift faster than expected or slower than expected.
So basically their premise is this: "If we assume that existing trends continue for the next 20 years and we artificially inflate the price of fossil fuels to account for their externalities we project green tech will reach price parity around 2030." Those are two pretty big "ifs".
How much energy does it take to create given a requirement of infinite sustainability? i.e. you have to replenish the soil in which the trees grow with fertilizer, etc.
Agreed. "Watching cat videos" seems a bit gratuitous. It's a little too perfect as a stereotypical "goofing off on the internet" type activity. Unless they didn't mean it literally. Also- how was Bob maintaining his jobs at the other businesses in the area? "Working from home" five days a week? Did he never have to go on-site or call in for meetings?
The summary insinuates switching to WebKit would somehow help Microsoft increase its share on mobile and tablets. How? Consider the three main categories of device: Microsoft, Apple and "not Microsoft or Apple":
Microsoft devices: How many folks are going to buy a mobile or tablet device running some flavor of Windows then install a third party browser rather than use the IE that's available by default? I'd say close to zero.
Apple devices: Is there even a version of IE available to install on iOS phones and tablets? If so, what Apple device user is going to install and use it instead of the default Safari that's already available? More over, for the switch to WebKit to "matter" there would need to be folks who would not download and use a Trident-based IE who would download and use a WebKit-based IE. Does such a person exist?
"Other" devices: Basically Android. Same questions as above. Same answers. I can't think of anyone who would download and use IE on Android unless there were some specific website they wished to use that was incompatible with the default Chrome browser but worked with IE.
Oracle was notified of the vulnerability and attempted to fix it. Their fix was inadequate. So they're just incompetent instead of willfully dismissive of security concerns.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for nothing, Rodman.
OP already said he disabled WPS.
Number of slots is not limited. Unless it's just impossible to increase the size of student bodies and/or build more universities, which it isn't. There is no doubt foreign students consume some taxpayer funded services while in the country. They also pay taxes in the form of the sales tax and property tax (including if they rent) and inject money into the economy (whey they, say, buy food and pay tuition) that wouldn't otherwise have been there. I'm not the H1-B visa program's biggest fan, namely because it's temporary labor. I want highly educated, hard-working immigrants on a path to full citizenship instead of just here for 3-6 years.
Sure. Eventually. My suggestion was that many graphs that show an asymptotic spike in oil prices may not have taken into account the existence of large slightly-more-expensive reserves we just haven't bothered to extract. Yet. If these reserves are large enough we might just enter a new phase where the price of oil is stable, just at a slightly higher level.
I can only speak to my own experience in graduate school. Master's students in my program (C.S.) did not get fellowships; only the Ph.D. seekers did. The most lucrative fellowship in a related program (Computational and Applied Mathematics), which was significantly more generous than the one I had, was limited to U.S. citizens only. One could argue foreign students displace citizens, but that's only true if the number of spots is static. It needn't be.
Don't have exact numbers, I was led to believe that, as the price of oil increases, it would become cost-effective to extract large amounts of oil from currently known locations that are simply not cost-effective to extract at today's prices.
Definitely. There is also such huge demand for a limited number of slots that the govt. could, if it wanted, auction them and make even *more* money off foreign students.
Hosting top foreign students is about as close to "win/win" as you get, depending on how it's managed. They pay tuition. They do research. They spend money on basic necessities while here (rent, food, etc.). Sometimes, if we're lucky, they stay here after graduating and become citizens. Highly paid citizens who are likely to contribute more in tax revenue and economic activity than they consume in govt. services. That is to say, the exact type of citizen we want to attract.
Someone with a similar opinion:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/modeledbehavior/2012/10/09/the-20-billion-export-industry-that-the-government-is-holding-back/
Again, this is part of the give-and-take system through which we arrive at a final set of charges.
