I don't see how thats a problem. The site is designed to collect the genuine opinions of anyone who cares enough to express one; these are all people with genuine opinions, expressing them.
I still maintain that the site is fulfilling its purpose perfectly in these cases - its just that its purpose is not necessarily what some folks might wish it to be. Remove politics from the issue and take tv as an example instead: If you ask the general viewing public, then the best TV out there is Real Teen Diet Angst, or some such bollocks. Is that wrong? No, not for the people who think its true. Is it useful to me? No. Now tell me what the run-of-the-mill Firefly fan thinks is the best TV on air, and you're more than likely telling me something I'll find useful...
If you have a site where the point is that everyone gets a voice, then even the idiots have to be allowed a voice.
Why does the study only project a 5-year lifespan for the hybrids in working out whether they break even?
(This is not a sarcastic question; there may be a reason to assume a 5-year lifespan... but until they tell us what that reason is, it makes it sound like a bogus study.)
I mean, if they rounded up a bunch of people who didn't care one way or the other about the story and convinced them to vote anyways - definite cheat. If one person creates a hundred Digg ids and votes with all of them - definite cheat. But if 100 people who genuinely like or do not like a story all log in once to say so, isn't that what the site is for?
The problem isn't multiple people voting, its the fact that everyones votes count towards the rating I see - even the votes of people who I' don't agree with. Digg tries to create a single online community, when it would more usefully facilitate the growth of multiple communities, and help people find which oneS they most belong in. Let the Tea Partiers digg as much as they like, and they will usefully tell other Tea Partiers about things they are interested in, and won't bother the rest of us one bit.
(And then, as the author of the main article above suggests, throw in the odd random story anyways, to keep people from getting _too_ balkanized.)
I know, I know; going to actually read the linked article breaks most/. rules of etiquette, but...
They're collecting statistical demographic data - like, "between 5:30 and 6:00 60% of people at station B are males between 25 and 35" - so they can haul it back to corporate headquarters, analyse it, and next week program the billboards to sell porn for that half-hour. They're not making the billboards react in realtime to whoever is there.
Which is a shame, really. Have you ever _seen_ a Japanese suburban train station? There's like a billion people on the platform at once, being mashed into train cars by strange little men in white gloves. Can you imagine what the system would do if it was trained to react to individuals? It'd explode! Everyone would get one pixel for their very own adspace...
If you just turned off your forums because they're a drain on employee time that generates no income and at least as much bad will as good, then you'd cop bad press for the decision. But if you make it so everyone _voluntarily_ abandons the forums, well... thats just letting people do what they want, right?
...from a guy with a purple velvet frock coat and arseless trousers. What would the-artist-formerly-known-as-LoveSquiggle know about reality? He hasn't lived there for years...
Everything ever published has at least one screenplay based on it.
Seriously. If there aren't half a dozen screenplays floating around Hollywood based on the grafitti at Central Station, I'll eat my socks. Its not worth fussing over. The fact the the movie rights to something have been bought is equally unworthy of notice; they regularly buy up rights to things that might possibly one day seem like a good idea, or even just buy up the rights to things that they think would compete against something they have in production, just to keep someone else from using it.
Now when you hear that they've hired some cameramen and actors and are starting production, _then_ you can get excited (or horrified, or whatever your reaction to hearing that one of your favorite tales is about to be Hollywoodized is.)
Wow! You mean modern technology has progressed to the point where it can approximate the results of totally inaccurate guesswork derived from people so sad that they'll actually stay on the line when phoned up by a total stranger?
Truly, technology amazes me. (Or humanity does. I can never quite keep that straight.)
On your second point - or my second point; they appear to be the same - we agree. Not all jailbreakers necessarily want the app. But its possibly (I'd even venture probably) a larger percentage than for non-jailbreakers. As an extreme example, if 10% of people are pirates, and 10% of non-pirates are potential sales, but 50% of pirates are potential sales, then stopping all of the pirates would raise your sales by more than 50% (For a million people, thats 90k sales with piracy and 140k sales without; 140/90 = 155%.) I'm not saying those numbers are correct, of course, but I am saying that without knowing what they are you can't say that there is a 10% cap.
But for your first point, I'll just quote the original article again:
only 10% of their potential customers are pirates
Not "at most 10% of their customers are pirates". Only. Perhaps it was just a slip of the tongue, but round Slashdot stating that all jailbreakers are pirates is flame-bait extrordinaire...
only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales
10% of iPhones are jailbroken != 10% of potential customers are pirates.
To establish that you would have to show:
1) ALL owners of jailbroken phones are also pirates - rather obviously not necessarily true. This might still leave the second part of the statement true - where you qualify with the phrase "at most", except for:
2) ALL iPhone owners would also have to be potential game sales as well. It seems likely - though I have no evidence to back it up at all - that jailbreakers would be more likely to be game-players (more technologically saavy, therefore more likely to use it for other things than a phone) which would _allow_ but not force your piracy rates up.
