Oil, gas, coal, and every other fuel would be valueless. The commodity prices of those items would crash, resulting in a economic crisis. The economies of Russia, Venezuela, and many Middle East and some Latin American countries would collapse. The stock of oil companies, shipping companies, power generation companies, etc. would crash. All the jobs, many of them very good paying jobs, in the energy production industries would disappear.
Producing an inferior product with excessive resources is basically never the right choice economically.
As for the population explosion, I don't see any reason to believe cheap energy causes people to have more babies. If anything, cheap, clean energy raises the worldwide level of wealth, and wealthier nations have lower birth rates.
AIG's counterparties were hardly gambling. They were buying CDS contracts from AIG effectively as insurance, believing AIG was big enough and creditworthy enough that this rendered their default risk close to zero.
AIG was certainly gambling, although the "risk" was the risk of a systemic collapse in housing prices. (Check.)
The counterparties believed they had insurance on their CDOs from a very reputable institution (AIG).
Do you think that he's going to be able to find this out? Do you think they're going to approve of him surveying customers to see what they're willing to pay?
Yes, that's what the ISP should be doing, but if his boss didn't think to explore that in the first place, don't think he's going to get the nod to doing market research.
(It's always possible his boss is implementing throttling as a stop-gap while they find another answer, like pay-to-play for big usage)
It's also possible they have a completely unrealistic expectation about bandwidth. Maybe they have 7000 customers and a 10Mb/s line from XO to route them over.
What qualifies these authors to even write on these topics? Do they engage the community of PHP developers at all? Do they have the exposure to enough environments and circumstances and code to be effective authors on the topic?
Chris Shiflett is the CTO of OmniTI, arguably one of the biggest PHP development braintrusts around. Several of the Schlossnagle family work there (and it used to include George, who wrote the awesome Advanced PHP Programming. Chris wrote Essential PHP Security, and also maintains a blog that has a lot of good stuff.
One might be charitable and infer they meant that PHP is inherently insecure, as in - if you don't take steps to properly write secure code, it won't be secure. But is that true of any language used in web programming? You're providing a service often trusted with secure data to a bunch of effectively anonymous clients.
PHP has a pedigree which includes a lot of poor design decisions about security, but it certainly is very much possible to write secure PHP code, and lots of places do it.
Google had ~63% of the search market. Hard to corner advertising - even search advertising, which is their best niche - with 63%. By contrast, in Jan '09, Windows controls some ~89% of the Desktop OS market.
But this just in - having high market share isn't illegal. What's bad is leveraging your monopoly in one market to injure competition in other markets.
For example, bundling your Web Browser product with your OS, and even integrating it as a half-assed file browser, so that everyone would have it and it would be difficult or impossible to remove. Add in some license agreements that forbid OEMs from removing it or installing a competitor.
Who did Google leverage their "monopoly" to injure? Instead, Google continues to enter markets where the competition is basically screwing the customer, and drastically improves it with their product. Witness the webmail battle between Hotmail and Yahoo. Ridiculously small disk allotments; tons of spam; horrible user interfaces; feeble POP/IMAP policies. How are we not better off with gmail in the world?
Even if Google were a monopoly - which they are not - it's a stretch and a half to imply they have violated anti-trust laws.
And - this just in - even IF Google had a monopoly on search advertising, you can still select advertising on TV, print, Internet "display" ads, radio, flyers on windshields, sports sponsorship, or a thousand other things.
Want to talk about a concerning monopoly?
Monsanto owns 70-100% of the market share for a lot of crops. Monsanto has shown interest in producing and marketing "terminator" seeds; seeds which would produce sterile plants, so every crop would require a new batch of seeds to be grown. I don't know about everyone, but I'm thinking we should be a bit more concerned with a monopoly in the food supply than in search engine advertising, especially when the company involved in pushing genetically modified seed appears to have a blatant disregard for the risk of starving half the planet.
Nice pick Obama. Of course, McCain would probably have made Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant the Secretary of Agriculture.
But even an omnidirectional antenna gets every major network beautifully. Cable is an insanely weak value proposition. A good cable package in digital is like $75+ where I am. For $900 a year, I can buy every series I watch in HD, and have a lot left over. (In my case, a heck of a lot, since I only watch one show) And I have the antenna for backup.
But in an MMO sense. WoW did this very well, imo - you can start, and click a button or two, and gain levels immediately. Literally. My 7 yr old can make a hunter and master the basics easily.
Get to L80 and run a raid dungeon, and you'll find a bunch of adults trying out reasonably complex strategies, practicing timing and pacing, installing complex modification to the UI, in order to overcome challenges.
I initially ordered the Comcast triple play, then decided that my cell was good enough and that cable was a waste of money when I only watch one show, and I can stream it from Netflix.
