It's like being in a crowd with half screaming "Less Filling!" and the other half screaming "Tastes Great!" - and neither side aware that there isn't a drop of beer in sight. Wake up folks.
You forgot the ending: Buy Now...if you want to lose a lot of money. There's a reason a stock drops that much on news like this - it is widely overvalued due to speculation. While I agree with a contrarian approach, there's better ways to do it than buying Google stock.
Counter-example: Exercise. I do not control how my body responds to changes in body temperature. However, I am fully capable of changing my body temperature through exercise. Or, by choosing clothing. In this case, I can regulate the environment of my body but not my body's response to it. There is nothing logically inconsistent in the claims you cite.
Overvalued? You think? Given that the book value of the company per share for the most recent quarter is: 31.959999 and it is trading at more than 14 times that, you beat they are overvalued. If you were to pay 10 times earnings would be just under 200 dollars per share. It would be foolish to pay that price - much less 400 plus.
I'm sure some people have made some good short term money. Some might still make some money of it. Many others will be left holding the bag. In the long (or even medium) term, Google has to come back to sanity - which if I were to guess is maybe 50 dollars a share. Look for it with 2-5 years. Want a good example to work off of, check out Amazon - which is still crazy given the.01 per share book value. The wake up call is coming folks.
A search bar, a blog, and ebay are all you need to find out almost anything, tell the world your take on it, or operate a business.
Really? If it's that easy, how about answering a few of these: What are the household PC Penetration rates worldwide, by country from 1990-present? How many 2-liter bottles of Coke sold in the month of December 2005 in the U.S.? How much money did Cadillac spend on Hispanic TV broadcast advertising in the U.S. in April 2005? Can you name the top 5 frozen bagel brands in the U.S. in 2004? Who is most likely to drink Mountain Dew and what magazines do they read? How many hours do women around the world spend cleaning per week - with breaks by region and country? How about the Google hypothesis in philosophy? How about the number of reference to Noam Chomski's work in linquistics?
I could go on all day. While the Internet is a powerful and useful tool, there are reasons that market research firms (Forrester, Yankelovich, MRI), industry specialists (Spectra, Claritas, IRI, ACNielsen), information aggregators (Factiva, Lexis-Nexis, Dailog) and so forth exist. People do not pay millions of dollars for these services because they have nothing better to do. They pay because the Internet is like a big Wikipedia. So long as you have interests narrow enough, it might meet your needs. However, most businesses need better information than what can be dug up by an intern slavishly working on Google.
I was vaguely aware that you could influence the my recommendations on Amazon. I guess I just couldn't be bother to correct it. The point I was trying to make was that using Amazon's database of purchases will have to have a much more sophisticated algorithm that what Amazon uses to make recommendations. Even then, it will likely require user intervention - either from the analyst evaluating the data or other ways of eliminating false positives.
Not to mention all the crap purchased for other people. Amazon still recommends screen writer books to me because I bought some for my mom three years ago.
During our conversation half a year ago I made mention of how I'd love to see old commercials for current products -- the old Coke commercials are priceless (and comical) and there is NO reason why Google couldn't offer to bring back this and more.
I can think of one near and dear to many a Slashdot user heart: rights and permissions. When a commercial is produced, you license images that appear in the commercial, the actor and so forth. To get the permissions to re-run old ads in a commercial context and on this scale, would be nothing short of a nightmare.
Google's interesting, yes. They might even significantly change the face of advertising; you might argue that they already have given the importance of the Internet and search is becoming in the advertising world. But, it isn't going to be Advertising 2.0 anymore than the Internet bubble was Business 2.0.
You need to be realistic about the impact of what you are talking about here. When you get right down to it, people do not like advertising unless it is useful or at the very least entertaining. I'll tolerate a gmail link to curryfever.com if I happen to be sending a recipe to someone. I would not tolerate a Coke add streamed alongside a product placement of someone drinking a Coke in a movie or TV program I'm watching. I certainly don't want to see that annoying I'd like to give the world a Coke ad from the 70s, the Bologna song, Tony telling my how Great Frosted Flakes are or whatever.
