Does anyone remember the scene in Aliens when Ripley shows up at the end in the giant robotic suit and yells to the alien 'Get away from her, you Bitch!'?
And for every 4 people that claim it wasn't them or they didn't intend to break that store window there will be 1 person who admits freely to doing it. That's better than nothing
A university friend of mine was constantly targeted at borders and airports because his background and especially because his name was one or two letters off from a known terrorist (A known terrorist that was already in jail mind you). More than once held for hours at a border while they did extensive background checks to see if he had any connection to the terrorist in question and various terror groups (The spelling difference was in the last name, so I don't really know where the logic was there). And this was even before 9-11. After 9-11 he was smart enough to know not to bother traveling. It ended up being years before this kid who had just moved away from home to go to school got to see his parents again.
Now compare Steam with other similar services. Games for Windows Live for example. I shouldn't have to outline how inferior it is to Steam to anyone who has used both. Any program whose poor programming requires me to turn off my firewall to play any games tied to it can go screw itself.
Most studies that have shown aggressive behavior have only looked at the immediate, short term effects. The flaw there is that people are very susceptible to just about any stimuli in the short term and this in no way shape or form relates to long term effects. If a person reads words related to the elderly they will walk and drive slower for a short period after. But this doesn't mean that speeding tickets are now a thing of the past for you or that you'll now start paying for things in pennies.
The effects last a couple minutes at best and are so widespread (not just in video games) that society would simply cease to function if we attempted to ban and avoid everything that causes short term psychological effects.
I personally believe that revealing things after the fact is the cowardly and less effective way of dealing with the issue. Doesn't it make more sense to bring deceit and lies to people's attention when public pressure can be used to change government behavior while those issues are ongoing? Waiting until the issues are in the past is going to leave us with only one thing: regret
The problem with reducing pricing in general, any product or service, doesn't matter which, is that the lower you reduce a price and the more often companies do it, the perceived value of that item drops and won't recover for years. (it can take up to seven years for prices to return to what consumers perceive as “normal.” - Martin Lindstrom, Neuromarketer)
There are two downsides and one upside to this:
The downside: Indy developers continually discounting their product means they will never be able to get away with selling it at full price after. If they weren't careful with their pricing, ie, the discounted price being below cost (if 'cost' can even easily be determined for a digital copy of a game) they could find themselves in trouble with funding future development.
The upside? Combined with Steam sales for big games, the discounted prices are going to devalue PC Games as a whole. You're going to see many more sales in the future since it's going to be tough to make the same money as they were used to otherwise.
Downside, part two: Publishers that aren't PC exclusive might see this as a liability for producing games for Windows/OSX. Console game sales aren't likely to be affected (or affected very little) by the devaluation of PC game prices. It can be a smaller market, the development is more complicated and the expected price for new games is dropping. The end result is obvious.
I'd also like to add: 3) What are the consequences of being caught vs the consequences in letting the event happen? 3.5) Are the odds in your favour enough to take the chance given the answer to the above?
In this case, the information is out there. Most of the damage is already done. How much damage is would even be avoided by removing it from trending topics?
Now think about how much damage it would cause to get caught asking/forcing major companies like Google and Twitter to help "reduce" the damage. I'm not only talking about the damage to the government. I'm also talking about the damage to Google and Twitter and other involved sites.
Not to mention, for a government who would go to lengths to force/ask Google and Twitter to remove trending topics, they've done a pretty awful job at reducing the damage in other mediums.
Conspiracy theories in my mind always come down to two basic questions: How many people would would need to be in the know in order to pull off such a large scale deception? And how much do you trust those people to stay silent about the conspiracy?
Let's put it this way: Top secret documents accessible by people with reasonably high security clearance are now making their rounds around the web and news media. Do you really think nobody is going to think twice about involving potentially thousands of employees in covering up secrets when clearly it can't work for some of the most classified documents in the world?
Two weeks ago I tried to find a new release PC game in a mall that has 4 stores that at one point used to stock PC games. Now, every last one of them is down to maybe one rack with awful, awful discount games and maybe a recent release if it's already managed to sell 20 million copies. Maybe it's due mostly to strategic selling by store owners, but around here I think it mostly comes down to the big companies buying up the shelf space.
Companies like Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo will shell out millions of dollars to ensure they get guaranteed prime shelf space. With no similarly sized PC Game companies able to do the same.
But don't go feeling sorry for companies like EA that are getting squeezed out of stores. EA was notorious for shelf buying years ago to the point where each of their games (including the Sim Towers and Sim Ants) would get multiple facings while competitors games (like the original Half Life) had to be turned to the side to squeeze into the remaining space.
