The hell? People change jobs for a million reasons, few of which have anything to do with "back" and whatever macho/nationalistic fantasy you've got going on there.

- People at the beginning of their careers sometimes improve their skills more rapidly than their employers can accommodate. eg, the guy who starts out doing desktop support and grows into a sysadminning role, at a company that's already overstaffed on sysadmins.

- Companies downsize or go out of business. Any time you join a startup it is a crapshoot (mostly based upon factors outside your control) whether it will still be around next year. Does that mean that no one should ever join new companies?

- Many, many people simply cannot afford to live anywhere near their offices.

- Changes in medical conditions may alter the type and amount of work that you're capable of.

- Changes in your or your family's medical or educational situation may alter the amount or reliability of money necessary. eg, moving to a less fulfilling job at a big corporation with solid medical benefits.

And, frankly, change and drive and curiosity are good things. I would much rather hire someone who has displayed the ability to excel in ten different environments than someone who has sat still at one company for a decade.

Yes, clearly the only reasonable solution is for everyone to move (probably to a vastly different neighborhood with completely different safety and cost) every time they change jobs. Certainly there's nothing in the world wiser than applying for a new mortgage every time you have just started a new job.

Also, couples or people living together are only allowed to work within four blocks of one another.

I don't know what a "Humble Bundle" is; again, I suspect it's something that features far more prominently in some small specialized market than in the general world. I would suggest that your deep involvement with this niche may be impairing your perspective.

Just glancing at the small games market, 90k sales certainly seems unexceptional. The top few dozen games sold through itunes seem to each have 10k-30k _reviews_, which almost certainly implies many more than 90k sales.

And given that those all, obviously, run without Flash, it's hard to see this as supporting the case that Flash does something unique or important.

>>> ...online multimedia platform.
>> Can you tell us what that is?
> Like he said, it doesn't have a viable feature-comparable alternative.

That... doesn't answer the question. If your argument is that Flash is so awesome because it's the best "online multimedia platform", then you're going to have to back that up to what the fuck an "online multimedia platform" is and why I would want one.

Because yes, like many others in this conversation, I have only seen Flash used for things that I quite strongly did not want happening in any browser of mine. So if the only consequence of Flash's death is that those things couldn't happen anymore that sounds to me like a huge improvement.

It backfires a bit when your argument in favor of Flash being at the heart of a vast and vital industry is citing a company no one has ever heard of and three games that no one has ever heard of.

It sounds as if you live in some tiny little niche universe in which "multimedia platform" is a thing. But you should be aware that for nearly everyone else out there, those words are not even meaningful, much less describe anything important or desired.

> Here's how it works: faced with low price competition, if you immediately drop your price to defend your market share

This is how it works for, say, the Dells of the world: the companies who just repackage others' technologies rather than creating anything, and thus have control only over market traits like price.

But you're forgetting the other lever available to companies that actually create new things, which is to compete on quality and innovation. This has always been Apple's chosen tactic, and it has served them incredibly well, making them the most stable and successful technology company over the last 35ish years.

> Until we become more enlightened here on Earth and make some progress in the nature of the human heart, we will only bring those problems with us.

Really, sorting out the nature of the human heart will get rid of asteroids? I had no idea.

Man, dinosaurs must have been assholes.

Carbon footprint of racing sailboat is pretty much 0, at least while it's actually racing. I'll grant you that construction and the diesel auxiliary contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, and especially if they're having it moved around on a container ship so it's ready to go in exotic locations, and then flying in to sail on it, they're pretty much at the head of the line in terms of their individual contribution to future generations' climate-related misery. But overall, I think sailboats should be way down your list if you're making a catalog of climate-hostile consumption.

Still, I realize this is slashdot. Let the poorly-informed outrage fly!

Your details are a bit vague, but let's pretend "your pipe" is a single DS3 (45 megabits) out in the boonies somewhere and you are offering a mix of plans that average out to 7.8 megabits per customer (400 * 7.8 / 70 = 44.5).

