If this ever gets implemented, I can see fuel transfer pumps suddenly selling like hotcakes. Then I can see dumbfounded gas station attendants who can't figure out why this car comes to fill up every day but GPS shows that other than the trip to the gas station it never left the garage, so the fuel tax is minimal.
Re:How would SBC do this?
on
SBC's VoIP End Run
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
How do wireless companies handle this?
And, how does SBC charge this termination fee? Somewhere out there sits a device which receives packets, converts packets into voice, dials a phone, and "speaks into the phone". SBC charges for hooking up that device, right? Seems like the same charge would them apply to wireless and long-distance carriers, no? Also, what would happen if Packet 8 struk a deal with, say, MCI, and hooked up their IP-to-voice converter to MCI's network (which is all IP anyway) and then SBC would just see all calls as long-distance from MCI?
I don't know how VoIP works now, so may be someone can explain what exactly SBC is planning here, but...
Say, I have an appliance in my house which connects to the net and sends encrypted traffic to some server somewhere out there using one of the standard protocols and ports (https, or one of vpn protocols). Said appliance happens to me by internet phone, and the encrypted traffic carries voice. The server could be that of Vonage, or Vonage could contract with some big VPN provider or some other third party as well. What is SBC going to do? Trottle down all SSL/https, and all VPN? Unlikely. Figure out which ones are Vonage's? Can be pretty hard, they all look the same, that's the idea.
Now, if Vonage currently does not do it and sends voice unencrypted or using some easilly identifiable dedicated ports or protocols, this is bad ofr many reasons, mostly it's bad for us users, but now it's bad for Vonage too, so may be they will change it to a more secure protocol. That would be good for everyone.
Or is it the poor record-keeping? When you dig, you're supposed to call and have the location of utilities marked. They get marked according to what's in the city of county records. But what you find under ground does not always match:
my neighbor had a gas pipe marked going along the edge of his lawn then doing a 90-degrees turn and going along the other edge. But the gas company saved few feet of pipe and laid it straight along the diagonal, under the lawn.
power line is marked right next to my foundation every time I call for markings. It's about 2 feet away from the foundation, actually.
my other neighbor discovered a buried cable conduit under his lawn, with active cable. Nobody knows what the heck it's doing there, no cable is marked anywhere near.
Interesting... How are they going to pull it off? Schedules soutinely slip by a couple of minutes, and sometimes sports wreck total havock. So they cannot sync up their billboards with original ads by timing, otherwise they will one day show Smirnoff billboard over Ford's ad. They would need the broadcasters to embed some marker into the signal... I can see a market for devices which strip such markers from the video signal, similarly to the Macrovision removal boxes.
Depends how the implementation ends up looking like: Option 1: out of the jumbled mess, which is how all playback looks like at 30X, a small portion is less jumbled. Fine, whatever, I wasn't watching it anyway, just as long as I can see when the movie resumes. Option 2: enough of the screen is covered up so it't hard to see when to stop fast-forwarding. That would be bad, unless TiVo also added some features to help stop the fast-forward on time, like automatic detection of the end of the commercial. Option 3: every time I fast-forward the box plays some extra ads. That's evil.
Fortunately, option 3 is almost certain to be challenged in courts, and may be option 2 as well: the advertizers and the networks will sue for effectively replacing their ads with TiVo's ads, similarly to how web advertisers sued when some companies tried to do a similar thing with web pages (stick code into browsers to float their ads over the original ads).
RFID for Slashdot seems to be what half-naked women for advertising. Slap it on any story or product, and shazam - instant hot story. Would the story make it anywhere if the kids carried magnetic cards or coded punch cards like some hotels use for doorkeys, and used them to sign in and out of school by swiping them through the reader? Nah, too boring. But do the same thing with RFID, and suddenly it's ACLU time. Never mind that the cards are being used in exactly the same way, only instead of swiping them through the reader they are held next to the reader until it beeps.
The Principal and the Provost likely clock in, or have a calendar marking their appointments, tasks, and whereabouts, or track their work in one of the other ways used by employers to keep track of the attandance by employees. Which makes it different from the way the kids are treated... in no way at all. Nobody is tracking the kids, they are not being labeled like cattle, black helicopters are not hovering over them, and despite popular belief sky is not falling. Kids are swiping their IDs to check in and out, only these IDs happen to be radio instead of magnetic.
