Companies can used personalized RSS to their advantage.
I should be able to go to widgetco.com and sign up for information about my widget200.
It can provide general information supporting my widget, let me know of any recalls, inform me that it's about to be out of warranty, let me know that a guiness would go great with my widget.
If it's fine tuned to my tastes then i'd have an RSS for every widget in my house.
I've had a seller fail to ship the advertised book in each of these situations.
It took me close to 2 months to get my money back from half.com, and in the end I did some detective work and called the seller up... Turns out it was an innocent mistake on their part and they refunded my cash - they hadn't even heard from half.com about my problem.
Amazon had it sorted in about 2 hours.
The plural of anecdote isn't data - but i've made my choice.
Connecting the buyer and seller is all about trust.
Lots of people (myself included) would rather buy from amazon marketplace rather than eBay. Amazon probably take a bigger cut, but they provide decent customer service and bail you out when things go wrong.
Amazon have brand recognition and consumer confidence and it'll be a struggle for anyone else (particularly a non-profit organization) to garner that kind of support.
If your competitors play it then your hand is forced and no large corporation can afford to NOT patent random crap.
For the most part these patents only exist to create some sort of nuclear stalemate - where your competitors are too afraid to sue you since it's certain that they violate some of your patents.
I think every gas station i've seen here includes tax in their gas prices. Otherwise how would people avoid putting more gas in their car than they have cash in their pocket. It's not easy for the gas station to take their product back if the customer cant afford the taxes.
I grew up in the UK where all retail sales are already priced with VAT included. Some stores show you both prices - particularly online or in places like costco.
Most receipts now show you how much VAT you paid at the bottom - it's not rocket science to advertise a tax-inclusive price but still be able to show a breakdown of where the taxes went.
In the UK it's easy to walk round the supermarket and keep a total in your head. You get to the checkout and know exactly what your bill is going to be. You get a receipt that shows exactly how much the government took.
In the US it's a nightmare. I'm pretty good with numbers but struggle to keep track of the differing tax rates and even more difficult to actualy compute the total in your head. Just like the UK, you get a receipt that shows how much the government took (state, county and city in some places)
Even though you know Comcast is only seeing the same amount of money as your ISP in the end
I'm not sure what this has to do with anything. As a consumer I really only care about the actual out of pocket costs to me. Comcast have higher costs because of taxes, but save through pure economies of scale... my broadband ISP may pay less tax, but they employ competant technical support people.
I'm not suggesting that Comcast have to hide all the various taxes, i'm merely suggesting that their advertised price should be the actual price on the bill. They can certainly itemize all the taxes - and i'd encourage them to do so.
Sales tax is at least uniform. I can compare Kroger and Safeway prices because (as long as they are both in the same jurisdiction) the taxes will be the same. I can't do that with T-Mobile and Cingular since they seem to run those figures differently.
I think comcast are screwing me by advertising one price when the actual cost of service is significantly higher. Different providers have different sets of taxes and fees so it's virtually impossible to accurately compare prices.
Another particularly nasty example is that i've booked flights recently that have a "Fuel Surcharge" added to them. In other words, gas has gotten more expensive, and rather than letting that push ticket prices up, they keep their low prices and tack on a few more dollars in fees afterwards.
I'm in full favor of companies itemizing this on a bill, but it should be included in the advertised price.
Telcos advertise artificially low prices, and then tack on the fees ON TOP.
What's to stop Comcast advertising broadband for $10/month, and adding a $20 line fee and a $15 bandwidth usage assessment to each bill. Things are going to move in that direction unless regulation dictates that people have to advertise the true cost of the service.
Every month i'm billed for X gallons of water - which is fair enough.
But i'm billed the same X number of gallons of sewerage, yet at least half my water gets sprinkled on my lawn and evaporates off instead of ending up in the city sewers.
I wouldn't mind if t-mobile advertised $50/mo service and the bill comes and it reads:
Service $47 Regulatory fees $2 Extra soft toilet paper for CEO fee $1
But instead they advertise $47 which doesn't seem right.
I had a similar conversation with a comcast rep that called me. Their service is very slightly cheaper (at face value) than my current ISP, but my ISP charge me the EXACT amount that they advertise, when i know that my comcast bill is bound to be higher.