You're oversimplifying a very, very, very complex system. We're getting better at creating vegetarian diets that can fulfill our bodies needs, but we're not quite there yet. And to remove the effects of livestock completely you're talking about a vegan diet and not a vegetarian one (A milk producing cow still requires an inefficient amount of grain to keep producing milk). And there are zero vegan diets that come anywhere close to meeting our bodies needs. And the diets that come closest are thanks to the import of grains and supplements from the other side of the planet (the transport of which kind of defeats the purpose now doesn't it?) So while we might have a Whole Foods down the street from us, the majority of the world does not. So to expect everyone to be able to survive on a vegan diet without the means to stay healthy doing it is rather short sighted.
A more sensible solution would be to reduce our meat intake to more reasonable levels and try to eliminate cows and other inefficient ruminants as long as we can ensure we get proper levels of nutrients elsewhere.
I suppose this depends on the field you're talking about. Physics and chemistry are less susceptible to corruption, but then you get fields like human biology, psychology and social 'sciences' whose data can easily be subjected to manipulation or bias. To suggest that all scientists are fully immune from bias when it comes to qualitative results is asinine and dangerous.
If science has taught us anything is that we should question everything. Never trust a source to be 100% correct.
1) Facebook didn't even have a positive cash flow until 2009. That's an awfully long time to wait around for your financial model to really kick in if you had lofty financial goals in the beginning. That was back when Facebook had about 300 Million users. Passing the 100 Million user mark (Hell, the 10 million user mark) without implementing a strong financial model makes it pretty clear to me that they were a) playing it by ear and b) weren't that eager about making tons of cash (because they certainly could have at that point).
2) Zuckerman had continually turned down enormous amounts of money for the site while also giving up significant shares in the company to third parties which would be quite contradictory behavior for someone motivated by money.
Computer technology seems to be one of the few industries left that really seems to continually push the limits in innovation. I fear the day when this isn't true.
Give users a quick link to display a -clean- Facebook page and news feed. A lot of people are getting fed up with seeing non-stop wall posts for farmville and news feed items and application requests. I've known several people to leave the site for this exact reason. Sure, you can block various applications from showing up on your news feed, but as far as I know you can't hide them from other people's pages. Even if you could do this, it would be tedious to constantly filter out every application's posts. Additionally it's also quite possible that people may want to see the items only sometimes.
Forcing people to manually block applications (ie, income generating advertisers) only does 2 things: 1) Piss people off due to the tediousness of it and 2) Permanently eliminates those advertisers ability to make money off you. Wouldn't it just make sense to make people happy and at the same time not cut off advertisers completely?
When I try to discuss this with religious people, they often argue that my 'moral code' is based off of Christian teachings and wouldn't exist otherwise.
What they fail to understand is that their moral codes were created for very sensible reasons that likely predates their religion by millenia. We are social creatures, this is how we evolved. Our ability to function within groups has always been so crucially important to our survival. So within those groups, rules naturally form to make sure that group functions as well as possible to help give it better chances of survival. In small groups "for the good of the community" reasons work fine and dandy, but when groups grow beyond Dunbar's Number then more extreme measures have to be taken (as people will lose connection with the 'community' in larger groups and no longer feel as obligated to contribute to it). And the desire to avoid eternal damnation works well for the most part.
You're right on that point. However give it enough time after it's achieved generic status and you could start losing that market share and have a very tough time maintaining it or getting it back. But that is mostly just true with physical products. In the land of the Internet websites will be born and die out long before this would ever be an issue.
You can't blame FB execs for wanting/expecting their company/product to last forever though.
In the world of marketing that is one of the worst or best things that can happen to a brand, depending on who you ask. In extreme cases people might not realize a particular name is actually just a brand name (such as escalator or thermos). It then becomes very difficult to market your product properly and next to impossible to fix it after it's already happened. Worse, if you let your brand become that genericized you risk losing the ability to enforce your trademark. In the case of thermos or escalator, the two companies can no longer sue people for using those two terms because of how widespread those names have become.
This potential privacy issue also lacks an implementation, but still represents more information than anyone specifically needs to have.
If those shoes were found to contain pieces of jagged metal as a result of a manufacturing issue, then a quick RFID scan could give a company the details it needs to issue a recall with as narrow a scope as possible. Perhaps less an issue with shoes, but for things like food, this information would invaluable. If they narrowed down an issue to one particular manufacturing line using RFID they could limit their recall to hundreds of items instead of tens of thousands. As it stands food companies try to cram as much information into some cryptic codes on their packaging, but RFID would allow even more information to be stored on the product in a way that would be much easier to decipher (with the aid of a reader that is).
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone remember the scene in Aliens when Ripley shows up at the end in the giant robotic suit and yells to the alien 'Get away from her, you Bitch!'?
I feel like this parallels nicely.
