I can not understand how an unbiased person can criticize the experience of the bottom of the Repub's ticket when she had more executive experience than the TOP of the Demo's ticket! Seriously?
I said "unqualified", and you jumped to the "executive experience" Republican talking point. I don't think Sarah Palin had particularly valuable executive experience (mayor of Wasilla doesn't count, and she was not governor for long), and I believe experience as a community organizer, state Senator, and US Senator are valuable. But more fundamentally, by unqualified I didn't just mean inexperienced but also not knowledgeable.
Do you ever stop to consider, even for a second, that maybe, MAYBE, the reason you have such a negative opinion is that all you have heard are negative things about both of them?
Yes. Please see this post. Are you prepared to show evidence, or are you just insinuating?
While it has been shown that all media was biased toward Obama in the last election
No, I looked at your citations, and they don't say that. They talk about positive/negative coverage (judgement), from which you've made the huge leap of assuming bias (prejudice).
As someone who finds it reasonable to support Obama (I voted for him and donated to his campaign), I'm not going to believe the media was biased in his favor without qualitatively different evidence what you supplied. McCain picked a totally unqualified person to be an old man's heartbeat away from the Presidency. I simply can not understand how an unbiased person could continue to support him after that moment, so I'm certainly not going to say the media was biased simply because the media supported Obama over McCain.
So...you made a choice to trade better terms for better amenities. Seems to me you knew exactly what you were doing; why would it therefore be "adhesion," let alone "unconscionable?"
That's a fair question, but those are just a few of the reasons I selected the large complexes. Among the others are that I'm a busy guy and it's just hard to find something smaller (there aren't that many of them, and of course by definition they can house fewer each, they go quickly, and it's more difficult to evaluate them quickly, and they can sometimes be unaffordable). Particular people sometimes have other options with some work, but in my area it will always be true that the vast majority of people live in these large complexes and have to take a gamble that the least reasonable terms won't really be enforced.
And, for the record, the terms *can* be negotiated. I know because I've done it with nearly every apartment I've rented, having clauses struck that I didn't like and adding clauses I wanted. The idea that it's a contract of adhesion fails on several points, and "unconscionable" is laughable at best.
Congratulations; you did a very difficult thing.
I tried this with my last place and had no luck. The people in the local office had no real authority and wouldn't pass my (reasonable, IMO) request along to anyone who did. They don't take a lot of initiative, and even if they did they'd know that their competitors have basically the same outrageous clauses in their lease.
I might have had better luck at my current place because I signed the lease when there were a lot of vacancies all around and thus some incentive to compete for tenants. I regret not trying, but it probably wouldn't have been successful anyway.
Now there is one exception: if I rented a house from the owner or the like, (s)he'd probably give me a reasonably good contract to start with (my last such landlord did) and probably would be open to changing terms. That'd be a whole different experience though in a number of ways and the last few times I've selected the large complexes for the nice fitness center, pool, maintenance staff, etc.
You violate the terms of your lease and you are fined. What's your point here?
People get upset when you hold them to the lease because leases are ridiculous - you shouldn't need your landlord's permission to have a guest over in your home. Often the full terms aren't even presented to until after you have paid money to reserve the apartment, and you have no real negotiating power. These are unconscionable contracts of adhesion.
Wonder if they applied for a patent before April 22, 2004 ?
The government doesn't issue patents for half-baked ideas; it issues them for actual inventions (IIRC it even used to require a physical prototype be sent for examination). www.halfbakery.com is not prior art.
Re:Yes, but does it run Gnu/Linux on Alpha and oth
on
Microsoft COFEE Leaked
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That this person's home was raided on several occasions is probable cause for suspicion in my mind.
That's the nasty sort of positive feedback loop from which an innocent person, once trapped, can never escape. The burden of proof should grow each time, not shrink, to prevent police harassment.
But in summary, Microsoft was fined 500 million Euros ($800 million) which was I believe the largest fine anywhere ever at the time, certainly the largest ever in Europe.
Microsoft's net income revenue last quarter was $12.92 billion, according to Microsoft. Assuming that quarter's typical (feel free to check more thoroughly if you suspect it's not), the fine you've discussed was 5.6% of Microsoft's net income for a year, or 1.5% of their revenue. That's not far from what pete6677 said, and as you say it was the largest (in absolute terms) fine anywhere ever at the time.
