There are a lot of business people who think by sheer force of money, they can disrupt an industry and eventually own the kingdom.
Stupid as that sounds, it can still make a lot of money for the VC's. As long as they sell their stake (or enough of it to pocket a big profit) before the whole house of cards tumbles down, the worthless kingdom they end up owning ended up costing them nothing (or even netting them a big windfall). The problem is that the media and, in turn, the public buy into the hype on the way up, facilitating this whole 'succeed by failing' sham.
Corruption aside, the fact that the medallion is 'worth' $500K in the first place attests to its scarcity - which is, mostly, the point. Medallions were created to keep the city streets from being overcrowded with taxis. I suppose the reduced hours of Uber drivers could be attributed at least in part to the fact that the streets are again overcrowded - due to Uber's skirting of the medallion system. Not much profit in driving an empty car around the city - or charging a flat rate for a trip that ends up taking too long due to excessive traffic.
So, medallions are a form of market manipulation that has the effect of 1) increasing the value of a taxi, 2) reducing overall city traffic and yes, 3) opening up a new channel for payola. But 3 is certainly not the primary purpose - and could be shut down by effective law enforcement. And if you think 1) and 2) are important, but 3) is inevitable - and assuming your not some hardcore anarchist, how do you distinguish between enforceable and unenforceable laws before you decide to give up on them.
Yes, that's what I suspect too. But in order to deliver targeted ads based on your browsing habits, all they need is for you to use any browser they control. I.e., it doesn't need to have its own implementation of HTML, CSS, etc. It could just be a Microsoft wrapper around Webkit - like Chrome and Safari. So why invest in a Microsoft rendering engine? Seems like a remnant of MS's attitude that "if it's software, we need to at least try to dominate it", rather than any true business need.
Not quite. I was saying that the 'market' would start making heavy SUV-type cars if they got decent range - instead of treating electrics as an efficient alternative. I suppose a super-efficient Leaf might still exist, but I suspect that all the advertising would attempt to steer customers to heavier, more expensive vehicles - negating the potential efficiency gains.
Indeed. But I suspect the market (i.e. the automakers) would try its damnedest to steer you to a super-accelerating muscle car version of the Leaf to eat up the extra battery capacity - rather than making your Leaf even that much more efficient.
Why do they need significant penetration with Edge? They're not going to parlay Edge into success in Mobile - or, as they tried with IE, to prevent web-based applications from replacing Windows native apps. So what are they getting for their investment in Edge?
Perhaps the ability to compete with ChromeOS? Even so, why not just build another wrapper around Webkit? And in that case, why care whether users select it or not? Just fooling - I assume the reason is that they want to track your web usage - and/or steer you to Bing and other Microsoft (potential) revenue generators. Still, why build their own engine for that when a free one is available?
Obviously, your 'invisible hand of Supply vs Demand' isn't working in this particular Capitalist case. The problem is our perverted version of Capitalism. We grant monopolies on pharmaceuticals, and then act in total denial of the ways monopoly distorts supply and demand.
So, I'll grant this guy his 'moral imperative' to charge as much as he can. As long as we recognize (and insist on) Government's moral imperative to fix the distortions of the market caused by, yes, important government interventions like patent protection. I.e., there needs to be a government enforced limit on how much as he can charge. And then let the market work its magic within that reasonable playing field. And if the market doesn't work in all cases - well, maybe those gaps need to be filled by the government too. That's not fascism or slavery or any of the hyperbolic anti-government names you want to use. It's just a simple acknowledgement of reality.
They gave it away, not because it was bad (it was, but that's beside the point). They did it to seed the market for their whole new Matro application platform - but it was already too late for that.
Most Windows users use it the same way they would use a Chromebook. And business users use it out of inertia or for some legacy win32 application they count on in some business process. The rest (gamers, content producers) are a blip in the universe of Windows desktop users. That's just the truth.
This might be a good opportunity to legislate the difference between "sell your information" and "make money by letting marketers ask us to target ads to you based on what we know about you - without revealing that information".
