It's because they don't give a fuck and don't care. There is nothing you/we can do to them, they are on the top of the food chain.
The company may be untouchable, yes. But in the UK, under the Data Protection Act, YOU, the employee, can be held legally responsible, even if acting under company orders.
This focuses the mind of the analyst who is about to do something that they know is wrong or negligent; it also stops the Directors playing games with the legal concepts of "person" and "company."
So if a major supermarket chain has to defend itself against millions of people who would shoplift if they thought they would get away with it, you think they should just abandon security and give everything away?
No, they employ security guards against shoplifting directly, in-store. They don't lobby the government to force the landlord of the shopping centre (mall) to employ them at no cost to the retail company.
No-one in this thread was pro-pirate. It was about how we might go about policing piracy over the Internet, and who pays for it. So with respect, GooberToo, what the fuck does that have to do with it? And where are YOUR answers?
Good point. I was thinking more about a virtual team that changes often. If you're in it for the long haul then you do start making personal connections and understand what the various people understand and don't understand. Er, if you understand me.
Then of course there's the whole thing about mental pictures you form on the phone and the shock you sometimes get when you finally meet them.:-)
But: small companies buy business-to-business services from large companies; and the large companies can only offer those at such a low price because their own costs are so low. The "large companies" are so embedded in the infrastructure that we don't even see them.
For example, telecoms - try starting a small business without phones and email.
American economic growth over the last 20 years has been entirely driven by American companies getting costs down through outsourcing. If you hadn't "given American jobs to offshore" you'd be in a lot more shit than you are now.
1. UK ENGLISH IS NOT INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH. AMERICAN ENGLISH IS NOT INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH.
Avoid slang and colloquialisms if anyone new is in the conversation. Think HARD about what might be slang or idiom. Be particularly careful to avoid phrases where the meaning is the opposite of the individual words.
Learn what "mistakes" are common in speakers from particular countries and learn how to go around them. Often non-native speakers will use academically correct English which sounds imperative and aggressive to idiomatic speakers. e.g. "I'll have John look at that" is perfectly natural American English but sounds imperialist even to English English speakers. I've noticed Indian staff often do the opposite and what should be "you must, otherwise this project is doomed" becomes "if you don't mind when you can get around to it if it's not too much trouble."
2. Remember cultural references are not universal, despite Coca-Cola Co's best efforts. Watch out for this when drawing analogies, especially with TV shows, social situations, and personal money.
3. Be patient. It's not anyone's fault that you were born 9000 miles apart. If a communication doesn't make sense or seems offensive on first sight, check.
4. Quick phone meeting every day is essential. Try and find a slot that isn't the end of day for anyone (can be tough to do that depending what timezones are involved.) And I do mean quick - 15 mins - and have a tight agenda e.g. "UK hotspot/news, India hotspot news, Singapore hotspot/news." Be careful about what "today" and "tomorrow" means in practice. "End of tomorrow" is probably "first thing the day after tomorrow" for someone on the call.
5. Unified Comms is great if used properly, but do remember it's not face to face conversation and works on different assumptions. Instant messaging is particularly dangerous because written English and spoken English do not operate on the same set of assumptions; but in IM it's tempting to mix it up. I ran two similar projects in a bank two years apart; the second time, we had Office Communicator and it made the whole thing a HELL of a lot easier. I was astounded by how useful it was.
6. In a virtual team, it's very likely that not everyone in the team will be in the team full-time. Be aware of that and don't assume that "four hours work" means that it will be done the same afternoon. Ask.
Cray-2 used Fluorinert. In 1985. Related jokes and memes abounded until... dunno. Certainly they were still part of HPC culture when I started my career in 1994.
Wrong assumptions. Adams was very clear that you must start from the correct assumptions, otherwise the principal of supply and demand does not work.
The "Internet music industry," if I may call it that, is very close to a monopoly (Apple dominance), and a confusopoly to boot (what am I paying for, who owns it, is it licensed in perpituity, will the DRM work on my gadget, will this mp3 sound as good as the CD, etc). Both of these break the "efficient market" and "perfect information" assumptions.
You have also assumed that your "infinite" supply is of identical, commodity, widgets. It's not. For whatever reasons, the market thinks a remastered special this-that-the-other-feature is worth more money than a generic album track.
So - "supply and demand" - by which you really mean Adams' invisible hand, I suspect - simply does not apply to the recorded music market. Apple have done a great job of understanding and exploiting this, and the incumbents have not. Simple as that.
What Apple have not anticipated is that eventually people do catch on. Once the big shareholders catch on that people are going to catch on, bye bye share price.