I'm not an attorney, but as I understand it prosecutors generally don't have input on sentencing. What they do have input on is which sort of conviction to try for, which obviously has implications for the severity of sentence the convicted eventually receives. I can charge you with X or I can charge you with Y. If I think it's harder for me to prove X then I may go with Y, with the understanding that the range of sentences for Y are less severe.
The law may be bad and the sentencing guidelines overly punitive, but given they're on the books, I'm not seeing what the DOJ did wrong here. Prosecutor seeks the max sentence he thinks he can get. Defense seeks the minimum sentence it thinks it can get. They meet in the middle. That's the way it generally works, no?
Its primary strength is as a server OS. This guy's specific complaints seem to center around desktop usage. If he thought of it purely as a headless server OS he might view it more favorably.
Think of it as a server OS and you'll find it easier to like.
That, and build model trains.
My personal experience is the opposite. I highly suspect there's some music I would have purchased had it not been available for free in digital form at little effort and with negligible legal risk. (i.e. borrowing a friend's CD and ripping it.) It's entirely possible I'm not representative of most people, but I suspect I'm not the only one like this either.
People who want music will get what they can online and buy the rest. People who don't care to own their own music just listen the radio or stream Pandora. It's no surprise that people who listen to music and want to own some of their own are both more likely to purchase music *and* more likely to acquire it illegally. The $64,000 question is how much music this group of folks would be purchasing if file-sharing were somehow no longer an option.
In this context contracts usually cover some period of time. Like "one year" or "two years". If we're talking about someone who contracted for a period of time and then had the quality of service changed (e.g. caps introduced) then I agree that person has a legitimate gripe. But, as far as I know, that's not how residential internet service typically works. For instance, I signed up for 6Mb/s DSL at $N/month. There was no mention of a bandwidth cap or throttling, but by the same token there was no guarantee of unlimited bandwidth or the absence of a throttle. If my provider were to say, "Hey, we're going to start charging for bandwidth over 100GB/month. This will be effective starting next month, since you've already paid for this month. If that's not going to work for you, then you're free to sever your relationship with us at no penalty," then they would not have breached any contract that I'm aware of.
What changes are we talking about? I didn't read the original article and haven't followed the FCC saga closely. Mainly because I'm a low-bandwidth user who actually stands to benefit from a tiered pricing model. Were providers previously forbidden from using this pricing model and then subsequently allowed to?
For what it's worth, in my area, I've got DSL (AT&T), U-verse (AT&T), Cable (Time Warner). There's also a smaller provider that (I think) shares Time Warner's cable lines. They don't serve my home, but they do serve many others in the city where I live. They also offer a plan with more bandwidth (110 Mbps) than Time Warner's highest plan (50 Mbps). That seems like more than window dressing. Given the amount of junk mail I get from AT&T and Time Warner trying to get me to switch from one to the other, it sure seems as if there's competition happening.
Back to my example, though. I'll posit that the business model I described (i.e. catering to heavy users) is fairly limited because there just aren't that many heavy users. A generous estimate might be 5% of all users. If I cater to them by offering a fixed-price model with no caps, throttling or overages, I would necessarily have to charge a higher base rate than my competition. Not because heavy users incur more cost, per se, but because my lack of tiered pricing means I'm not extracting huge margins from my heavy users in order to subsidize my normal users. So, ignoring the folks who'll switch to my company for philosophical reasons alone, the only rational consumers who'll switch are the heavy users. They should switch en masse since my model offers them a much, much better deal. That gives me instant 5% market share, but little room to grow past that. Maybe that's enough? Hard to say.
And, of course, the big providers can always alter their pricing schemes such that a higher percentage of their customers pay the "base rate". Maybe they structure it so that only the top 1% of users end up paying extra. That shrinks my potential market share from 5% to 1%. Though, I suppose that to the extent I would have forced the big providers to inch closer to a fixed-price model that could be considered a "win".
