Or, the more they change, the more they stay the same!
I never did fully grok the bottled water movement (the small plastic bottles, not the big jug bottles folks put in their homes). I just reasonedd all those little water bottles add up to a big recycling and compost mess (and mostly, they do).
But, I would imagine the bottled water and soda company executives laughed all the way to the bank -- what's the profit margin on bottling H2O??? Sometimes I go to the movies and buy my girlfriend a bottle of water, and I pull out my wallet to pay the $2 or $3, and then I just laugh.
But you're absolutely right...it never really was free -- even if you had to walk down to the river and bail it with a bucket, it cost you the calories to get there.
So on the larger water management front, I think we're going to see a lot more of these initiatives, especially in those areas of the world that are more dramatically impacted by drought.
When I was a kid, water was free. You could go anywhere, visit anyone, and get a glass of water. No problem. No questions.
Of course, it came out of the tap. Then some peopel got the idea that bottled water was better. Or filtered water. Whatever. They got people used to paying for water.
Of course, it never really was free, if you consider that someone was putting that safe-to-drink water into the pipes that led to your house. There was a lot of infrastructure. But for the masses, it was an expected commodity, something no one expected to pay for.
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The US National Security Agency learned the hard way that it can be dangerous to give a contractor too much money and access, with too little scrutiny. The NSA and other government agencies hire tens of thousands of contractors
a year to analyze data. Edward Snowden -- who revealed himself as the NSA leaker after fleeing the country -- was one such contractor, reportedly holding a $122,000 salaried position at Booz Allen Hamilton at the time of his departure.
Midsize businesses rarely achieve the same standards of security in their own datacenters as professional providers that specialize in delivering these services to organizations.
Big-data and analytics tools enable marketers to understand customers as individuals, identifying unmet needs and addressing each customer as a "segment of one," says John Kennedy, VP corporate marketing, IBM.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Monaco kicked into high gear today, and we've already begun to see news emerging from that lovely city-state by the sea.
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