I think that when more vehicles come with a standard backup camera, there will be more such incidents, not fewer.
I think it is an important stat to track, regardless of whether you think these things are good. I like backup cameras, personally. But even if they are good, we need to know if the investment is paying off. At $100/car and 6.5m new cars sold per year (both a touch on the low side), we're talking about more than half a billion per year. Whether that is government spending or government mandated spending is irrelevant -- it is social spending either way. If it saves all 200 lives and all 17,000 injuries, that would be a good price. If it saves 3 lives and 200 injuries, it is too expensive. Obviously, if it costs lives, as you explain that it may, it is a very bad deal indeed.
Which is just to say that your underlying point -- that we should measure the outcome -- rings very true with me. Measuring the outcome gives us the opportunity for sober reflection -- something that often seems missing from policy rhetoric.
First of all, considering Walmart runs the whole business on just a few percentage points of margin, and does billions of dollars a year in its stores, I dont' think it's a stretch to think that they pay 1% or maybe even less on credit card charges.
Banks don't base their fees on what a customer claims they can afford to pay, and the volume discount can only go so far. The banks aren't just making up their fees -- there are costs associated with clearing those charges, and with taking some of the risk of fronting the money for the transaction. They're not just charging because they can, they're charging because it costs them money to provide the service. Wal Mart surely gets a discount off the baseline fee (2.x% + $0.0x per transaction), but to get to under 1% net, you're suggesting they get more than 50% off. That is a very big discount. Without some evidence to back up the claim, it is not particularly credible.
Second, I think you're missing a bunch of other costs someone like Walmart would have if they had to handle significantly more cash.
I think you are doing the same by, for example, ignoring the cost of the POS swipe/sign machines.
In addition to personnel directly handling the cash, there might have to be additional supervisory personnel (or additional time spent by existing supervisors).
That is why, in my calculation, I used a rate of pay of $25/hr or $50k/year. It was a rough measure, showing that even supervisor-level pay would yield far more hours than needed for the counting portion of the job. That was to demonstrate that the most expensive component of the job would leave a substantial portion of the allotted $2k to cover the remaining costs of processing. It was not an attempt to capture the itemized cost.
You might need bigger sorting rooms, bigger safes, etc.
A fine example of a relatively small additional cost that would be easily covered in the remainder of the $2k after the main labor. Take $100 of the $2k per day, that gives you $3k per month. That's about a thousand feet of commercial space plus a chunky standing safe every month.
Cashiers would have to clear out their drawers more often during shifts, taking them off the floor for various periods of time (or requiring additional personnel). You might need additional armored car runs. The banks definitely like electronic deposits better than cash, so your banking costs might change if the mix changes. You'd have to assume a certain "leakage" associated with cash -- stealing, miscounts, wrong change, etc.
All of these things either are the main labor cost used as the main estimate, or fall comfortably into the ample margin left after the main cost of labor, or have correlated costs associated with accepting credit cards. This itemizing is clouding the issue. $2k per day is $700,000 per year. Lots of small businesses operate on less revenue than that. You could have a four-man operation doing nothing but processing the drawers from one Wal-Mart, with more than enough money left over to pay for an armored car run every day.
And, finally, a topic I neglected to bring up before, but that makes a big difference for large retailers. Credit card companies provide a lot of information to the retailer about their shoppers. That information may be unavailable if shoppers use cash (this is why so many have those frequent shopper cards).
No they don't. They sell that information to the highest bidder. If Wal Mart is getting that info, they are either paying the card companies for it or buying it through some other channel. The CC companies aren't giving it away.
So let's say Walmart could get rid of most of the cost of moving around $200,000 a day, and it only costs them something like $2,000. Quickly starts to make a whole lot of sense.
Wal-Mart is the ultimate high-volume, low-skill retail, a fine benchmark case to consider. You suggest it costs Wal Mart $2k per day to process $200k in credit card revenue. That's a mighty big break they're getting from the banks, but let's go with that to be on the conservative side.
So: $2k per day to process $200,000 -- how does that compare to the cost of processing cash?
Let's say you're paying $25/hr to your cash handlers ($50k per year) at 100% overhead, so they cost you $50/hr. At $2k, that's 40 man-hours per day to process cash. At $200k revenue, they need to process $5k per hour, or $100 per minute plus a smoke break. That's less than $2 per second. I'd wager the slowest part of the the job -- bankfacing the singles, which is a very small part of the overall work -- goes faster than that. That strikes me as exceedingly do-able, particularly in that kind of volume.
So while I agree that it is an even better deal for the smaller business, I think it is still a win even on the Wal-Mart scale.
Does it? Or does it enable more money to flow through the economy? If it really was sucking retailers dry like that, wouldn't they just choose not to accept the card?... Retailers feel, and rightly so I would estimate, that the cost of not accepting credit cards is too high.
You are pointing out that retailers think accepting credit cards is better than not accepting credit cards. It does not necessarily follow that a credit card transaction is preferable to a cash transaction. My anecdotal evidence from working at a number of owner-operated retail businesses, and having been friends with other owner-operators and discussing their businesses, is that cash is still king by a solid margin -- at least with smaller retail establishments where the people handling the cash are relatively high skill and have a sense of ownership (ie: more trustworthy).
Ultimately the question is of relative transaction cost. There are plenty of special cases where the transaction cost of handling cash is distorted, but at the main street USA coffee shop or yarn store, cash has a per-dollar transaction cost very close to zero.
He deflected the issue by saying that copy protection mechanisms can be implemented in hardware, and that such hardware can be used by open source browsers.