The secret sauce of advertising comes down to two things: less is more and unless it's interesting (advertising executives calls this "creativity") you've probably wasted your money and someone else's time. The great Google advertising promise is to give us less advertising - and in so far as they accomplish that promise, I'm with them.
Exactly my point. Linux - as a desktop system owned and administrated by an end user - is not for Joe Average. If it is important to remember the acronym/command, they either should exercise a little brain power to remember it, look it up when they need it or they should use something else geared to their needs.
People don't go around talking about why AutoCAD or SPSS have names Joe Average can't remember. You know why? Because the Average Joe wouldn't even know what these programs are for or how to use them if they were sat down in front of a computer running them.
Linux may be able to accomodate the limited needs of Joe Average and have programs that these users may find helpful. However, a user group is defined by its center not its periphery. Joe Average is not at the center of Linux development concerns - nor should they be. Articles like this one miss this important point.
If you truly wish, you could motify your.bash file to accept move instead of mv. You could also "improve" the thousands of other commands to your liking - rm to remove, cal to calendar, ls to list, passwd to password and so forth. Personally, I'd rather common commands require less typing rather than more (which I understand is not an unusual position for someone that works mostly on the command line) - but you can readily change the behavior to match your preferences.
Outlook, Access, Excel...real intuitive names there. If you want to throw in third party vendors like the original did with Photoshop, you have a whole host of products that do different things with similar names - i.e., Quicken or Quick Time.
Linux names are acronyms. Acronyms are easier to type and remember. Just as a wouldn't want Linux to be renamed Runs Computer, I do not want software to be renamed from a four letter command such as gimp to Image Manipulator because someone cannot be bothered to learn its name. If they cannot be bothered to learn the name, then they are welcome to go use the programs that are named something they can remember.
The whole world does not revolve around the lowest common denominator. Let's stop pretending that it does, shall we?
Let's not forget those scary Quakers! If they bring out another threat like the one that follows, I cannot guarantee my bowel control...
One example of identified "threats" is a group in Lake Worth, Florida that included five Quakers and a 79-year old grandmother who met at their local Quaker meeting house to discuss how to protest military recruiting at an area high school. Other examples of "threatening" events in the database included handing out literature in front of military recruiting stations and commemorating the second anniversary of the Iraq War.
Probably because most jobs that interview don't require geniuses or visionaries. They need people that work.
Ever been to a meeting with someone who thinks their job is to think outside the box? Half of it is sheer undoable mental masturbation. The parts that can be done are generally thought to be the work of someone else. Geniuses and visionaries are a dime a dozen; great ideas are a given. Give me someone that can actually implement their great idea or vision (or can even be bothered to concieve of a process to make the idea tangible) and then we have something to talk about.
It has been said before, but apparently needs to be said again:
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. - Benjamin Franklin (1706-90)
This quotation, slightly altered, is inscribed on a plaque in the stairwell of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
I also like this one from Ben - "Where liberty is, there is my country."
Sloppy? Not really. We use republic in a very specific sense that matches how the term was used in the formation of our republic - Madison's Federalist Paper #10 comes to mind:
A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking. Let us examine the points in which it varies from pure democracy, and we shall comprehend both the nature of the cure and the efficacy which it must derive from the Union....The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended.
The meaning of words - and fashions - change. However, Madison was accurately identifying the issue that traditional notions of democracy need to include safeguards to protect minorities. Whether you call this representative democracy or republic doesn't much matter - except to people like me who believe representative democracy is an oxymoron. Democracy has traditionally meant majority rule. You don't get that with a representative system of government. So, it should be called something else - which is why we use republic.
The Wikipedia addresses your question adequetely enough for my purposes. The relevent quote:
In political theory and political science, the term "republic" is generally applied to a state where the government's political power depends solely on the consent, however nominal, of the people governed. This usage leads to two sets of problematic classification. The first are states which are oligarchical in nature, but are not nominally hereditary, such as many dictatorships, the second are states where all, or almost all, real political power is held by democratic institutions, but which have a monarch as nominal head of state, generally known as constitutional monarchies. The first case causes many outside the state to deny that the state should, in fact, be seen as a Republic. In many states of the second kind there are active "republican" movements that promote the ending of even the nominal monarchy, and the semantic problem is often resolved by calling the state a Democracy.