We tend to get the governance we (as a whole) desire. If you want to change the system, stop voting for either of the two parties. Only when third parties can win elections will we see real change.
Speaking as an American - your comment reads as if you think the American two-party political model is the only one in use world-wide. It's not. Nor is America the only place where a guy like Rupert Murdoch (who is not an American, for whatever that's worth) can buy political influence, unfortunately.
In the UK we have three parties with a major voice in Parliament for the first time in decades. (Which rather contradicts what I said earlier this morning about Mail readers being politically influential. Oh well.)
Murdoch Jr's proposed move to America is widely seen here as his escape plan, before it properly goes pear shaped for him in the UK. (I never thought I'd see it happen; but the election went against Murdoch; even the Conservative half of Govt seems interested in actually doing some regulating, for a change; and the Premiership arguably now have more influence than the satellite TV company that created it.)
And the demographic which reads the Daily Mail is neither technically literate nor particularly well-informed or erudite.
No, but it is still a readership of 2m. Not sure what that is as a share of people that actually read papers these days, but it certainly seems a lot. I bet election turnout is higher than average amongst Mail readers too.
Who modded this Funny? It's deeply, seriously, insightful, in a way that Associated Newspapers will never understand.
Although there is the opposite issue; it is too easy to publish to a CMS and so there's a temptation to publish everything without editing, fact-checking, or curation. You'd think a newspaper with the Mail's legal history would be a bit more careful about that.
You don't have to be a mechanic or even a licensed driver to detect when someone is speeding.
You don't. Until it's a sufficiently complicated case, and then, you do.
We had a case in the UK a couple of years ago where an econobox type small car was "detected" speeding at 90-some mph. The guy got an expert witness involved to prove that the car was simply not capable of the claimed speed in the prevailing conditions. The expert largely spent his time explaining advanced driving and mechanics to the magistrates.
Similarly with intellectual property... if you find a cut-and-paste into a document, complete with Mountweazles, then it's pretty black and white.
If on the other hand you are arguing about what's generic software and what is an interpretation and what is an algorithm, then, well, good luck with that; but you'll certainly need to understand the argot, and that is not standard International English by any means.
Magnitude isn't the only factor at play here. A 6.3 earthquake destroyed parts of central Christchurch in NZ a few months ago, and earthquakes are no stranger to NZ so buildings are built with quakes in mind. It was so devastating because it was almost exactly under the city, and was very near the surface.
Buildings in Chch only really earthquake-friendly since the 70s - another reason a lot of damage was done. Older buildings did not do well.
I've been meaning to ask this for a while: is this somehow deduced at the epicentre or does it reflect the level of damage / energy transferred / work done over some wider area?
Is a 7.4 in one city likely to cause the same problems as a 7.4 in another? (Say one on clay and one on basalt?)
In the UK, this is rapidly becoming the other way around. I look at newspapers and then dig around on Twitter to find out what's really happening, without the Murdoch-filter and egregious violations of NPOV.
This is the point. Unless we apply some financial pressure there is no reason to use it more efficiently or to develop alternatives.
There is indeed a knock-on effect, and that cuts both ways. The supermarket that adopts a fleet of electric vehicles is the supermarket that has lowest prices - unless we hide the true cost of continuing to use oil by granting tax benefits. Not much point encouraging "green" with tax rebates if you then give the oil users a tax rebate too, is there?
Or we could do nothing for another 50 years and then have a 50-year recession sorting out the mess once we're well past crisis point. Sound good?
Blame Fraunhofer in the 18th Century, for effective long lenses, if you must blame technology. The privacy issue is nothing to do with the sensor.
Privacy, by the way, is a Victorian invention.
Promote asocial behaviour and/or obesity
Yes, those pesky exercise and yoga videos, making everybody fat!
Since trolling is such fun: You can also argue that what "causes cancer" the most is: having eliminated almost every other form of terminal disease, cancer gets a bigger slice.
Petrol is the UK is now LESS heavily taxed, "driven by high oil prices." Apparently it's better for us to line the pockets of countries IN A CARTEL than it is to spend tax money on public services.
We don't seem to be able to get past the oil price issue by going around it and removing oil from the cycle. Can't blame central government entirely; it's the electorate that seems to think spending money on oil is better than having "ugly" windfarms.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah I saw him the other day in a flash new automobile. Wonder where he got the money...? :-)
It's because they don't give a fuck and don't care. There is nothing you/we can do to them, they are on the top of the food chain.