And for every 4 people that claim it wasn't them or they didn't intend to break that store window there will be 1 person who admits freely to doing it. That's better than nothing
A university friend of mine was constantly targeted at borders and airports because his background and especially because his name was one or two letters off from a known terrorist (A known terrorist that was already in jail mind you). More than once held for hours at a border while they did extensive background checks to see if he had any connection to the terrorist in question and various terror groups (The spelling difference was in the last name, so I don't really know where the logic was there). And this was even before 9-11. After 9-11 he was smart enough to know not to bother traveling. It ended up being years before this kid who had just moved away from home to go to school got to see his parents again.
Why penalize at all? Why not just completely disregard links from those sites?
Now compare Steam with other similar services. Games for Windows Live for example. I shouldn't have to outline how inferior it is to Steam to anyone who has used both. Any program whose poor programming requires me to turn off my firewall to play any games tied to it can go screw itself.
This may be the only time you'll hear me say this, but: Good work Federal Conservatives
Most studies that have shown aggressive behavior have only looked at the immediate, short term effects. The flaw there is that people are very susceptible to just about any stimuli in the short term and this in no way shape or form relates to long term effects. If a person reads words related to the elderly they will walk and drive slower for a short period after. But this doesn't mean that speeding tickets are now a thing of the past for you or that you'll now start paying for things in pennies.
The effects last a couple minutes at best and are so widespread (not just in video games) that society would simply cease to function if we attempted to ban and avoid everything that causes short term psychological effects.
I personally believe that revealing things after the fact is the cowardly and less effective way of dealing with the issue. Doesn't it make more sense to bring deceit and lies to people's attention when public pressure can be used to change government behavior while those issues are ongoing? Waiting until the issues are in the past is going to leave us with only one thing: regret
The problem with reducing pricing in general, any product or service, doesn't matter which, is that the lower you reduce a price and the more often companies do it, the perceived value of that item drops and won't recover for years. (it can take up to seven years for prices to return to what consumers perceive as “normal.” - Martin Lindstrom, Neuromarketer)
There are two downsides and one upside to this:
The downside: Indy developers continually discounting their product means they will never be able to get away with selling it at full price after. If they weren't careful with their pricing, ie, the discounted price being below cost (if 'cost' can even easily be determined for a digital copy of a game) they could find themselves in trouble with funding future development.
The upside? Combined with Steam sales for big games, the discounted prices are going to devalue PC Games as a whole. You're going to see many more sales in the future since it's going to be tough to make the same money as they were used to otherwise.
Downside, part two: Publishers that aren't PC exclusive might see this as a liability for producing games for Windows/OSX. Console game sales aren't likely to be affected (or affected very little) by the devaluation of PC game prices. It can be a smaller market, the development is more complicated and the expected price for new games is dropping. The end result is obvious.
I'd also like to add: 3) What are the consequences of being caught vs the consequences in letting the event happen? 3.5) Are the odds in your favour enough to take the chance given the answer to the above?
In this case, the information is out there. Most of the damage is already done. How much damage is would even be avoided by removing it from trending topics?
Now think about how much damage it would cause to get caught asking/forcing major companies like Google and Twitter to help "reduce" the damage. I'm not only talking about the damage to the government. I'm also talking about the damage to Google and Twitter and other involved sites.
Not to mention, for a government who would go to lengths to force/ask Google and Twitter to remove trending topics, they've done a pretty awful job at reducing the damage in other mediums.
Conspiracy theories in my mind always come down to two basic questions: How many people would would need to be in the know in order to pull off such a large scale deception? And how much do you trust those people to stay silent about the conspiracy?
Let's put it this way: Top secret documents accessible by people with reasonably high security clearance are now making their rounds around the web and news media. Do you really think nobody is going to think twice about involving potentially thousands of employees in covering up secrets when clearly it can't work for some of the most classified documents in the world?
The site Lamebook.com, a ...I guess you could call it a satire site is also in legal trouble.
Agree completely
Two weeks ago I tried to find a new release PC game in a mall that has 4 stores that at one point used to stock PC games. Now, every last one of them is down to maybe one rack with awful, awful discount games and maybe a recent release if it's already managed to sell 20 million copies. Maybe it's due mostly to strategic selling by store owners, but around here I think it mostly comes down to the big companies buying up the shelf space.
Companies like Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo will shell out millions of dollars to ensure they get guaranteed prime shelf space. With no similarly sized PC Game companies able to do the same.
But don't go feeling sorry for companies like EA that are getting squeezed out of stores. EA was notorious for shelf buying years ago to the point where each of their games (including the Sim Towers and Sim Ants) would get multiple facings while competitors games (like the original Half Life) had to be turned to the side to squeeze into the remaining space.