So I cancelled the other two halves. They had no objection. I call them every 6 months to ask nicely that they keep my broadband price at the introductory rate so I am not tempted to switch to DSL. They have been very obliging.
Fortunately, lobbyists only get one vote too. Money can buy ads, but there are contribution limits, and even then, if you can make it a voting issue for enough people, money just won't matter.
The moment politicians believe their constituents care about the issue, they'll do whatever they need to to placate people. One thing you can be certain of - there will not be a bunch of people lining up to fight *for* DRM.
I'm thinking the easiest way around it is to just download a copy. Seriously, wtf, people - do you not like having customers?
I damn near gave up buying media of any kind because of copy protection, and so I do without. Yay Amazon MP3 store to the rescue. But I'm getting completely sick of this.
It's time to push Congress for a Consumer's Digital Purchases Bill of Rights that forces compatibility. If you want DRM so bad, it's your job to make it work.
I guess what I'd say is that when I encounter someone manifestly lacking in ambition or curiosity, someone who wants to "get by", they skew distinctly older.
But it's not as if my sample size is huge. I have speculated in the past that the reason IT doesn't have a ton of really strong older workers is because they all got rich and retired, and I'm only partially kidding. Of the tip top people I know, a significant percentage have a lot of money and no longer work by choice. There has been such a boom of opportunity that all the things you want in a person - smart, communicates well, understands business, gets things done, ambitious - translate directly into real dollars, even in side projects.
By the same token, young people often have things older people lack. Drive, ambition, flexibility, curiosity, and a lot more hours they're willing to work on salary.
Not every older person lacks those. Heck, I've been posting on/. since I was "the young IT worker", and now I'm approaching the time I'm supposed to be put out to pasture.
The real issue, I think, is that too many people suck at learning on their own. They come out of school with Java, and if they can't do that, they fail.
I interviewed an older coder in the past year. He was over 40 for sure, maybe 50, but was playing with RoR, knew python, but still had his C and bash under his belt. The *only* reason I didn't hire him on the spot was he was very expensive and it was early on in the interview cycle. (In retrospect, I'd have pulled the trigger; it turned out to be much, much harder to find good people than I had expected.)
There were no routes between Sprint and Cogent, which means anyone who only reached Cogent via Sprint and vice versa (including anyone who was single-homed to either) could not reach the other. IIRC, it was about 210 ASes on one side, 270 ASes on the other.
I love how 'Anonymous Reader' can comment on how Twitter was built wrong. You show us your service handling something servicing 3 million customers 2 years after launch, then you can lay the smack down.
Not that Payne is exactly insightful or entirely correct. IPv4 is part of a stack comprising most Internet traffic, but it is not a necessary part of the Internet; nor is SMTP.
Did Oprah warn her faithful viewers that if Amazon ever abandons the kindle or the content, that there's a good chance all their "book collection" will be gone forever?
I still have books I bought 20 years ago. Who could possibly be confident your kindle and all those books would be working 20 years from now when DRM schemes are dropping like flies. Can you imagine what's going to happen when studios stop wanting to produce the "old" DVDs?
I was going to use it for sending a lot of emails (closed-loop confirmed opt-in, not spam. We just have a million customers and they like alerts for certain types of sales), but the spamhaus listing ruins that.
Still useful for some things, but it can't sub in for normal IP space if they can't handle the spam thing.
Maybe amazon can maintain a spam-free block where you post a bond before you can use it.
(1) It should never be possible for me to lose access to media I have paid for, period. Perhaps this could be solved with a consumer rights law and enforced key escrow for media.
(2) I should be able to play any media on any device I own which supports playing the underlying media. I should be able to convert between media types (ie, aac->mp3) for the purposes of using a media type on another device.
(3) I should be able to make and keep backups on any media. I should be able to restore out of backup onto any device I own. There should not be onerous measures required to 'activate' my media on new devices (I'm looking at you, EA!)
Ultimately, this is why piracy is attractive - piracy gives you a "better" copy - a copy you can use anywhere and move anywhere.
ALFA for NWN was a great idea - a set of persistent world servers making up the Forgotten Realms.
The implementation was crap. The servers were colossally laggy. The scripting was often horrible. The servers were frequently nice to look at but shockingly devoid of content, especially - thanks to that bad scripting - reasonably dynamic content.
Right here on slashdot you'll find comments from Adam Miller, who produced the best content for NWN and NWN2 -- Dreamcatcher, Dark Waters, Lute Hero. ALFA can't even hold a candle to this.
Even on the "persistent world" side, ALFA was always underpopulated... maybe 15-30 people playing across all their servers most times. More people are still playing City of Arabel now than ever really played ALFA. I looked the other night and it had 45 people on (and it is a single server).
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Everything you just described is a variant on the broken window fallacy.
Producing an inferior product with excessive resources is basically never the right choice economically.
