This is a classic anticompetitive tactic - and the reason that Standard Oil was broken up in the 20th century.
Standard Oil would find a mom-and-pop gas station on a corner somewhere, set up shop across the street, and sell gas for below cost. Once they ran mom & pop out of business, they jacked up the prices of gas on that corner to well above cost.
And that, friends, is how the Rockefeller fortune was made.
One more thing (dammit Slashdot! Let me edit my damned posts already!!!) --
They just did a new series (the one I linked to above is a little dated - almost 10 years old at this point). You can see that one here. It covers cosmology as well as a bit of quantum mechanics. Still very approachable.
I've been watching this NOVA series on quantum mechanics - it's been an excellent primer on this stuff for me. It's hosted by Brian Greene, a prof at Columbia who wrote a book about it for a lay audience. I think it would be very approachable for anybody with an interest in science, but without a scientific background.
> No one here cares
No? How's your unemployment rate?
Danish actually.
The problem with that, inherently, is the Tragedy of the Commons.
Imagine a 'Boston Common' scenario where four sheep farmers share a plot of grazing land. Each farmer can use the land to graze his sheep. Soon, the common is completely grazed clean as farmers use the land as much as possible to out-compete their neighbors - because if Farmer Joe takes more than he needs, there won't be enough for Farmer Tom - therefore Farmer Tom needs to consume as much as he can before Farmer Joe takes it all. If the common is fenced off in four equal portions, the common stays green as farmers budget the land, each to his own need, because he knows the land will be there for him in the future - no need to over-consume the resource.
because such things can drag out conversations that could be had in an hour into drawn out e-mail threads that span over days or weeks, wasting precious time?
The time difference is always the vendor's problem - never the customer's.
We've dumped European vendors because they were unable to provide service and support during August. Believe it or not, your holiday time really screws you economically.
I'd love to see the digital version of the Illudium Q-36 explosive space modulator...
Facebook, OpenID, Yahoo, AOL, Google, Microsoft - they all support SSO for websites that want to use it. It's just a matter of the individual websites implementing it.
If you notice, Slashdot has even implemented it.
See that's the problem.
Around here (Chicago), if you leave too big of a gap in front of you, somebody will merge into that gap. If you have ACC, and your car decides on the standard 2 second following distance on the expressway, somebody will merge in front of you, causing you to slow down, creating a bigger gap, causing someone to merge in front of you, causing you to slow down to create a bigger gap... until you've actually created a traffic jam instead of avoided one.
I wouldn't say nobody in
Don't forget about these guys.
Or they're learning our weaknesses and how to exploit them - like Yamamoto.
I'm allergic, so if I tried to huff a kitten, I'd likely wind up with my face swollen shut. I suppose that makes it unsafe...
Understanding is always the understanding of a smaller problem in relation to a bigger problem. -- P.D. Ouspensky
