There may be a disparity between Apple's actual ability to make money and the stock price. But 90%? Seems unlikely, not when they own a third of the cell phone market.
If the site needs another source of revenue, they'll find it be it micropayments, subscriptions, etc.
Or they'll just become junk content sites or go out of business, which is what usually happens,.,
When did advertising suddenly become evil, after 300+ years of being the main revenue source for most media? I'll answer my own question: when technology started making it easy for people to rip off content. So people like you need to rationalize their selfish behavior, and invented a new, not very logical, moral model.
Mind you, I'd love to see content providers start relying on payments from readers. Better revenue streams would attract more quality content online in place of the pervasive low-budget crap we have now. (And I do mean you, Ariana!) But I don't see it happening any time soon. Micropayment systems never seem to reach critical mass, and few people can afford to subscribe to all the web sites they access.
BTW, the only reason ad-blocking even works is that only a few techies know how to do it. If ad-blockers became really pervasive, content providers would just block users who used them — as some already do.
Now that you mention it, I was thinking about a sociopath too. And I think you're wrong. Yeah, a good sociopath wears an effective mask. But I think it would be a lot easier to conceal the enjoyment of the odd weekend murder spree than it would be to conceal enjoyment of spending an entire workday staring at degrading crap.
The story makes it sound like Google only uses contractors for this job because they know nobody could hold it down for more than a year. But it sounds more like Google is misusing contractors the way I've seen happen at many high-tech companies. Bad managers don't have it together well enough to come up with a proper plan for expanding their departments, so whenever they have a new project that needs heads they don't have, they hire some contractors. These are always hired under a time limit, to avoid a repeat of the Vizcaino v Microsoft lawsuit.
This ties in with one of my pet peeve with Google: they only seem to hire really brilliant people with great academic credentials who are never expected to bother themselves with scutwork. On the rare occasions when they realize that the scutwork can't be avoided (like manual crap filtering) they hire temps. Thus scutwork either doesn't get done or is done by people who aren't really a part of the employee community, and don't coordinate well with the real employees. That's why so many of their commercial products die on the vine, why so many of their products stay in beta mode for years, and why they have such abysmal documentation and tech support.
They did two things right: they came up with the best search engine ever, and they figured out how to make it generate huge tons of money. This allows the rest of the company to be run wastefully and ineffectively. The shareholders don't care for this, but the voting stock is controlled by a small cadre of insiders.
The worst cubicle job in the world is better than 12 hour days following a donkey around a field.
Technical innovation is important, but it isn't very valuable without means to turn it into mass-produced goods. That means large-scale production, not little factories scattered little independent entities. Without large-scale industry, the computer you're using right now, which has more computing power than existed on the entire planet 40 years ago, would simply not exist. And not because nobody knew how to build it, but because nobody could afford to.
Easy enough to test. Approach a stranger on the street and threaten to kill them. I predict that a cop will magically appear and educate you as to the current state of the law
It's amused me that one's right to free speech is limited by the need to protect the safety of others, but the right to own weapons is considered inviolable. Tell me, which of these two rights is more important in a democracy?
Or perhaps he has a couple of fully auto M-16s, a couple thousand rounds of ammo, a couple of grenades and maybe some other souvenirs of the Middle East.
Being a crazy person with enough weapons to wipe out a small town is protected by the 2nd amendment!
The fact that the UK government chartered and then de-chartered the EIC is beside the point All corporations operate under government charter.
The Earl of Cumberland (who was still a commoner in 1600) was in no sense part of the government. He was an MP at the time. He got a charter and sold shares.
John Company did a lot of things that we associate with governments. But in that period it was pretty common for private entities to control territory and fight wars. I live in what used to be the Columbia District of the Hudson Bay Company. They also had their own flag, had an army (they built Fort Vancouver just across the river from where I live in Portland) and even signed treaties. But they weren't an arm of the British Government; if they had been, they would have worked harder to maintain UK control south of the 49th parallel. But that would have meant encouraging Canadian settlers, who would have cleared land that HBC wanted to continue to exploit for their lucrative fur trade. So the region filled up with American settlers (despite HBC's best efforts to discourage them) and is now part of the U.S.
By the same token, East India Company was beholden to its shareholders, not to the UK government. That's why they lost their charter — they were too busy exploiting India to actually rule it properly.
I think the important point is that threatening to lift an organization's charter for vague, general reasons is pretty impractical. It happened to Cleveland Clinic because they were mismanaging a important community resource. It would be very hard to justify that for a forprofit corporation. "Hello, IBM? We're shutting you down because your public stakeholders think you're a bunch of creeps."
I think you've latched onto one of those internet memes that proposes some magic formula to make things right. If you want big corporations to behave, you need to better laws and regulations, and better enforcement of same, That's complicated and boring and makes a louse meme, but it's the only way that's going to work.
