As a practical matter, they are granted because the conventional wisdom is that they would be natural monopolies, and granting them is ultimately in the best interests of the public as it avoids nasty corporate bickering and proprietary hardware incompatibilities.
Not to say that the argument is borne out by reality, but it can be reasonably stated that, at least according to "what everyone knows", telco monopolies are both natural and government-granted monopolies.
Honestly, the first thing I thought when i heard about this was "what fucktard broke this story and blew the best counter-intelligence opportunity of the new century?"
How about showing them tons of unencrypted feeds of the places where we don't want them, and silently observing the areas we do so that when they use the "safe" route we track them to the hiding spots we haven't found yet? Flipping to unencrypted feeds in the final seconds, in time for the adversary to witness a drone strike unfold at the point where nothing can be done to prevent or mitigate it? How about putting enough birds up that we can, in fact, see everywhere, then dumping it all into unencrypted frequencies like shock porn on a Dora the Explorer fansite?
Now that everybody knows that everybody knows, it's no longer or any use to either side... the one because they obviously can't trust anything they from it, and the other because they can't exploit that trust.
It might not be of much use right now, but in 10-30 years I have no doubt that online dirt is going to just be assumed by the shot-callers. That's because, in 10-20 years, the people currently in their 20s and 30s will rule the world, and virtually all of these people have grown up with the knowledge that secrets no longer exist.
Now, if you did something truly malicious or destructive, you might still have some issues, but drunk pictures or evidence of shenanigans will have to be swept under the rug or else *nobody* will be acceptable.
Google is just the new Apple. They make some great products that Just Work and have a sort of kitschy "unique" feel, then wrap it all up in a rhetoric of difference, individuality and rebellion foiled against stodgy, dull Microsoft. Same shit, different publicly traded corporation.
That said, I can't help but feel that TFA is a little unfair: Google may not care most about coming up with cool ideas, but at least that's the route of competition they have chosen. It seems more than a little disingenuous to say coming up with new products and services with buying off third parties in a deliberate effort to stymie competition are equally scummy tactics.
To be fair, politics (at least in modern America) is primarily concerned with creating and manipulating law. It is objectively more useful to have a president with a keen understanding of arbitration than one with a keen understanding of string theory (assuming you think that string theory isn't completely bogus).
Competition? Hell no! That's just a line we use whenever somebody points out that private industry is fucking everyone sideways and maybe we should do something about it before we're all completely hosed... but if you actually try to make companies compete, they scream communism just as loud.
The US is a dollar bill democracy... every dollar gets a vote, and the people are just noise.
What if we never even HAD a huge stockpile of nukes, just a huge stockpile of cardboard cutouts made to LOOK like nukes?
Seriously though, it was pointed out that our current arsenal is sufficient to annhilate all life on earth several times over, and STILL people are wetting themselves at the idea that we might not be able to deter our enemies... wtf? How much more "deterred" can they be? I just can't believe that somebody willing to launch nukes when we can kill everything with fire 40 times over would suddenly think twice about it if we could do it 1000 times over, because that would be batshit fucking insane.
I call this phenomenon "Tom Clancy Syndrome", it's a state of believing that the US military is not only better in every way than everyone else anywhere, but that this doesn't give rational people any reason to seriously reconsider their half-baked world domination plans. It also has been known to result in popping a semi whenever you learn about a new and phenomenally expensive technology that is almost as effective at killing people as good old fashioned bullets, and experiencing wet dreams about a full-on modern military confrontation between ourselves and another nuclear world power.
Unless they need some sort of user input, or there are set time delays for non-technical reasons. Then they stop until you tell them to go.
Very few people actually use their computers in such a way that their ability to go forever makes one bit of difference.
If it takes me an hour to complete a task, what difference does it really make whether my computer spends 90% of that time waiting for me to press another button, or 10% of that time waiting for me to press another button? So long as I spend no more of my time waiting for the computer to respond to the button I pushed, the answer is none.
Mercenaries 2 is filed under "Shit, Complete & Total"
It was just another shitty GTA rip-off with uninspired weapons, boring vehicles, a plot that made 30 Days of Night look good, and actually forced you to be a nearly-decent human being (killing innocent civilians has repercussions beyond drawing the attention of enemy forces? lamesauce) instead of a psychotic murdering rapist.
Oh, and the hardest thing in the whole game was not losing the will to live after pressing over 9000 buttons in the same lameass hijacking sequences over and over again. Sure, it was kinda cool the first time you jacked a tank by running down the cannon and shoving a grenade down some dude's throat, but once you realized it was the exact same shit every single time it somehow became a lot less fun.