That'd be the trusted computing component right there. Between the PS3, iPad, and iPhone getting end users accustomed to not being allowed to control their machines, and the fact that now Google is teaming up with Microsoft to turn control of your computer over to Hollywood, it's going to go through this time, I suspect. Give it another five years and you won't be able to buy a computer at a retail store that doesn't have an approved chip in it.
Ask for ROI estimates instead of (or as well as) priority estimates. This won't work in every environment, but where it works, it can have a lot of upside.
I put it in play at a company where the engineers worked directly with marketing. One of the marketing guys was a pure sociopath -- lied about his priorities every single time, regardless of the upside for the company, just to keep his numbers up. After one particularly expensive project that generated about enough revenue to cover the electricity for the coffeemaker, I asked him for an estimate of ROI on the next project.
As it happens, he was actually a pretty sharp analyst, and he gave me some really accurate figures. They were low, and he acknowledged that his new project wasn't really high priority compared to the other things on the plate. He didn't even seem upset about it -- once he had run the numbers, he couldn't deny reality. It was the numbers' fault, not mine.
As noted above, this obviously won't work in every situation. When it does, however, it is quite effective. It also has some significant upside for marketing the IT department internally. If you keep track of the estimated ROI figures, and follow up for actual figures, you can make a clear case that IT is a profit center, not a cost center (as it is often perceived).
Perhaps this is obvious, but it seems that an anarchic, leaderless grouping can be hard to keep tabs on.
I saw an article in the paper not too long ago that talked about the Mayor of Oakland having contacted the leadership of the Occupy movement to ask them to disavow Occupy Oakland. It made me want to smack my forehead. The hierarchy drones have a fundamental lack of comprehension of "distributed."
When evils progress beyond what is sufferable, you pass a tipping point where there need be no rabble-rousers. The rabble become self-rousing. These are the warning signs that our leadership has overstepped its bounds and we need to re-examine our dedication to the principles that hold us together as a free nation and people. When the rabble start rousing themselves, we would do well to assume that the more civilized among us are likewise displeased, but with more self-control. The longer we fail to correct our course, the lower the barrier to rabble-hood becomes. It's just the nuttiest x% that are genuinely acting out right now. Soon it will be the nuttiest 2*x%.
Suppose it costs $20/hour to hire a student to help proctor a test.
Suppose students take four classes per semester, two semesters per year, four exams per class, two hours per exam. That's 64 exam hours per year per student.
Hire one proctor for each of ten students. So each group of ten students will have to pay for $20 * 64 proctor hours. That's $1280 per ten students, or $128 per student per year for exam proctoring.
Now, let them use the Internet as much as they want, and have one student-proctor monitoring each group of ten students for inappropriate behavior. That costs $128 per student per year.
Now, hire an additional set of proctor-proctors for another $128 to manage and oversee the first set of proctors. Hire students from the business school and give them half a credit of management.
With twice the estimated required number of proctors, that's still only $256 per student year to closely monitor the tests. That is not a large portion of college tuition.
This sounds like a very solvable problem -- if the institution is flexible enough to come up with interesting solutions. Seems like being able to come up with that kind of solution would also be a pretty good way of judging the quality of a university -- good PR opportunity.
Having grades align well with academic proficiency seems like a high-value line item for universities. Spending less than 10% of tuition to make exams more accurately test for subtle skills seems like a worthwhile investment to me.
Sweet. I like the way you think, because I am short on cash and thought I would resell my iTunes purchased music that I don't listen to anymore to a friend of mine to raise some extra cash. First-sale doctrine being what it is, I bet I could get him to pay me a quarter a song to transfer ownership to him.
Wait... what?
Exactly so, go for it. And if your friends don't want them, there's even a market maker called "ReDigi." If they're relatively popular tracks, I think ReDigi pays more than $0.25 each.
Both. It's a license or a sale depending on which benefits the RIAA more. Apparently, music files are like photons being waves or particles. They're both until observed (brought into a court of law) when they collapse into a single (RIAA-benefiting) state.
That is funny, but bear in mind that the legal truth in this case almost certainly is that they are both -- but reversed from the RIAA's argument.
When a label gives a single master copy to iTunes and grants them a license to reproduce for retail sale, that is a license. That is important, because it means that the label is not incurring the cost of reproduction and distribution of many individual copies, and should not be retaining the pressing costs associated with vinyl records (the rational reason for copies paying the artist less).
When iTunes sells an individual copy to a retail customer, that is a sale -- but it has no bearing on the contract between the artist and the label. The artist's contract interest is in the transaction between the label and iTunes.
From a legal standpoint, it is almost certainly the case that the labels license iTunes to reproduce and distribute, and iTunes sells copies to retail customers. Trying to claim that something else is the case would require a judge with a very pliable sense of reality.
Please RTFS again. Artists get a 25% percent cut when it's a license. The MAFIAA is telling them that music through iTunes is sold, which only gives artists a 6% cut.
It's actually even worse than that. The label is arguing that when they give iTunes a single master file and a license to reproduce that file for retail sale, it is a sale. But when iTunes sells individual MP3 copies to end users, it is a license.
The legal truth is almost certainly reversed. When the label gives a single master file and license to reproduce to iTunes, it is a license. When they sell an individual copy to a retail customer, it is a sale.
when labels argued that there was no right of resale for customers.
This lawsuit appears to be discussing the transaction between the record labels and the retailers -- the transaction with which the artist has some concern. The transaction between the retailer and the retail customer is none of Sister Sledge's concern, and a federal district judge has just denied a request to shutter ReDigi on the basis that MP3's may well be traditional property. It is very possible (I would even say almost certain) that the former transaction is a license and the latter transaction is a sale.
