And you think that by giving some folks higher power votes encourages diversity? If anything it's interfering with such a process. I'm sorry, but each individual should have an equally powerful vote. There's no reason at all to conclude that everyone in highly populated areas think the same. I know I don't think much like the people around me. Why doesn't my vote count more then?
I agree diversity is important -- I don't see how geographical representation has anything to do with that.
Actually that is demonstrably untrue. Despite humanity's overall tendancy to be selfish, it is in fact communication and cooperation that have got us where we are today. Note that each culture that succeeds has a high degree of internal cooperation. In fact, cooperation is so benficial to one's own success, one might even say it is selfish!
Read "The Evolution Of Cooperation" by Axelrod. It's a real eye-opener.
Other than that, I agree that we're probably better off with pure instant runoff voting, and letting go the whole geographic crap. There is no legitimate reason I see to give some individuals (in low population states) ten times more voting power than those in high population states.
For a long time I've believed that a third party vote is a waste because of our lousy voting system. But I'm beginning to change my mind. If the dems lose enough elections because of spoilers like Nader, maybe they'll eventually back voting reform and we can get a decent system like instant runoff.
I think I may vote my concience this time. I'm begining to think that voting reform is a more worthy long term goal then replacing Bush the tool with Kerry the tool.
Yeah, I always thought that movie was a bit misdirected. I mean, it appealed to many of my geek sensibilities, but at the same time it was a bit ridiculous. Like when he claims that the old guys have tried to recite every combination of a 256 digit number... yeah, right!
Sorry, but chaos theory prevails here. There is no way in hell that anyone is going to predict the stock market activities using a formula. There's too many varaibles that interact in unknown (possibly unknowable) ways. It's like the butterfly effect. It has it's roots in the quantum nature of the universe.
We live in a roiling sea of unpredictable happenstance. Enjoy!
My 2.4Ghz model would cut my network off neatly from the moment it rang to the moment I hung up. For some reason (my think skull?) it actually took me several weeks to realize this was what was happening. I guess because I would stop what I was doing when the phone rang, usually. Then if I tried anything while I was on the phone -- no dice. And after I hung up most of my ssh sessions would be dead.
Anyways, I went out and got a 5.8 and I've had no problems since. YMMV.
I swear I got the definitions straight years ago. But reading up again it looks like I totally misunderstood. Thanks for the correction, and modding this error down.
Typing this on my 17" Powerbook and listening to my 3G iPod...
Apple is being lame.
Why do companies fight so hard to keep from reaching more customers and giving them what they want? Apple says they want to grow market share but they aren't doing a very good job. They spend a substantial portion of their energy preventing customers from doing what they want. Not that this is uncommon. But it's still stupid.
And to all the apologists -- the DMCA is a destructive law and anyone who uses it is playing games with your freedom. Grow up: you can love the good things a company does and still hate the bad things a company does.
I love Apple's OS and hardware, and I think their business practices suck. As long as people defend them for this stuff they'll keep shooting themselves in the foot. Give Apple a little tough love, eh?
Good points. I'm in Nevada so I have to vote for Kerry, even though I can't think of one thing I like about him other than he doesn't yet have a proven track record for running our country into the ground while stripping away our most basic rights.
You're totally wrong. How is Kerry pointing at a trailer park as "your land" and a mansion as "my land" not parody of the original? Then there's the Native American guy saying it was his land, and then a chorus of consumers saying "now it's our land".
Just because it also satires the presidential candidates doesn't mean it isn't also a parody of the song, as it is commonly interpreted.
Seriously: if JibJab gets in real trouble for this then the US sucks ass. It is stuff like this parody/satire that traditionally has let me believe I'm living in a great country. Where the hell are we headed?
It sure does make fun of the original song! In the original the "your land" and "my land" are supposed to be the same land. In the JibJab version they play it up as two different places... Kerry referring to "your land" as a trailer park and "my land" as a mansion.
And what about the American Indian towards the end who mentions that it used to be his land?
The song, as it is commonly interpreted, is certainly being parodied here. In addition the presidential candidates are being satired.
JibJab is fine -- if the courts have half a brain.
I was just saying to myself yesterday that the JibJab parody/satire is why this country is great. Leave it to alleged patriots to try and prove me wrong.
I think you're all kind of missing the point. Who cares why Eve was punished? I find it terribly unjust that all humans are to be judged by the mistakes of one. Put another way, if your great-great-grandfather was a murderer, should you be kept in prison? According to God... sure.