The fact that you are countering someone else's bollocks science is not an excuse to use bollocks science yourself - rather it is a mandate to get it right.
This study nicely shows that using a phrase to remember your password - even if you're not using the entire phrase as your password - helps make them harder to crack _and_ easier to remember (and therefore less likely to be stuck on a post-it note on the monitor.) And all it takes to implement is an email to new users giving them a bit of advice.
The study also notes that a certain percentage of users are just arseholes who will ignore any advice you give them, but hey; you can't fix everything with code...
Which I assume you know is a great example of why password rotation _doesn't_ work, rather than some kind of sneaky awesome password that noone will ever guess, or else you wouldn't have posted it on slashdot. The column passwords are right up the top of many a crackers dictionary.
I use them too, when someone hits me with ridiculous password requirements on an account I don't care about anyways.
Except for the fact that most users - and especially the less tech-savy ones, like most CEOs - will respond to a password rotation policy by using an easily guessable (read memorizable) series of passwords. So, when the cracked password of "T3hDude01" stops working, guess which one I'm going to try next? Betcha a dollar "T3hDude02" works...
Say what you like about Seth Green; man's got serious balls taking on a project that he knows is going to be villified from day dot by its own purported fanbase.
I'm not saying it isn't a terrible idea, but he gets a tip of the hat for courage.
There are two different objectives here: securing your information, and covering your arse. Standards compliance may have little or nothing to do with the one, but its vitally important to the other.
Re:Location without GPS
on
iPad Review
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I think the key is that _nothing_ is "the" fourth dimension; all you have is a list of candidates for "a" fourth dimension.
Or to put it another way, what is the second dimension? Is it height? Width? Depth? Depends where I start counting, doesn't it? Could be time even. Rudy Rucker wrote a good book about it, thats worth a look: The Fourth Dimension.
Slashdot Mirror
Genius!
That means they're stealing my hard-earned electricity!
No really! I'm like totally subversive and stuff; put one on _my_ car!
(Because I'm going to mail that puppy back and forth across the US so many times it'll make your little database spin.)
Heh. Actually, that was my first thought, but I decided to be charitable...
"based on... just plain bad judgment."
You mean like, they had a Facebook account with their real name on it?
I don't see how thats a problem. The site is designed to collect the genuine opinions of anyone who cares enough to express one; these are all people with genuine opinions, expressing them.
I still maintain that the site is fulfilling its purpose perfectly in these cases - its just that its purpose is not necessarily what some folks might wish it to be. Remove politics from the issue and take tv as an example instead: If you ask the general viewing public, then the best TV out there is Real Teen Diet Angst, or some such bollocks. Is that wrong? No, not for the people who think its true. Is it useful to me? No. Now tell me what the run-of-the-mill Firefly fan thinks is the best TV on air, and you're more than likely telling me something I'll find useful...
If you have a site where the point is that everyone gets a voice, then even the idiots have to be allowed a voice.
Why does the study only project a 5-year lifespan for the hybrids in working out whether they break even?
(This is not a sarcastic question; there may be a reason to assume a 5-year lifespan... but until they tell us what that reason is, it makes it sound like a bogus study.)
I mean, if they rounded up a bunch of people who didn't care one way or the other about the story and convinced them to vote anyways - definite cheat.
If one person creates a hundred Digg ids and votes with all of them - definite cheat.
But if 100 people who genuinely like or do not like a story all log in once to say so, isn't that what the site is for?
The problem isn't multiple people voting, its the fact that everyones votes count towards the rating I see - even the votes of people who I' don't agree with. Digg tries to create a single online community, when it would more usefully facilitate the growth of multiple communities, and help people find which oneS they most belong in. Let the Tea Partiers digg as much as they like, and they will usefully tell other Tea Partiers about things they are interested in, and won't bother the rest of us one bit.
(And then, as the author of the main article above suggests, throw in the odd random story anyways, to keep people from getting _too_ balkanized.)
I know, I know; going to actually read the linked article breaks most /. rules of etiquette, but...
They're collecting statistical demographic data - like, "between 5:30 and 6:00 60% of people at station B are males between 25 and 35" - so they can haul it back to corporate headquarters, analyse it, and next week program the billboards to sell porn for that half-hour. They're not making the billboards react in realtime to whoever is there.
Which is a shame, really. Have you ever _seen_ a Japanese suburban train station? There's like a billion people on the platform at once, being mashed into train cars by strange little men in white gloves. Can you imagine what the system would do if it was trained to react to individuals? It'd explode! Everyone would get one pixel for their very own adspace...