So, what is the nature of your disapproval? Are you some libertarian nut-job who can't comprehend the idea that the government might be uniquely able to positively influence the market? Or are you afraid that such an initiative might hurt your Wal-Mart stock?
Neither. You missed the point: I don't necessarily disapprove of government regulations (not in the context you are describing anyway), as long as they apply equally to everyone. I disapprove when people say "I want all of you (except me) to pay more so I can have a clan consciousness". You want to sleep better at night? Then this is something of value to you, so you pay for it. Not me. If you don't care enough about it to pay for it, then you don't really care about it at all.
A. I want to buy only things that weren't made by slave labor (for example), ...
C. I want other people to not buy products made by slave labor, whether or not they care, because I know a lot of people don't care but slave labor is wrong regardless.
I don't feel strongly enough about A that I'll attempt it without B & C being in place...
Let's see... You want other people to pay for something you want but you don't want to pay your fair share, and you use fancy words to achieve this result. As far as I'm concerned, you're a con man. Whether you are trying to get me to pay for your ideals or your big-screen TV, whether you talk about slave labor of African workers or millions left to you by your great-uncle the former minister of an African country, you're trying get something at my expense without paying for it yourself.
wouldent it be nice if we held international corporations to provide the same level of economic and humanitarian funding outside the country, and taxed the pajamas out of importers that don't
Are you prepared to pay the significantly higher price for the goods you can by today cheap precisely because the companies do not provide the same level of funding outside the country?
I have great respect for people who argue for equal wages and labor conditions and then live by their ideals (which means their level of life is significantly lower than what they could afford otherwise). I may not agree with their ideas, but I respect them.
Hypocrites who yak about terrible working conditions in the 3rd world and then go by chineese t-shirts on sale get no respect from me.
But if you need service, you can go to the service desk and they will help you find stuff, if they are out they will check other Costcos in the area and delivery schedules. And they have very good return policies.
The chicken story reminded me the opposite scene I saw at Costco (love their customer service btw). They sent out some cupons for 2-for-1 on whole chickens, limit 2 free chicken. When I came to the store I saw a sign which said that you don't need a cupon, everyone can get 2 free chicken with 2 paid. Then the manager of he meat dept came out while I was shopping and was telling shoppers that they have lots of chicken today so there is no limit. It actually looked almost like some village market, with him calling out to passing shoppers and hawking the chicken.
The Linked article makes the case perfectly: a frequent buying customer, who therefore is a frequent returner, gets flagged, gets pissed off, and gets turned off, never to return.
If this is indeed the case, then the tool they use to rate customers made a mistake. Retailers who use bad rating tools will lose profitable customers.
There is another possibility: that the lady was in fact not a profitable customer. May be she does not buy as much as she says, or she returns even more, and overall ends up losing money for the store. Assuming there is no "fallout", the retailer can come out ahead by banning the customer either explicitly (hard to do) or implicitly, by driving them away. It is possible that this will cause more losses, from bad publicity or negative word-of-mouth reputation. A well-designed customer rating tool would have some empirical estimates of this effect built into it. Of course the tool or the estimates could be wrong too, but the market is good at fixing this sort of problems.
The only thing to fear, but it's a real possibility, is emergence of a monopoly similar to the credit reporting agencies (I know, there are three, not one, but they work like one anyway). If there is one customer-rating database, then retailers have a choice of using it or not. If overall it saves some money, it's good enough and retailers will use it. If you are in it, you might as well start growing your own potatoes in pots (but you have to steal the pots first because nobody will sell you any).
If the security officer in a company cannot overrule EVERY single person in the company on a matter of security, the job is a joke and exists merely as a butt-covering operation.
This would be true if security was the overriding concern, the ultimate goal. It isn't. It would be true if the cost of security breach was infinite, but that is not so as well. So it is an entirely legitimate question to ask: should we accept the risks at our current level of security, or spend more on tightening it (in the form of direct expenses or lost productivity). There are other ways to mitigate against risks (redundancy, insurance, etc). If at the end of the day you can come out ahead by accepting the risk, that that is the correct thing to do. Security officer is not qualified to make this judgement.
