Clean drinking water for drinking, yes. Clean drinking water for industrial (or even irrigation) purposes, no – because putting a fair price on it would appropriately punish those who use it wastefully.
And to build on that, only about 5% of California's water goes to indoor household use. It, or perhaps the first 50/100 gallons per person per day, could easily be free based on a tiny fee to the other 95%.
I wish it were so simple to remove economics from things. Unfortunately, the problem isn't the need (the demand), its the supply. We don't just have unlimited clean drinking water, and as soon as there is a constrained supply, we have to consider how we can divvy it up to meet demand.
Usually that means increasing price, but the what the commenter above was saying is that often we're making it artificially cheaper. Often by either subsidizing things w/ our taxes (hiding the cost), or by not adequately funding the collection, which will eventually cause failure or exhaustion of the supply.
The problem is that fresh water is a scarce resource. Give it away for free and it will be used inefficiently and you will run out. This is an area where markets are an efficient solution, so long as the scarcity problem does not become so pronounced that the poor are unable to afford water. If this happens it is a policy failure and an external force (the government) would have to step in to insure that everybody has enough water to at least survive, probably by shutting down some big industrial users to reduce demand and lower the price.
In California, I believe the state actually does subsidize the price of water for farmers. However, as a result of water being significantly under market price, farmers are not incentivized to undertake water conservation efforts -- even though in times of drought, that aggravates the water supply.
There's nothing talented at all about buying rights to a drug and then raising the price of it. Monopolies hurt consumers, why would you think that's okay? Especially in a field like pharmaceuticals where peoples lives are literally on the line?
We sure didn't. I think one guy got hired by Apple because he came out with an innovative app switcher, and I know a few others who got internships there, but largely speaking, Apple took over a lot of features we put into play.
P.S. There's another reason why jailbreaks are few and far in between. There is close to no trust between the people who create the jailbreaks...I had several good exploits that became public without my permission.
I remember it being a practice at one time in various IRC and other online communities to share hashes of the exploit payloads between teams so that they knew whether or not there was one or more than one, and whether or not they were going to collaborate.
meh, making what is essentially a complete clone of snapchat within Instagram hardly seems like "ethically out-competing them" in my opinion. They took the ideas directly from Snapchat and just stuck them in an app that already has a huge sticky userbase, relying on the convenience factor to get people to use it.
Totally made up and arbitrary example but it would be like if Starbucks started serving some widely popular menu item based on a recipe from a competing chain. They already have a huge loyal customer base that's coming into their stores all the time, so it's more convenient for these people to get this new item at Starbucks since they're going there anyway, but Starbucks didn't come up with the idea or recipe, they just saw that it was popular elsewhere and knew they could leverage the convenience factor to get people to buy it from their stores (which people were already coming to) instead of going to a second store for it. That's not really ethical competition.
Why not? At the risk of sounding like a hand-wringing capitalist, at the end of the day, isn't the purpose of a business to charge money in exchange for providing a good or service that is useful to a customer? If Starbucks can greater serve the needs of their customers by providing a new item (regardless of where they got the idea from), then why shouldn't they? Some might argue that they are actually doing their customers a disservice by not providing it and making them go elsewhere.
Isn't the problem that at an extreme this gives no incentive for smaller coffee ships to experiment and roll the dice on new ideas that may not work, because if they succeed, Starbucks will end up reaping the rewards.
Neither does Snapchat, but I don't see how that changes the argument anyway. If Facebook greater serves its users needs, then that brings in more users who spend more time on its network of apps which greater serves its paying customers (advertisers).
What's wrong with Starbucks doing that? Mcdonald's tried to capture the morning coffee crowd multiple times and failed. It's not dirty, it's how competition works. It's offering the same product more conveniently or otherwise improved- that's not far off a textbook definition of competition.
How is offering a similar application with similar modes of communication, similar formatting unethical but, copying an API like the Java API for Android not considered unethical in the same vein?
I'd have to think there isn't a legal case or the billion dollar company that is Snapchat would have mounted a case. They didn't patent an interface (code or visual). They didn't try to protect it or even make a public case that it was somehow copying.
Yet, here we are on Hacker News saying it's somehow unethical? At this level, all social networks are "clones" of each other. Twitter is a clone of the FB news feed. Android is a clone of the iPhone. All of the food delivery startups are clones of each other. They all should do the moral thing and close up shop or at least pivot to something else.
Except we would all be poorer for it. We would have less options, less innovations and fewer ways to communicate. If any of the parties thought this was unethical stealing of their work, they are big boys and well funded; they'd at the very least say so.
You may not like FB/Instagram because of it but, if it's a superior free product and no one is making a case then I don't think it's immoral.
