Comment Re:Garfield (Score 1) 45
In a company stocked by Odies.
In a company stocked by Odies.
Comment was insightful. I accidentally clicked Redundant. (Never sneeze while moderating).
Undoing accidental mis-moderation by posting as self. Nothing to see here.
I'd be curious as to whether someone has a better model in mind on how this should be done.
Given:
The Amazon Kindle Terms and Conditions: “We are entitled to determine what content we accept and distribute through the Program in our sole discretion.”
The anime.net definition of Yaoi:
An acronym standing for YAma nashi, Ochi nashi, Imi nashi – No Climax, no point, no meaning. It’s used
to describe manga/anime focusing on male relationships, not avoiding strong, graphically portrayed homosexual
themes. Very often, yaoi story focuses only on the sex, ignoring elements like true plot, emotions or characters development.
There really is zero doubt as to why Amazon didn't want this on the Kindle. I don't know why there are any “phone calls from journalists asking about the subject.” If you live in the US, clearly the Kindle's primary market, then you know that there are a large number of people here who would spontaneously combust if the they found their tweenager reading this stuff as a “Lend Me” book on their Kindle.
Given that this content is available online (and in color) it would seem a difficult niche to make money on, which would be required to re-engineer your whole e-book system to have age-sections/age-bars. Simply rating 900,000 ebooks so you could decide their category would be a serious expense.
So my questions are:
Would such ratings be more valuable than they would be a tool for greater censorship?
What scale would you use?
Is this is project we should Open/Crowd-Source?
Where would you rate: The Canterbury Tales, Sons and Lovers, 1984?
The above are available on the Kindle store now. Would an rating system that we implemented make them available to more or fewer total humans?
To the Slovakian Minister of the Interior,
I wish to express profound regret on the part of the US for failing to categorize and properly label DVDs obviously sold to your country. Odd as it may seem, the "Police Academy" video series was never intended as instructional.
Sincerest apologies,
I. M. Spending
President of Physics
I can see two honorable paths here:
You can find them FOSS substitutes for their existing software.
You can find another job.
If you want to be optimistic you can stand your ground with the managers and state: "I will not install software unless I'm certain we have a proper license for it." And see if they show you the door, or attempt to find some kind of compromise. People that take the time to look seriously at Open Office often like what they find. So there is a slim hope, but odds are, these are not the class of people you want to make a career with, and you'll be happier working somewhere that ethical compromises are not a daily expectation.
Your comment Gothmolly is ambiguous. So I should reply to both. As I am exactly the kind of engineer this sort of task requires.
On the surface it's good advice. Don't build something that can suffocate everyone who lives underneath it without some serious engineering.
On the other hand it's terrible advice. As an engineer, I want people who will share data (like the link from the poster) for everything they related thing they can find. I WANT them to share all their worries. As an engineer it's my job to prepare a list, and address each of them. There are lives at stake in these designs, and these worries should be addressed with math, not hubris.
The early history of powered flight is littered with the corpses of the brave. Perhaps some of them were uninterested in comments too...
I live in Washington and take my old computers to RePC. They charge a fee, $5 to $10 a unit that depends entirely on the labor to rip it apart into its "differently recycled pieces." They have huge heaps of PCBs in one pile, metal caes in another, I assume crushable plastic was hiding behind those.
If you get the federal government involved they will put a tax on the manufacturers (which we will pay for our new toys), and then they'll go spend it elsewhere (e.g. social security). That's inane. I'm sorry the mega-corps have to deal with all the state laws, but they have lawyers for that sort of thing already.
Even if the money collected were in a closed loop, (which it won't be), having the consumer put the five dollar bills in the hands of the company doing the work seems vastly more efficient than anything that we could do with "national taxes by weight/volume/content," "recycling-prepaid" stamps and typical regulation details.
Collusion would be the best explanation in a void of facts. Here I think I can be of assistance.
I am a telecommunications engineer. I am reading this article because it relates to my industry, not because of any belief that these data thieves have done anything remotely interesting. Given that it may be "on topic" to assume this could affect SMS pricing, it seems then "on topic" to relate why it cannot.
Here are the Big Secrets:
Except for one hour a day, SMSs don't cost anything.
Except for one hour a day, Voice calls don't cost anything.