I'd have to say this supports pete6677's point - courts don't issue fines sufficiently large to really hurt a corporation, and they do issue fines against individuals which exceed their net worth or yearly earnings; then they garnish their income for years to come.
This, however, isn't a non-monopoly - you only have two real players in the desktop OS market (yes, I know linux is out there, and it's so cute *pat pat*).
Let's say you're right and the OS market is a monopoly (or oligopoly). What about all the other software out there which is constructed in a similar fashion? While this particular bug is an OS flaw, aren't many others in software created by non-monopolies?
When will software/computer/IT companies be held to the same standards that other engineers (Civil, Electrical, Mechanical) are? If a bridge is built and it collapses due to a poor design, or a gadget catches fire or brakes are poorly designed, people head to their local courthouse and sue.
When consumers are willing to wait (much) longer, pay (much) more, and/or get (much) less powerful software for the "not warranted for any particular purpose" to be removed from the license text. Don't hold your breath.
It's entirely possible to make software that is rock-solid and that people will legally stand behind. But something has to be sacrificed to do so, and I don't imagine consumers will want that trade-off any time soon for the software on their desktop. Rather, people just complain about software developers not taking responsibility without really understanding what that would mean. It's like the old adage - good, fast, cheap, pick any two (if you're lucky). Unless the developers are just incompetent (which theoretically in non-monopolies the market will correct), it's hard to improve in one way without sacrificing something else. Software development is cumulative, so there's some hope of improvement over time - essentially you can mitigate the sacrifice of development speed through reuse - but that only takes you so far.
Should computers (or electric devices in general) with persistent storage carry a huge warning label on them that says,
What difference would it make? I think that it's common knowledge that you should take backups. Would putting that in warning label form make it more likely for people to actually do so?
Except, with the Honda vehicle, if there is a failure in the computer system, you die.... I rode a Segway. It had a RISK OF DEATH (all caps) label.
If the bicycle were invented today, it would come with that label. We live in a society that is increasingly litigious and risk-averse. These both apply more for newer and higher-tech things - more so for commercial airplanes than cars, in spite of their relative risks.
People don't usually die in {bicycle,Segway,Honda thing} crashes, but they do sometimes, and for a new device, that's enough that its creators usually fear lawsuits without that label. These things might be a bit silly and overpriced, but they're not dangerous no matter what the stupid sticker says.
No. They get a portion of that money since almost every one of the major airlines have missed flight policies that charges the customer the difference between the ticket price they paid and the "ticket desk price" for the next flight if they want in addition to a standard change fee if the airline charges one. South West does not have a change fee so you only have to pay the difference in what you already paid and the new ticket. If you can fly out a day later the difference is pretty small. In the neighborhood of 20 bucks from PHX to SEA.
As far as I know, airlines have policies like that for change with advance notice (in which case they could potentially resell the seat even without overbooking), but not for just having missed a flight - you're stuck paying then.
I recall having this conversation with a Northwest (I think) telephone agent when I phoned them immediately after going into a ditch on the way to the airport - she said if I hadn't called, I would have been charged the full ticket price. I still had to pay a change fee, so if they were overbooked or managed to resell the ticket in the few hours before the flight took off, they got paid by two people for the same seat.
Fair enough. They offer encentives to take the edge off. I personally think that it's not really voluntary, since if no one agreed to it, they would have to cancel the last purchased ticket (unless it was 1st class:)
If they actually did that, it would certainly not be voluntary. I think from a PR perspective, they'd be smart to offer well in excess of the ticket price for getting bumped if that's what it takes for that to not happen.
Come to think of it, I've been moved off a flight before. They called me the day before, told me that they were oversold and wanted to upgrade me to first-class on a different (earlier, I think) flight at their expense. I said yes. Though they'd singled me out and suggested it, it was still voluntary, and I was happy about it.
Whether or not they have the capacity to fulfill all of their commitmants in a worst-case scenario isn't relevant.