The reason the transaction between the label and the retailers appears to be a license is because the retailer gets a single master and license to duplicate for retail sale. Hence the labels do not incur, and should not be retaining, the cost of reproducing the "records".
They're the middlemen; the brokers. The only "benefit" they have for the artists is its distribution channel and marketing/ promotions (but that''s been eroding for the past decade, thanks to the internet.)
They also provide the equivalent of venture capital to small artists with potential to go big. There is lots of room to debate the pros and cons of how those relationships are formed and how they mature (just as with venture capital). Regardless of those questions, however, it is another benefit that has to be acknowledged when forming a complete image of the problem space.
The television networks that actively supported SOPA and PIPA didn't take advantage of their broadcast credibility to press their case.
Perhaps that is sufficiently dubious in itself, given the ratio of pro-SOPA to anti-SOPA perspectives presented on the news networks. (don't forget to count single-sentence meme-casting like, "the bill before congress that would prevent online music theft")
That alone is, at best, one-eyebrow-raisingly dubious. But wait! There's more!
Let's take a hard look at the general form of that statement:
[The television networks that] actively supported SOPA and PIPA didn't take advantage of their [broadcast credibility] to press their case.
Two quick substitutions:
[Those who] actively supported SOPA and PIPA didn't take advantage of their [position] to press their case.
So, nobody who supported SOPA gave concert tickets to a Senator whose daughter just loves Bieber? Not one member of the MPAA got a Congressperson's spouse a tour around a movie studio? The Obama kids have never been introduced to a music or movie star by a SOPA supporter? Not a single record label made an introduction between a politician who was up for reelection and an ASCAP rep to talk about public performance rights on the campaign trail?
Oh yeah, and bribery. The RIAA and MPAA bribe our legislators. They give money directly to politicians, and threaten to cut the off if they don't get their way. In public. They call that "free speech" because a corporation handing a politician money is legally indistinguishable from a person speaking. And they have the gall to attack Google and Wikipedia for engaging in actual speech against the bill.
God forbid corporations should start disseminating information about legislation. There is perfectly legitimate graft and bribery going on here, and these rabble-rousers are shamelessly telling the public about the laws that are being purchased! It is unacceptable!
You're right, Javascript is a way different style of coding than C/C++/Java, but that's OK. So is Lisp. Surely you wouldn't feel wounded by having to learn Lisp. Use the different style to develop a new facet to your perspective on programming. Duck typing is pretty well respected in academic OOP, so it's not like you're going to be learning GOTO statements or anything.
Debugging is a bit harder, but that's OK, fire up Firefox, go to "Tools >> Web Developer >> Web Console." That'll give you most of what you're looking for (use console.log("message") to write to the console). You can check out Firebug also, if you want something a bit heavier. I personally ditched Firebug as soon as Firefox's Web Console got good enough, because I found Firebug a bit too clunky, but lots of people swear by it.
Leave the preconceptions and stereotypes behind, check out Wikipedia on Duck Typing and give it a go. Don't sweat it when you make noob mistakes -- you're supposed to do that when you're a noob to a language. Give it a crack, have fun with it, relax, it's really not a bad language once you get into it.
Patents are expressly designed to increase revenue flow to the patent holder. It is *always* about inhibiting the competition. Sometimes the inhibition is total ("killing"), sometimes it is limited. The decision is up to the patent holder.
Honeywell are anti-social profiteers who are using the system as it is designed.
Patents are a good mechanism. They have a positive role in a GDP maximizing economy -- inventors satisfy wants by coming up with new ideas, and a laissez-faire economy would not reward them for doing so. The well-regulated free market benefits from some degree of patent grants and enforcement.
Ever since the inception of the U.S. patent system, however, we have been increasing the duration and strength of patents, and decreasing the threshold of novelty and non-obviousness. For 200 years we have been turning the knob in the same direction; increasing the rate at which we transfer revenue from producers to inventors. We have never seriously considered turning the knob the other direction -- reducing the strength of patents in general -- and it is beginning to show. It is inhibiting our economic advancement.
We need ask whether we are channeling too much or too little revenue using the patent system knob. Are corporations spending too much on production and too little on invention, or the other way around? Are they spending too much of their revenue on acquiring patents, patent enforcement, and patent defense, or should they be spending more?
We design for behavior like Honeywell is exhibiting. Honeywell deserves to be shunned for harming our GDP for their own enrichment, and we also need to recognize that the general solution lies in diligently measuring and adjusting the patent system for optimal output.
Don't you just hate it when you strengthen a system, like patents, and it gets worse, and you strengthen it even more, and it gets worse, and you strengthen it still more, and it gets worse?
Psst -- Google, Apple, Motorola, Microsoft, IBM -- come here, I want to tell you something.
When the machine that you have built is moving too much revenue from the producers to the inventors; you can fix it by making it move less revenue from the producers to the inventors. When producing for the customer is paying less and less, and having lawyers and patents is paying more and more, and it is leading to wild legal thickets that make it unattractive to produce things for the customer, the system is out of balance. Much like copyright, the answer to a malfunctioning patent system is not always stricter patents. Sometimes the answer is weaker patents. You should be able to see that pretty clearly from where you are standing. Just open your damned eyes.
You are getting hoist by your own petard. Wake up and figure it out, already. You own the government now, so we can't do anything to help you. You've got to tell the legislators you own to cut back on patent strength, or you -- and all of us, not that you give a shit -- but you are going to lose all you have built.