Assuming you are in the US, 45 megabits of transit is unlikely to cost you more than ~$2k/month ($50/megabit transit is easy to come by, you can do way better if you shop and have access to many carriers), but due to the amazing power of phone company pricing, the DS3 to carry it could easily run $10k-40k/month depending on how far out of a major city you are. (Within a major city, DS3s are closer to $3k/month.) Let's use the low end of that range and call it $10000/mo for the DS3 and $2000/mo for the bandwidth, or $12000/mo total for 45 megabits or your total cost of ~$267/megabit.

If your customers were to demand no oversubscription (as most Slashdotters seem to), delivering a 10 meg cable connection would therefore cost you $2670/month to deliver to your customers. At standard retail markup (including maintaining the cable lines, buying routers, paying rent, paying salaries, etc) of ~2x, let's call it $5k/month per customer. This poses a problem, since no residential customer will pay $5k/month.

If you work it from the other angle, starting from what your customers will pay, let's pretend they are comfortable paying $80/month for their 10 meg cable connection. (This is high if they were in a city, but if this is their only option vs dialup, they'll buy it anyway.) Assuming you have some overhead and only half that can pay for bandwidth, you have $40/month for 10 megabits or $4/megabit.

How do you reconcile that your customers will only pay $4/megabit when your costs are $267/megabit? The magic of oversubscription.

These customers need to be willing to live with the idea that they are expected, on average, to use only 143Kbit/sec on their 10 meg pipe. If on average they want more than that, they have to be willing to pay for it, otherwise the ISP is just going to fold, and they can go back to dialup.

For some reason, Slashdotters see this as evil. Is it? How else can you make the numbers work? (Most of these numbers are ballpark since the posters details were so vague, but they real-ish.)

Uh, what vintage of imac was that? If you mean the crt or lamp-style ones, that's fair.

But the past-several-years square imacs are incredibly simple to open. Three screws, and the whole back lifts off, exposing every component in the machine.

I ended up using MS Word for the ugly monkey book, because O'Reilly only offered me that or LaTex, and I didn't want the hassle of figuring out the latter, which I'd never used. It worked out okay; I just used their template, and made a point of religiously applying the styles they'd set up. And yeah, I kept copies of the Word files (one per chapter) in revision control, though I don't think I ever used that for anything other than backup purposes.

The biggest lesson I gained from it was that while outlining and proposing a book is exciting, and getting it accepted by the publisher was really exciting, actually writing the thing was way more work than I'd expected. I'd written and edited professionally for years in the magazine business, so the writing part was familiar, but the difference between a 3,000-word article and a 500-page book turned out to be much bigger in practice than it had looked in theory. Especially late in the process, when it was all about plowing through everything again to get it all to the highest possible standard, the book was a huge undertaking.

It didn't sell particularly well, which was a disappointment, but the fact that I had believed (and continue to believe) in the book's premise made it possible for me to invest the work required. And in hindsight, I think of the book as a success, at least for me personally. Not because it sold a lot of copies, but because the process of writing it taught me more about its subject matter than I could have learned any other way.

I never would have finished it if I hadn't been sustained by my naive hopes of big sales, and I'm glad I wrote it, so I guess I'm glad I was naive. Presumably you have high hopes for your own book. That's great. Hang onto those. They will be essential as you close in on completion, and the mountain of remaining work just seems to reach higher and higher.

Good luck!

The very top of the list of things that constitute abusing a monopoly is leveraging it to force artificial success in a different market. This is in fact the specific thing the DoJ slapped them on the wrist for doing: leveraging their desktop OS monopoly into artificial success in the browser market.

The concern here is that Microsoft could leverage that resultant artificial success in the browser market into further artificial success in the online advertising market. Again, precisely the type of thing that antitrust laws are designed to prevent.