The new "feature" is going to be downloaded to your Tivo, sometime soon. Or at least will try to get downloaded. If your Tivo is hacked, expecially for extracting video, you've probably disabled the upgrades (and if you added shell you can go check it right now, and disable upgrading if it's not done yet). Now, it's possible that Tivo will disconnect service for all units which do not accept the upgrade, but I somehow doubt it.
It's not IBM Sun has to compete against with these boxes. It's Dell. Dell sells the 64-bit workstations with Intel's Opteron clones, even with Linux preloaded, and beats Sun by at least 30%. It's even worse if you configure them with more RAM: Sun is so used to charging outrageous prices for their workstation RAM that they just can't turn on a dime. Dell wants about $1200 for the extra 4G of RAM (to bring the total to 8G), Sun at least twice as much.
It's good that Sun realized that they have to move to commodity hardware if they want to survive, now we're waiting for them to have an epiphany that commodity hardware sells at commodity prices.
I pay $55 (with all taxes and fees) to AT&T for 450min shared between 2 lines (long-distance included) and unlimited mobile-to-mobile. T-mobile has even beter deal now, but didn't have it when I was shopping for plans. Plus I got two NEC-515's for a penny each. If with this merger I can get rollover of unused minutes on top of my plan, that'll be great.
You can put together a $100 PC if you scour special deals and rebates, but I suspect most of those are loss leaders, which means you can't sell these PCs on a sustainable basis (unless Microsoft is willing to sell PCs themselves as a loss leader). But $200 PC can be bought, already assembled. Fry's runs an ad for a $200 PC every now and then, the configuration varies slightly, today it's an Athlon 2000+ with 128MB RAM, 40GB disk, Ethernet, CD, and Linspire Linux preinstalled.
It's a game set in ancient Egypt. As such, it should have social interactions appropriate for the time and the place. A trader who refuses to deal with women is certainly not out of character, so it has every right to be there. You don't like that? Then you don't like to play a character in ancient Egypt, nobody said you must. You want to play a character in an Egypt-like land which treats women fairly? Well, may be some other game will accomodate you, or you can start your own, but even if not, there is no God-given right to have your perfect game.
While entering a team into a tournament scored for individuals and then sacrificing the whole team for one player is by no means a new idea, what makes it so remarkably successfull here is the existance of a "guaranteed draw" strategy (in this case, always defect). The best individual response to "always defect" is to defect yourself, anything else is a suicide, so if you always defect you can force a draw. Then all your team loses to one team member, and he is the winner.
Compare this with, for example, a chess tournament. You could secretly enter a team and have them all lose to you. While this will keep you from ending last, it won't assure victory, unless all players are roughly equal. If there is a very strong player, he'll win against all your team, yourself included. So you can cheat by redistributing players of comparable strenghts, but at least you can't rob a clear champion of his deserved victory.
This is not the case in the PD tournament. But let's redefine the problem slightly: say, if both sides cooperate, each gets a dollar. If then defect, each pays a dollar. Sucker's reward is paying 10 dollars. Now the Southampton team's strategy boils down to using the tournament to give all their money to one player, while paying a hefty tax in the process. There is a cheaper way to do this, just give all money to one guy outside the tournament:) But now we can gauge any strategy: enter one player or a team, recognize your own team members or not, transfer money between team members as you wish, but can you make money, overall, from this tournament?
This makes the IMO unreasonable assumption that a single individual writes code for the machines without any checks or oversight by at least one other person, and that the malicious coder is willing to become a fugitive or go to jail when (not if) the easter egg is discovered.
Not really, it makes the assumption that after the code is written by many individuals, there is a single individual with the power to alter it. I think this assumption is fairly reasonable. Sure, this individual is probably not a regular programmer who logs in at the last second and hacks some code, although, if security procedures in the company are lax, even this is possible. But someone with enough authority could do it:
"Attention headcount, CEO speaking. Everyone clear the building, we're about to load the voting machines with our security-audited verified code onto the armored truck and ship them under guard to the polls. Building clear? Yes? Good, let me just replace the flash chip in the machine with this one in my pocket... done. Now haul them away!":)
As far as the penalty argument, if it didn't work on CEO of Enron why do you expect it to work on CEO of Diebold?