People (and, apparently, a lot of Slashdot posters) think Google does the former, when they only do the latter. Facebook does both (or at least at the time of the Cambridge Analytica fiasco they did). It sounds like Yahoo is planning to follow the Google model, which might not be so bad. But there's no reason Congress can't pass a law that makes it illegal to sell your information directly - without your granting explicit permission (in writing, perhaps - as opposed to clicking some "I Agree" box). That kind of law would put some reasonable constraints on internet services and define some consistent rules that users could understand and, more importantly, assume are being followed by all the services they use.
Instead we have Trump tweeting that he wants a low to require that search engines return links to 'both sides' of an issue, regardless of what's actually out there as determined by popularity (or whatever their algorithm is these days).
I always thought that Public Broadcasting could have been a vehicle to teach the public how to listen critically to of all sorts of messages (political and commercial) that seek to manipulate them. How to evaluate them for truthfullness - and to decipher the underlying behavior they're trying to influence.
But of course the independence of Public Broadcasting didn't stand a chance against the messaging that it was a Liberal plot designed to destroy the country. And after much concerted effort, PBS and NPR have been made to grovel for corporate funding just like everyone else. Hasn't destroyed them as useful resources, but don't expect any hard-hitting news stories about Archer Daniels Midland. And, well Judy Woodruff has morphed into a more literate and 'serious' version of your average CNN talking head (... and now for the perspective of the other side on whether "the tax cuts will pay for themselves"...).
I've even heard Liberal commentators trying to make the argument that PBS is better off 'freed' from government funding, since it's now less subject to accusations of bias. Except that it's now biased toward the corporate overlords... Hmmm, am I making your point?
Well, finally it is revealed. The founding fathers anticipated the rise of cybersnooping corporations and bestowed upon us the sacred second ammendment so we the people could go to actual, literal war against them. I guess the founding fathers also anticipated that a complacent and/or easily distracted public wouldn't use the other tool they gave them - i.e., the vote - to accomplish the same thing by peaceful means...
I think the tinfoil hat version of election tampering centers on the part that is centralized. At some point all those distributed components of the voting system log on electronically to a central system to tabulate the statewide vote. And the real life event that convinced at least some that hacking this central tabulation was Karl Rove's on-air meltdown in 2008 over Ohio calling the state for Obama. It sure looked like he 'knew' that that was not supposed to happen, and to the conspiracy minded, that sure looked like he thought the fix was in somewhere along the chain of custody. Who knows? But to assume that the distributed nature of the system renders it invulnerable is a bit naive...
None of it pissed you off? How about the corruption of the standards process that got Office XML declared a standard alongside a truly open one that was on the verge of being adopted in Europe. And then the subsequent 'support' of non-compliant versions of both Microsoft's own standard and the competing one, so that only Office could support documents produced in Office in either format.
If that didn't piss you off, then you don't care about the issues involved - or are such a Microsoft supporter that you do care - in the sense that your guys won.
Well, now that we know the National Enquirer disguised a $100K+ campaign contribution as a purchase of rights to publish a Playboy bunny's story, how about the rest of their 'journalism' throughout the election.
The Rachel Maddow segment linked below lists a bunch of blatantly false cover stories that ran throughout the 2016 election season. Now, even if you hate Maddow, and think she's a 'left-wing version of Fox' (she isn't, but hey...), you can't argue with her interpretation of what was on the covers of these tabloids. Okay, so nobody actually believes tabloid covers, but still - they were published for a reason, and it would be hard to argue that that reason was anything other than to make Trump look good and Clinton look bad (even if it's just by boring the ugliest images they could find of her face deep into your subconscious). So, free speech, right? Well, there are certainly limits. So where would this fall? And does the truth or falsehood (and whether the speaker is aware of that falsehood) relevant?
Well, okay. But wasn't one of the main selling points of ChromeOS the fact that it's seamlessly self-updating? Why does that not include the kernel? Certainly the latest linux kernels are capable of supporting old ChromeOS hardware - but does the A/B upgrading scheme make it impossible for their seamless upgrade process to update the kernel? And even if so, couldn't they provide a less seamless alternative method of bringing your Chromebook up to date? I assume they could, and the only thing preventing it would be OEM's that want you to buy a new device.
But are there other obstacles? The current updating system is handled by Google, so I guess the OEM's would have to get involved to do a kernel upgrade, and maybe that just doesn't fit into the economic model of Chromebooks as cheap (almost disposable) devices...