As for the population explosion, I don't see any reason to believe cheap energy causes people to have more babies. If anything, cheap, clean energy raises the worldwide level of wealth, and wealthier nations have lower birth rates.
AIG's counterparties were hardly gambling. They were buying CDS contracts from AIG effectively as insurance, believing AIG was big enough and creditworthy enough that this rendered their default risk close to zero.
AIG was certainly gambling, although the "risk" was the risk of a systemic collapse in housing prices. (Check.)
The counterparties believed they had insurance on their CDOs from a very reputable institution (AIG).
My, how different the world looks with hindsight.
Do you think that he's going to be able to find this out? Do you think they're going to approve of him surveying customers to see what they're willing to pay?
Yes, that's what the ISP should be doing, but if his boss didn't think to explore that in the first place, don't think he's going to get the nod to doing market research.
(It's always possible his boss is implementing throttling as a stop-gap while they find another answer, like pay-to-play for big usage)
It's also possible they have a completely unrealistic expectation about bandwidth. Maybe they have 7000 customers and a 10Mb/s line from XO to route them over.
Doesn't the legislature have more important stuff to do?
What qualifies these authors to even write on these topics? Do they engage the community of PHP developers at all? Do they have the exposure to enough environments and circumstances and code to be effective authors on the topic?
Chris Shiflett is the CTO of OmniTI, arguably one of the biggest PHP development braintrusts around. Several of the Schlossnagle family work there (and it used to include George, who wrote the awesome Advanced PHP Programming. Chris wrote Essential PHP Security, and also maintains a blog that has a lot of good stuff.
If I was buying one, I'd buy Chris's book.
One might be charitable and infer they meant that PHP is inherently insecure, as in - if you don't take steps to properly write secure code, it won't be secure. But is that true of any language used in web programming? You're providing a service often trusted with secure data to a bunch of effectively anonymous clients.
PHP has a pedigree which includes a lot of poor design decisions about security, but it certainly is very much possible to write secure PHP code, and lots of places do it.
What an idiot.
Google had ~63% of the search market. Hard to corner advertising - even search advertising, which is their best niche - with 63%. By contrast, in Jan '09, Windows controls some ~89% of the Desktop OS market.
But this just in - having high market share isn't illegal. What's bad is leveraging your monopoly in one market to injure competition in other markets.
For example, bundling your Web Browser product with your OS, and even integrating it as a half-assed file browser, so that everyone would have it and it would be difficult or impossible to remove. Add in some license agreements that forbid OEMs from removing it or installing a competitor.
Who did Google leverage their "monopoly" to injure? Instead, Google continues to enter markets where the competition is basically screwing the customer, and drastically improves it with their product. Witness the webmail battle between Hotmail and Yahoo. Ridiculously small disk allotments; tons of spam; horrible user interfaces; feeble POP/IMAP policies. How are we not better off with gmail in the world?
Even if Google were a monopoly - which they are not - it's a stretch and a half to imply they have violated anti-trust laws.
And - this just in - even IF Google had a monopoly on search advertising, you can still select advertising on TV, print, Internet "display" ads, radio, flyers on windshields, sports sponsorship, or a thousand other things.
Want to talk about a concerning monopoly?
Monsanto owns 70-100% of the market share for a lot of crops. Monsanto has shown interest in producing and marketing "terminator" seeds; seeds which would produce sterile plants, so every crop would require a new batch of seeds to be grown. I don't know about everyone, but I'm thinking we should be a bit more concerned with a monopoly in the food supply than in search engine advertising, especially when the company involved in pushing genetically modified seed appears to have a blatant disregard for the risk of starving half the planet.
Nice pick Obama. Of course, McCain would probably have made Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant the Secretary of Agriculture.
But even an omnidirectional antenna gets every major network beautifully. Cable is an insanely weak value proposition. A good cable package in digital is like $75+ where I am. For $900 a year, I can buy every series I watch in HD, and have a lot left over. (In my case, a heck of a lot, since I only watch one show) And I have the antenna for backup.
I'd like to congratulate Microsoft on finding yet another way to strangle the life out of any goodwill remaining in its brand.
But in an MMO sense. WoW did this very well, imo - you can start, and click a button or two, and gain levels immediately. Literally. My 7 yr old can make a hunter and master the basics easily.
Get to L80 and run a raid dungeon, and you'll find a bunch of adults trying out reasonably complex strategies, practicing timing and pacing, installing complex modification to the UI, in order to overcome challenges.
It won't be long before the billboards switch as we pass them and scream our names to get our attention.
I initially ordered the Comcast triple play, then decided that my cell was good enough and that cable was a waste of money when I only watch one show, and I can stream it from Netflix.
So I cancelled the other two halves. They had no objection. I call them every 6 months to ask nicely that they keep my broadband price at the introductory rate so I am not tempted to switch to DSL. They have been very obliging.