Well OK, I was wrong to call you apathetic. But good luck with bootstraping a "pure" political system. Even if you succeed in creating a new political party, what are the odds that it will escape the fate of every other major political movement: being capture by the very professional political operatives you despise?
If you want real change, you're more likely to get results demanding reform of existing power structures instead of trying to invent new ones from scratch.
The EIC didn't simply own a lot of land. They were effectively the sovereign rulers of India for about 80 years.
However, you're wrong to call them a government corporation — John Company was founded and controlled by private individuals. If they'd been an arm of the British government, they probably would have had less power than they actually had.
You're actually understating your case — shares eventually reached 1K. Then it became obvious that the company wasn't all that profitable and the shares lost about 90% of their value. Not likely to happen to Apple, of course, but it's a reminder of how investors can go crazy over a sexy stock.
I disagree that advocating political reform "rewards corruption". But even if it did, simply refusing to participate at all (except for whining about how bad things are) is the very definition of apathy.
I think the Obama administration has accomplished a lot more than you give it credit for. But even if you find them unsatisfactory, you might consider how they've hamstrung by Senate filibusters blocking appointment of key officials. Reform of the Senate so that supermajorities aren't required for every little issue would make a big difference. Agitating for reform would make a big difference — unless you're absolutely committed to your militant apathy.
I suppose you could probably get a consistent value if you were very specific about the physical setup and the benchmark. But it wouldn't be that much different from the theoretical limit, and wouldn't tell you jack about real-world use cases.
Benchmarking is a complicated, controversial branch of computing. Any time you try to "prove" that one piece of hardware or software is faster than another, somebody who's selling competing technologies will show you benchmarks to "prove" that you're wrong. You're not going to get any objective measures this way, especially not for ethernet, which is highly stochastic.
Slashdot Mirror
There may be a disparity between Apple's actual ability to make money and the stock price. But 90%? Seems unlikely, not when they own a third of the cell phone market.
If the site needs another source of revenue, they'll find it be it micropayments, subscriptions, etc.
Or they'll just become junk content sites or go out of business, which is what usually happens,.,
When did advertising suddenly become evil, after 300+ years of being the main revenue source for most media? I'll answer my own question: when technology started making it easy for people to rip off content. So people like you need to rationalize their selfish behavior, and invented a new, not very logical, moral model.
Mind you, I'd love to see content providers start relying on payments from readers. Better revenue streams would attract more quality content online in place of the pervasive low-budget crap we have now. (And I do mean you, Ariana!) But I don't see it happening any time soon. Micropayment systems never seem to reach critical mass, and few people can afford to subscribe to all the web sites they access.
BTW, the only reason ad-blocking even works is that only a few techies know how to do it. If ad-blockers became really pervasive, content providers would just block users who used them — as some already do.
Thank you for exemplifying what a waste of space AC posts are.
Perhaps you're right about the sociopath's ability to do the job. Indeed, maybe they'd be more objective about it than a more empathic person.
And I wouldn't worry too much about feeding a crazy imagination. Anybody with access to Google (!) can do that without help.
Huh, we may have stumbled on a way for lifers to earn their upkeep....
An entirely subjective opinion that justifies itself in a gross misrepresentation of the work entailed.
Have you ever plowed a field? If not, your evaluation is as subjective as mine, and a lot less consistent with basic human psychology.
Now that you mention it, I was thinking about a sociopath too. And I think you're wrong. Yeah, a good sociopath wears an effective mask. But I think it would be a lot easier to conceal the enjoyment of the odd weekend murder spree than it would be to conceal enjoyment of spending an entire workday staring at degrading crap.
The story makes it sound like Google only uses contractors for this job because they know nobody could hold it down for more than a year. But it sounds more like Google is misusing contractors the way I've seen happen at many high-tech companies. Bad managers don't have it together well enough to come up with a proper plan for expanding their departments, so whenever they have a new project that needs heads they don't have, they hire some contractors. These are always hired under a time limit, to avoid a repeat of the Vizcaino v Microsoft lawsuit.
This ties in with one of my pet peeve with Google: they only seem to hire really brilliant people with great academic credentials who are never expected to bother themselves with scutwork. On the rare occasions when they realize that the scutwork can't be avoided (like manual crap filtering) they hire temps. Thus scutwork either doesn't get done or is done by people who aren't really a part of the employee community, and don't coordinate well with the real employees. That's why so many of their commercial products die on the vine, why so many of their products stay in beta mode for years, and why they have such abysmal documentation and tech support.
They did two things right: they came up with the best search engine ever, and they figured out how to make it generate huge tons of money. This allows the rest of the company to be run wastefully and ineffectively. The shareholders don't care for this, but the voting stock is controlled by a small cadre of insiders.
