That was supposed to be a rhetorical question, I think.
But what's telling here is "We are going to make this bad for most people." No ruling class succeeds by intending to make things bad for the underclass. They succeed by intending to make things better for themselves, which is very different. Whether or not things are bad for the underclass or not doesn't matter, but it usually works out that the underclass is worse off than it could/should be if the intention is to make things better for everyone.
In many modern societies (those that consider themselves democracies), the belief is that individual effort pays off and anyone can become a member of the ruling class. Anecdotally, this is true, but by and large you will remain in the class you are born into no matter what you do. The elected governments who continually stack the deck in favor of the ruling class are reelected partially on this belief: "When I'm in the ruling class, I want to have all those perks."
Today, it's not the ruling class who's entirely to blame for how the entire society fails to thrive. It's also those who vote (or don't) and make their voices heard (or don't). It's the Mac zealots and the Linux fanboys and the M$ junkies and the n00bs all together.
And yet, I'm only paying $25/mo for phone servive, instead of $50+ that I used to pay to the ILEC, using the broadband connection that I had already. I have heard about Vonage's troubles, their IPO problem, the fact that they're still burning cash. Fine. I'll get cheaper phone service while they do so.
So yeah, one might have been able to trade up a single red paperclip into a house without publicity, but it would have taken longer and been a much more impressive feat.
Just to make sure everyone knows, this man's (still impressive) accomplishment was fueled not by being able to make smart trades, but by the publicity of the stunt. Clearly, the people trading with him were giving him items of far greater value than what he was providing. The balance of the transaction can be measured in publicity.
Indeed, the human race will survive the next 100 years no matter what happens, and probably the next thousand or zillion after that. But plain survival doesn't necessarily have to be comfortable. A species can survive for a long time in really adverse and sucky conditions.
Seems that many people interpreted the question (as may have been intended) to be: "How can the human race survive the next 100 years and come out the other end comfortable and thriving?"
Well, let's think about that. Pick any 100 year span in history. I would bet that, at the end of any 100 year span, most of humanity is merely surviving in really adverse and sucky conditions. A small fraction of the whole of humanity actually thrives. That is as true today as ever.
Maybe the question should rightly be interpreted as "How can the small fraction of humanity which is today thriving continue to thrive through the next 100 years and never mind the people who are already scrabbling for survival today." Because that's really the only question anyone has ever truly asked.
... I can't help but recall that AOL didn't bill you for the time "downloading new art".
Ah I never looked into it that far. All I knew was that AOL was charging by the hour, that I had to download new art every time, and I could only connect at 2400 baud when 14.4Kbps was standard, and 28.8 was coming up. I just did the math in my own head.
I would have been surprised if I could have found anyone at AOL to confirm that downloading art wasn't paid time. I spent many hours in their support chats trying different modem strings to see if I could connect faster than 2400. Until I decided to dial the 800 POP number, which connected at 14.4 no problem.
In fact, in the early early days, AOL had quality content that could not be found on the internet-at-large. Besides that, computers and networks were very new to a lot of people. I started online in 1995 with AOL for DOS, and let me tell you, it was great.
Great until I figured out that, while AOL was advertising 14.4Kbps (top speed in the day), my dialup POP in the suburbs was 2400bps. And every time I dialed up, I had to wait fifteen minutes while AOL "downloaded new art." And they were charging me by the hour. And my AOL bills were ~$200/mo.
As soon as I figured out the scam, I went to the store and bought a magazine. I started paging through looking for a new ISP. I was signed up with someone else (Netcom) by the end of the day for $19.95/mo unlimited.
Interestingly, I had no problem canceling my AOL service back then.
Anyway, my point is that AOL had a place at one time. The market has opened up a lot since then, to the point where AOL's purpose (at a premium price) has been eliminated.
Isn't "coronary" an adjective? You can't die of an adjective.
Words can be more than one thing. When used as part of the phrase 'coronary thrombosis,' yes, it is an adjective. Common usage abbreviates that phrase to 'coronary.' When used that way, the word is a noun.
For example, you might be called a 'dick' for performing a 'dick move.' The former is a noun, the latter an adjective.