Because this hacking attempt was aimed at Anti-Trump, Anti-Russia Republicans. I.e., not the ones the were working with in the last election. And even those are most likely wary of direct Russian contacts this time around, with Mueller still poking around in their garbage.
Yeah, I get that the term is 'dumping'. Just not sure how and when it applies to a startup that's not profitable enough to subsidize their dumping with profits from an existing monopoly product.
I have no doubt that self-driving cars will SOMEDAY exist. Just not self-driving cars based on what passes for 'artificial intelligence' at the moment. Teaching a car to know the precise locations of street furniture and buildings - and arming it with algorithms that allow it to avoid crashing into things (as long as they've been trained to 'understand' the specific situations the algorithm handles, is a clever bit of data processing, but is not intelligence - artificial or otherwise.
In the coming decades there may indeed be a quantum leap in computer intelligence. And it will probably involve whole new approaches - perhaps in addition to today's approaches that might still be good at the basics of identifying objects and such. And at that point, we'll have self-driving cars, self programming computers and the end of civilization as we know it. But Uber's certainly not going to be the company that gets us there. And whether we want to get there at all is a question worth debating.
I think it's more that investors are interested in a company that eventually proves it can make a profit. I don't think they have a problem with Uber diversifying - they just want some indication that they're not going to lose their investment first.
Which brings me to the point I originally intended to make. What does it say about our American version of venture Capitalism that, increasingly, the model seems to be to fund a company through years of losses until they eventually achieve monopoly or near-monopoly status and start raking in the money. Would it be appropriate for antitrust legislation to consider running absurd losses while pricing your competition out of business a violation of antitrust law? There are certainly similar restrictions on existing profitable businesses from selling stuff at a loss in order to expand into new markets - so why not restrictions on running an entire enterprise at a loss with a similar goal?
Or does the fact that many of these ventures end up failing make it nearly impossible to enforce such a restriction?
Obviously, they need your location to open a map to that location. But beyond that, it all gets iffy. Okay, maybe they want to store a list of your 'favorite' locations in order to provide services (or, yes, ads) to you relevant to that list. For example, Maps puts push-pins onto locations you've searched for before. But then again, why does it matter to them when you visited those locations? They seem to have the attitude that they'll just store all the raw data you give them - and figure out what to do with it later. Still, when you've asked that they not track your location history, they could at least remove the 'when' information.
My big beef with Google Maps is that the UI keeps getting more and more unintelligible. I guess that's not unique to Maps, but still, Google in general is particularly bad about this. And somewhere along the line it became impossible to hide the pushpins for every coffee shop and other business (that pays, I guess) when you view a map. I spent minutes looking for a way to turn this off (since often it is hidden somewhere in the UI), but in this case there is no such option.
So the UI to control things is so 'uncluttered' that it's near impossible to figure out how to use features - but the actual map data is so cluttered that you can't actually find stuff you're looking for on the map. But it sure is smart about searching for places - otherwise I might not use it at all. In fact, I sometimes open Google Maps to a foreign city and 'wander around'. Now, since I'm thousands of miles away, you'd think that maybe all the coffee shops and sneaker stores in that city might not care whether I know their locations - and certainly wouldn't knowingly pay for me to know them. Couldn't Google at least have an option to hide that stuff when you're, say, outside of a 50 mile radius of the businesses in question?
True. I can already hear the Fox pundits (and James Inhoff) going on an on about how fossil fuels are now fine - burn away.
There are other advantages to solar, hydro, wind, battery solutions. And the technology invesment required to build those out is probably comparable to the investment to scale up and deploy a magnesite solution capable of sequestering historical C02 as well as countering new and increasing sources.
So yes, do both - to repair past damage. But fer Crissake, let's figure out how to make solar cheap and non-polluting instead of pretending we've found a magic bullet that makes it safe to let Koch Industries continue to have their way...
Slashdot Mirror
There are a lot of business people who think by sheer force of money, they can disrupt an industry and eventually own the kingdom.