Including taxes in the price won't actually increase the cost - it'll only bring the actual cost inline wiht the advertised price.
I have a premium (3Mb/1Mb static ip) broadband connection and it costs me only $58/mo.
Which means it's less than I spend on electricity, water, car payments, insurance... I know that I use my broadband a lot more than I use my car, or my sprinkler system.
In my case it avoids me having a 40mi round-trip commute to work each day, which probably almost pays for it.
It'd be nice if it were cheaper, but to be fair it's one of the more reasonable bills i get each month.
I cant get over that telcos are happy to pass them onto their consumers. That'd be like McDonalds adding 11c to your bigmac to pay for trash collection.
It leads to very deceptive advertising which can't be good for the consumer. Comcast and T-Mobile need to pay those taxes themselves and put sticker prices up to compensate.
While we are at it, this sort of thing is likely to push VoIP offshore. I rarely receive calls on VoIP so it wouldn't make much difference to me if it terminated in canada or mexico.
Why not just have a flat tax for each phone number and roll all these other taxes & fees into it - surely that would hit everyone fairly.
My wife is in her final year of a degree program at one of the best rated schools in the state, yet her A grade papers are fairly poor.
I don't consider myself particularly anal about spelling and grammar (especially when i post on slashdot), but i'm surprised by what will get you an A.
I've also seen other people's contributions to group projects that conffirm that my wife's work is well above average.
In the tech field it pays to be able to clearly articulate your ideas. It's not easy to describe complex technical problems, and it's hard to work in a team without good communication.
I was educated in the UK where the English language is rarely taught well. What really opened my eyes was learning French. I had to learn about all the different verb tenses, breaking down the sentence structure, and it gave me an appreciation for just how difficult it can be to comprehend poorly structured prose.
While I rarely use my French now, and have forgotten much of it, it taught me more about English than anything else.
I like java a lot and use java a lot, but this sort of benchmark doesn't prove a whole lot. It IS impressive that Java can run floating point ops at the speed of C++.
However, java is slow because of object allocation and deallocation and arguably because of the immutability of objects.
Personally i think the drop in runtime speed is acceptable given shorter development times and safer code.
If an actor is shorted and receives $50k instead of $75 is it fine for them to sue?
Except in that case, the lawyers fees would probably negate any value in suing.
Also when you start to reach the level of wealth that Jackson has, the only valuable thing to do with it is to start donating to charity. Jackson might be a money-hungry whore, but i'm certain he'll make better use of the cash than new line cinema.
I know that American Family Insurance check them in realtime since when i first applied for car insurance here they knew immediately that I wasn't a permanant resident
Since the cellphone owner has to bear the full burden of the cost of their phone, they can put more pressure on the companies to produce a decent price.
My wife and I get 500 minutes a month (to anywhere in the US or any other US cellphone), free nights, free weekends, free calls to other t-mobile users (most of our friends & collegues), unlimited data and we each have a smartphone which we can have replaced every year.
We pay around $80/month for it - In the UK that would scarely cover a few hours of web surfing.
To me fair suggests that they show both sides of a debate... it's questionable if they do. Look at their troubleshooter segments for example.
Balanced suggests that they equally represent both sides of a debate...which would suggest, to me, that it was without bias.
Personally I find they spend too much time on "curiosity stories" like runaway brides and braindead women, which would be better spent on things like international politics. I won't deny that Fox News has a higher "entertainment" value than CNN or BBC but that doesn't make them a good news source.
Slashdot Mirror
Companies can used personalized RSS to their advantage.
I should be able to go to widgetco.com and sign up for information about my widget200.
It can provide general information supporting my widget, let me know of any recalls, inform me that it's about to be out of warranty, let me know that a guiness would go great with my widget.
If it's fine tuned to my tastes then i'd have an RSS for every widget in my house.
and my old monitor is small and round.
People will be wowed by the advances in technology that they miss because they only upgrade once every 3 or 4 years.
They'll fail to see that their new shiny flatscreen is worse than their goldfish-bowl crt.
My parents still have theirs.
We opened it up sometime around '95 and fitted a harddisk, which oddly enough shows up as about 80 floppy disk drives.