*WinYY.a (in between WinYY and WinZZ) - With the chimney blocked, the paper walls quickly charred and caught fire, burning the whole thing to the ground. (See WinME.)
eBay is the perfect place for unique, must-have items. For example, my wife is trying to find an extra baby blanket to match the one my daughter uses, just to have an extra one. The price gouging is insane; people are asking $50 for these blankets that sold new for far less. Of course, since they're not produced new anymore, Random People On The Intarweb are the only place to get them. And said People know full well that a desperate parent will shell out the cash in a pinch.
1) What about the children? 2) ??? 3) Profit!
It's not the launch that matters anymore
on
Shuttle Launch Success
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Granted, a launch is the controlled ignition of the largest bottle rocket ever made, and that's dangerous. But isn't the primary concern these days the foam breaking off of the fuel tank and damaging heat tiles, which don't matter until re-entry? Post again when it's touched down on earth safely, please.
When the profit margin on the products you're selling is constant and eBay constantly raises the fees, then no, you can't.
If your profit margin was constant while eBay was raising fees, you would have to be raising your selling price (so that the increased fees were not cutting into the profit margin).
In other words, yes, you can. If eBay raises its fees, then you raise your price (or reserve). If you are still unable to compete in the marketplace, then you need to figure out how to spend less capital on something else (because, if you're unable to compete, then someone is succeeding, and you need to do what they're doing).
More generally, when the market changes, businesses must change to keep up. Unless you're the RIAA/MPAA, in which case you can wave your arms around and sue people a lot.
I currently have three computers all running XP, all in the same workgroup and they can only access each other by IP address.
This is because NetBIOS browsing is (ahem) t3h suXX0r. It's never been dependable. If you want to browse by NetBIOS name (computername), you need to resolve that to an IP address. A WINS server can handle that for you. If you want to browse by hostname (FQDN), you'll need to resolve that to an IP address. An internal DNS server can handle that for you. But network browse lists on Windows machines are next to useless.
What's even worse is that neither WINS server nor DNS server are available in WinXP. So... what you do instead on a small network is add entries to the LMHOSTS file (for NetBIOS resolution) for each computername and IP address, which can be found in %systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc
Once that's done, when you try to lookup a NetBIOS name to IP address, the machine will check the LMHOSTS file before broadcasting. If it finds an entry, resolved, done and done.
You're on to something there. All the police need is a legitimate reason to get close enough to observe something. Kind of like when there's a crack house around, they get real strict on lane usage and turn signal laws - just so they can stop a car that they consider suspicious but wouldn't otherwise have cause to stop.
Since there's no way they could know exactly which residence had the unsecured access point, they'd have to visit every residence in the vicinity. That gives the police the opportunity to more closely observe residences that don't even have electricity, let alone a WAP. And now, legally.
Open letter to Canada: Please invade the US. We need someone to liberate us from tyranny, and our own government is busy liberating oil^H^H^H Iraqis from tyranny.
But I thought that piracy had been contained!? Is the RIAA talking out of both side of its mouth again. Or, does one hand of the RIAA not know what the other is doing? Hmm.
Piracy has been contained. It used to be happening on a national and global level. It's been contained to a local level now!
Open letter to the **AA: Most adults don't have the free time to consume your products (music, movies). Most of the consumption comes from youth, who don't have so much money to buy your products with. What they do have is free time and the internet. The huge mass of tech-savvy youth have nothing better to do than defeat DRM schemes all day and all night, and that is what they will do. Forever. So it seems that your business model must change. It seems that you're trying to change your revenue stream from selling physical media to recovering court settlements. That's really stupid.
That struck me as odd, too. I wonder why they didn't decide to use removable flash media cards like my camera uses, which hold way more than 64MB. Oh, maybe it's because you can't stick a flash card into a drawing of an idea.
Oh I am fully aware of Mr. Buffet's generosity. When I heard about that a couple days back, a first thought I had was, "Wouldn't those billions of dollars have served a greater good had they not been amassed into a giant pile for so many years? Wouldn't it have been better for that wealth to have been distributed into the hands of the hundreds of thousands of Berkshire Hathaway employees, thereby generating economic growth and bringing up the standard of living for a huge number of people?"