They may have initially chosen all-you-can-eat, but it's entirely their prerogative to change that at any point in time (barring regulation by the FCC). If they think they can increase profits by going to a tiered model then I applaud them for doing so. Certainly their shareholders do. At the end of the day, the heavy users derive more utility from the service being provided, so I don't have much sympathy when they're required to pay more for it. They are, after all, getting more out of it. From the provider's point of view, his job is to ensure that the price for each individual customer is as high as possible without motivating that customer to forgo the product altogether (grandma stays on dial-up) or take his business elsewhere (heavy user migrates to a competitor whose service is purely flat-rate with no caps).
It seems that if bandwidth has very little cost to the provider then a given provider could differentiate itself as the haven for heavy users, moving to a flat-rate pricing model that's moderately more expensive than what its competitors is charging for "normal use" but significantly cheaper than what a "heavy user" would pay once he goes over the competition's bandwidth caps and starts paying by-the-byte. All heavy users would migrate to this provider. His cost to provide all the extra bandwidth would be only marginally higher than if all his users were "normal", but each one of them would be paying premium over what his competitors end up charging to 99% of their customers (who are not "heavy users").
Tiered pricing is nothing new, no is it anything sinister. When you have some customers deriving vastly more utility from your fixed-cost service those customers are understandably willing to pay more for it. So you charge them more. You'd be a fool not to. Charging every customer the same price means the base price has to go up in order to cover the fixed costs. The base price going up means some customers at the margins (of low use) will simply not bother to pay for your service, i.e. fewer overall customers. You get grandma off dialup by making it artificially inexpensive for her to purchase broadband. You recoup the discount you gave to grandma by charging "guy who streams hundreds of movies every month" more.
My personal preference would be to have broadband companies charge a base price for some reasonable amount of bandwidth that would cover, say, 90% of their users, then charge a per-unit-bandwidth rate for usage over that base threshold. Set the per-unit rate at some reasonable level such that heavy users pay approx. 2x or 3x the base cost as opposed to some astronomically higher price.
I read about college football teams using these in very hot weather about a year or two ago. To prevent guys dying of heat stroke.
Couple thoughts on that study:
1. They price in externalities when comparing against fossil fuels. How to price those in is highly subjective. And, recall, they're not currently priced in and don't look to be any time soon.
2. Pretty sure they extrapolate future price decreases in green tech and price increases in fossil fuels. This is by nature somewhat speculative. Past doesn't always predict future. The prices could shift faster than expected or slower than expected.
So basically their premise is this: "If we assume that existing trends continue for the next 20 years and we artificially inflate the price of fossil fuels to account for their externalities we project green tech will reach price parity around 2030." Those are two pretty big "ifs".
How much energy does it take to create given a requirement of infinite sustainability? i.e. you have to replenish the soil in which the trees grow with fertilizer, etc.
Agreed. "Watching cat videos" seems a bit gratuitous. It's a little too perfect as a stereotypical "goofing off on the internet" type activity. Unless they didn't mean it literally. Also- how was Bob maintaining his jobs at the other businesses in the area? "Working from home" five days a week? Did he never have to go on-site or call in for meetings?
The summary insinuates switching to WebKit would somehow help Microsoft increase its share on mobile and tablets. How? Consider the three main categories of device: Microsoft, Apple and "not Microsoft or Apple":
Microsoft devices: How many folks are going to buy a mobile or tablet device running some flavor of Windows then install a third party browser rather than use the IE that's available by default? I'd say close to zero.
Apple devices: Is there even a version of IE available to install on iOS phones and tablets? If so, what Apple device user is going to install and use it instead of the default Safari that's already available? More over, for the switch to WebKit to "matter" there would need to be folks who would not download and use a Trident-based IE who would download and use a WebKit-based IE. Does such a person exist?
"Other" devices: Basically Android. Same questions as above. Same answers. I can't think of anyone who would download and use IE on Android unless there were some specific website they wished to use that was incompatible with the default Chrome browser but worked with IE.
Oracle was notified of the vulnerability and attempted to fix it. Their fix was inadequate. So they're just incompetent instead of willfully dismissive of security concerns.