It is not a false distinction. A republic is government where the population is ruled by representatives. Democracy is government where the population governs without representation. Two very distinct concepts. If you want to know whether you live in a democracy, ask yourself when the last time you (and the rest of your fellow citizens) passed a law? You might argue referendums are a form of democracy - and there is something to that. However, they are the excpetion that proves who rules.
It demends on the circumstances - which is exactly what the lawyers did not want to hear. I can imagine circumstances where touching a toe might warrant a felony conviction. However, most circumstances would probably only be a misdemeanor, if anything. The judge - and the lawyers - wanted to argue that the law says touching a toe when you have been told not to is a felony period irrespective of the circumstances. If true, this would mean that most children should spend some time in jail. The bottom line is that the legal establishment wanted prospective jury members to assent to relinquish their rights and responsibilities as citizens and as members of a jury - and most citizens were happy to give it up.
Would you want to bet your freedom on it in a court in the U.S.? You, my friend, are braver than I. I'd want some way to prove traffic wasn't me if I were hosting an unsecured port.
They don't. The ISP will simply have the traffic logs. He will need to provide the MAC addresses - assuming he had a log. Without a log, they would just assume it is him, and he would be screwed. You think you could get a judge to even understand what this means or a prosecuter that wouldn't argue that it was his traffic regardless - with the open port just being a convenient excuse? People get sent to jail for much less.
Have you been selected to jury duty? I remember being screened for a jury in a trial where one of the lawyers asked the jury whether they would pass a guilty verdict for battery if a defendent had touched the toe of someone that had asked them not to touch it. Everyone, but me, said they would. Felony conviction for touching someone's toe. I think you grossly overestimate the free thinking capabilities of your fellow citizens.
Presumably, they have MAC addresses - which you may be able to use to plausibly deny goats.cx and all the other unsavory traffic that is likely being piped through that unsecured port. Good luck in court with that defense.
Don't mean to nit, but he did say: "I'm looking for ways of making Linux (and maybe Unix or even Apple desktops) an option as we replace or add PCs." We aren't talking migrating the whole organization, and there are many instances I can think of where a particular user group in a corporation that size would be not impacted in the slightest by Linux/Apple on the desktop; it might even improve their performance. Any design, select IT/engineering, even certain support functions like the mail room all seem like viable candidates.
Slashdot Mirror
You cannot talk intelligently about politics because most discussions are framed around questions like "Do you support Democrats or Republicans?" instead of substantive commentary like these on the Iraq War or the U.S. use of torture around the world, ignorance of public officials, and ignorance of the American people about the facts of the current administration. I don't support either majority party, and even if I did, its not even the point.
It's like being in a crowd with half screaming "Less Filling!" and the other half screaming "Tastes Great!" - and neither side aware that there isn't a drop of beer in sight. Wake up folks.
You forgot the ending: Buy Now...if you want to lose a lot of money. There's a reason a stock drops that much on news like this - it is widely overvalued due to speculation. While I agree with a contrarian approach, there's better ways to do it than buying Google stock.
Counter-example: Exercise. I do not control how my body responds to changes in body temperature. However, I am fully capable of changing my body temperature through exercise. Or, by choosing clothing. In this case, I can regulate the environment of my body but not my body's response to it. There is nothing logically inconsistent in the claims you cite.
Overvalued? You think? Given that the book value of the company per share for the most recent quarter is: 31.959999 and it is trading at more than 14 times that, you beat they are overvalued. If you were to pay 10 times earnings would be just under 200 dollars per share. It would be foolish to pay that price - much less 400 plus.
I'm sure some people have made some good short term money. Some might still make some money of it. Many others will be left holding the bag. In the long (or even medium) term, Google has to come back to sanity - which if I were to guess is maybe 50 dollars a share. Look for it with 2-5 years. Want a good example to work off of, check out Amazon - which is still crazy given the .01 per share book value. The wake up call is coming folks.