Buffet is still just playing with money however he likes - even when the way he likes is very generous. That still leaves the working class doing paycheck to paycheck, if not worse, and the poor on the fringe. Yes, the Gates Foundation does great things, and Buffet's donation will enable them to do more great things - for those people who are deemed worthy of assistance by the Gates Foundation. If the obscene wealth amassed by a few was more evenly distributed among those who work to generate that profit, perhaps so many great things wouldn't need doing by charitable organizations, who pick and choose who they're going to help while taking a cut off the top for themselves.
I promote a theory of "trickle up" economics. Trickle down was supposed to be great - give rich people a bunch of money, which they'll invest, creating jobs. Didn't/doesn't work. How about we give the working class and poor that money instead, which they'll spend as consumers, thereby generating more profits for business and the rich? How about that?
I have oft used the word treacle, but generally in a derogatory sense to describe something that is overly sugary and sappy (think a really cheesy song). I have not used it as a metaphor for something slow-moving. In fact, when I read the original post, I was about to post myself about the use of the word treacle. But I read the thread first.
The above statement is true. However, the decision to spend less money on the front end and more on the back end has nothing to do with the aforementioned truth.
What matters is profit today. Spend as little money as possible today while taking in as much revenue as possible today. This makes the stock price go up today, which makes your options (someone else mentioned these) go up today, and the Board of Directors happy today.
Do not concern yourself with trivialities like "tomorrow" or "TCO" or "long-term survivability." By the time any of that comes around, you'll have jumped (or been pushed) to another company that you can squeeze the same way. If you just so happen to still be around tomorrow, blame it on the office staff for using too many paperclips, and stop subsudizing employees' soft drinks.
Once you understand that business leaders are not running businesses for the long term, or even the medium term, it's very easy to understand the (il)logic of their actions. The company exists to be soaked by execs until it dies.
Slashdot Mirror
Have an interview coming up? Why not delete the pictures you posted online of yourself doing bong hits?
That's a good place to start, but with the Wayback Machine and several cache sites, is that enough?
... am I at least allowed to manually fast-forward through the naughty bits, or would that offend the MPAA's sensitivities as well?
It would offend the MPAA if the "naughty bits" were commercials, I bet.
...
That was supposed to be a rhetorical question, I think.
But what's telling here is "We are going to make this bad for most people." No ruling class succeeds by intending to make things bad for the underclass. They succeed by intending to make things better for themselves, which is very different. Whether or not things are bad for the underclass or not doesn't matter, but it usually works out that the underclass is worse off than it could/should be if the intention is to make things better for everyone.
In many modern societies (those that consider themselves democracies), the belief is that individual effort pays off and anyone can become a member of the ruling class. Anecdotally, this is true, but by and large you will remain in the class you are born into no matter what you do. The elected governments who continually stack the deck in favor of the ruling class are reelected partially on this belief: "When I'm in the ruling class, I want to have all those perks."
Today, it's not the ruling class who's entirely to blame for how the entire society fails to thrive. It's also those who vote (or don't) and make their voices heard (or don't). It's the Mac zealots and the Linux fanboys and the M$ junkies and the n00bs all together.
And yet, I'm only paying $25/mo for phone servive, instead of $50+ that I used to pay to the ILEC, using the broadband connection that I had already. I have heard about Vonage's troubles, their IPO problem, the fact that they're still burning cash. Fine. I'll get cheaper phone service while they do so.
So yeah, one might have been able to trade up a single red paperclip into a house without publicity, but it would have taken longer and been a much more impressive feat.
Just to make sure everyone knows, this man's (still impressive) accomplishment was fueled not by being able to make smart trades, but by the publicity of the stunt. Clearly, the people trading with him were giving him items of far greater value than what he was providing. The balance of the transaction can be measured in publicity.
Indeed, the human race will survive the next 100 years no matter what happens, and probably the next thousand or zillion after that. But plain survival doesn't necessarily have to be comfortable. A species can survive for a long time in really adverse and sucky conditions.
Seems that many people interpreted the question (as may have been intended) to be: "How can the human race survive the next 100 years and come out the other end comfortable and thriving?"
Well, let's think about that. Pick any 100 year span in history. I would bet that, at the end of any 100 year span, most of humanity is merely surviving in really adverse and sucky conditions. A small fraction of the whole of humanity actually thrives. That is as true today as ever.