Morale of the story: if you ever make an illegal U-turn in China, take a good look around and make sure to run over every guy with a camera, he could be a vigilante bounty-hunter:)
Slashdot Mirror
If this ever gets implemented, I can see fuel transfer pumps suddenly selling like hotcakes. Then I can see dumbfounded gas station attendants who can't figure out why this car comes to fill up every day but GPS shows that other than the trip to the gas station it never left the garage, so the fuel tax is minimal.
How do wireless companies handle this?
And, how does SBC charge this termination fee? Somewhere out there sits a device which receives packets, converts packets into voice, dials a phone, and "speaks into the phone". SBC charges for hooking up that device, right? Seems like the same charge would them apply to wireless and long-distance carriers, no? Also, what would happen if Packet 8 struk a deal with, say, MCI, and hooked up their IP-to-voice converter to MCI's network (which is all IP anyway) and then SBC would just see all calls as long-distance from MCI?
I don't know how VoIP works now, so may be someone can explain what exactly SBC is planning here, but...
Say, I have an appliance in my house which connects to the net and sends encrypted traffic to some server somewhere out there using one of the standard protocols and ports (https, or one of vpn protocols). Said appliance happens to me by internet phone, and the encrypted traffic carries voice. The server could be that of Vonage, or Vonage could contract with some big VPN provider or some other third party as well. What is SBC going to do? Trottle down all SSL/https, and all VPN? Unlikely. Figure out which ones are Vonage's? Can be pretty hard, they all look the same, that's the idea.
Now, if Vonage currently does not do it and sends voice unencrypted or using some easilly identifiable dedicated ports or protocols, this is bad ofr many reasons, mostly it's bad for us users, but now it's bad for Vonage too, so may be they will change it to a more secure protocol. That would be good for everyone.
Or is it the poor record-keeping? When you dig, you're supposed to call and have the location of utilities marked. They get marked according to what's in the city of county records. But what you find under ground does not always match:
my neighbor had a gas pipe marked going along the edge of his lawn then doing a 90-degrees turn and going along the other edge. But the gas company saved few feet of pipe and laid it straight along the diagonal, under the lawn.
power line is marked right next to my foundation every time I call for markings. It's about 2 feet away from the foundation, actually.
my other neighbor discovered a buried cable conduit under his lawn, with active cable. Nobody knows what the heck it's doing there, no cable is marked anywhere near.
Interesting... How are they going to pull it off? Schedules soutinely slip by a couple of minutes, and sometimes sports wreck total havock. So they cannot sync up their billboards with original ads by timing, otherwise they will one day show Smirnoff billboard over Ford's ad. They would need the broadcasters to embed some marker into the signal... I can see a market for devices which strip such markers from the video signal, similarly to the Macrovision removal boxes.
Depends how the implementation ends up looking like:
Option 1: out of the jumbled mess, which is how all playback looks like at 30X, a small portion is less jumbled. Fine, whatever, I wasn't watching it anyway, just as long as I can see when the movie resumes.
Option 2: enough of the screen is covered up so it't hard to see when to stop fast-forwarding. That would be bad, unless TiVo also added some features to help stop the fast-forward on time, like automatic detection of the end of the commercial.
Option 3: every time I fast-forward the box plays some extra ads. That's evil.
Fortunately, option 3 is almost certain to be challenged in courts, and may be option 2 as well: the advertizers and the networks will sue for effectively replacing their ads with TiVo's ads, similarly to how web advertisers sued when some companies tried to do a similar thing with web pages (stick code into browsers to float their ads over the original ads).
RFID for Slashdot seems to be what half-naked women for advertising. Slap it on any story or product, and shazam - instant hot story. Would the story make it anywhere if the kids carried magnetic cards or coded punch cards like some hotels use for doorkeys, and used them to sign in and out of school by swiping them through the reader? Nah, too boring. But do the same thing with RFID, and suddenly it's ACLU time. Never mind that the cards are being used in exactly the same way, only instead of swiping them through the reader they are held next to the reader until it beeps.