Don't you know that the speed of computing operates on the same principles as driving? Of course you'll get to work faster in a Lamborghini than in a Corolla, because more horsepower means you can really drive the hell out of every 5 foot gap in bumper-to-bumper traffic.
I take it that you just accidentally missed the extra 'o' from "too"? You know,'cause otherwise you'd basically fall into the category of dumbass... but...no... You do know basic grammar right?
FTFY... well, sort of. I inserted the minimum characters and punctuation to make your post almost tolerable, but it's still pretty bad, even for dialect.
As somebody who was forced to use dial-up at home until 2005 (no broadband was available), I can attest that US Robotics modems were the best after the buyout as well. Connections virtually never dropped, they worked in every OS I threw at them, and they always made the best of the fact that the phone line wouldn't accommodate better than 28.8... Now that I think about it, the two I owned were outstanding, but I still don't miss them even a little.
Aristotle is taken seriously not because all of his conclusions were valid or just or relevant, but because he was one of the first to really apply logic and philosophy to create a generalized code of conduct and describe a utopia based upon it. He was also quite prolific, and for various reasons his work was considered to be the final word in Western philosophy for about 2000 years, so it should be no surprise that virtually everything else we have in that field is pretty much a direct response to it.
Aristotle wrote the framework for Western thought, you have to either take him seriously or start completely from scratch.
Perhaps none of you have ever had the, um, "joy" of working in mass retail, but there's an entire class of rule that covers this: "shit we kmake up on the spot to kick people out who we find creepy, annoying, stupid, or otherwise undesirable." It's a shitty, asinine thing to do, and that's why management loves it. You basically find some halfway plausible reason to say "get out" and then stick to it no matter what anybody says or does.
My guess is that they couldn't have cared less about the hood, and that they were just creeped out by this guy and couldn't handle it. Turns out that a lot of norms just can't handle people who dress or look or act differently from themselves, and rather than keep this to themselves or simply ignore it they feel the need to lash out. I'd also point out that many abnorms have an equally shitty reaction to the habits or opinions of norms, and willfully refuse to respect the people around them who aren't interested in their quirk by forcing it upon everyone they encounter.
Anyway, I don't know how this guy was actually behaving in the store, but if he was annoying people this was to be expected, and even if he was being completely reasonable I am unsurprised that retail managers would kick a guy out simply for wearing a robe in their store and weirding them out.
Of course they would, but the start up might not, and therefore just sell at a lower rate.
Or they would only carry music by artists who explicitly allow such 30-second snippets, require lower per-track fees in the first place, and likely aren't affiliated with any of those trade groups. If this caught on, and they couldn't find an angle in, this would be RIAA apocalypse, but that doesn't really sound so bad for the rest of us.
"And what about in the middle of the day which is when this incident occurred?"
Break-ins happen at 2 pm as well as at 2am. Daytime home burglaries are actually fairly common, in part because during the late morning and early afternoon, most homes are completely vacant. Most burglars do not, to the chagrin of overzealous gun owners, want to be anywhere near anyone while committing a crime.
"And I would be really pissed if a cop followed me into my house with no more cause for suspicion than someone had made a call where they said that they maybe, possibly thought something might be happening but were not really very sure."
Sorry, that's just not how it works. The cops don't know you live there, hell, they don't even know who you are, but they have received a 911 call reporting a 911 call. They are legally required to follow up on this by establishing whether or not a crime has happened, and if so attempting to arrest (or obtain information about) the perpetrator. They would have been completely remiss in NOT following him into the home prior to establishing that he was not, in fact, actually a burglar.
"After all there is absolutely nothing suspicious about going back into your own house in order to retrieve the requested id."
Not unless, given the circumstances, they have sufficient reason to doubt that it is your home at all. If they'd shown up to investigate something other than a possible break-in, you'd have a point.
"Hell, I'm perfectly within my rights to tell the cop to go screw because there is no legal requirement to provide id in my own home."
And they'd be perfectly happy to explain to you that they are investigating a reported possible break-in, and that without ID they cannot assume it is your home. You're trying to establish an obvious catch-22 here, and you're an idiot if you think any court or jury with 2 working brain-cells would ever take it seriously.
"That cop should have been happy with the fact the guy was complying in the first place, instead he tried to push it."
Until ID was provided, the cop wasn't "pushing" anything. He started screwing up precisely when, and not a moment before, professor Gates provided ID. Arresting a guy in what has been legally established as his own home on a charge that doesn't exist isn't "pushing it" either, it's just completely wrong. the appropriate response was "thanks for the ID, I'm very sorry for the inconvenience, have a nice day" and leaving the way he came. Saying that he never should have been in the home in the first place though, is just silly.