Ask yourself this: Are we having more problems with companies not bothering to come up with cool new patentable things? Or are we having more problems with companies squabbling over who is allowed to build which things? If the bigger problem is the latter, it means we need to reduce the rate of revenue flow or we will all lose. It is actually a pretty easy thing to control through patent policy -- strengthen it, more revenue flows, weaken it, less revenue flows; like a faucet -- you just have to open your eyes and recognize the problem.
I put together an economics paper and sent it around to a few PhDs I know. Two of them came back with the exact response that this article indicates; "It needs more references if you want to get published." I asked if the math, logic, or conclusions were off, both responded they were not, but that was not the point. They made it clear that to get published it had to have more references to existing work, regardless of the content.
I can come up with arguments why such a policy has some merit -- keeping wacky stuff like modern monetary theory's hypothesis that there is no such thing as too much debt from distracting researchers, for example -- but good, bad, or indifferent; the fact that there is a barrier to papers which do not pay homage to existing academics is very real.
You know, like a single coordinated unrepeatable multiplane hijacking could theoretically cause an entire country to be consumed by paroxysms of paranoia for more than a decade, leading to absurd legislation, efficiency costs for hundreds of millions of people, as well as actual TRILLIONS of dollars of waste.
Well, sure, when you put it that way it sounds really stupid.:)
"Anonymous is a dangerous threat to national security. They can even listen in on phone calls on secure lines. We must have mandatory validated identification of all users of the Internet and an end to anonymity to protect our secret operations."
Do you think if Anonymous didn't exist they would say, "Well, we don't really need any more extreme measures to keep the populace quiet and compliant, because Anonymous doesn't exist. We'll just be happy with the tools we have now. We're even thinking about stopping the warrantless surveillance."
Was anonymous the cause of warrantless GPS? Warrantless surveillance? Total Information Awareness? Any of the other flagrant violations of the Fourth that have happened in the past decade?
Hardly. Anonymous is the convenient excuse of the moment, not the core motive. The core motive is, and always has been, a desire to control the "dangerous" elements in society, for our own good, by "regretfully" taking away our liberty. I'll even grant them that it is a well intentioned assault on the very reasons this nation exists. They have been getting on with it because the general populace has not been well informed. Most of our society has been more concerned with protecting their hyper-indulged fat children from threats that are 99.999% imaginary than they are with things like free speech, largely because most of them have exactly nothing interesting to say.
That is starting to change. The infringement of liberty is growing to become something that is no longer sufferable by ordinary people, despite their willingness to suffer. Anonymous is a symptom of our society reacting to authoritarian overreach -- not the cause of it.
So, to restate: More than a decade after the technical experts on the implementation side began explaining that centralized inhibition of copyright infringement is a costly boondoggle which will do far more to harm the public than to prevent copyright infringement, and more than a year after more fiscally minded people started asking whether we should be reducing copyright grants and enforcement instead of increasing them on a pure GDP maximization basis, the Tea Party decide to test the waters of supporting the rational, societally beneficial side. They did so when we technologists finally got so fed up that we started turning off the Internet. Actually, it wasn't just that -- they also realized (and frankly it was mostly this) they could use it as a political wedge issue to angle a few more seats in the power-and-pork circus.
Yeah, that's great. Nice work guys. Today you are truly statesmen.
I'll make you a deal -- you start showing some actual leadership on this issue. Start doing some research on the cost effectiveness, publishing the results, and using your offices as a serious bully pulpit to explain why the very spirit of America demands unhindered free speech on the Internet. You show that you understand why every step we have taken on digital copyright enforcement from the DMCA forward has been a direct violation of America's most sacred principles. You start trying to explain that to the populace, instead of just flapping in the breeze of popular emotionalism. You do that, then I'll stop thinking you are shameless opportunists who are only slightly less despicable on this particular issue than any of the other corrupt vermin in D.C.
Oh, and one more thing: You better make it clear that free speech means radical Muslims and American dissidents too. Everyone gets to speak, even if they are insane, evil, violent assholes.
So this means that anytime I am at a public place and fire up a VPN to access work materials I am engaged in terrorist activities?
Absolutely. Everybody knows that Patriotic Americans (ie: marketing people and executives) do not understand security well enough to benefit from a VPN. I have seen executives email annual strategy reports around in the clear, to non-corporate addresses, then tell the lower-ranked employees that they can't have a copy of the document for security reasons. I have seen marketing people send spreadsheets to one client that contain data on several other clients. It is only you freak software developers, network admins, and DBAs who get your panties all in a bunch about data security -- about using VPNs or SSH to transfer sensitive data -- and, frankly, you probably are a terrorist.
Don't think we haven't seen who you associate with. There are people on Slashdot who have had the "four boxes of liberty" thing in their sig -- and gotten moderated up to +5. Those people are openly admitting that they are terrorists, and you not only willingly associate with them but your community claims their radical anti-America agenda is +5 Insightful or +5 Interesting. How can you sit there and pretend you are not, at least, a terrorist sympathizer?
They're willing to reveal all, to act as better products for advertisers and to avoid suspicion from overbearing governments.
Poignantly said. I want that tattoo'd on my ass...
... No. I want it tattoo'd on the forehead of everyone who has ever uttered the phrase, "If you don't have anything to hide, you don't have anything to fear." An iconic scarlet 'P' would be a satisfactory substitute.
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I think that when more vehicles come with a standard backup camera, there will be more such incidents, not fewer.