There. It's out. The servers that process these things on average draw 4.0 amps per 2U at idle and 4.5 amps per 2U at busy. That's the total power savings ratio going from peak-hour to 4 a.m.
Since the equipment is already sitting there and the bandwidth is already leased and a large carrier rarely has to use another carrier's network for Long Distance transport. The fix costs burn whether you are yammering away on your phone or not.
Where adding customers to the network costs money is when those customers make a call during the busy hour. A "blocked call rate" is the % of people who get a network-busy signal or some sort of error when they try to make a call while the system is already at full capacity. Large carriers try to keep this number below 1%.
So where you cost them money in added infrastructure is when you make calls that contribute to busy hour traffic. The rest of the time the cost of your calls rounds comfortably down to zero.
Since the cost of support in a given month is 90% sunk whether you have zero calls or spend the whole month busy, your marketing department is given a large dollar figure they have to get from the subscribers so you can stay in the black.
The question then is "How to bill for it?" Enter game theory.
If you announced to the world what your busy hour is (say 9 a.m.), and that you were only charging for calls during that time, naturally no one would call during that time. You could then announce the new busy hour (now 10 a.m.), and then people would avoid that.... I'm sure you see where this is going. As a carrier with a growing subscriber base you'd still have to be adding cell-sites for the constantly roving busy hour and people on your network would constantly have to update their calling habits to dodge it.
So they pick large chunk of the day where the business users can't really avoid making calls and they divide cost of busy hour infrastructure across those hours. It's not all that tricky. The rest of the day is given away free or near free as the marketing gimmick enthusiasts see fit.
Slightly trickier, is the math to relate people's usage to the probability that they will cost you money in infrastructure upgrades. It's convoluted, but there isn't even any calculus involved. I've seen the spreadsheets where this is done. They generally just tweak a number here and a number there and hit F9 until they see the numbers they like.
The same issues apply to SMS. If you announced that "on your network all SMSs are free" you'd get people switching over just because of that (more money == good), but then they'd be SMS enthusiasts who would shortly saturate your SS7 infrastructure with messages. That equipment is very expensive. You can argue that it shouldn't be and what a great value it would be to create a nationwide wireless topology consisting entirely of WRT54Gs, but in the real world, the only people buying SS7 gear are large carriers, and the people selling it know that and charge much like they would charge the government.
So you want to know the ratio of the costs for SMS infrastructure vs voice? We can look at T-Mobile's "Individual Plan" page for some good clues. Going from their "basic plan" at $30 a month, to unlimited voice ($100) is a $70 difference, adding unlimited SMS to most plans is an extra $15 a month. So the jump from the voice "they'd expect you to use" is about 4.7 times as expensive as the extra SMS gear they'd have to buy if they give you unlimited SMS. Having seen the prices on this gear, that doesn't seem out of line. Nor does it surprise me that one carrier will allow SMS costs to inch toward the Red until one of the others gives in and raises their prices first. It's no more collusive gas stations that watch their competitors across the street and make sure they are within 5 cents (or whatever amount they've determined it takes to make people change stations).
I don't mean to get all Oprah on people that are complaining about SMS prices, but if they gave up two hours a month of their World of WarCraft time, and put in an extra two hours a month working at the Gas N' Sip, they'd be able to buy unlimited SMS, and we could end this tired meme once and for all...
Everywhere else it is vastly less efficient. With every step forward in efficiency comes a step backward in human rights and human dignity.
Nothing to see here.... Except a new web site called "Are those real?" finally with proof.
The message if you Read The Lengthy Article, is that if they don't have and open license to the server code, don't use them. He seems OK with the idea that you use a server based application if they are covered by the GNU Affero GPL.
If you are reading this, you have a perfect example of software as a service, in an open fashion. If you want to make your own
The correct direction to charge with pitchforks and torches would seem to be pressuring the Gmail team for a G-Code release, or making SquirrelMail (or your favorite server-based e-mail) as robust and reliable and Gmail.
That won't be easy. Does anyone here have a good suggestion for a starting point? What's the best FOSS ServerSide E-mail server?
Now I won't have anywhere to hookup my HD-DVD drive!
"You shouldn't make my toaster angry." -- Household security explained in "Johnny Quest"