Maybe the question should rightly be interpreted as "How can the small fraction of humanity which is today thriving continue to thrive through the next 100 years and never mind the people who are already scrabbling for survival today." Because that's really the only question anyone has ever truly asked.
... I can't help but recall that AOL didn't bill you for the time "downloading new art".
Ah I never looked into it that far. All I knew was that AOL was charging by the hour, that I had to download new art every time, and I could only connect at 2400 baud when 14.4Kbps was standard, and 28.8 was coming up. I just did the math in my own head.
I would have been surprised if I could have found anyone at AOL to confirm that downloading art wasn't paid time. I spent many hours in their support chats trying different modem strings to see if I could connect faster than 2400. Until I decided to dial the 800 POP number, which connected at 14.4 no problem.
In fact, in the early early days, AOL had quality content that could not be found on the internet-at-large. Besides that, computers and networks were very new to a lot of people. I started online in 1995 with AOL for DOS, and let me tell you, it was great.
Great until I figured out that, while AOL was advertising 14.4Kbps (top speed in the day), my dialup POP in the suburbs was 2400bps. And every time I dialed up, I had to wait fifteen minutes while AOL "downloaded new art." And they were charging me by the hour. And my AOL bills were ~$200/mo.
As soon as I figured out the scam, I went to the store and bought a magazine. I started paging through looking for a new ISP. I was signed up with someone else (Netcom) by the end of the day for $19.95/mo unlimited.
Interestingly, I had no problem canceling my AOL service back then.
Anyway, my point is that AOL had a place at one time. The market has opened up a lot since then, to the point where AOL's purpose (at a premium price) has been eliminated.
Isn't "coronary" an adjective? You can't die of an adjective.
Words can be more than one thing. When used as part of the phrase 'coronary thrombosis,' yes, it is an adjective. Common usage abbreviates that phrase to 'coronary.' When used that way, the word is a noun.
For example, you might be called a 'dick' for performing a 'dick move.' The former is a noun, the latter an adjective.
You forgot:
*WinYY.a (in between WinYY and WinZZ) - With the chimney blocked, the paper walls quickly charred and caught fire, burning the whole thing to the ground. (See WinME.)
Mother-Mary-on-a-piece-of-burnt-toast
eBay is the perfect place for unique, must-have items. For example, my wife is trying to find an extra baby blanket to match the one my daughter uses, just to have an extra one. The price gouging is insane; people are asking $50 for these blankets that sold new for far less. Of course, since they're not produced new anymore, Random People On The Intarweb are the only place to get them. And said People know full well that a desperate parent will shell out the cash in a pinch.
1) What about the children?
2) ???
3) Profit!
Granted, a launch is the controlled ignition of the largest bottle rocket ever made, and that's dangerous. But isn't the primary concern these days the foam breaking off of the fuel tank and damaging heat tiles, which don't matter until re-entry? Post again when it's touched down on earth safely, please.
When the profit margin on the products you're selling is constant and eBay constantly raises the fees, then no, you can't.
If your profit margin was constant while eBay was raising fees, you would have to be raising your selling price (so that the increased fees were not cutting into the profit margin).
In other words, yes, you can. If eBay raises its fees, then you raise your price (or reserve). If you are still unable to compete in the marketplace, then you need to figure out how to spend less capital on something else (because, if you're unable to compete, then someone is succeeding, and you need to do what they're doing).
More generally, when the market changes, businesses must change to keep up. Unless you're the RIAA/MPAA, in which case you can wave your arms around and sue people a lot.
Most Web 2.0. Article title. Evar.
I currently have three computers all running XP, all in the same workgroup and they can only access each other by IP address.
... what you do instead on a small network is add entries to the LMHOSTS file (for NetBIOS resolution) for each computername and IP address, which can be found in %systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc
This is because NetBIOS browsing is (ahem) t3h suXX0r. It's never been dependable. If you want to browse by NetBIOS name (computername), you need to resolve that to an IP address. A WINS server can handle that for you. If you want to browse by hostname (FQDN), you'll need to resolve that to an IP address. An internal DNS server can handle that for you. But network browse lists on Windows machines are next to useless.
What's even worse is that neither WINS server nor DNS server are available in WinXP. So
Once that's done, when you try to lookup a NetBIOS name to IP address, the machine will check the LMHOSTS file before broadcasting. If it finds an entry, resolved, done and done.