You're oversimplifying a very, very, very complex system. We're getting better at creating vegetarian diets that can fulfill our bodies needs, but we're not quite there yet. And to remove the effects of livestock completely you're talking about a vegan diet and not a vegetarian one (A milk producing cow still requires an inefficient amount of grain to keep producing milk). And there are zero vegan diets that come anywhere close to meeting our bodies needs. And the diets that come closest are thanks to the import of grains and supplements from the other side of the planet (the transport of which kind of defeats the purpose now doesn't it?) So while we might have a Whole Foods down the street from us, the majority of the world does not. So to expect everyone to be able to survive on a vegan diet without the means to stay healthy doing it is rather short sighted.
A more sensible solution would be to reduce our meat intake to more reasonable levels and try to eliminate cows and other inefficient ruminants as long as we can ensure we get proper levels of nutrients elsewhere.
A big chunk meaning 1.3 percent?
I suppose this depends on the field you're talking about. Physics and chemistry are less susceptible to corruption, but then you get fields like human biology, psychology and social 'sciences' whose data can easily be subjected to manipulation or bias. To suggest that all scientists are fully immune from bias when it comes to qualitative results is asinine and dangerous.
If science has taught us anything is that we should question everything. Never trust a source to be 100% correct.
Agreed.
Two supporting points:
1) Facebook didn't even have a positive cash flow until 2009. That's an awfully long time to wait around for your financial model to really kick in if you had lofty financial goals in the beginning. That was back when Facebook had about 300 Million users. Passing the 100 Million user mark (Hell, the 10 million user mark) without implementing a strong financial model makes it pretty clear to me that they were a) playing it by ear and b) weren't that eager about making tons of cash (because they certainly could have at that point).
2) Zuckerman had continually turned down enormous amounts of money for the site while also giving up significant shares in the company to third parties which would be quite contradictory behavior for someone motivated by money.
Computer technology seems to be one of the few industries left that really seems to continually push the limits in innovation. I fear the day when this isn't true.
They need one more option:
Give users a quick link to display a -clean- Facebook page and news feed. A lot of people are getting fed up with seeing non-stop wall posts for farmville and news feed items and application requests. I've known several people to leave the site for this exact reason. Sure, you can block various applications from showing up on your news feed, but as far as I know you can't hide them from other people's pages. Even if you could do this, it would be tedious to constantly filter out every application's posts. Additionally it's also quite possible that people may want to see the items only sometimes.
Forcing people to manually block applications (ie, income generating advertisers) only does 2 things: 1) Piss people off due to the tediousness of it and 2) Permanently eliminates those advertisers ability to make money off you. Wouldn't it just make sense to make people happy and at the same time not cut off advertisers completely?
When I try to discuss this with religious people, they often argue that my 'moral code' is based off of Christian teachings and wouldn't exist otherwise.
What they fail to understand is that their moral codes were created for very sensible reasons that likely predates their religion by millenia. We are social creatures, this is how we evolved. Our ability to function within groups has always been so crucially important to our survival. So within those groups, rules naturally form to make sure that group functions as well as possible to help give it better chances of survival. In small groups "for the good of the community" reasons work fine and dandy, but when groups grow beyond Dunbar's Number then more extreme measures have to be taken (as people will lose connection with the 'community' in larger groups and no longer feel as obligated to contribute to it). And the desire to avoid eternal damnation works well for the most part.
16 Labels on my personal email and about a dozen filters
75+ labels on my work email and about 3 dozen filters
Frankly, I'm going to be pissed if I did all that work for nothing
You're right on that point. However give it enough time after it's achieved generic status and you could start losing that market share and have a very tough time maintaining it or getting it back. But that is mostly just true with physical products. In the land of the Internet websites will be born and die out long before this would ever be an issue.
You can't blame FB execs for wanting/expecting their company/product to last forever though.
In the world of marketing that is one of the worst or best things that can happen to a brand, depending on who you ask. In extreme cases people might not realize a particular name is actually just a brand name (such as escalator or thermos). It then becomes very difficult to market your product properly and next to impossible to fix it after it's already happened. Worse, if you let your brand become that genericized you risk losing the ability to enforce your trademark. In the case of thermos or escalator, the two companies can no longer sue people for using those two terms because of how widespread those names have become.
I was just trying to stick with the shoes mentioned in the original post. Poor example, I agree.
And it really has little to do with protection of the customer and more to do with limiting losses and easier quality control.
This potential privacy issue also lacks an implementation, but still represents more information than anyone specifically needs to have.
If those shoes were found to contain pieces of jagged metal as a result of a manufacturing issue, then a quick RFID scan could give a company the details it needs to issue a recall with as narrow a scope as possible. Perhaps less an issue with shoes, but for things like food, this information would invaluable. If they narrowed down an issue to one particular manufacturing line using RFID they could limit their recall to hundreds of items instead of tens of thousands. As it stands food companies try to cram as much information into some cryptic codes on their packaging, but RFID would allow even more information to be stored on the product in a way that would be much easier to decipher (with the aid of a reader that is).