And to anyone who thinks that I'm taking it too literally, be aware that God repeats this philosphy later. The "he" is Yahweh himself speaking:
Exodus 34:6-7
6 And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, "The LORD , the LORD , the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, 7 maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation."
Know your bible. Know what you are placing all your faith in. Start here. It's not only educational, it's fun.
Oh, and before you go off on how the new testament changes everything think long and hard about why that is and what it means that God makes mistakes. If after all that you still believe every word in the bible without question, then consider yourself very lucky.
See, you're missing the point. Of course the customer might be a friggin' moron. But you have to treat them as though their crap smells like roses because they butter your bread.
Yes, as I mentioned in my post there are insatiable customers (our DB even has a flag for this). And we handle them as best we can. That's the point.
I've worked in service for years. Currently I work in development, but in either case I kept this viewpoint and I did well at my work and the companies I was with did well.
Best buy has never screwed me either, but if they offer something for lower than they can make a profit at in a veiled attempt at a bait-and-switch, then they're setting up their customers as adversaries. Which, whether it works or not, is kinda lame.
You're right that I don't know service oriented business. I've always worked for product oriented business so my comments may not apply.
You obviously aren't in a primary position within the company you work for.
Actually, I am. I'm director of development and I report directly to the CEO... he's the one I learned this attitude from. He could probably have made a similar post himself. And before you assume we don't know what it's like to deal with customers, I have years of customer service experience both in retail and with internet companies. So does he.
I said in my post that there are in fact insatiable customers. But they are few and far between and you're better off worrying more about pleasing the other customers than protecting yourself from a few misbehaving jerks that you can't avoid anyways. The proof is in the pudding: our company has done this and we're growing our good customers fast enough to more than make up for the ones that cause trouble.
Most people don't really understand why this is so true. They get all caught up on the idea that some customers are actually wrong, or trouble makers, or whatever. But here's the skinny:
The losses you suffer from taking it in the rear for lousy customers is miniscule compared to what you lose when you treat normal customers with suspicion and disrespect in an effort to protect yourself.
Luckily, the company I work for gets this right. And we keep growing at a phenomenal rate, mostly through word of month. I am often amazed at what we do to keep the good word-of-mouth going.
Are there insatiable customers? Sure. Do your best to please them and move on. Let them enjoy the little world they've created for themeselves with their tempertantrums. Chances are all their friends and family find them annoying too. I remember one of our service people returning a nasty call and talking to the irate customer's wife. She said, in essense, "Oh, he's such a mean bastard. Don't listen to a word he says. I'll set him straight when he gets home." We had a good laugh.
Oh, and BestBuy's problem is that they've set up a dishonest business model that depends on misleading customers with sales and rebates. So now their whining that it's not working for them. If you have a honest business model then you rarely get angry at your customers.
I know:) CD's are actually amazingly robust comared to other media. I've buffed scratches out with a dremmel, a cloth disc, and some buffing compound.. Try that with a 5 1/4 inch floppy! I've never tried it with a DVD but I imagine it would work fine.
Too bad there is no valid legal entity (international/global like the United Nations) that sanctions these 'contracts'.
That's never stopped people from claiming ownership of unclaimed places before. Or even places that were claimed, but not by anyone who could fully defend themselves.
Rule seems to be if you can take it and nobody can stop you, it's yours.
One of the projects I've worked on for my current employer is fraud detection code.
They must have lost the stats on fraud from Russia, Israel and the USA itself, because Macedonia's negligible internet population cannot possibly account for that much trouble
It's not about numbers. It's about percentage. Sure, most of our fraud comes from the US, but it's a miniscule percentage of the US business. Whereas Indonesia accounts for a small percentage of fraud but nearly all indonesian orders are fraud.
We did a lot of analysis to identify indicators and assign scores to them. Funny things turn up. Like we found that Florida had a very high fraud liklihood. So did the Bronx.
Working with UPS we found that they do it by zip code. They keep tabs on how many shipments to each zip result in a missing package report, and then they won't drop off packages in those zip codes without a signature.
If you didn't know how they arrived at the list of zips and looked them over you might think the company was being mean. But it would be foolish for a business to not use reasonable data like that to avoid trouble.
Back in the day, I was hacking away with my Commodore 64 while enjoying a tall glass of milk. On the floor next to my desk was a large open disk organizer, containing over a hundred 5 1/4 inch disks. This collection represented years of pirating (who said that!) and at least as much time game writing. Backups? Sure -- all in the same box.
Anyways, an errant elbow movement sends the glass of milk careening into the disk organizer and just about every disk is saturated. I may have actually cried.