The abstract is available and the whole article is available for purchase for those interested.
Really? If it's that easy, how about answering a few of these: What are the household PC Penetration rates worldwide, by country from 1990-present? How many 2-liter bottles of Coke sold in the month of December 2005 in the U.S.? How much money did Cadillac spend on Hispanic TV broadcast advertising in the U.S. in April 2005? Can you name the top 5 frozen bagel brands in the U.S. in 2004? Who is most likely to drink Mountain Dew and what magazines do they read? How many hours do women around the world spend cleaning per week - with breaks by region and country? How about the Google hypothesis in philosophy? How about the number of reference to Noam Chomski's work in linquistics?
I could go on all day. While the Internet is a powerful and useful tool, there are reasons that market research firms (Forrester, Yankelovich, MRI), industry specialists (Spectra, Claritas, IRI, ACNielsen), information aggregators (Factiva, Lexis-Nexis, Dailog) and so forth exist. People do not pay millions of dollars for these services because they have nothing better to do. They pay because the Internet is like a big Wikipedia. So long as you have interests narrow enough, it might meet your needs. However, most businesses need better information than what can be dug up by an intern slavishly working on Google.
I was vaguely aware that you could influence the my recommendations on Amazon. I guess I just couldn't be bother to correct it. The point I was trying to make was that using Amazon's database of purchases will have to have a much more sophisticated algorithm that what Amazon uses to make recommendations. Even then, it will likely require user intervention - either from the analyst evaluating the data or other ways of eliminating false positives.
Not to mention all the crap purchased for other people. Amazon still recommends screen writer books to me because I bought some for my mom three years ago.
You forgot jaywalking, unauthorized wi-fi access and other heinous crimes.
I can think of one near and dear to many a Slashdot user heart: rights and permissions. When a commercial is produced, you license images that appear in the commercial, the actor and so forth. To get the permissions to re-run old ads in a commercial context and on this scale, would be nothing short of a nightmare.
Google's interesting, yes. They might even significantly change the face of advertising; you might argue that they already have given the importance of the Internet and search is becoming in the advertising world. But, it isn't going to be Advertising 2.0 anymore than the Internet bubble was Business 2.0.
You need to be realistic about the impact of what you are talking about here. When you get right down to it, people do not like advertising unless it is useful or at the very least entertaining. I'll tolerate a gmail link to curryfever.com if I happen to be sending a recipe to someone. I would not tolerate a Coke add streamed alongside a product placement of someone drinking a Coke in a movie or TV program I'm watching. I certainly don't want to see that annoying I'd like to give the world a Coke ad from the 70s, the Bologna song, Tony telling my how Great Frosted Flakes are or whatever.
The secret sauce of advertising comes down to two things: less is more and unless it's interesting (advertising executives calls this "creativity") you've probably wasted your money and someone else's time. The great Google advertising promise is to give us less advertising - and in so far as they accomplish that promise, I'm with them.
Exactly my point. Linux - as a desktop system owned and administrated by an end user - is not for Joe Average. If it is important to remember the acronym/command, they either should exercise a little brain power to remember it, look it up when they need it or they should use something else geared to their needs.
People don't go around talking about why AutoCAD or SPSS have names Joe Average can't remember. You know why? Because the Average Joe wouldn't even know what these programs are for or how to use them if they were sat down in front of a computer running them.
Linux may be able to accomodate the limited needs of Joe Average and have programs that these users may find helpful. However, a user group is defined by its center not its periphery. Joe Average is not at the center of Linux development concerns - nor should they be. Articles like this one miss this important point.
If you truly wish, you could motify your .bash file to accept move instead of mv. You could also "improve" the thousands of other commands to your liking - rm to remove, cal to calendar, ls to list, passwd to password and so forth. Personally, I'd rather common commands require less typing rather than more (which I understand is not an unusual position for someone that works mostly on the command line) - but you can readily change the behavior to match your preferences.
Outlook, Access, Excel...real intuitive names there. If you want to throw in third party vendors like the original did with Photoshop, you have a whole host of products that do different things with similar names - i.e., Quicken or Quick Time.