It is well established that dragons were never something that people actually saw... they were imagined monsters. European written and oral tradition simply does not contain any credible tales of human-dragon interaction, and provides ample evidence that no such thing ever happened.
"I believe the high cost of insurance is largely due to insurers wasting money, rather than insurers not telling their customers that they should just buy it themselves. But that's just me."
Define "wasting"... their job is to take your money, then use it for all of the following purposes:
1) Pay shareholders (by the way, this is, by law, their first priority) 2) Reimburse your medical expenses (this is what you pay them for, so presumably they'll do it... right?) 3) Pay themselves, those salaries do come from somewhere, and they aren't cheap 4) Pay themselves again, a lot of these guys are also big into pharmaceutical and medical supply companies, and a lot of them also sell malpractice insurance (one of the largest expenses for a doctor or hospital in this country is purchasing such insurance)
Now, just for a moment, put yourself into the shoes of a ruthless businessman running a large health insurer having to prioritize these jobs. Paying the shareholders will probably go near the top for a couple of reasons, one being that if it doesn't you could be in a world of shit, and the other being that you almost certainly own a huge amount of stock and/or options in the company (sweet! paying yourself comes up 3 times!). But now you're in a dilemma... your company exists to pay out for medical expenses, and if you pay out nothing you will also be in a world of shit, but every penny you pay out is one less penny you can pay yourself. Aha! a solution, charge EVEN MORE money for insurance, which most people won't even see because it's usually an employer cost and employees don't pay taxes on it as they would with any other benefit, and at the same time use your position and influence to jack up the cost of actually providing medical care so that you can pay yourself a huge chunk of that AND pay yourself a larger salary that is still proportional to the revenues.
They aren't "wasting" anything, they're just not spending it on useful medical care because, simply put, that doesn't make them any money. Isn't objectivism fun?
Slashdot Mirror
"Wealth of Nations", I choose YOU!
As a practical matter, they are granted because the conventional wisdom is that they would be natural monopolies, and granting them is ultimately in the best interests of the public as it avoids nasty corporate bickering and proprietary hardware incompatibilities.
Not to say that the argument is borne out by reality, but it can be reasonably stated that, at least according to "what everyone knows", telco monopolies are both natural and government-granted monopolies.
B-b-b-but Ronald Reagan said government is the enemy!
Don't you love people who insist on making government ineffective and wasteful on the grounds that government is ineffective and wasteful?
Honestly, the first thing I thought when i heard about this was "what fucktard broke this story and blew the best counter-intelligence opportunity of the new century?"
How about showing them tons of unencrypted feeds of the places where we don't want them, and silently observing the areas we do so that when they use the "safe" route we track them to the hiding spots we haven't found yet? Flipping to unencrypted feeds in the final seconds, in time for the adversary to witness a drone strike unfold at the point where nothing can be done to prevent or mitigate it? How about putting enough birds up that we can, in fact, see everywhere, then dumping it all into unencrypted frequencies like shock porn on a Dora the Explorer fansite?
Now that everybody knows that everybody knows, it's no longer or any use to either side... the one because they obviously can't trust anything they from it, and the other because they can't exploit that trust.
It might not be of much use right now, but in 10-30 years I have no doubt that online dirt is going to just be assumed by the shot-callers. That's because, in 10-20 years, the people currently in their 20s and 30s will rule the world, and virtually all of these people have grown up with the knowledge that secrets no longer exist.
Now, if you did something truly malicious or destructive, you might still have some issues, but drunk pictures or evidence of shenanigans will have to be swept under the rug or else *nobody* will be acceptable.
Google is just the new Apple. They make some great products that Just Work and have a sort of kitschy "unique" feel, then wrap it all up in a rhetoric of difference, individuality and rebellion foiled against stodgy, dull Microsoft. Same shit, different publicly traded corporation.
That said, I can't help but feel that TFA is a little unfair: Google may not care most about coming up with cool ideas, but at least that's the route of competition they have chosen. It seems more than a little disingenuous to say coming up with new products and services with buying off third parties in a deliberate effort to stymie competition are equally scummy tactics.
Not if I can see it in a mirror.
If you didn't have such shitty attitude's I assure you that you wouldn't be assailed with so many negative comments like that one.
Chicken, egg, first?
To be fair, politics (at least in modern America) is primarily concerned with creating and manipulating law. It is objectively more useful to have a president with a keen understanding of arbitration than one with a keen understanding of string theory (assuming you think that string theory isn't completely bogus).
"That sounds suspiciously like Milo Minderbinder in Catch-22... "I lose money on every sale, but I make it up in volume!".'