But then was the cool part: I could not accept that my life was over, so I decided to fix the disks. Over the course of a week I cut open every disk jacket, took out the actual magnetic diskette, and washed them gently by hand. I then put them back into a clean, freshly cut jacket and tried them out.
All but one disk survived this process. (A commercial copy of Ultima III).
Achieving goals through intelligent, persistant effort gives me a sense of accomplishment that would be seriously lacking if I had the goal handed to me by a drug.
Yeah -- your comment pretty much sums up how I feel. I don't intend to put anyone else's experimentation choices down, but I know that I'd feel less proud of myself if I went the other root. I imagine that could change in the future, but overall I think there's an experience to be had by getting through everything without chemical help -- and that's a trip in itself:)
You know, that feeling where one idea sort of flows into the next and you feel like there's a net of idea connections in your head.
Yes -- I've played with this both awake and sleeping. I used to play a game with some friends where we'd take turns having to say three words that were completely unrelated in our minds rather quickly:
metaverse
potato
calvin klein
for example. It's actually pretty tough to do back and forth as your mind loves to make connections between things. It's like trying to do a true SELECT word FROM brain WHERE id = RAND(), which your brain seems to resist while awake.
Anyways, sometimes in my dreams I'll sort of fall into a non-dream unconcious awareness, and I'll play this game with myself and be able to come up instantly with endless strings of unconnected words and concepts. It can go so fast that it's exhilirating. It feels like I really do have sort of random access to my brain during those times, and it's kinda neat. Somtimes I'll feel I'm being amazingly creative, too.
Of course, I can never remember much of the details when I wake up:)
Slashdot Mirror
And you think that by giving some folks higher power votes encourages diversity? If anything it's interfering with such a process. I'm sorry, but each individual should have an equally powerful vote. There's no reason at all to conclude that everyone in highly populated areas think the same. I know I don't think much like the people around me. Why doesn't my vote count more then?
I agree diversity is important -- I don't see how geographical representation has anything to do with that.
Cheers.
Humanity's selfishness got us where we are today
Actually that is demonstrably untrue. Despite humanity's overall tendancy to be selfish, it is in fact communication and cooperation that have got us where we are today. Note that each culture that succeeds has a high degree of internal cooperation. In fact, cooperation is so benficial to one's own success, one might even say it is selfish!
Read "The Evolution Of Cooperation" by Axelrod. It's a real eye-opener.
Other than that, I agree that we're probably better off with pure instant runoff voting, and letting go the whole geographic crap. There is no legitimate reason I see to give some individuals (in low population states) ten times more voting power than those in high population states.
Cheers.
For a long time I've believed that a third party vote is a waste because of our lousy voting system. But I'm beginning to change my mind. If the dems lose enough elections because of spoilers like Nader, maybe they'll eventually back voting reform and we can get a decent system like instant runoff.
I think I may vote my concience this time. I'm begining to think that voting reform is a more worthy long term goal then replacing Bush the tool with Kerry the tool.
Cheers.
Yeah, I always thought that movie was a bit misdirected. I mean, it appealed to many of my geek sensibilities, but at the same time it was a bit ridiculous. Like when he claims that the old guys have tried to recite every combination of a 256 digit number... yeah, right!
Anyways...
Sorry, but chaos theory prevails here. There is no way in hell that anyone is going to predict the stock market activities using a formula. There's too many varaibles that interact in unknown (possibly unknowable) ways. It's like the butterfly effect. It has it's roots in the quantum nature of the universe.
We live in a roiling sea of unpredictable happenstance. Enjoy!
Cheers.
My 2.4Ghz model would cut my network off neatly from the moment it rang to the moment I hung up. For some reason (my think skull?) it actually took me several weeks to realize this was what was happening. I guess because I would stop what I was doing when the phone rang, usually. Then if I tried anything while I was on the phone -- no dice. And after I hung up most of my ssh sessions would be dead.
Anyways, I went out and got a 5.8 and I've had no problems since. YMMV.
Cheers.
I swear I got the definitions straight years ago. But reading up again it looks like I totally misunderstood. Thanks for the correction, and modding this error down.
Cheers.
...but it bugs me when people use "backwards compatible" incorrectly. People basically use it to mean "compatible" now.
If the PS3 can play DVD's and PS2 games, it's "compatible".
If the PS3 games can be played on the PS2, it's "backwards compatible".
They are two distinct concepts that deserve distinct names. Like I said, I'm such a nitpicky ass.
Cheers.
Typing this on my 17" Powerbook and listening to my 3G iPod...