Linux names are acronyms. Acronyms are easier to type and remember. Just as a wouldn't want Linux to be renamed Runs Computer, I do not want software to be renamed from a four letter command such as gimp to Image Manipulator because someone cannot be bothered to learn its name. If they cannot be bothered to learn the name, then they are welcome to go use the programs that are named something they can remember.
The whole world does not revolve around the lowest common denominator. Let's stop pretending that it does, shall we?
Let's not forget those scary Quakers! If they bring out another threat like the one that follows, I cannot guarantee my bowel control...
Probably because most jobs that interview don't require geniuses or visionaries. They need people that work.
Ever been to a meeting with someone who thinks their job is to think outside the box? Half of it is sheer undoable mental masturbation. The parts that can be done are generally thought to be the work of someone else. Geniuses and visionaries are a dime a dozen; great ideas are a given. Give me someone that can actually implement their great idea or vision (or can even be bothered to concieve of a process to make the idea tangible) and then we have something to talk about.
It has been said before, but apparently needs to be said again:
This quotation, slightly altered, is inscribed on a plaque in the stairwell of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
I also like this one from Ben - "Where liberty is, there is my country."
Sloppy? Not really. We use republic in a very specific sense that matches how the term was used in the formation of our republic - Madison's Federalist Paper #10 comes to mind:
The meaning of words - and fashions - change. However, Madison was accurately identifying the issue that traditional notions of democracy need to include safeguards to protect minorities. Whether you call this representative democracy or republic doesn't much matter - except to people like me who believe representative democracy is an oxymoron. Democracy has traditionally meant majority rule. You don't get that with a representative system of government. So, it should be called something else - which is why we use republic.
The Wikipedia addresses your question adequetely enough for my purposes. The relevent quote:
It is not a false distinction. A republic is government where the population is ruled by representatives. Democracy is government where the population governs without representation. Two very distinct concepts. If you want to know whether you live in a democracy, ask yourself when the last time you (and the rest of your fellow citizens) passed a law? You might argue referendums are a form of democracy - and there is something to that. However, they are the excpetion that proves who rules.
It demends on the circumstances - which is exactly what the lawyers did not want to hear. I can imagine circumstances where touching a toe might warrant a felony conviction. However, most circumstances would probably only be a misdemeanor, if anything. The judge - and the lawyers - wanted to argue that the law says touching a toe when you have been told not to is a felony period irrespective of the circumstances. If true, this would mean that most children should spend some time in jail. The bottom line is that the legal establishment wanted prospective jury members to assent to relinquish their rights and responsibilities as citizens and as members of a jury - and most citizens were happy to give it up.
Would you want to bet your freedom on it in a court in the U.S.? You, my friend, are braver than I. I'd want some way to prove traffic wasn't me if I were hosting an unsecured port.
They don't. The ISP will simply have the traffic logs. He will need to provide the MAC addresses - assuming he had a log. Without a log, they would just assume it is him, and he would be screwed. You think you could get a judge to even understand what this means or a prosecuter that wouldn't argue that it was his traffic regardless - with the open port just being a convenient excuse? People get sent to jail for much less.
Have you been selected to jury duty? I remember being screened for a jury in a trial where one of the lawyers asked the jury whether they would pass a guilty verdict for battery if a defendent had touched the toe of someone that had asked them not to touch it. Everyone, but me, said they would. Felony conviction for touching someone's toe. I think you grossly overestimate the free thinking capabilities of your fellow citizens.
Presumably, they have MAC addresses - which you may be able to use to plausibly deny goats.cx and all the other unsavory traffic that is likely being piped through that unsecured port. Good luck in court with that defense.
Don't mean to nit, but he did say: "I'm looking for ways of making Linux (and maybe Unix or even Apple desktops) an option as we replace or add PCs." We aren't talking migrating the whole organization, and there are many instances I can think of where a particular user group in a corporation that size would be not impacted in the slightest by Linux/Apple on the desktop; it might even improve their performance. Any design, select IT/engineering, even certain support functions like the mail room all seem like viable candidates.