The company may be untouchable, yes. But in the UK, under the Data Protection Act, YOU, the employee, can be held legally responsible, even if acting under company orders.
This focuses the mind of the analyst who is about to do something that they know is wrong or negligent; it also stops the Directors playing games with the legal concepts of "person" and "company."
So if a major supermarket chain has to defend itself against millions of people who would shoplift if they thought they would get away with it, you think they should just abandon security and give everything away?
No, they employ security guards against shoplifting directly, in-store. They don't lobby the government to force the landlord of the shopping centre (mall) to employ them at no cost to the retail company.
No-one in this thread was pro-pirate. It was about how we might go about policing piracy over the Internet, and who pays for it. So with respect, GooberToo, what the fuck does that have to do with it? And where are YOUR answers?
Read Orwell's 1984. There's a nice piece on language in it....
O RLY?
Good point. I was thinking more about a virtual team that changes often. If you're in it for the long haul then you do start making personal connections and understand what the various people understand and don't understand. Er, if you understand me.
Then of course there's the whole thing about mental pictures you form on the phone and the shock you sometimes get when you finally meet them. :-)
But: small companies buy business-to-business services from large companies; and the large companies can only offer those at such a low price because their own costs are so low. The "large companies" are so embedded in the infrastructure that we don't even see them.
For example, telecoms - try starting a small business without phones and email.
American economic growth over the last 20 years has been entirely driven by American companies getting costs down through outsourcing. If you hadn't "given American jobs to offshore" you'd be in a lot more shit than you are now.
1. UK ENGLISH IS NOT INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH. AMERICAN ENGLISH IS NOT INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH.
Avoid slang and colloquialisms if anyone new is in the conversation. Think HARD about what might be slang or idiom. Be particularly careful to avoid phrases where the meaning is the opposite of the individual words.
Learn what "mistakes" are common in speakers from particular countries and learn how to go around them. Often non-native speakers will use academically correct English which sounds imperative and aggressive to idiomatic speakers. e.g. "I'll have John look at that" is perfectly natural American English but sounds imperialist even to English English speakers. I've noticed Indian staff often do the opposite and what should be "you must, otherwise this project is doomed" becomes "if you don't mind when you can get around to it if it's not too much trouble."
2. Remember cultural references are not universal, despite Coca-Cola Co's best efforts. Watch out for this when drawing analogies, especially with TV shows, social situations, and personal money.
3. Be patient. It's not anyone's fault that you were born 9000 miles apart. If a communication doesn't make sense or seems offensive on first sight, check.
4. Quick phone meeting every day is essential. Try and find a slot that isn't the end of day for anyone (can be tough to do that depending what timezones are involved.) And I do mean quick - 15 mins - and have a tight agenda e.g. "UK hotspot/news, India hotspot news, Singapore hotspot/news." Be careful about what "today" and "tomorrow" means in practice. "End of tomorrow" is probably "first thing the day after tomorrow" for someone on the call.
5. Unified Comms is great if used properly, but do remember it's not face to face conversation and works on different assumptions. Instant messaging is particularly dangerous because written English and spoken English do not operate on the same set of assumptions; but in IM it's tempting to mix it up. I ran two similar projects in a bank two years apart; the second time, we had Office Communicator and it made the whole thing a HELL of a lot easier. I was astounded by how useful it was.
6. In a virtual team, it's very likely that not everyone in the team will be in the team full-time. Be aware of that and don't assume that "four hours work" means that it will be done the same afternoon. Ask.
7. Notice how far down this list technology is...
Cray-2 used Fluorinert. In 1985. Related jokes and memes abounded until... dunno. Certainly they were still part of HPC culture when I started my career in 1994.
Er, "principle." But I think it's quite an apposite thinko. :-)
Wrong assumptions. Adams was very clear that you must start from the correct assumptions, otherwise the principal of supply and demand does not work.
The "Internet music industry," if I may call it that, is very close to a monopoly (Apple dominance), and a confusopoly to boot (what am I paying for, who owns it, is it licensed in perpituity, will the DRM work on my gadget, will this mp3 sound as good as the CD, etc). Both of these break the "efficient market" and "perfect information" assumptions.
You have also assumed that your "infinite" supply is of identical, commodity, widgets. It's not. For whatever reasons, the market thinks a remastered special this-that-the-other-feature is worth more money than a generic album track.
So - "supply and demand" - by which you really mean Adams' invisible hand, I suspect - simply does not apply to the recorded music market. Apple have done a great job of understanding and exploiting this, and the incumbents have not. Simple as that.
What Apple have not anticipated is that eventually people do catch on. Once the big shareholders catch on that people are going to catch on, bye bye share price.