Apple is being lame.
Why do companies fight so hard to keep from reaching more customers and giving them what they want? Apple says they want to grow market share but they aren't doing a very good job. They spend a substantial portion of their energy preventing customers from doing what they want. Not that this is uncommon. But it's still stupid.
And to all the apologists -- the DMCA is a destructive law and anyone who uses it is playing games with your freedom. Grow up: you can love the good things a company does and still hate the bad things a company does.
I love Apple's OS and hardware, and I think their business practices suck. As long as people defend them for this stuff they'll keep shooting themselves in the foot. Give Apple a little tough love, eh?
Cheers.
Good points. I'm in Nevada so I have to vote for Kerry, even though I can't think of one thing I like about him other than he doesn't yet have a proven track record for running our country into the ground while stripping away our most basic rights.
Cheers.
You're totally wrong. How is Kerry pointing at a trailer park as "your land" and a mansion as "my land" not parody of the original? Then there's the Native American guy saying it was his land, and then a chorus of consumers saying "now it's our land".
Just because it also satires the presidential candidates doesn't mean it isn't also a parody of the song, as it is commonly interpreted.
Seriously: if JibJab gets in real trouble for this then the US sucks ass. It is stuff like this parody/satire that traditionally has let me believe I'm living in a great country. Where the hell are we headed?
Cheers.
It sure does make fun of the original song! In the original the "your land" and "my land" are supposed to be the same land. In the JibJab version they play it up as two different places... Kerry referring to "your land" as a trailer park and "my land" as a mansion.
And what about the American Indian towards the end who mentions that it used to be his land?
The song, as it is commonly interpreted, is certainly being parodied here. In addition the presidential candidates are being satired.
JibJab is fine -- if the courts have half a brain.
I was just saying to myself yesterday that the JibJab parody/satire is why this country is great. Leave it to alleged patriots to try and prove me wrong.
Cheers.
Watch an aging Indy in a wheelchair fight off seniale ex-Nazis in a search for the bathroom so he doesn't have to use that bedpan any more.
For some reason this reminds me of Bubba Ho-Tep. Great Bruce Campbell... fighting off undead again... this time from a nursing home.
Anyways.
I think you're all kind of missing the point. Who cares why Eve was punished? I find it terribly unjust that all humans are to be judged by the mistakes of one. Put another way, if your great-great-grandfather was a murderer, should you be kept in prison? According to God... sure.
And to anyone who thinks that I'm taking it too literally, be aware that God repeats this philosphy later. The "he" is Yahweh himself speaking:
Exodus 34:6-7
6 And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, "The LORD , the LORD , the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness,
7 maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation."
Know your bible. Know what you are placing all your faith in. Start here. It's not only educational, it's fun.
Oh, and before you go off on how the new testament changes everything think long and hard about why that is and what it means that God makes mistakes. If after all that you still believe every word in the bible without question, then consider yourself very lucky.
Cheers.
No, sometimes the customer is a friggin' moron
See, you're missing the point. Of course the customer might be a friggin' moron. But you have to treat them as though their crap smells like roses because they butter your bread.
Yes, as I mentioned in my post there are insatiable customers (our DB even has a flag for this). And we handle them as best we can. That's the point.
I've worked in service for years. Currently I work in development, but in either case I kept this viewpoint and I did well at my work and the companies I was with did well.
Best buy has never screwed me either, but if they offer something for lower than they can make a profit at in a veiled attempt at a bait-and-switch, then they're setting up their customers as adversaries. Which, whether it works or not, is kinda lame.
Cheers.
You're right that I don't know service oriented business. I've always worked for product oriented business so my comments may not apply.
You obviously aren't in a primary position within the company you work for.
Actually, I am. I'm director of development and I report directly to the CEO... he's the one I learned this attitude from. He could probably have made a similar post himself. And before you assume we don't know what it's like to deal with customers, I have years of customer service experience both in retail and with internet companies. So does he.
I said in my post that there are in fact insatiable customers. But they are few and far between and you're better off worrying more about pleasing the other customers than protecting yourself from a few misbehaving jerks that you can't avoid anyways. The proof is in the pudding: our company has done this and we're growing our good customers fast enough to more than make up for the ones that cause trouble.
Cheers.
Most people don't really understand why this is so true. They get all caught up on the idea that some customers are actually wrong, or trouble makers, or whatever. But here's the skinny:
The losses you suffer from taking it in the rear for lousy customers is miniscule compared to what you lose when you treat normal customers with suspicion and disrespect in an effort to protect yourself.