The Principal and the Provost likely clock in, or have a calendar marking their appointments, tasks, and whereabouts, or track their work in one of the other ways used by employers to keep track of the attandance by employees. ... in no way at all. Nobody is tracking the kids, they are not being labeled like cattle, black helicopters are not hovering over them, and despite popular belief sky is not falling. Kids are swiping their IDs to check in and out, only these IDs happen to be radio instead of magnetic.
Which makes it different from the way the kids are treated
Neither. You missed the point: I don't necessarily disapprove of government regulations (not in the context you are describing anyway), as long as they apply equally to everyone. I disapprove when people say "I want all of you (except me) to pay more so I can have a clan consciousness". You want to sleep better at night? Then this is something of value to you, so you pay for it. Not me. If you don't care enough about it to pay for it, then you don't really care about it at all.
...
C. I want other people to not buy products made by slave labor, whether or not they care, because I know a lot of people don't care but slave labor is wrong regardless.
I don't feel strongly enough about A that I'll attempt it without B & C being in place...
Let's see... You want other people to pay for something you want but you don't want to pay your fair share, and you use fancy words to achieve this result. As far as I'm concerned, you're a con man. Whether you are trying to get me to pay for your ideals or your big-screen TV, whether you talk about slave labor of African workers or millions left to you by your great-uncle the former minister of an African country, you're trying get something at my expense without paying for it yourself.
Are you prepared to pay the significantly higher price for the goods you can by today cheap precisely because the companies do not provide the same level of funding outside the country?
I have great respect for people who argue for equal wages and labor conditions and then live by their ideals (which means their level of life is significantly lower than what they could afford otherwise). I may not agree with their ideas, but I respect them. Hypocrites who yak about terrible working conditions in the 3rd world and then go by chineese t-shirts on sale get no respect from me.
But if you need service, you can go to the service desk and they will help you find stuff, if they are out they will check other Costcos in the area and delivery schedules. And they have very good return policies.
The chicken story reminded me the opposite scene I saw at Costco (love their customer service btw). They sent out some cupons for 2-for-1 on whole chickens, limit 2 free chicken. When I came to the store I saw a sign which said that you don't need a cupon, everyone can get 2 free chicken with 2 paid. Then the manager of he meat dept came out while I was shopping and was telling shoppers that they have lots of chicken today so there is no limit. It actually looked almost like some village market, with him calling out to passing shoppers and hawking the chicken.
If this is indeed the case, then the tool they use to rate customers made a mistake. Retailers who use bad rating tools will lose profitable customers.
There is another possibility: that the lady was in fact not a profitable customer. May be she does not buy as much as she says, or she returns even more, and overall ends up losing money for the store. Assuming there is no "fallout", the retailer can come out ahead by banning the customer either explicitly (hard to do) or implicitly, by driving them away. It is possible that this will cause more losses, from bad publicity or negative word-of-mouth reputation. A well-designed customer rating tool would have some empirical estimates of this effect built into it. Of course the tool or the estimates could be wrong too, but the market is good at fixing this sort of problems.
The only thing to fear, but it's a real possibility, is emergence of a monopoly similar to the credit reporting agencies (I know, there are three, not one, but they work like one anyway). If there is one customer-rating database, then retailers have a choice of using it or not. If overall it saves some money, it's good enough and retailers will use it. If you are in it, you might as well start growing your own potatoes in pots (but you have to steal the pots first because nobody will sell you any).
If the security officer in a company cannot overrule EVERY single person in the company on a matter of security, the job is a joke and exists merely as a butt-covering operation.
This would be true if security was the overriding concern, the ultimate goal. It isn't. It would be true if the cost of security breach was infinite, but that is not so as well. So it is an entirely legitimate question to ask: should we accept the risks at our current level of security, or spend more on tightening it (in the form of direct expenses or lost productivity). There are other ways to mitigate against risks (redundancy, insurance, etc). If at the end of the day you can come out ahead by accepting the risk, that that is the correct thing to do. Security officer is not qualified to make this judgement.
The new "feature" is going to be downloaded to your Tivo, sometime soon. Or at least will try to get downloaded. If your Tivo is hacked, expecially for extracting video, you've probably disabled the upgrades (and if you added shell you can go check it right now, and disable upgrading if it's not done yet). Now, it's possible that Tivo will disconnect service for all units which do not accept the upgrade, but I somehow doubt it.