Stupid as that sounds, it can still make a lot of money for the VC's. As long as they sell their stake (or enough of it to pocket a big profit) before the whole house of cards tumbles down, the worthless kingdom they end up owning ended up costing them nothing (or even netting them a big windfall). The problem is that the media and, in turn, the public buy into the hype on the way up, facilitating this whole 'succeed by failing' sham.
Corruption aside, the fact that the medallion is 'worth' $500K in the first place attests to its scarcity - which is, mostly, the point. Medallions were created to keep the city streets from being overcrowded with taxis. I suppose the reduced hours of Uber drivers could be attributed at least in part to the fact that the streets are again overcrowded - due to Uber's skirting of the medallion system. Not much profit in driving an empty car around the city - or charging a flat rate for a trip that ends up taking too long due to excessive traffic.
So, medallions are a form of market manipulation that has the effect of 1) increasing the value of a taxi, 2) reducing overall city traffic and yes, 3) opening up a new channel for payola. But 3 is certainly not the primary purpose - and could be shut down by effective law enforcement. And if you think 1) and 2) are important, but 3) is inevitable - and assuming your not some hardcore anarchist, how do you distinguish between enforceable and unenforceable laws before you decide to give up on them.
Yes, that's what I suspect too. But in order to deliver targeted ads based on your browsing habits, all they need is for you to use any browser they control. I.e., it doesn't need to have its own implementation of HTML, CSS, etc. It could just be a Microsoft wrapper around Webkit - like Chrome and Safari. So why invest in a Microsoft rendering engine? Seems like a remnant of MS's attitude that "if it's software, we need to at least try to dominate it", rather than any true business need.
Not quite. I was saying that the 'market' would start making heavy SUV-type cars if they got decent range - instead of treating electrics as an efficient alternative. I suppose a super-efficient Leaf might still exist, but I suspect that all the advertising would attempt to steer customers to heavier, more expensive vehicles - negating the potential efficiency gains.
Indeed. But I suspect the market (i.e. the automakers) would try its damnedest to steer you to a super-accelerating muscle car version of the Leaf to eat up the extra battery capacity - rather than making your Leaf even that much more efficient.
Why do they need significant penetration with Edge? They're not going to parlay Edge into success in Mobile - or, as they tried with IE, to prevent web-based applications from replacing Windows native apps. So what are they getting for their investment in Edge?
Perhaps the ability to compete with ChromeOS? Even so, why not just build another wrapper around Webkit? And in that case, why care whether users select it or not? Just fooling - I assume the reason is that they want to track your web usage - and/or steer you to Bing and other Microsoft (potential) revenue generators. Still, why build their own engine for that when a free one is available?
Obviously, your 'invisible hand of Supply vs Demand' isn't working in this particular Capitalist case. The problem is our perverted version of Capitalism. We grant monopolies on pharmaceuticals, and then act in total denial of the ways monopoly distorts supply and demand.
So, I'll grant this guy his 'moral imperative' to charge as much as he can. As long as we recognize (and insist on) Government's moral imperative to fix the distortions of the market caused by, yes, important government interventions like patent protection. I.e., there needs to be a government enforced limit on how much as he can charge. And then let the market work its magic within that reasonable playing field. And if the market doesn't work in all cases - well, maybe those gaps need to be filled by the government too. That's not fascism or slavery or any of the hyperbolic anti-government names you want to use. It's just a simple acknowledgement of reality.
They gave it away, not because it was bad (it was, but that's beside the point). They did it to seed the market for their whole new Matro application platform - but it was already too late for that.
Most Windows users use it the same way they would use a Chromebook. And business users use it out of inertia or for some legacy win32 application they count on in some business process. The rest (gamers, content producers) are a blip in the universe of Windows desktop users. That's just the truth.
Donald Trump is president. If you live in Michigan, Wisconsin or Pennsylvania, you're the problem. Lesser of two evils is less evil.
And since the first thing he says is
I have not used desktop software for probably a decade now
which makes all that follows perfectly appropriate.
Why gamers and content producers read "a Chromebook suits my purposes" and are still threatened enough by that to post a rant eludes me.
Actually, if you think there were more than two viable candidates, you are the problem (assuming you voted for a 3rd).
This might be a good opportunity to legislate the difference between "sell your information" and "make money by letting marketers ask us to target ads to you based on what we know about you - without revealing that information".