How is providing an identical or inspired product/service unethical? It sounds like you're implying that their size or position as a market leader makes somehow makes it unethical. I don't follow.
Think about it this way: Let's say you invented some brand new technology that was revolutionary and extremely useful. You're just a single person, so you don't have the resources to bring it to mass markets right away, but you start small-scale production and it quickly gains popularity. Big Company A who has massive manufacturing facilities notices the growth of your product and the value it has and decides to make a clone of it, but they already have huge production facilities and a refined supply chain, so they can produce many many more than you are capable of producing, so they flood the market with clones, which are easier for the public to get.
Is this really fair to you? Big Company A stole your invention and leveraged their market power to basically shove you into a corner and out-produce you, but if it weren't for your original idea, they would have never done any of this. It's the concept of a company stealing an idea/invention from someone else and using it to profit themselves that doesn't sit well with me.
If a company is able to clone your idea and able to execute it better then your idea wasn't unique enough and your product is lacking something that the other company has.
Take for instance Google Plus, clearly a clone of every other social media. But it didn't work out too well. Facebook on the other hand was a copy of other platforms as well but well executed. Plus can Snapchat still be considered a small company, I guess in comparison to Facebook sure.
I use both and actually prefer Instagram stories. I use Stories more than my feed, and the feed is where the ads are – on Instagram, I can (as of now) bypass the advertising and chat directly with my friends and view/create stories... in Snapchat, ads are inserted between my friends stories.
Not true, f.lux released a version of their app in the App Store. Apple pulled their app and so they added another method to sideload it https://justgetflux.com/sideload/ using xcode. Apple then revoked their development license which broke that method as well. It's always been available as a jailbreak tweak but it's also been available to the general, non-jailbroken public
I don't think you understand how Apple works. They love to promote proprietary software in their "walled garden".
Apple's concern was that f.lux changes the color of the screen outside the app, and that fact alone goes directly against Apple's philosophy of keeping apps in their own respective sandboxes. Only Apple is allowed to change UI outside of an app. Consistency at all costs.
I think you don't understand what the comment was implying. If it was open source anyone could build it using xcode and install it in their devices themselves.
I second this. My advisor and I recently visited Cisco to present some embedded security work we've been doing. From what I could gather, they were very interested in ensuring that their customers' applications and devices were secure. They were also looking for ways to provide their customers with ways to check for government backdoors.
There's an honest question about how deep that support goes though. Is it just that group, which is a tiny tiny part of a megacorp? How much influence do they have on the huge number of shipped products? What percentage of shipped Cisco products get a security review?
An alternative line of thought is, making the right noises for the customers while also keeping the bribe budgets liquid, to put it crassly.
Putting my security researcher hat on, maybe this tiny little group's purpose is to figure out and get intel on what directions customers are actually looking in, so they know where to hide stuff.
Actually if you read the paper, the architecture is designed in such a way that the key management server can be implemented as an on-premise box while all the rest of your data lives in Cisco's cloud. In that situation, Cisco has access to your data but it's fully encrypted with keys that they do not have access to, making it a true end-to-end solution. It's a pretty interesting design that allows companies to be the only ones with access to the raw, unencrypted data while still letting Cisco manage everything in the cloud.
Now this does only apply for companies that choose to go with the on-premise KMS, if not, Cisco manages the KMS in their own cloud as well, which does mean it's not a true e2e solution (although like I said, I can speak with a pretty high level of confidence that security is one of the top priorities)
But the client (Cisco software) does the encryption does it not? Therefore it has access to the unencrypted data, therefore can do what it likes with it.
I mean I suppose that's true but that's a terribly weak argument. You could say the same thing about Signal which is considered one of the most secure messaging applications on the market at the moment. It's pretty trivial to monitor network traffic to see that the unencrypted data never leaves your own device
As far as I know, security has always been one of Cisco's top priorities which is one of the reasons they have been so strong in the enterprise market. It's almost inevitable at some point that bugs like the one in the link here pop up but I haven't heard of any backdoors or nefarious practices from Cisco in the past.
Cisco has been strong in the enterprise market because they are good at marketing to the enterprise market, and providing certifications so that they can ensure a labor pool for IT departments.
Part of the marketing is talking about security. It's unclear if the reputation matches reality though.
I say this as someone who has become super disillusioned with Cisco, as the thread originator has. But this is mostly because of their switch products, pricing, configuration management, and end user software. I don't have much experience with their security. Though I have no reason to suspect that it's the least better than any other companies' security based on the amount of patching and their default configurations.
>On one hand, people have different skill levels even in a role. On the other, shouldn't the salary be tied to title?
I think bonuses are a great way to account for this. Give everyone with the same title the same salary and then take individual performance into consideration for bonuses so the better workers get more compensation in the end