I think it is an important stat to track, regardless of whether you think these things are good. I like backup cameras, personally. But even if they are good, we need to know if the investment is paying off. At $100/car and 6.5m new cars sold per year (both a touch on the low side), we're talking about more than half a billion per year. Whether that is government spending or government mandated spending is irrelevant -- it is social spending either way. If it saves all 200 lives and all 17,000 injuries, that would be a good price. If it saves 3 lives and 200 injuries, it is too expensive. Obviously, if it costs lives, as you explain that it may, it is a very bad deal indeed.
Which is just to say that your underlying point -- that we should measure the outcome -- rings very true with me. Measuring the outcome gives us the opportunity for sober reflection -- something that often seems missing from policy rhetoric.
First of all, considering Walmart runs the whole business on just a few percentage points of margin, and does billions of dollars a year in its stores, I dont' think it's a stretch to think that they pay 1% or maybe even less on credit card charges.
Banks don't base their fees on what a customer claims they can afford to pay, and the volume discount can only go so far. The banks aren't just making up their fees -- there are costs associated with clearing those charges, and with taking some of the risk of fronting the money for the transaction. They're not just charging because they can, they're charging because it costs them money to provide the service. Wal Mart surely gets a discount off the baseline fee (2.x% + $0.0x per transaction), but to get to under 1% net, you're suggesting they get more than 50% off. That is a very big discount. Without some evidence to back up the claim, it is not particularly credible.
Second, I think you're missing a bunch of other costs someone like Walmart would have if they had to handle significantly more cash.
I think you are doing the same by, for example, ignoring the cost of the POS swipe/sign machines.
In addition to personnel directly handling the cash, there might have to be additional supervisory personnel (or additional time spent by existing supervisors).
That is why, in my calculation, I used a rate of pay of $25/hr or $50k/year. It was a rough measure, showing that even supervisor-level pay would yield far more hours than needed for the counting portion of the job. That was to demonstrate that the most expensive component of the job would leave a substantial portion of the allotted $2k to cover the remaining costs of processing. It was not an attempt to capture the itemized cost.
You might need bigger sorting rooms, bigger safes, etc.
A fine example of a relatively small additional cost that would be easily covered in the remainder of the $2k after the main labor. Take $100 of the $2k per day, that gives you $3k per month. That's about a thousand feet of commercial space plus a chunky standing safe every month.
Cashiers would have to clear out their drawers more often during shifts, taking them off the floor for various periods of time (or requiring additional personnel). You might need additional armored car runs. The banks definitely like electronic deposits better than cash, so your banking costs might change if the mix changes. You'd have to assume a certain "leakage" associated with cash -- stealing, miscounts, wrong change, etc.
All of these things either are the main labor cost used as the main estimate, or fall comfortably into the ample margin left after the main cost of labor, or have correlated costs associated with accepting credit cards. This itemizing is clouding the issue. $2k per day is $700,000 per year. Lots of small businesses operate on less revenue than that. You could have a four-man operation doing nothing but processing the drawers from one Wal-Mart, with more than enough money left over to pay for an armored car run every day.
And, finally, a topic I neglected to bring up before, but that makes a big difference for large retailers. Credit card companies provide a lot of information to the retailer about their shoppers. That information may be unavailable if shoppers use cash (this is why so many have those frequent shopper cards).
No they don't. They sell that information to the highest bidder. If Wal Mart is getting that info, they are either paying the card companies for it or buying it through some other channel. The CC companies aren't giving it away.
So let's say Walmart could get rid of most of the cost of moving around $200,000 a day, and it only costs them something like $2,000. Quickly starts to make a whole lot of sense.
Wal-Mart is the ultimate high-volume, low-skill retail, a fine benchmark case to consider. You suggest it costs Wal Mart $2k per day to process $200k in credit card revenue. That's a mighty big break they're getting from the banks, but let's go with that to be on the conservative side.
So: $2k per day to process $200,000 -- how does that compare to the cost of processing cash?
Let's say you're paying $25/hr to your cash handlers ($50k per year) at 100% overhead, so they cost you $50/hr. At $2k, that's 40 man-hours per day to process cash. At $200k revenue, they need to process $5k per hour, or $100 per minute plus a smoke break. That's less than $2 per second. I'd wager the slowest part of the the job -- bankfacing the singles, which is a very small part of the overall work -- goes faster than that. That strikes me as exceedingly do-able, particularly in that kind of volume.
So while I agree that it is an even better deal for the smaller business, I think it is still a win even on the Wal-Mart scale.
Does it? Or does it enable more money to flow through the economy? If it really was sucking retailers dry like that, wouldn't they just choose not to accept the card? ... Retailers feel, and rightly so I would estimate, that the cost of not accepting credit cards is too high.
You are pointing out that retailers think accepting credit cards is better than not accepting credit cards. It does not necessarily follow that a credit card transaction is preferable to a cash transaction. My anecdotal evidence from working at a number of owner-operated retail businesses, and having been friends with other owner-operators and discussing their businesses, is that cash is still king by a solid margin -- at least with smaller retail establishments where the people handling the cash are relatively high skill and have a sense of ownership (ie: more trustworthy).
Ultimately the question is of relative transaction cost. There are plenty of special cases where the transaction cost of handling cash is distorted, but at the main street USA coffee shop or yarn store, cash has a per-dollar transaction cost very close to zero.
He deflected the issue by saying that copy protection mechanisms can be implemented in hardware, and that such hardware can be used by open source browsers.