We tend to get the governance we (as a whole) desire. If you want to change the system, stop voting for either of the two parties. Only when third parties can win elections will we see real change.
Speaking as an American - your comment reads as if you think the American two-party political model is the only one in use world-wide. It's not. Nor is America the only place where a guy like Rupert Murdoch (who is not an American, for whatever that's worth) can buy political influence, unfortunately.
In the UK we have three parties with a major voice in Parliament for the first time in decades. (Which rather contradicts what I said earlier this morning about Mail readers being politically influential. Oh well.)
Murdoch Jr's proposed move to America is widely seen here as his escape plan, before it properly goes pear shaped for him in the UK. (I never thought I'd see it happen; but the election went against Murdoch; even the Conservative half of Govt seems interested in actually doing some regulating, for a change; and the Premiership arguably now have more influence than the satellite TV company that created it.)
My God. It's a nam-shub. This explains a lot.
And the demographic which reads the Daily Mail is neither technically literate nor particularly well-informed or erudite.
No, but it is still a readership of 2m. Not sure what that is as a share of people that actually read papers these days, but it certainly seems a lot. I bet election turnout is higher than average amongst Mail readers too.
Who modded this Funny? It's deeply, seriously, insightful, in a way that Associated Newspapers will never understand.
Although there is the opposite issue; it is too easy to publish to a CMS and so there's a temptation to publish everything without editing, fact-checking, or curation. You'd think a newspaper with the Mail's legal history would be a bit more careful about that.
You don't have to be a mechanic or even a licensed driver to detect when someone is speeding.
You don't. Until it's a sufficiently complicated case, and then, you do.
We had a case in the UK a couple of years ago where an econobox type small car was "detected" speeding at 90-some mph. The guy got an expert witness involved to prove that the car was simply not capable of the claimed speed in the prevailing conditions. The expert largely spent his time explaining advanced driving and mechanics to the magistrates.
Similarly with intellectual property... if you find a cut-and-paste into a document, complete with Mountweazles, then it's pretty black and white.
If on the other hand you are arguing about what's generic software and what is an interpretation and what is an algorithm, then, well, good luck with that; but you'll certainly need to understand the argot, and that is not standard International English by any means.
Magnitude isn't the only factor at play here. A 6.3 earthquake destroyed parts of central Christchurch in NZ a few months ago, and earthquakes are no stranger to NZ so buildings are built with quakes in mind. It was so devastating because it was almost exactly under the city, and was very near the surface.
Buildings in Chch only really earthquake-friendly since the 70s - another reason a lot of damage was done. Older buildings did not do well.
Except on Wednesday afternoon, when we weren't even doing that...
I've been meaning to ask this for a while: is this somehow deduced at the epicentre or does it reflect the level of damage / energy transferred / work done over some wider area?
Is a 7.4 in one city likely to cause the same problems as a 7.4 in another? (Say one on clay and one on basalt?)
In the UK, this is rapidly becoming the other way around. I look at newspapers and then dig around on Twitter to find out what's really happening, without the Murdoch-filter and egregious violations of NPOV.
This is the point. Unless we apply some financial pressure there is no reason to use it more efficiently or to develop alternatives.
There is indeed a knock-on effect, and that cuts both ways. The supermarket that adopts a fleet of electric vehicles is the supermarket that has lowest prices - unless we hide the true cost of continuing to use oil by granting tax benefits. Not much point encouraging "green" with tax rebates if you then give the oil users a tax rebate too, is there?
Or we could do nothing for another 50 years and then have a 50-year recession sorting out the mess once we're well past crisis point. Sound good?
No more privacy.
Blame Fraunhofer in the 18th Century, for effective long lenses, if you must blame technology. The privacy issue is nothing to do with the sensor.
Privacy, by the way, is a Victorian invention.
Promote asocial behaviour and/or obesity
Yes, those pesky exercise and yoga videos, making everybody fat!
Since trolling is such fun: You can also argue that what "causes cancer" the most is: having eliminated almost every other form of terminal disease, cancer gets a bigger slice.
Petrol is the UK is now LESS heavily taxed, "driven by high oil prices." Apparently it's better for us to line the pockets of countries IN A CARTEL than it is to spend tax money on public services.
We don't seem to be able to get past the oil price issue by going around it and removing oil from the cycle. Can't blame central government entirely; it's the electorate that seems to think spending money on oil is better than having "ugly" windfarms.
Indeed it is off-topic. We appear to have a bug in a moderator who has marked it "informative." There's yer problem.