When I said "they sold 3X as much bandwidth as they should have", I'm not talking about a wost-case scenario. I didn't mean "they oversold their bandwidth by 3X when they should not have oversold at all." That's not realistic. I meant they oversold to the extent that users are regularly unable to use more than 1/3rd of their nominal bandwidth. They are not meeting their commitments during conditions they can (and probably have) predicted.
I don't think that's accurate. For starters, your description of the airline's policy is wrong:
We overbook our flights to save you money because some poeple don't show. So for that 1% that hurt our business we have to lie and sell you a service that we cannot possibly deliver on.
They sold the tickets to those 1% and get the money whether they show up or not. A more accurate statement would be "we overbook our flights to (save you money and/or make more profit) because we can - 1% of people don't show up, and we can get paid twice for those seats if we lie and sell you a service that we cannot possibly deliver on.
Second, overbooking doesn't make the top 10 list of things that airlines do to make people mad. Why? They ask for volunteers and offer incentives to be bumped. If no one jumps, they increase the incentive. Even on a small plane that's the last chance to get home before Christmas, someone will volunteer once their price is reached. I would be pissed if I were involuntarily bumped, but so far they've been smart enough to make that not happen.
In contrast, this ISP is saying that they sold 3X as much bandwidth as they should have, and they are just not going to deliver with no compensation. WTF? How is that possibly acceptable?
It's only theft if you accept the idea that selling the book to you was also theft (i.e. you accept the infringement of intellectual property rights = theft) and if you do, then you were, ispo facto, in possession of stolen property and have no claim over it.
You're saying that "deleting something that someone was using" should only be considered a crime if "copying something created 60 years ago by someone who died 59 years ago without giving money to someone else who 'owns the rights'" is also considered a crime? Seriously?... I... disagree... to put it mildly. This work would not be under copyright by any reasonable standard.
"If this was anything except 1984, this wouldn't have been news at all." I completely disagree. Let's not give up the right to keep the information we buy entirely
You're confusing "wouldn't" with "shouldn't". Of course it should be news no matter the book. But the objective truth is that not only "wouldn't" it be news, it "wasn't" news when they did it to Ayn Rand books.
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but having this whole mess center around "1984" is a pretty big coincidence.
It's not a coincidence; it's the cause. Stuff like this happened to other books and there was barely a murmor. It takes someone flushing down the memory hole a book that is famously about flushing things down the memory hole before anyone pays attention to the memory holes. (Fahrenheit 451 would have worked, too.)
Truth be told, modern construction techniques have made it perfectly safe to place buildings in tornado and earthquake-prone zones.
Really? I'm not aware of any above-ground buildings that can withstand wind speeds of 300 mph or higher. I've heard of buildings that can withstand fairly severe earthquakes (I'm sitting in one now) and buildings that can withstand at least average hurricanes, but never ones that can withstand the worst recorded tornadoes.
The best we have are storm cellars: you go downstairs where you're fairly safe, wait out the storm, and then see if your house is still standing. (I grew up in the midwest, and this was just something that happened in the summer. I was fortunate enough that a tornado never came closer than a few miles from our town in the time that I lived there, but of course we never knew the path of the storm when the tornado warning sirens sounded.)
It had to be 1984 (or Fahrenheit 451) for anyone to take notice. IIRC they had done the same thing to some other books the week before, and it did not make a stir. But when they did the same to 1984, it didn't take too much imagination to be scared of the possibilities, and they directly impacted people most likely to possess at least that small bit of imagination and speak up.
I have moderation points, but unfortunately, there's no option for "Fallacies - Straw Man". The closest is "Troll" but I'd like to be more specific. I mean, really:
a tax-free threshold that would allow everyone to purchase the necessities of life, then taxing flatly from then on
So, is a fat person allowed to purchase more "necessities of life" than a skinny person? Is the person who decides to live in an area where houses are routinely destroyed by hurricanes allowed to get more tax-free "necessities of life" income because they've chosen to live in a way that costs more than someone else? Ah, I see - you're suggesting a gigantic new bureacracy (paid for by more taxes, of course) that would be in charge of figuring out just how much of a necessity is each and every purchase, as applied to each demographic living under each possible circumstance in each geographic area. Because obviously someone living in North Dakota needs a substantial all-terrain vehicle and a snowmobile, whereas the family living in Georgia doesn't. Or do they? Gosh, the efficiency of your plan is amazing! What could possibly get in the way of it being fair and quickly implemented!