That'd be the trusted computing component right there. Between the PS3, iPad, and iPhone getting end users accustomed to not being allowed to control their machines, and the fact that now Google is teaming up with Microsoft to turn control of your computer over to Hollywood, it's going to go through this time, I suspect. Give it another five years and you won't be able to buy a computer at a retail store that doesn't have an approved chip in it.
Ask for ROI estimates instead of (or as well as) priority estimates. This won't work in every environment, but where it works, it can have a lot of upside.
I put it in play at a company where the engineers worked directly with marketing. One of the marketing guys was a pure sociopath -- lied about his priorities every single time, regardless of the upside for the company, just to keep his numbers up. After one particularly expensive project that generated about enough revenue to cover the electricity for the coffeemaker, I asked him for an estimate of ROI on the next project.
As it happens, he was actually a pretty sharp analyst, and he gave me some really accurate figures. They were low, and he acknowledged that his new project wasn't really high priority compared to the other things on the plate. He didn't even seem upset about it -- once he had run the numbers, he couldn't deny reality. It was the numbers' fault, not mine.
As noted above, this obviously won't work in every situation. When it does, however, it is quite effective. It also has some significant upside for marketing the IT department internally. If you keep track of the estimated ROI figures, and follow up for actual figures, you can make a clear case that IT is a profit center, not a cost center (as it is often perceived).
Perhaps this is obvious, but it seems that an anarchic, leaderless grouping can be hard to keep tabs on.
I saw an article in the paper not too long ago that talked about the Mayor of Oakland having contacted the leadership of the Occupy movement to ask them to disavow Occupy Oakland. It made me want to smack my forehead. The hierarchy drones have a fundamental lack of comprehension of "distributed."
When evils progress beyond what is sufferable, you pass a tipping point where there need be no rabble-rousers. The rabble become self-rousing. These are the warning signs that our leadership has overstepped its bounds and we need to re-examine our dedication to the principles that hold us together as a free nation and people. When the rabble start rousing themselves, we would do well to assume that the more civilized among us are likewise displeased, but with more self-control. The longer we fail to correct our course, the lower the barrier to rabble-hood becomes. It's just the nuttiest x% that are genuinely acting out right now. Soon it will be the nuttiest 2*x%.
Suppose it costs $20/hour to hire a student to help proctor a test.
Suppose students take four classes per semester, two semesters per year, four exams per class, two hours per exam. That's 64 exam hours per year per student.
Hire one proctor for each of ten students. So each group of ten students will have to pay for $20 * 64 proctor hours. That's $1280 per ten students, or $128 per student per year for exam proctoring.
Now, let them use the Internet as much as they want, and have one student-proctor monitoring each group of ten students for inappropriate behavior. That costs $128 per student per year.
Now, hire an additional set of proctor-proctors for another $128 to manage and oversee the first set of proctors. Hire students from the business school and give them half a credit of management.
With twice the estimated required number of proctors, that's still only $256 per student year to closely monitor the tests. That is not a large portion of college tuition.
This sounds like a very solvable problem -- if the institution is flexible enough to come up with interesting solutions. Seems like being able to come up with that kind of solution would also be a pretty good way of judging the quality of a university -- good PR opportunity.
Having grades align well with academic proficiency seems like a high-value line item for universities. Spending less than 10% of tuition to make exams more accurately test for subtle skills seems like a worthwhile investment to me.
Sweet. I like the way you think, because I am short on cash and thought I would resell my iTunes purchased music that I don't listen to anymore to a friend of mine to raise some extra cash. First-sale doctrine being what it is, I bet I could get him to pay me a quarter a song to transfer ownership to him.
Wait... what?
Exactly so, go for it. And if your friends don't want them, there's even a market maker called "ReDigi." If they're relatively popular tracks, I think ReDigi pays more than $0.25 each.
Both. It's a license or a sale depending on which benefits the RIAA more. Apparently, music files are like photons being waves or particles. They're both until observed (brought into a court of law) when they collapse into a single (RIAA-benefiting) state.
That is funny, but bear in mind that the legal truth in this case almost certainly is that they are both -- but reversed from the RIAA's argument.
When a label gives a single master copy to iTunes and grants them a license to reproduce for retail sale, that is a license. That is important, because it means that the label is not incurring the cost of reproduction and distribution of many individual copies, and should not be retaining the pressing costs associated with vinyl records (the rational reason for copies paying the artist less).
When iTunes sells an individual copy to a retail customer, that is a sale -- but it has no bearing on the contract between the artist and the label. The artist's contract interest is in the transaction between the label and iTunes.
From a legal standpoint, it is almost certainly the case that the labels license iTunes to reproduce and distribute, and iTunes sells copies to retail customers. Trying to claim that something else is the case would require a judge with a very pliable sense of reality.
Please RTFS again. Artists get a 25% percent cut when it's a license. The MAFIAA is telling them that music through iTunes is sold, which only gives artists a 6% cut.
It's actually even worse than that. The label is arguing that when they give iTunes a single master file and a license to reproduce that file for retail sale, it is a sale. But when iTunes sells individual MP3 copies to end users, it is a license.
The legal truth is almost certainly reversed. When the label gives a single master file and license to reproduce to iTunes, it is a license. When they sell an individual copy to a retail customer, it is a sale.
when labels argued that there was no right of resale for customers.
This lawsuit appears to be discussing the transaction between the record labels and the retailers -- the transaction with which the artist has some concern. The transaction between the retailer and the retail customer is none of Sister Sledge's concern, and a federal district judge has just denied a request to shutter ReDigi on the basis that MP3's may well be traditional property. It is very possible (I would even say almost certain) that the former transaction is a license and the latter transaction is a sale.