Luckily, the company I work for gets this right. And we keep growing at a phenomenal rate, mostly through word of month. I am often amazed at what we do to keep the good word-of-mouth going.
Are there insatiable customers? Sure. Do your best to please them and move on. Let them enjoy the little world they've created for themeselves with their tempertantrums. Chances are all their friends and family find them annoying too. I remember one of our service people returning a nasty call and talking to the irate customer's wife. She said, in essense, "Oh, he's such a mean bastard. Don't listen to a word he says. I'll set him straight when he gets home." We had a good laugh.
Oh, and BestBuy's problem is that they've set up a dishonest business model that depends on misleading customers with sales and rebates. So now their whining that it's not working for them. If you have a honest business model then you rarely get angry at your customers.
Cheers.
True enough. And CD's are pretty darn robust. As I mentioned elsewhere I've buffed out scratches with a dremmel.
:)
So I guess we _have_ made progress
I know :) CD's are actually amazingly robust comared to other media. I've buffed scratches out with a dremmel, a cloth disc, and some buffing compound.. Try that with a 5 1/4 inch floppy! I've never tried it with a DVD but I imagine it would work fine.
Cheers.
Too bad there is no valid legal entity (international/global like the United Nations) that sanctions these 'contracts'.
That's never stopped people from claiming ownership of unclaimed places before. Or even places that were claimed, but not by anyone who could fully defend themselves.
Rule seems to be if you can take it and nobody can stop you, it's yours.
Cheers.
One of the projects I've worked on for my current employer is fraud detection code.
They must have lost the stats on fraud from Russia, Israel and the USA itself, because Macedonia's negligible internet population cannot possibly account for that much trouble
It's not about numbers. It's about percentage. Sure, most of our fraud comes from the US, but it's a miniscule percentage of the US business. Whereas Indonesia accounts for a small percentage of fraud but nearly all indonesian orders are fraud.
We did a lot of analysis to identify indicators and assign scores to them. Funny things turn up. Like we found that Florida had a very high fraud liklihood. So did the Bronx.
Working with UPS we found that they do it by zip code. They keep tabs on how many shipments to each zip result in a missing package report, and then they won't drop off packages in those zip codes without a signature.
If you didn't know how they arrived at the list of zips and looked them over you might think the company was being mean. But it would be foolish for a business to not use reasonable data like that to avoid trouble.
Anyways...
Back in the day, I was hacking away with my Commodore 64 while enjoying a tall glass of milk. On the floor next to my desk was a large open disk organizer, containing over a hundred 5 1/4 inch disks. This collection represented years of pirating (who said that!) and at least as much time game writing. Backups? Sure -- all in the same box.
Anyways, an errant elbow movement sends the glass of milk careening into the disk organizer and just about every disk is saturated. I may have actually cried.
But then was the cool part: I could not accept that my life was over, so I decided to fix the disks. Over the course of a week I cut open every disk jacket, took out the actual magnetic diskette, and washed them gently by hand. I then put them back into a clean, freshly cut jacket and tried them out.
All but one disk survived this process. (A commercial copy of Ultima III).
Try that with today's floppies!
Cheers.
Mail you some dream journal entries? If that's what you'd like I'll collect a few :)
Achieving goals through intelligent, persistant effort gives me a sense of accomplishment that would be seriously lacking if I had the goal handed to me by a drug.
:)
Yeah -- your comment pretty much sums up how I feel. I don't intend to put anyone else's experimentation choices down, but I know that I'd feel less proud of myself if I went the other root. I imagine that could change in the future, but overall I think there's an experience to be had by getting through everything without chemical help -- and that's a trip in itself
Cheers.
You know, that feeling where one idea sort of flows into the next and you feel like there's a net of idea connections in your head.
:)
Yes -- I've played with this both awake and sleeping. I used to play a game with some friends where we'd take turns having to say three words that were completely unrelated in our minds rather quickly:
metaverse
potato
calvin klein
for example. It's actually pretty tough to do back and forth as your mind loves to make connections between things. It's like trying to do a true SELECT word FROM brain WHERE id = RAND(), which your brain seems to resist while awake.
Anyways, sometimes in my dreams I'll sort of fall into a non-dream unconcious awareness, and I'll play this game with myself and be able to come up instantly with endless strings of unconnected words and concepts. It can go so fast that it's exhilirating. It feels like I really do have sort of random access to my brain during those times, and it's kinda neat. Somtimes I'll feel I'm being amazingly creative, too.
Of course, I can never remember much of the details when I wake up
Cheers.