That is an absolutely classic an attack of a straw man. Nowhere did the grandparent suggest such a massive bureaucracy to decide the necessity of individual purchases; he instead described a tax-free threshold. The number he later mentioned ($11,000; the official poverty threshold) or some fixed multiple of it would presumably be quite suitable.
But on second thought, if I were that specific I'd also need to give multiple moderations, because you've really run the gamut of dishonest arguments.
The grandparent made it quite clear that by "a flat tax discriminates against low-income earners" he's talking about their ability to pay for basic necessities, and even your example (taxes changing person A's income $10,000->$9,000 (aka poverty line - $1000 -> poverty line - $2000) and person B's income $1,000,000->$900,000 (aka poverty line + $989,000 -> poverty line + $889,000) supports that quite well if you'd care to remove the bizarre assumption that a burger-flipper has some unstated, untaxable second income and thus only needs his burger-flipping job for beer money.)
If the company was based in Mumbai they wouldn't be subject to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act anyway
Wrong. Any US citizen employees (such as Ballmer himself) would still be subject to the FCPA.
plus they'd have to get caught. They've been pretty much proven to be using bribery already in different places anyway. What's to stop them doing it again?
Far more sensible for MS to move to Mumbai for most of their operations and keep the Dublin setup as it is. Staffing is cheap in Mumbai and there is a fast-growing computer/IT industry there and to top it all off a government that is willing to bend over backwards - for a small fee.
Yeah, that sounds like a great idea. I wouldn't mind seeing senior Microsoft management "subject to a fine of up to $100,000 and imprisonment for up to five years" under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
However, you're rant against the person is ALSO unfounded. You, along with the WSJ author, are assuming that 30%, THIRTY PERCENT, of those people fell out of THAT tax bracket during the recession. I find it unlikely...
I'm not assuming, but I find it likely (and I found it disingenuous to not mention the possibility), so if you want to convince me that most of this was due to other factors you'll have to provide evidence. But thanks for the link to the WSJ article; it was interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
I said "unqualified", and you jumped to the "executive experience" Republican talking point. I don't think Sarah Palin had particularly valuable executive experience (mayor of Wasilla doesn't count, and she was not governor for long), and I believe experience as a community organizer, state Senator, and US Senator are valuable. But more fundamentally, by unqualified I didn't just mean inexperienced but also not knowledgeable.
Yes. Please see this post. Are you prepared to show evidence, or are you just insinuating?
Here's some ideas. You might work on proving that they failed in some of the following ways and that those failures systematically favored Obama.
No, I looked at your citations, and they don't say that. They talk about positive/negative coverage (judgement), from which you've made the huge leap of assuming bias (prejudice).
As someone who finds it reasonable to support Obama (I voted for him and donated to his campaign), I'm not going to believe the media was biased in his favor without qualitatively different evidence what you supplied. McCain picked a totally unqualified person to be an old man's heartbeat away from the Presidency. I simply can not understand how an unbiased person could continue to support him after that moment, so I'm certainly not going to say the media was biased simply because the media supported Obama over McCain.
That's a fair question, but those are just a few of the reasons I selected the large complexes. Among the others are that I'm a busy guy and it's just hard to find something smaller (there aren't that many of them, and of course by definition they can house fewer each, they go quickly, and it's more difficult to evaluate them quickly, and they can sometimes be unaffordable). Particular people sometimes have other options with some work, but in my area it will always be true that the vast majority of people live in these large complexes and have to take a gamble that the least reasonable terms won't really be enforced.
Congratulations; you did a very difficult thing.
I tried this with my last place and had no luck. The people in the local office had no real authority and wouldn't pass my (reasonable, IMO) request along to anyone who did. They don't take a lot of initiative, and even if they did they'd know that their competitors have basically the same outrageous clauses in their lease.
I might have had better luck at my current place because I signed the lease when there were a lot of vacancies all around and thus some incentive to compete for tenants. I regret not trying, but it probably wouldn't have been successful anyway.