Fortunately, lobbyists only get one vote too. Money can buy ads, but there are contribution limits, and even then, if you can make it a voting issue for enough people, money just won't matter.
The moment politicians believe their constituents care about the issue, they'll do whatever they need to to placate people. One thing you can be certain of - there will not be a bunch of people lining up to fight *for* DRM.
I'm thinking the easiest way around it is to just download a copy. Seriously, wtf, people - do you not like having customers?
I damn near gave up buying media of any kind because of copy protection, and so I do without. Yay Amazon MP3 store to the rescue. But I'm getting completely sick of this.
It's time to push Congress for a Consumer's Digital Purchases Bill of Rights that forces compatibility. If you want DRM so bad, it's your job to make it work.
I guess what I'd say is that when I encounter someone manifestly lacking in ambition or curiosity, someone who wants to "get by", they skew distinctly older.
But it's not as if my sample size is huge. I have speculated in the past that the reason IT doesn't have a ton of really strong older workers is because they all got rich and retired, and I'm only partially kidding. Of the tip top people I know, a significant percentage have a lot of money and no longer work by choice. There has been such a boom of opportunity that all the things you want in a person - smart, communicates well, understands business, gets things done, ambitious - translate directly into real dollars, even in side projects.
By the same token, young people often have things older people lack. Drive, ambition, flexibility, curiosity, and a lot more hours they're willing to work on salary.
Not every older person lacks those. Heck, I've been posting on /. since I was "the young IT worker", and now I'm approaching the time I'm supposed to be put out to pasture.
The real issue, I think, is that too many people suck at learning on their own. They come out of school with Java, and if they can't do that, they fail.
I interviewed an older coder in the past year. He was over 40 for sure, maybe 50, but was playing with RoR, knew python, but still had his C and bash under his belt. The *only* reason I didn't hire him on the spot was he was very expensive and it was early on in the interview cycle. (In retrospect, I'd have pulled the trigger; it turned out to be much, much harder to find good people than I had expected.)
There were no routes between Sprint and Cogent, which means anyone who only reached Cogent via Sprint and vice versa (including anyone who was single-homed to either) could not reach the other. IIRC, it was about 210 ASes on one side, 270 ASes on the other.
Consider that +5 a big fat middle finger to anyone who thinks they get to decide what appropriate speech is.
I love how 'Anonymous Reader' can comment on how Twitter was built wrong. You show us your service handling something servicing 3 million customers 2 years after launch, then you can lay the smack down.
Not that Payne is exactly insightful or entirely correct. IPv4 is part of a stack comprising most Internet traffic, but it is not a necessary part of the Internet; nor is SMTP.
Do I really want to buy a kindle just so I can read DRM-free stuff? And does that help me get my books back when Amazon stops supporting them?
Hardware breaks.
And I can insure my books.
Did Oprah warn her faithful viewers that if Amazon ever abandons the kindle or the content, that there's a good chance all their "book collection" will be gone forever?
I still have books I bought 20 years ago. Who could possibly be confident your kindle and all those books would be working 20 years from now when DRM schemes are dropping like flies. Can you imagine what's going to happen when studios stop wanting to produce the "old" DVDs?
I was going to use it for sending a lot of emails (closed-loop confirmed opt-in, not spam. We just have a million customers and they like alerts for certain types of sales), but the spamhaus listing ruins that.
Still useful for some things, but it can't sub in for normal IP space if they can't handle the spam thing.
Maybe amazon can maintain a spam-free block where you post a bond before you can use it.
These are exactly the issues:
(1) It should never be possible for me to lose access to media I have paid for, period. Perhaps this could be solved with a consumer rights law and enforced key escrow for media.
(2) I should be able to play any media on any device I own which supports playing the underlying media. I should be able to convert between media types (ie, aac->mp3) for the purposes of using a media type on another device.
(3) I should be able to make and keep backups on any media. I should be able to restore out of backup onto any device I own. There should not be onerous measures required to 'activate' my media on new devices (I'm looking at you, EA!)
Ultimately, this is why piracy is attractive - piracy gives you a "better" copy - a copy you can use anywhere and move anywhere.
ALFA for NWN was a great idea - a set of persistent world servers making up the Forgotten Realms.
The implementation was crap. The servers were colossally laggy. The scripting was often horrible. The servers were frequently nice to look at but shockingly devoid of content, especially - thanks to that bad scripting - reasonably dynamic content.
Right here on slashdot you'll find comments from Adam Miller, who produced the best content for NWN and NWN2 -- Dreamcatcher, Dark Waters, Lute Hero. ALFA can't even hold a candle to this.
Even on the "persistent world" side, ALFA was always underpopulated... maybe 15-30 people playing across all their servers most times. More people are still playing City of Arabel now than ever really played ALFA. I looked the other night and it had 45 people on (and it is a single server).