A psychopath wouldn't be very good at such a job. He's look at a video of kittens being eviscerated and wonder why anybody would be bothered by it.
The worst cubicle job in the world is better than 12 hour days following a donkey around a field.
Technical innovation is important, but it isn't very valuable without means to turn it into mass-produced goods. That means large-scale production, not little factories scattered little independent entities. Without large-scale industry, the computer you're using right now, which has more computing power than existed on the entire planet 40 years ago, would simply not exist. And not because nobody knew how to build it, but because nobody could afford to.
Subsistence farming is a really boring way to make a living.
Easy enough to test. Approach a stranger on the street and threaten to kill them. I predict that a cop will magically appear and educate you as to the current state of the law
It's amused me that one's right to free speech is limited by the need to protect the safety of others, but the right to own weapons is considered inviolable. Tell me, which of these two rights is more important in a democracy?
Or perhaps he has a couple of fully auto M-16s, a couple thousand rounds of ammo, a couple of grenades and maybe some other souvenirs of the Middle East.
Being a crazy person with enough weapons to wipe out a small town is protected by the 2nd amendment!
The fact that the UK government chartered and then de-chartered the EIC is beside the point All corporations operate under government charter.
The Earl of Cumberland (who was still a commoner in 1600) was in no sense part of the government. He was an MP at the time. He got a charter and sold shares.
John Company did a lot of things that we associate with governments. But in that period it was pretty common for private entities to control territory and fight wars. I live in what used to be the Columbia District of the Hudson Bay Company. They also had their own flag, had an army (they built Fort Vancouver just across the river from where I live in Portland) and even signed treaties. But they weren't an arm of the British Government; if they had been, they would have worked harder to maintain UK control south of the 49th parallel. But that would have meant encouraging Canadian settlers, who would have cleared land that HBC wanted to continue to exploit for their lucrative fur trade. So the region filled up with American settlers (despite HBC's best efforts to discourage them) and is now part of the U.S.
By the same token, East India Company was beholden to its shareholders, not to the UK government. That's why they lost their charter — they were too busy exploiting India to actually rule it properly.
I think the important point is that threatening to lift an organization's charter for vague, general reasons is pretty impractical. It happened to Cleveland Clinic because they were mismanaging a important community resource. It would be very hard to justify that for a forprofit corporation. "Hello, IBM? We're shutting you down because your public stakeholders think you're a bunch of creeps."
I think you've latched onto one of those internet memes that proposes some magic formula to make things right. If you want big corporations to behave, you need to better laws and regulations, and better enforcement of same, That's complicated and boring and makes a louse meme, but it's the only way that's going to work.
Isn't tinkering exactly what you're doing? For a new political party to get anywhere, it has to participate in the very corrupt process you condemn.
So, no mass production? No large-scale farming? Get ready to pay a lot more money for everything.
Well OK, I was wrong to call you apathetic. But good luck with bootstraping a "pure" political system. Even if you succeed in creating a new political party, what are the odds that it will escape the fate of every other major political movement: being capture by the very professional political operatives you despise?
If you want real change, you're more likely to get results demanding reform of existing power structures instead of trying to invent new ones from scratch.
The EIC didn't simply own a lot of land. They were effectively the sovereign rulers of India for about 80 years.
However, you're wrong to call them a government corporation — John Company was founded and controlled by private individuals. If they'd been an arm of the British government, they probably would have had less power than they actually had.
You're actually understating your case — shares eventually reached 1K. Then it became obvious that the company wasn't all that profitable and the shares lost about 90% of their value. Not likely to happen to Apple, of course, but it's a reminder of how investors can go crazy over a sexy stock.
I disagree that advocating political reform "rewards corruption". But even if it did, simply refusing to participate at all (except for whining about how bad things are) is the very definition of apathy.
So, all we have to do is roll our economic model to back before the age of steam...
I think the Obama administration has accomplished a lot more than you give it credit for. But even if you find them unsatisfactory, you might consider how they've hamstrung by Senate filibusters blocking appointment of key officials. Reform of the Senate so that supermajorities aren't required for every little issue would make a big difference. Agitating for reform would make a big difference — unless you're absolutely committed to your militant apathy.
I suppose you could probably get a consistent value if you were very specific about the physical setup and the benchmark. But it wouldn't be that much different from the theoretical limit, and wouldn't tell you jack about real-world use cases.
Benchmarking is a complicated, controversial branch of computing. Any time you try to "prove" that one piece of hardware or software is faster than another, somebody who's selling competing technologies will show you benchmarks to "prove" that you're wrong. You're not going to get any objective measures this way, especially not for ethernet, which is highly stochastic.
I'm talking about publically-held corporations. You're talking about a non-profit.