Now there is one exception: if I rented a house from the owner or the like, (s)he'd probably give me a reasonably good contract to start with (my last such landlord did) and probably would be open to changing terms. That'd be a whole different experience though in a number of ways and the last few times I've selected the large complexes for the nice fitness center, pool, maintenance staff, etc.
People get upset when you hold them to the lease because leases are ridiculous - you shouldn't need your landlord's permission to have a guest over in your home. Often the full terms aren't even presented to until after you have paid money to reserve the apartment, and you have no real negotiating power. These are unconscionable contracts of adhesion.
The government doesn't issue patents for half-baked ideas; it issues them for actual inventions (IIRC it even used to require a physical prototype be sent for examination). www.halfbakery.com is not prior art.
That's the nasty sort of positive feedback loop from which an innocent person, once trapped, can never escape. The burden of proof should grow each time, not shrink, to prevent police harassment.
Microsoft's net income revenue last quarter was $12.92 billion, according to Microsoft. Assuming that quarter's typical (feel free to check more thoroughly if you suspect it's not), the fine you've discussed was 5.6% of Microsoft's net income for a year, or 1.5% of their revenue. That's not far from what pete6677 said, and as you say it was the largest (in absolute terms) fine anywhere ever at the time.
I'd have to say this supports pete6677's point - courts don't issue fines sufficiently large to really hurt a corporation, and they do issue fines against individuals which exceed their net worth or yearly earnings; then they garnish their income for years to come.
Let's say you're right and the OS market is a monopoly (or oligopoly). What about all the other software out there which is constructed in a similar fashion? While this particular bug is an OS flaw, aren't many others in software created by non-monopolies?
When consumers are willing to wait (much) longer, pay (much) more, and/or get (much) less powerful software for the "not warranted for any particular purpose" to be removed from the license text. Don't hold your breath.
It's entirely possible to make software that is rock-solid and that people will legally stand behind. But something has to be sacrificed to do so, and I don't imagine consumers will want that trade-off any time soon for the software on their desktop. Rather, people just complain about software developers not taking responsibility without really understanding what that would mean. It's like the old adage - good, fast, cheap, pick any two (if you're lucky). Unless the developers are just incompetent (which theoretically in non-monopolies the market will correct), it's hard to improve in one way without sacrificing something else. Software development is cumulative, so there's some hope of improvement over time - essentially you can mitigate the sacrifice of development speed through reuse - but that only takes you so far.
What difference would it make? I think that it's common knowledge that you should take backups. Would putting that in warning label form make it more likely for people to actually do so?
If the bicycle were invented today, it would come with that label. We live in a society that is increasingly litigious and risk-averse. These both apply more for newer and higher-tech things - more so for commercial airplanes than cars, in spite of their relative risks.
People don't usually die in {bicycle,Segway,Honda thing} crashes, but they do sometimes, and for a new device, that's enough that its creators usually fear lawsuits without that label. These things might be a bit silly and overpriced, but they're not dangerous no matter what the stupid sticker says.
As far as I know, airlines have policies like that for change with advance notice (in which case they could potentially resell the seat even without overbooking), but not for just having missed a flight - you're stuck paying then.
I recall having this conversation with a Northwest (I think) telephone agent when I phoned them immediately after going into a ditch on the way to the airport - she said if I hadn't called, I would have been charged the full ticket price. I still had to pay a change fee, so if they were overbooked or managed to resell the ticket in the few hours before the flight took off, they got paid by two people for the same seat.
If they actually did that, it would certainly not be voluntary. I think from a PR perspective, they'd be smart to offer well in excess of the ticket price for getting bumped if that's what it takes for that to not happen.
Come to think of it, I've been moved off a flight before. They called me the day before, told me that they were oversold and wanted to upgrade me to first-class on a different (earlier, I think) flight at their expense. I said yes. Though they'd singled me out and suggested it, it was still voluntary, and I was happy about it.
When I said "they sold 3X as much bandwidth as they should have", I'm not talking about a wost-case scenario. I didn't mean "they oversold their bandwidth by 3X when they should not have oversold at all." That's not realistic. I meant they oversold to the extent that users are regularly unable to use more than 1/3rd of their nominal bandwidth. They are not meeting their commitments during conditions they can (and probably have) predicted.