People (and, apparently, a lot of Slashdot posters) think Google does the former, when they only do the latter. Facebook does both (or at least at the time of the Cambridge Analytica fiasco they did). It sounds like Yahoo is planning to follow the Google model, which might not be so bad. But there's no reason Congress can't pass a law that makes it illegal to sell your information directly - without your granting explicit permission (in writing, perhaps - as opposed to clicking some "I Agree" box). That kind of law would put some reasonable constraints on internet services and define some consistent rules that users could understand and, more importantly, assume are being followed by all the services they use.
Instead we have Trump tweeting that he wants a low to require that search engines return links to 'both sides' of an issue, regardless of what's actually out there as determined by popularity (or whatever their algorithm is these days).
I always thought that Public Broadcasting could have been a vehicle to teach the public how to listen critically to of all sorts of messages (political and commercial) that seek to manipulate them. How to evaluate them for truthfullness - and to decipher the underlying behavior they're trying to influence.
But of course the independence of Public Broadcasting didn't stand a chance against the messaging that it was a Liberal plot designed to destroy the country. And after much concerted effort, PBS and NPR have been made to grovel for corporate funding just like everyone else. Hasn't destroyed them as useful resources, but don't expect any hard-hitting news stories about Archer Daniels Midland. And, well Judy Woodruff has morphed into a more literate and 'serious' version of your average CNN talking head (... and now for the perspective of the other side on whether "the tax cuts will pay for themselves"...).
I've even heard Liberal commentators trying to make the argument that PBS is better off 'freed' from government funding, since it's now less subject to accusations of bias. Except that it's now biased toward the corporate overlords... Hmmm, am I making your point?
Well, finally it is revealed. The founding fathers anticipated the rise of cybersnooping corporations and bestowed upon us the sacred second ammendment so we the people could go to actual, literal war against them. I guess the founding fathers also anticipated that a complacent and/or easily distracted public wouldn't use the other tool they gave them - i.e., the vote - to accomplish the same thing by peaceful means...
I said it was a tinfoil hat conspiracy, didn't I?
I think the tinfoil hat version of election tampering centers on the part that is centralized. At some point all those distributed components of the voting system log on electronically to a central system to tabulate the statewide vote. And the real life event that convinced at least some that hacking this central tabulation was Karl Rove's on-air meltdown in 2008 over Ohio calling the state for Obama. It sure looked like he 'knew' that that was not supposed to happen, and to the conspiracy minded, that sure looked like he thought the fix was in somewhere along the chain of custody. Who knows? But to assume that the distributed nature of the system renders it invulnerable is a bit naive...
None of it pissed you off? How about the corruption of the standards process that got Office XML declared a standard alongside a truly open one that was on the verge of being adopted in Europe. And then the subsequent 'support' of non-compliant versions of both Microsoft's own standard and the competing one, so that only Office could support documents produced in Office in either format.
If that didn't piss you off, then you don't care about the issues involved - or are such a Microsoft supporter that you do care - in the sense that your guys won.
Well, now that we know the National Enquirer disguised a $100K+ campaign contribution as a purchase of rights to publish a Playboy bunny's story, how about the rest of their 'journalism' throughout the election.
The Rachel Maddow segment linked below lists a bunch of blatantly false cover stories that ran throughout the 2016 election season. Now, even if you hate Maddow, and think she's a 'left-wing version of Fox' (she isn't, but hey...), you can't argue with her interpretation of what was on the covers of these tabloids. Okay, so nobody actually believes tabloid covers, but still - they were published for a reason, and it would be hard to argue that that reason was anything other than to make Trump look good and Clinton look bad (even if it's just by boring the ugliest images they could find of her face deep into your subconscious). So, free speech, right? Well, there are certainly limits. So where would this fall? And does the truth or falsehood (and whether the speaker is aware of that falsehood) relevant?
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-ma...
Well, okay. But wasn't one of the main selling points of ChromeOS the fact that it's seamlessly self-updating? Why does that not include the kernel? Certainly the latest linux kernels are capable of supporting old ChromeOS hardware - but does the A/B upgrading scheme make it impossible for their seamless upgrade process to update the kernel? And even if so, couldn't they provide a less seamless alternative method of bringing your Chromebook up to date? I assume they could, and the only thing preventing it would be OEM's that want you to buy a new device.