Which, of course, worked out quite well for Milo, making him both extremely wealthy and extremely powerful.
Maybe you forget that his trick was where he lost the money in question... most of his transactions were actually purchases from himself.
Sony's at it again!
*rimshot*
Competition? Hell no! That's just a line we use whenever somebody points out that private industry is fucking everyone sideways and maybe we should do something about it before we're all completely hosed... but if you actually try to make companies compete, they scream communism just as loud.
The US is a dollar bill democracy... every dollar gets a vote, and the people are just noise.
What if we never even HAD a huge stockpile of nukes, just a huge stockpile of cardboard cutouts made to LOOK like nukes?
Seriously though, it was pointed out that our current arsenal is sufficient to annhilate all life on earth several times over, and STILL people are wetting themselves at the idea that we might not be able to deter our enemies... wtf? How much more "deterred" can they be? I just can't believe that somebody willing to launch nukes when we can kill everything with fire 40 times over would suddenly think twice about it if we could do it 1000 times over, because that would be batshit fucking insane.
I call this phenomenon "Tom Clancy Syndrome", it's a state of believing that the US military is not only better in every way than everyone else anywhere, but that this doesn't give rational people any reason to seriously reconsider their half-baked world domination plans. It also has been known to result in popping a semi whenever you learn about a new and phenomenally expensive technology that is almost as effective at killing people as good old fashioned bullets, and experiencing wet dreams about a full-on modern military confrontation between ourselves and another nuclear world power.
Unless they need some sort of user input, or there are set time delays for non-technical reasons. Then they stop until you tell them to go.
Very few people actually use their computers in such a way that their ability to go forever makes one bit of difference.
If it takes me an hour to complete a task, what difference does it really make whether my computer spends 90% of that time waiting for me to press another button, or 10% of that time waiting for me to press another button? So long as I spend no more of my time waiting for the computer to respond to the button I pushed, the answer is none.
Mercenaries 2 is filed under "Shit, Complete & Total"
It was just another shitty GTA rip-off with uninspired weapons, boring vehicles, a plot that made 30 Days of Night look good, and actually forced you to be a nearly-decent human being (killing innocent civilians has repercussions beyond drawing the attention of enemy forces? lamesauce) instead of a psychotic murdering rapist.
Oh, and the hardest thing in the whole game was not losing the will to live after pressing over 9000 buttons in the same lameass hijacking sequences over and over again. Sure, it was kinda cool the first time you jacked a tank by running down the cannon and shoving a grenade down some dude's throat, but once you realized it was the exact same shit every single time it somehow became a lot less fun.
Don't you know that the speed of computing operates on the same principles as driving? Of course you'll get to work faster in a Lamborghini than in a Corolla, because more horsepower means you can really drive the hell out of every 5 foot gap in bumper-to-bumper traffic.
I take it that you just accidentally missed the extra 'o' from "too"? You know, 'cause otherwise you'd basically fall into the category of dumbass... but...no... You do know basic grammar right?
FTFY... well, sort of. I inserted the minimum characters and punctuation to make your post almost tolerable, but it's still pretty bad, even for dialect.
That's great and all, but I was very disappointed with the result I got:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=is+bing+worth+using%3F
That's a question I really want an answer for.
As somebody who was forced to use dial-up at home until 2005 (no broadband was available), I can attest that US Robotics modems were the best after the buyout as well. Connections virtually never dropped, they worked in every OS I threw at them, and they always made the best of the fact that the phone line wouldn't accommodate better than 28.8... Now that I think about it, the two I owned were outstanding, but I still don't miss them even a little.
Aristotle is taken seriously not because all of his conclusions were valid or just or relevant, but because he was one of the first to really apply logic and philosophy to create a generalized code of conduct and describe a utopia based upon it. He was also quite prolific, and for various reasons his work was considered to be the final word in Western philosophy for about 2000 years, so it should be no surprise that virtually everything else we have in that field is pretty much a direct response to it.
Aristotle wrote the framework for Western thought, you have to either take him seriously or start completely from scratch.
Perhaps none of you have ever had the, um, "joy" of working in mass retail, but there's an entire class of rule that covers this: "shit we kmake up on the spot to kick people out who we find creepy, annoying, stupid, or otherwise undesirable." It's a shitty, asinine thing to do, and that's why management loves it. You basically find some halfway plausible reason to say "get out" and then stick to it no matter what anybody says or does.