They sold the tickets to those 1% and get the money whether they show up or not. A more accurate statement would be "we overbook our flights to (save you money and/or make more profit) because we can - 1% of people don't show up, and we can get paid twice for those seats if we lie and sell you a service that we cannot possibly deliver on.
Second, overbooking doesn't make the top 10 list of things that airlines do to make people mad. Why? They ask for volunteers and offer incentives to be bumped. If no one jumps, they increase the incentive. Even on a small plane that's the last chance to get home before Christmas, someone will volunteer once their price is reached. I would be pissed if I were involuntarily bumped, but so far they've been smart enough to make that not happen.
In contrast, this ISP is saying that they sold 3X as much bandwidth as they should have, and they are just not going to deliver with no compensation. WTF? How is that possibly acceptable?
I stopped reading after the first paragraph the first time through, so I misunderstood your post. Sorry about that.
You're saying that "deleting something that someone was using" should only be considered a crime if "copying something created 60 years ago by someone who died 59 years ago without giving money to someone else who 'owns the rights'" is also considered a crime? Seriously? ... I ... disagree ... to put it mildly. This work would not be under copyright by any reasonable standard.
You're confusing "wouldn't" with "shouldn't". Of course it should be news no matter the book. But the objective truth is that not only "wouldn't" it be news, it "wasn't" news when they did it to Ayn Rand books.
It's not a coincidence; it's the cause. Stuff like this happened to other books and there was barely a murmor. It takes someone flushing down the memory hole a book that is famously about flushing things down the memory hole before anyone pays attention to the memory holes. (Fahrenheit 451 would have worked, too.)
Really? I'm not aware of any above-ground buildings that can withstand wind speeds of 300 mph or higher. I've heard of buildings that can withstand fairly severe earthquakes (I'm sitting in one now) and buildings that can withstand at least average hurricanes, but never ones that can withstand the worst recorded tornadoes.
The best we have are storm cellars: you go downstairs where you're fairly safe, wait out the storm, and then see if your house is still standing. (I grew up in the midwest, and this was just something that happened in the summer. I was fortunate enough that a tornado never came closer than a few miles from our town in the time that I lived there, but of course we never knew the path of the storm when the tornado warning sirens sounded.)
It had to be 1984 (or Fahrenheit 451) for anyone to take notice. IIRC they had done the same thing to some other books the week before, and it did not make a stir. But when they did the same to 1984, it didn't take too much imagination to be scared of the possibilities, and they directly impacted people most likely to possess at least that small bit of imagination and speak up.
I have moderation points, but unfortunately, there's no option for "Fallacies - Straw Man". The closest is "Troll" but I'd like to be more specific. I mean, really:
That is an absolutely classic an attack of a straw man. Nowhere did the grandparent suggest such a massive bureaucracy to decide the necessity of individual purchases; he instead described a tax-free threshold. The number he later mentioned ($11,000; the official poverty threshold) or some fixed multiple of it would presumably be quite suitable.
But on second thought, if I were that specific I'd also need to give multiple moderations, because you've really run the gamut of dishonest arguments.
The grandparent made it quite clear that by "a flat tax discriminates against low-income earners" he's talking about their ability to pay for basic necessities, and even your example (taxes changing person A's income $10,000->$9,000 (aka poverty line - $1000 -> poverty line - $2000) and person B's income $1,000,000->$900,000 (aka poverty line + $989,000 -> poverty line + $889,000) supports that quite well if you'd care to remove the bizarre assumption that a burger-flipper has some unstated, untaxable second income and thus only needs his burger-flipping job for beer money.)
Wrong. Any US citizen employees (such as Ballmer himself) would still be subject to the FCPA.
[citation needed]
Yeah, that sounds like a great idea. I wouldn't mind seeing senior Microsoft management "subject to a fine of up to $100,000 and imprisonment for up to five years" under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
I'm not assuming, but I find it likely (and I found it disingenuous to not mention the possibility), so if you want to convince me that most of this was due to other factors you'll have to provide evidence. But thanks for the link to the WSJ article; it was interesting.