The reason the transaction between the label and the retailers appears to be a license is because the retailer gets a single master and license to duplicate for retail sale. Hence the labels do not incur, and should not be retaining, the cost of reproducing the "records".
They're the middlemen; the brokers. The only "benefit" they have for the artists is its distribution channel and marketing/ promotions (but that''s been eroding for the past decade, thanks to the internet.)
They also provide the equivalent of venture capital to small artists with potential to go big. There is lots of room to debate the pros and cons of how those relationships are formed and how they mature (just as with venture capital). Regardless of those questions, however, it is another benefit that has to be acknowledged when forming a complete image of the problem space.
The television networks that actively supported SOPA and PIPA didn't take advantage of their broadcast credibility to press their case.
Perhaps that is sufficiently dubious in itself, given the ratio of pro-SOPA to anti-SOPA perspectives presented on the news networks. (don't forget to count single-sentence meme-casting like, "the bill before congress that would prevent online music theft")
That alone is, at best, one-eyebrow-raisingly dubious. But wait! There's more!
Let's take a hard look at the general form of that statement:
[The television networks that] actively supported SOPA and PIPA didn't take advantage of their [broadcast credibility] to press their case.
Two quick substitutions:
[Those who] actively supported SOPA and PIPA didn't take advantage of their [position] to press their case.
So, nobody who supported SOPA gave concert tickets to a Senator whose daughter just loves Bieber? Not one member of the MPAA got a Congressperson's spouse a tour around a movie studio? The Obama kids have never been introduced to a music or movie star by a SOPA supporter? Not a single record label made an introduction between a politician who was up for reelection and an ASCAP rep to talk about public performance rights on the campaign trail?
Oh yeah, and bribery. The RIAA and MPAA bribe our legislators. They give money directly to politicians, and threaten to cut the off if they don't get their way. In public. They call that "free speech" because a corporation handing a politician money is legally indistinguishable from a person speaking. And they have the gall to attack Google and Wikipedia for engaging in actual speech against the bill.
God forbid corporations should start disseminating information about legislation. There is perfectly legitimate graft and bribery going on here, and these rabble-rousers are shamelessly telling the public about the laws that are being purchased! It is unacceptable!
Some people need to go to jail.
You're right, Javascript is a way different style of coding than C/C++/Java, but that's OK. So is Lisp. Surely you wouldn't feel wounded by having to learn Lisp. Use the different style to develop a new facet to your perspective on programming. Duck typing is pretty well respected in academic OOP, so it's not like you're going to be learning GOTO statements or anything.
Debugging is a bit harder, but that's OK, fire up Firefox, go to "Tools >> Web Developer >> Web Console." That'll give you most of what you're looking for (use console.log("message") to write to the console). You can check out Firebug also, if you want something a bit heavier. I personally ditched Firebug as soon as Firefox's Web Console got good enough, because I found Firebug a bit too clunky, but lots of people swear by it.
Leave the preconceptions and stereotypes behind, check out Wikipedia on Duck Typing and give it a go. Don't sweat it when you make noob mistakes -- you're supposed to do that when you're a noob to a language. Give it a crack, have fun with it, relax, it's really not a bad language once you get into it.
If people buy more window panes because someone's going around breaking all the windows, that's good for the GDP
Only in the short run. Non-productive damage to useful capital necessarily reduces long-run GDP growth.
This is about killing the competition.
Patents are expressly designed to increase revenue flow to the patent holder. It is *always* about inhibiting the competition. Sometimes the inhibition is total ("killing"), sometimes it is limited. The decision is up to the patent holder.
Honeywell are anti-social profiteers who are using the system as it is designed.
Patents are a good mechanism. They have a positive role in a GDP maximizing economy -- inventors satisfy wants by coming up with new ideas, and a laissez-faire economy would not reward them for doing so. The well-regulated free market benefits from some degree of patent grants and enforcement.
Ever since the inception of the U.S. patent system, however, we have been increasing the duration and strength of patents, and decreasing the threshold of novelty and non-obviousness. For 200 years we have been turning the knob in the same direction; increasing the rate at which we transfer revenue from producers to inventors. We have never seriously considered turning the knob the other direction -- reducing the strength of patents in general -- and it is beginning to show. It is inhibiting our economic advancement.
We need ask whether we are channeling too much or too little revenue using the patent system knob. Are corporations spending too much on production and too little on invention, or the other way around? Are they spending too much of their revenue on acquiring patents, patent enforcement, and patent defense, or should they be spending more?
We design for behavior like Honeywell is exhibiting. Honeywell deserves to be shunned for harming our GDP for their own enrichment, and we also need to recognize that the general solution lies in diligently measuring and adjusting the patent system for optimal output.
Don't you just hate it when you strengthen a system, like patents, and it gets worse, and you strengthen it even more, and it gets worse, and you strengthen it still more, and it gets worse?
Psst -- Google, Apple, Motorola, Microsoft, IBM -- come here, I want to tell you something.
When the machine that you have built is moving too much revenue from the producers to the inventors; you can fix it by making it move less revenue from the producers to the inventors. When producing for the customer is paying less and less, and having lawyers and patents is paying more and more, and it is leading to wild legal thickets that make it unattractive to produce things for the customer, the system is out of balance. Much like copyright, the answer to a malfunctioning patent system is not always stricter patents. Sometimes the answer is weaker patents. You should be able to see that pretty clearly from where you are standing. Just open your damned eyes.
You are getting hoist by your own petard. Wake up and figure it out, already. You own the government now, so we can't do anything to help you. You've got to tell the legislators you own to cut back on patent strength, or you -- and all of us, not that you give a shit -- but you are going to lose all you have built.