But are there other obstacles? The current updating system is handled by Google, so I guess the OEM's would have to get involved to do a kernel upgrade, and maybe that just doesn't fit into the economic model of Chromebooks as cheap (almost disposable) devices...
Because this hacking attempt was aimed at Anti-Trump, Anti-Russia Republicans. I.e., not the ones the were working with in the last election. And even those are most likely wary of direct Russian contacts this time around, with Mueller still poking around in their garbage.
Yeah, I get that the term is 'dumping'. Just not sure how and when it applies to a startup that's not profitable enough to subsidize their dumping with profits from an existing monopoly product.
I have no doubt that self-driving cars will SOMEDAY exist. Just not self-driving cars based on what passes for 'artificial intelligence' at the moment. Teaching a car to know the precise locations of street furniture and buildings - and arming it with algorithms that allow it to avoid crashing into things (as long as they've been trained to 'understand' the specific situations the algorithm handles, is a clever bit of data processing, but is not intelligence - artificial or otherwise.
In the coming decades there may indeed be a quantum leap in computer intelligence. And it will probably involve whole new approaches - perhaps in addition to today's approaches that might still be good at the basics of identifying objects and such. And at that point, we'll have self-driving cars, self programming computers and the end of civilization as we know it. But Uber's certainly not going to be the company that gets us there. And whether we want to get there at all is a question worth debating.
I think it's more that investors are interested in a company that eventually proves it can make a profit. I don't think they have a problem with Uber diversifying - they just want some indication that they're not going to lose their investment first.
Which brings me to the point I originally intended to make. What does it say about our American version of venture Capitalism that, increasingly, the model seems to be to fund a company through years of losses until they eventually achieve monopoly or near-monopoly status and start raking in the money. Would it be appropriate for antitrust legislation to consider running absurd losses while pricing your competition out of business a violation of antitrust law? There are certainly similar restrictions on existing profitable businesses from selling stuff at a loss in order to expand into new markets - so why not restrictions on running an entire enterprise at a loss with a similar goal?
Or does the fact that many of these ventures end up failing make it nearly impossible to enforce such a restriction?
Obviously, they need your location to open a map to that location. But beyond that, it all gets iffy. Okay, maybe they want to store a list of your 'favorite' locations in order to provide services (or, yes, ads) to you relevant to that list. For example, Maps puts push-pins onto locations you've searched for before. But then again, why does it matter to them when you visited those locations? They seem to have the attitude that they'll just store all the raw data you give them - and figure out what to do with it later. Still, when you've asked that they not track your location history, they could at least remove the 'when' information.
My big beef with Google Maps is that the UI keeps getting more and more unintelligible. I guess that's not unique to Maps, but still, Google in general is particularly bad about this. And somewhere along the line it became impossible to hide the pushpins for every coffee shop and other business (that pays, I guess) when you view a map. I spent minutes looking for a way to turn this off (since often it is hidden somewhere in the UI), but in this case there is no such option.
So the UI to control things is so 'uncluttered' that it's near impossible to figure out how to use features - but the actual map data is so cluttered that you can't actually find stuff you're looking for on the map. But it sure is smart about searching for places - otherwise I might not use it at all. In fact, I sometimes open Google Maps to a foreign city and 'wander around'. Now, since I'm thousands of miles away, you'd think that maybe all the coffee shops and sneaker stores in that city might not care whether I know their locations - and certainly wouldn't knowingly pay for me to know them. Couldn't Google at least have an option to hide that stuff when you're, say, outside of a 50 mile radius of the businesses in question?
True. I can already hear the Fox pundits (and James Inhoff) going on an on about how fossil fuels are now fine - burn away.
There are other advantages to solar, hydro, wind, battery solutions. And the technology invesment required to build those out is probably comparable to the investment to scale up and deploy a magnesite solution capable of sequestering historical C02 as well as countering new and increasing sources.
So yes, do both - to repair past damage. But fer Crissake, let's figure out how to make solar cheap and non-polluting instead of pretending we've found a magic bullet that makes it safe to let Koch Industries continue to have their way...