Cant beat some frogger or repton3.
WAP is very quick to type on a cellphone... i always assumed the acronym was chosen for that purpose.
Well the didn't actually make it but they made it happen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro
I have fond memories of my Model B
You can probably sell the 10,000 song card on ebay for pretty close to $10,000 which should easily cover your tax bill.
I've had a seller fail to ship the advertised book in each of these situations.
It took me close to 2 months to get my money back from half.com, and in the end I did some detective work and called the seller up... Turns out it was an innocent mistake on their part and they refunded my cash - they hadn't even heard from half.com about my problem.
Amazon had it sorted in about 2 hours.
The plural of anecdote isn't data - but i've made my choice.
Had barnes and noble been behaving like a tech company then they'd have patented crossing out a books list price and displaying their lower price.
Then Amazon would have been afraid to sue B&N for fear of a retaliatory suit.
Connecting the buyer and seller is all about trust.
Lots of people (myself included) would rather buy from amazon marketplace rather than eBay. Amazon probably take a bigger cut, but they provide decent customer service and bail you out when things go wrong.
Amazon have brand recognition and consumer confidence and it'll be a struggle for anyone else (particularly a non-profit organization) to garner that kind of support.
If your competitors play it then your hand is forced and no large corporation can afford to NOT patent random crap.
For the most part these patents only exist to create some sort of nuclear stalemate - where your competitors are too afraid to sue you since it's certain that they violate some of your patents.
When does the advertised price ever include tax?
I think every gas station i've seen here includes tax in their gas prices. Otherwise how would people avoid putting more gas in their car than they have cash in their pocket. It's not easy for the gas station to take their product back if the customer cant afford the taxes.
I grew up in the UK where all retail sales are already priced with VAT included. Some stores show you both prices - particularly online or in places like costco.
Most receipts now show you how much VAT you paid at the bottom - it's not rocket science to advertise a tax-inclusive price but still be able to show a breakdown of where the taxes went.
In the UK it's easy to walk round the supermarket and keep a total in your head. You get to the checkout and know exactly what your bill is going to be. You get a receipt that shows exactly how much the government took.
In the US it's a nightmare. I'm pretty good with numbers but struggle to keep track of the differing tax rates and even more difficult to actualy compute the total in your head. Just like the UK, you get a receipt that shows how much the government took (state, county and city in some places)
Even though you know Comcast is only seeing the same amount of money as your ISP in the end
I'm not sure what this has to do with anything. As a consumer I really only care about the actual out of pocket costs to me. Comcast have higher costs because of taxes, but save through pure economies of scale... my broadband ISP may pay less tax, but they employ competant technical support people.
I'm not suggesting that Comcast have to hide all the various taxes, i'm merely suggesting that their advertised price should be the actual price on the bill. They can certainly itemize all the taxes - and i'd encourage them to do so.
Sales tax is at least uniform. I can compare Kroger and Safeway prices because (as long as they are both in the same jurisdiction) the taxes will be the same. I can't do that with T-Mobile and Cingular since they seem to run those figures differently.
I think comcast are screwing me by advertising one price when the actual cost of service is significantly higher. Different providers have different sets of taxes and fees so it's virtually impossible to accurately compare prices.
Another particularly nasty example is that i've booked flights recently that have a "Fuel Surcharge" added to them. In other words, gas has gotten more expensive, and rather than letting that push ticket prices up, they keep their low prices and tack on a few more dollars in fees afterwards.
I'm in full favor of companies itemizing this on a bill, but it should be included in the advertised price.
Telcos advertise artificially low prices, and then tack on the fees ON TOP.
What's to stop Comcast advertising broadband for $10/month, and adding a $20 line fee and a $15 bandwidth usage assessment to each bill. Things are going to move in that direction unless regulation dictates that people have to advertise the true cost of the service.
Every month i'm billed for X gallons of water - which is fair enough.
But i'm billed the same X number of gallons of sewerage, yet at least half my water gets sprinkled on my lawn and evaporates off instead of ending up in the city sewers.
I wouldn't mind if t-mobile advertised $50/mo service and the bill comes and it reads:
Service $47
Regulatory fees $2
Extra soft toilet paper for CEO fee $1
But instead they advertise $47 which doesn't seem right.