You're on to something there. All the police need is a legitimate reason to get close enough to observe something. Kind of like when there's a crack house around, they get real strict on lane usage and turn signal laws - just so they can stop a car that they consider suspicious but wouldn't otherwise have cause to stop.
Since there's no way they could know exactly which residence had the unsecured access point, they'd have to visit every residence in the vicinity. That gives the police the opportunity to more closely observe residences that don't even have electricity, let alone a WAP. And now, legally.
Open letter to Canada: Please invade the US. We need someone to liberate us from tyranny, and our own government is busy liberating oil^H^H^H Iraqis from tyranny.
First you want my CPU cycles, next you'll be trying to sap my precious bodily fluids!
Someone explain to me what the point of trying to get a first post is if you're posting AC?
Don't you realize that whatever the authorities want to do is legal, and that your disagreeing with that is criminal? You must be a terrorist!
But I thought that piracy had been contained!? Is the RIAA talking out of both side of its mouth again. Or, does one hand of the RIAA not know what the other is doing? Hmm.
Piracy has been contained. It used to be happening on a national and global level. It's been contained to a local level now!
Open letter to the **AA: Most adults don't have the free time to consume your products (music, movies). Most of the consumption comes from youth, who don't have so much money to buy your products with. What they do have is free time and the internet. The huge mass of tech-savvy youth have nothing better to do than defeat DRM schemes all day and all night, and that is what they will do. Forever. So it seems that your business model must change. It seems that you're trying to change your revenue stream from selling physical media to recovering court settlements. That's really stupid.
That struck me as odd, too. I wonder why they didn't decide to use removable flash media cards like my camera uses, which hold way more than 64MB. Oh, maybe it's because you can't stick a flash card into a drawing of an idea.
Oh I am fully aware of Mr. Buffet's generosity. When I heard about that a couple days back, a first thought I had was, "Wouldn't those billions of dollars have served a greater good had they not been amassed into a giant pile for so many years? Wouldn't it have been better for that wealth to have been distributed into the hands of the hundreds of thousands of Berkshire Hathaway employees, thereby generating economic growth and bringing up the standard of living for a huge number of people?"
Buffet is still just playing with money however he likes - even when the way he likes is very generous. That still leaves the working class doing paycheck to paycheck, if not worse, and the poor on the fringe. Yes, the Gates Foundation does great things, and Buffet's donation will enable them to do more great things - for those people who are deemed worthy of assistance by the Gates Foundation. If the obscene wealth amassed by a few was more evenly distributed among those who work to generate that profit, perhaps so many great things wouldn't need doing by charitable organizations, who pick and choose who they're going to help while taking a cut off the top for themselves.
I promote a theory of "trickle up" economics. Trickle down was supposed to be great - give rich people a bunch of money, which they'll invest, creating jobs. Didn't/doesn't work. How about we give the working class and poor that money instead, which they'll spend as consumers, thereby generating more profits for business and the rich? How about that?
I have oft used the word treacle, but generally in a derogatory sense to describe something that is overly sugary and sappy (think a really cheesy song). I have not used it as a metaphor for something slow-moving. In fact, when I read the original post, I was about to post myself about the use of the word treacle. But I read the thread first.
Cost is about TCO, not just initial.
The above statement is true. However, the decision to spend less money on the front end and more on the back end has nothing to do with the aforementioned truth.
What matters is profit today. Spend as little money as possible today while taking in as much revenue as possible today. This makes the stock price go up today, which makes your options (someone else mentioned these) go up today, and the Board of Directors happy today.
Do not concern yourself with trivialities like "tomorrow" or "TCO" or "long-term survivability." By the time any of that comes around, you'll have jumped (or been pushed) to another company that you can squeeze the same way. If you just so happen to still be around tomorrow, blame it on the office staff for using too many paperclips, and stop subsudizing employees' soft drinks.
Once you understand that business leaders are not running businesses for the long term, or even the medium term, it's very easy to understand the (il)logic of their actions. The company exists to be soaked by execs until it dies.
(Here, let me post my own reply: "Bitter much?")
Gah, on a reread, I stand corrected. It's not worded well, and my Asperger's Syndrome must have been kicking in when I read it.