It's not IBM Sun has to compete against with these boxes. It's Dell. Dell sells the 64-bit workstations with Intel's Opteron clones, even with Linux preloaded, and beats Sun by at least 30%. It's even worse if you configure them with more RAM: Sun is so used to charging outrageous prices for their workstation RAM that they just can't turn on a dime. Dell wants about $1200 for the extra 4G of RAM (to bring the total to 8G), Sun at least twice as much.
It's good that Sun realized that they have to move to commodity hardware if they want to survive, now we're waiting for them to have an epiphany that commodity hardware sells at commodity prices.
I pay $55 (with all taxes and fees) to AT&T for 450min shared between 2 lines (long-distance included) and unlimited mobile-to-mobile. T-mobile has even beter deal now, but didn't have it when I was shopping for plans. Plus I got two NEC-515's for a penny each. If with this merger I can get rollover of unused minutes on top of my plan, that'll be great.
You can put together a $100 PC if you scour special deals and rebates, but I suspect most of those are loss leaders, which means you can't sell these PCs on a sustainable basis (unless Microsoft is willing to sell PCs themselves as a loss leader). But $200 PC can be bought, already assembled. Fry's runs an ad for a $200 PC every now and then, the configuration varies slightly, today it's an Athlon 2000+ with 128MB RAM, 40GB disk, Ethernet, CD, and Linspire Linux preinstalled.
"The battle was won due to superior tactics and equipment". Does not say what exactly "won" meant in this case, though.
It's a game set in ancient Egypt. As such, it should have social interactions appropriate for the time and the place. A trader who refuses to deal with women is certainly not out of character, so it has every right to be there. You don't like that? Then you don't like to play a character in ancient Egypt, nobody said you must. You want to play a character in an Egypt-like land which treats women fairly? Well, may be some other game will accomodate you, or you can start your own, but even if not, there is no God-given right to have your perfect game.
You mean that backpack I saw the other day, with the "IBM" label and a two suitcases of batteris hanging on both sides, was a PDA?
While entering a team into a tournament scored for individuals and then sacrificing the whole team for one player is by no means a new idea, what makes it so remarkably successfull here is the existance of a "guaranteed draw" strategy (in this case, always defect). The best individual response to "always defect" is to defect yourself, anything else is a suicide, so if you always defect you can force a draw. Then all your team loses to one team member, and he is the winner.
:) But now we can gauge any strategy: enter one player or a team, recognize your own team members or not, transfer money between team members as you wish, but can you make money, overall, from this tournament?
Compare this with, for example, a chess tournament. You could secretly enter a team and have them all lose to you. While this will keep you from ending last, it won't assure victory, unless all players are roughly equal. If there is a very strong player, he'll win against all your team, yourself included. So you can cheat by redistributing players of comparable strenghts, but at least you can't rob a clear champion of his deserved victory.
This is not the case in the PD tournament. But let's redefine the problem slightly: say, if both sides cooperate, each gets a dollar. If then defect, each pays a dollar. Sucker's reward is paying 10 dollars. Now the Southampton team's strategy boils down to using the tournament to give all their money to one player, while paying a hefty tax in the process. There is a cheaper way to do this, just give all money to one guy outside the tournament
This makes the IMO unreasonable assumption that a single individual writes code for the machines without any checks or oversight by at least one other person, and that the malicious coder is willing to become a fugitive or go to jail when (not if) the easter egg is discovered.
:)
Not really, it makes the assumption that after the code is written by many individuals, there is a single individual with the power to alter it. I think this assumption is fairly reasonable. Sure, this individual is probably not a regular programmer who logs in at the last second and hacks some code, although, if security procedures in the company are lax, even this is possible. But someone with enough authority could do it:
"Attention headcount, CEO speaking. Everyone clear the building, we're about to load the voting machines with our security-audited verified code onto the armored truck and ship them under guard to the polls. Building clear? Yes? Good, let me just replace the flash chip in the machine with this one in my pocket... done. Now haul them away!"
As far as the penalty argument, if it didn't work on CEO of Enron why do you expect it to work on CEO of Diebold?
Morale of the story: if you ever make an illegal U-turn in China, take a good look around and make sure to run over every guy with a camera, he could be a vigilante bounty-hunter :)