I had a similar conversation with a comcast rep that called me. Their service is very slightly cheaper (at face value) than my current ISP, but my ISP charge me the EXACT amount that they advertise, when i know that my comcast bill is bound to be higher.
Including taxes in the price won't actually increase the cost - it'll only bring the actual cost inline wiht the advertised price.
I have a premium (3Mb/1Mb static ip) broadband connection and it costs me only $58/mo.
Which means it's less than I spend on electricity, water, car payments, insurance... I know that I use my broadband a lot more than I use my car, or my sprinkler system.
In my case it avoids me having a 40mi round-trip commute to work each day, which probably almost pays for it.
It'd be nice if it were cheaper, but to be fair it's one of the more reasonable bills i get each month.
I cant get over that telcos are happy to pass them onto their consumers. That'd be like McDonalds adding 11c to your bigmac to pay for trash collection.
It leads to very deceptive advertising which can't be good for the consumer. Comcast and T-Mobile need to pay those taxes themselves and put sticker prices up to compensate.
While we are at it, this sort of thing is likely to push VoIP offshore. I rarely receive calls on VoIP so it wouldn't make much difference to me if it terminated in canada or mexico.
Why not just have a flat tax for each phone number and roll all these other taxes & fees into it - surely that would hit everyone fairly.
My wife is in her final year of a degree program at one of the best rated schools in the state, yet her A grade papers are fairly poor.
I don't consider myself particularly anal about spelling and grammar (especially when i post on slashdot), but i'm surprised by what will get you an A.
I've also seen other people's contributions to group projects that conffirm that my wife's work is well above average.
In the tech field it pays to be able to clearly articulate your ideas. It's not easy to describe complex technical problems, and it's hard to work in a team without good communication.
I was educated in the UK where the English language is rarely taught well. What really opened my eyes was learning French. I had to learn about all the different verb tenses, breaking down the sentence structure, and it gave me an appreciation for just how difficult it can be to comprehend poorly structured prose.
While I rarely use my French now, and have forgotten much of it, it taught me more about English than anything else.
I always imagined they were pretty well controlled to stop people asking difficult questions.
Kudos to the journalists for getting that number of "don't knows" from someone who is used to being in the line of fire.
I suppose in some ways it's refreshingly honest, but people in his position are almost expected to BS their way through difficult questions.
I like java a lot and use java a lot, but this sort of benchmark doesn't prove a whole lot. It IS impressive that Java can run floating point ops at the speed of C++.
However, java is slow because of object allocation and deallocation and arguably because of the immutability of objects.
Personally i think the drop in runtime speed is acceptable given shorter development times and safer code.
A contract violation is a contract violation.
If an actor is shorted and receives $50k instead of $75 is it fine for them to sue?
Except in that case, the lawyers fees would probably negate any value in suing.
Also when you start to reach the level of wealth that Jackson has, the only valuable thing to do with it is to start donating to charity. Jackson might be a money-hungry whore, but i'm certain he'll make better use of the cash than new line cinema.
But there is a mcdonalds on the road to the right
I know that American Family Insurance check them in realtime since when i first applied for car insurance here they knew immediately that I wasn't a permanant resident
Since the cellphone owner has to bear the full burden of the cost of their phone, they can put more pressure on the companies to produce a decent price.
My wife and I get 500 minutes a month (to anywhere in the US or any other US cellphone), free nights, free weekends, free calls to other t-mobile users (most of our friends & collegues), unlimited data and we each have a smartphone which we can have replaced every year.
We pay around $80/month for it - In the UK that would scarely cover a few hours of web surfing.
To me fair suggests that they show both sides of a debate... it's questionable if they do. Look at their troubleshooter segments for example.
Balanced suggests that they equally represent both sides of a debate...which would suggest, to me, that it was without bias.
Personally I find they spend too much time on "curiosity stories" like runaway brides and braindead women, which would be better spent on things like international politics. I won't deny that Fox News has a higher "entertainment" value than CNN or BBC but that doesn't make them a good news source.
I dont know any other news source that open claims that it is unbiased.
Fox make that claim when it's obviously untrue - it's hard to respect them after that.