My guess is that they couldn't have cared less about the hood, and that they were just creeped out by this guy and couldn't handle it. Turns out that a lot of norms just can't handle people who dress or look or act differently from themselves, and rather than keep this to themselves or simply ignore it they feel the need to lash out. I'd also point out that many abnorms have an equally shitty reaction to the habits or opinions of norms, and willfully refuse to respect the people around them who aren't interested in their quirk by forcing it upon everyone they encounter.
Anyway, I don't know how this guy was actually behaving in the store, but if he was annoying people this was to be expected, and even if he was being completely reasonable I am unsurprised that retail managers would kick a guy out simply for wearing a robe in their store and weirding them out.
Of course they would, but the start up might not, and therefore just sell at a lower rate.
Or they would only carry music by artists who explicitly allow such 30-second snippets, require lower per-track fees in the first place, and likely aren't affiliated with any of those trade groups. If this caught on, and they couldn't find an angle in, this would be RIAA apocalypse, but that doesn't really sound so bad for the rest of us.
"And what about in the middle of the day which is when this incident occurred?"
Break-ins happen at 2 pm as well as at 2am. Daytime home burglaries are actually fairly common, in part because during the late morning and early afternoon, most homes are completely vacant. Most burglars do not, to the chagrin of overzealous gun owners, want to be anywhere near anyone while committing a crime.
"And I would be really pissed if a cop followed me into my house with no more cause for suspicion than someone had made a call where they said that they maybe, possibly thought something might be happening but were not really very sure."
Sorry, that's just not how it works. The cops don't know you live there, hell, they don't even know who you are, but they have received a 911 call reporting a 911 call. They are legally required to follow up on this by establishing whether or not a crime has happened, and if so attempting to arrest (or obtain information about) the perpetrator. They would have been completely remiss in NOT following him into the home prior to establishing that he was not, in fact, actually a burglar.
"After all there is absolutely nothing suspicious about going back into your own house in order to retrieve the requested id."
Not unless, given the circumstances, they have sufficient reason to doubt that it is your home at all. If they'd shown up to investigate something other than a possible break-in, you'd have a point.
"Hell, I'm perfectly within my rights to tell the cop to go screw because there is no legal requirement to provide id in my own home."
And they'd be perfectly happy to explain to you that they are investigating a reported possible break-in, and that without ID they cannot assume it is your home. You're trying to establish an obvious catch-22 here, and you're an idiot if you think any court or jury with 2 working brain-cells would ever take it seriously.
"That cop should have been happy with the fact the guy was complying in the first place, instead he tried to push it."
Until ID was provided, the cop wasn't "pushing" anything. He started screwing up precisely when, and not a moment before, professor Gates provided ID. Arresting a guy in what has been legally established as his own home on a charge that doesn't exist isn't "pushing it" either, it's just completely wrong. the appropriate response was "thanks for the ID, I'm very sorry for the inconvenience, have a nice day" and leaving the way he came. Saying that he never should have been in the home in the first place though, is just silly.
It is well established that dragons were never something that people actually saw... they were imagined monsters. European written and oral tradition simply does not contain any credible tales of human-dragon interaction, and provides ample evidence that no such thing ever happened.
Thanks for playing.
"I believe the high cost of insurance is largely due to insurers wasting money, rather than insurers not telling their customers that they should just buy it themselves. But that's just me."
Define "wasting"... their job is to take your money, then use it for all of the following purposes:
1) Pay shareholders (by the way, this is, by law, their first priority)
2) Reimburse your medical expenses (this is what you pay them for, so presumably they'll do it... right?)
3) Pay themselves, those salaries do come from somewhere, and they aren't cheap
4) Pay themselves again, a lot of these guys are also big into pharmaceutical and medical supply companies, and a lot of them also sell malpractice insurance (one of the largest expenses for a doctor or hospital in this country is purchasing such insurance)
Now, just for a moment, put yourself into the shoes of a ruthless businessman running a large health insurer having to prioritize these jobs. Paying the shareholders will probably go near the top for a couple of reasons, one being that if it doesn't you could be in a world of shit, and the other being that you almost certainly own a huge amount of stock and/or options in the company (sweet! paying yourself comes up 3 times!). But now you're in a dilemma... your company exists to pay out for medical expenses, and if you pay out nothing you will also be in a world of shit, but every penny you pay out is one less penny you can pay yourself. Aha! a solution, charge EVEN MORE money for insurance, which most people won't even see because it's usually an employer cost and employees don't pay taxes on it as they would with any other benefit, and at the same time use your position and influence to jack up the cost of actually providing medical care so that you can pay yourself a huge chunk of that AND pay yourself a larger salary that is still proportional to the revenues.
They aren't "wasting" anything, they're just not spending it on useful medical care because, simply put, that doesn't make them any money. Isn't objectivism fun?