Ask yourself this: Are we having more problems with companies not bothering to come up with cool new patentable things? Or are we having more problems with companies squabbling over who is allowed to build which things? If the bigger problem is the latter, it means we need to reduce the rate of revenue flow or we will all lose. It is actually a pretty easy thing to control through patent policy -- strengthen it, more revenue flows, weaken it, less revenue flows; like a faucet -- you just have to open your eyes and recognize the problem.
I put together an economics paper and sent it around to a few PhDs I know. Two of them came back with the exact response that this article indicates; "It needs more references if you want to get published." I asked if the math, logic, or conclusions were off, both responded they were not, but that was not the point. They made it clear that to get published it had to have more references to existing work, regardless of the content.
I can come up with arguments why such a policy has some merit -- keeping wacky stuff like modern monetary theory's hypothesis that there is no such thing as too much debt from distracting researchers, for example -- but good, bad, or indifferent; the fact that there is a barrier to papers which do not pay homage to existing academics is very real.
You know, like a single coordinated unrepeatable multiplane hijacking could theoretically cause an entire country to be consumed by paroxysms of paranoia for more than a decade, leading to absurd legislation, efficiency costs for hundreds of millions of people, as well as actual TRILLIONS of dollars of waste.
Well, sure, when you put it that way it sounds really stupid. :)
What destruction has Anonymous caused that compares to suppression of the 1st amendment?
Well said. Thanks.
"Anonymous is a dangerous threat to national security. They can even listen in on phone calls on secure lines. We must have mandatory validated identification of all users of the Internet and an end to anonymity to protect our secret operations."
Do you think if Anonymous didn't exist they would say, "Well, we don't really need any more extreme measures to keep the populace quiet and compliant, because Anonymous doesn't exist. We'll just be happy with the tools we have now. We're even thinking about stopping the warrantless surveillance."
Was anonymous the cause of warrantless GPS? Warrantless surveillance? Total Information Awareness? Any of the other flagrant violations of the Fourth that have happened in the past decade?
Hardly. Anonymous is the convenient excuse of the moment, not the core motive. The core motive is, and always has been, a desire to control the "dangerous" elements in society, for our own good, by "regretfully" taking away our liberty. I'll even grant them that it is a well intentioned assault on the very reasons this nation exists. They have been getting on with it because the general populace has not been well informed. Most of our society has been more concerned with protecting their hyper-indulged fat children from threats that are 99.999% imaginary than they are with things like free speech, largely because most of them have exactly nothing interesting to say.
That is starting to change. The infringement of liberty is growing to become something that is no longer sufferable by ordinary people, despite their willingness to suffer. Anonymous is a symptom of our society reacting to authoritarian overreach -- not the cause of it.
So, to restate: More than a decade after the technical experts on the implementation side began explaining that centralized inhibition of copyright infringement is a costly boondoggle which will do far more to harm the public than to prevent copyright infringement, and more than a year after more fiscally minded people started asking whether we should be reducing copyright grants and enforcement instead of increasing them on a pure GDP maximization basis, the Tea Party decide to test the waters of supporting the rational, societally beneficial side. They did so when we technologists finally got so fed up that we started turning off the Internet. Actually, it wasn't just that -- they also realized (and frankly it was mostly this) they could use it as a political wedge issue to angle a few more seats in the power-and-pork circus.
Yeah, that's great. Nice work guys. Today you are truly statesmen.
I'll make you a deal -- you start showing some actual leadership on this issue. Start doing some research on the cost effectiveness, publishing the results, and using your offices as a serious bully pulpit to explain why the very spirit of America demands unhindered free speech on the Internet. You show that you understand why every step we have taken on digital copyright enforcement from the DMCA forward has been a direct violation of America's most sacred principles. You start trying to explain that to the populace, instead of just flapping in the breeze of popular emotionalism. You do that, then I'll stop thinking you are shameless opportunists who are only slightly less despicable on this particular issue than any of the other corrupt vermin in D.C.
Oh, and one more thing: You better make it clear that free speech means radical Muslims and American dissidents too. Everyone gets to speak, even if they are insane, evil, violent assholes.
So this means that anytime I am at a public place and fire up a VPN to access work materials I am engaged in terrorist activities?
Absolutely. Everybody knows that Patriotic Americans (ie: marketing people and executives) do not understand security well enough to benefit from a VPN. I have seen executives email annual strategy reports around in the clear, to non-corporate addresses, then tell the lower-ranked employees that they can't have a copy of the document for security reasons. I have seen marketing people send spreadsheets to one client that contain data on several other clients. It is only you freak software developers, network admins, and DBAs who get your panties all in a bunch about data security -- about using VPNs or SSH to transfer sensitive data -- and, frankly, you probably are a terrorist.
Don't think we haven't seen who you associate with. There are people on Slashdot who have had the "four boxes of liberty" thing in their sig -- and gotten moderated up to +5. Those people are openly admitting that they are terrorists, and you not only willingly associate with them but your community claims their radical anti-America agenda is +5 Insightful or +5 Interesting. How can you sit there and pretend you are not, at least, a terrorist sympathizer?
They're willing to reveal all, to act as better products for advertisers and to avoid suspicion from overbearing governments.
Poignantly said. I want that tattoo'd on my ass ...
... No. I want it tattoo'd on the forehead of everyone who has ever uttered the phrase, "If you don't have anything to hide, you don't have anything to fear." An iconic scarlet 'P' would be a satisfactory substitute.