...for decades. Might as well hit them on the evil front too...
Oh well played Blizzard.
If you just turned off your forums because they're a drain on employee time that generates no income and at least as much bad will as good, then you'd cop bad press for the decision. But if you make it so everyone _voluntarily_ abandons the forums, well... thats just letting people do what they want, right?
...from a guy with a purple velvet frock coat and arseless trousers. What would the-artist-formerly-known-as-LoveSquiggle know about reality? He hasn't lived there for years...
Recursively ignorant.
Everything ever published has at least one screenplay based on it.
Seriously. If there aren't half a dozen screenplays floating around Hollywood based on the grafitti at Central Station, I'll eat my socks. Its not worth fussing over. The fact the the movie rights to something have been bought is equally unworthy of notice; they regularly buy up rights to things that might possibly one day seem like a good idea, or even just buy up the rights to things that they think would compete against something they have in production, just to keep someone else from using it.
Now when you hear that they've hired some cameramen and actors and are starting production, _then_ you can get excited (or horrified, or whatever your reaction to hearing that one of your favorite tales is about to be Hollywoodized is.)
Wow! You mean modern technology has progressed to the point where it can approximate the results of totally inaccurate guesswork derived from people so sad that they'll actually stay on the line when phoned up by a total stranger?
Truly, technology amazes me. (Or humanity does. I can never quite keep that straight.)
On your second point - or my second point; they appear to be the same - we agree. Not all jailbreakers necessarily want the app. But its possibly (I'd even venture probably) a larger percentage than for non-jailbreakers. As an extreme example, if 10% of people are pirates, and 10% of non-pirates are potential sales, but 50% of pirates are potential sales, then stopping all of the pirates would raise your sales by more than 50% (For a million people, thats 90k sales with piracy and 140k sales without; 140/90 = 155%.) I'm not saying those numbers are correct, of course, but I am saying that without knowing what they are you can't say that there is a 10% cap.
But for your first point, I'll just quote the original article again:
only 10% of their potential customers are pirates
Not "at most 10% of their customers are pirates". Only. Perhaps it was just a slip of the tongue, but round Slashdot stating that all jailbreakers are pirates is flame-bait extrordinaire...
only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales
10% of iPhones are jailbroken != 10% of potential customers are pirates.
To establish that you would have to show:
1) ALL owners of jailbroken phones are also pirates - rather obviously not necessarily true. This might still leave the second part of the statement true - where you qualify with the phrase "at most", except for:
2) ALL iPhone owners would also have to be potential game sales as well. It seems likely - though I have no evidence to back it up at all - that jailbreakers would be more likely to be game-players (more technologically saavy, therefore more likely to use it for other things than a phone) which would _allow_ but not force your piracy rates up.
The fact that you are countering someone else's bollocks science is not an excuse to use bollocks science yourself - rather it is a mandate to get it right.
This study nicely shows that using a phrase to remember your password - even if you're not using the entire phrase as your password - helps make them harder to crack _and_ easier to remember (and therefore less likely to be stuck on a post-it note on the monitor.) And all it takes to implement is an email to new users giving them a bit of advice.
The study also notes that a certain percentage of users are just arseholes who will ignore any advice you give them, but hey; you can't fix everything with code...
Which I assume you know is a great example of why password rotation _doesn't_ work, rather than some kind of sneaky awesome password that noone will ever guess, or else you wouldn't have posted it on slashdot. The column passwords are right up the top of many a crackers dictionary.
I use them too, when someone hits me with ridiculous password requirements on an account I don't care about anyways.
Sounds sensible, doesn't it?
Except for the fact that most users - and especially the less tech-savy ones, like most CEOs - will respond to a password rotation policy by using an easily guessable (read memorizable) series of passwords. So, when the cracked password of "T3hDude01" stops working, guess which one I'm going to try next? Betcha a dollar "T3hDude02" works...
"Perhaps Australia's most hated communications minister Steven Conroy could be right in his criticism of Google's privacy record after all."
Statistically, even the idiots have to get one right once in awhile by accident.
Say what you like about Seth Green; man's got serious balls taking on a project that he knows is going to be villified from day dot by its own purported fanbase.
I'm not saying it isn't a terrible idea, but he gets a tip of the hat for courage.
There are two different objectives here: securing your information, and covering your arse. Standards compliance may have little or nothing to do with the one, but its vitally important to the other.
Not Skyhook; Skynet.
I think the key is that _nothing_ is "the" fourth dimension; all you have is a list of candidates for "a" fourth dimension.
Or to put it another way, what is the second dimension? Is it height? Width? Depth? Depends where I start counting, doesn't it? Could be time even. Rudy Rucker wrote a good book about it, thats worth a look: The Fourth Dimension.