Odd then, that for any given aircraft type, on a given route, on a given date there isn't an optimal price that maximizes profit.
The trick is to charge each customer just the amount that he's willing to pay - ideally one cent less than the "walk away" price.
I'm sure most "Econ on the John" books have chapters on price discrimination and yield management.
True - there isn't just "an" ideal price, there are actually many ideal prices. I was simplifying a bit, for the benefit of those who weren't seeing why there should be different prices for diff movies at all. I've worked in the revenue management biz for many years, in multiple industries (including airlines), so I know quite a bit about the subject.
The trick, as always, is to find an excuse to charge different prices - to somehow separate what appears to be a single "product" into multiple products, so that people who are willing to pay more don't just pay the lower rate and save a few bucks. The airline biz does this in at least three ways:
1) Charge diff prices for diff seat qualities (arguably first class and coach really ARE separate products)
2) Charge diff prices for diff lead times (based on the fact that cheapskate vacationers tend to make their travel plans well in advance, whereas business travelers with expense accounts tend to make their travel plans at the last minute).
3) Charge diff prices for totally arbitrary things like saturday night stays, to ensure that even business travelers who DO plan ahead still pay a high rate.
The first two could theoretically apply to the movie biz (though the second would require "training" people to buy movie tickets weeks or even months in advance); the third doesn't seem to have any obvious equivalent.
It remains more or less the same as with books, lab equipment and classroom resources. Why does everyone expect something new when there's no real management and processing difference in what type of resource has been compared.
Yeah, like that time my history book got a virus while I was looking at pictures of naked statues... before anyone realized what was happening, the whole damn library had been infected, and they had to white-out all the pages and re-print everything... What a mess!
P.S. On the plus side, all the students got a week of free vacation, so it's not all bad.
At $5 you're likely to fill the theater, and have to turn people away. So maybe you could make more money by charging $6 and still being able to sell tons of concessions. Demand might go down a little, but as long as you can still fill the theater, you're making more money. In fact, any time you sell out and have to turn away would-be customers, you probably under-priced your product.
I have never seen 2 2d movies at the same cinema at different prices.
Yes, but why not? For any given movie, at a given cinema, at a given time, there's an optimal price that maximizes profit: charge a little more, and you discourage enough people that you end up with less profit; charge a little less, and while you may get more customers, you still end up with less profit.
If it were practical to determine this optimal price, any rational cinema would charge it.
It occurs to me, however, that determining the optimal price might be rather difficult: it probably varies from cinema to cinema, movie to movie, time of day, and "age" of movie (that is, the optimal price for a new movie is probably different than that same movie a month later). Since most of the money is made in the first couple of weeks, there's not much time to gather statistics, analyze them, and do all the necessary number-crunching.
Also, in many cinemas it would be fairly easy to defeat the system: buy a ticket for the cheapest movie listed, then sneak into the theater for the movie you actually want to see. Policing this might cost more than the additional profit.
I have no problem with what the US did to Japan - but that's not what I was referring to. I meant what the US did to tens of thousands of US citizens who happened to be of Japanese descent.
I'm an american, and I know where the middle east is. I've seen lots of muslims, and I've never attacked any.
The WW2/Japanese situation was complicated, and while I think what the US did was wrong, I understand that the people doing it thought it was the best way to ensure that the US won the war.
But the point you're missing is that I (me, personally) didn't do ANY of these things! Nor did 99% of other americans! Yet still you'd attack us just because of the area in which we live. Gosh, if only there were a word for pre-judging people based on superficial attributes... oh, yeah - PREJUDICE.
P.S. And what's with the british? I'm not british! I've never persecuted an irishman! Are all americans now guilty of that too by virtue of, what, LANGUAGE? Your "logic" just keeps getting better and better.
The day America goes Nuclear, is the day EVERY AMERICAN on the PLANET will be attacked. ON SIGHT.
I for one would welcome that and participate in that myself.
Really? You would attack me for something my government (who I didn't even vote for) did?
That's a very sophisticated attitude you've got there.... if only more people were like you (instead of being like us xenophobic war-mongering Americans), the world would be a better place...
erm... so you think if your browser is safe, its totally okay to visit goatse?
OK, yes, I think there should be some reasonable expectation of "decency" (however one defines it), much as changing channels on TV might expose you to ideas you don't like but generally won't inflict goatse upon you.
But TFA isn't talking about that - it's talking about using QR codes as an ATTACK vector for malware - essentially tricking people into (virtually) clicking on links which will then perform drive-by-downloads or whatnot upon their PCs.
My point is that the very existence of drive-by-downloads is a damning indictment of browsers, email programs, and the like. It's as if certain TV channels caused your TV to explode, or to become a camera instead of a TV and start watching your every move. Even if I did accidentally click over to the goatse channel, I could click away without the image having changed the basic functioning of my TV set.
Something's fundamentally wrong, though, if you can't click on a random link. OK, maybe there's a browser vulnerability from time to time, and given how many there have been, clicking on random links (especially on the seedier side of the web) might not be the smartest thing you can do - but if end users are supposed to have to worry about clicking on a link, then we (the techies) are letting them down big time.
Somebody writes the code, doesn't bother to comment it at all and then you come in years after the fact. You look at the code and wonder, "why did he do it that way instead of this way?" Then the big gotcha, you think I could ask him but he left the company 5 years ago(At this point slap your forehead and hope you don't break anything working on the code.)
One way to mitigate this is "extreme programming" where developers pair and constantly switch off projects and tasks. You end up with a larger body of people that understand the code and comments and code
Nice theory - in practice you end up with code that nobody understands, because it never looks anything like what you vaguely remember it looking like, and it ends up being a hodge-podge of different approaches and re-invented wheels. Sort of like programming by committee.
Having experienced both ends of the spectrum, I think small tightly-focused teams (3-5 devs) are the solution - any smaller than that, and you're taking too much risk if someone gets hit by a truck; any larger than that and you end up with an incomprehensible mess that strictly adheres to trivial coding standards.
Yes, and then when Reagan's attempt at altering the course of history (during a microphone TEST) backfired, he destroyed all the evidence of the law and quickly ginned up a "ventriloquist hacker" group to blame. Yup, same thing exactly.
P.S. WTF would it even mean to "outlaw Russia forever?"
Well of course you can't find any instances of voter fraud where a photo ID would help - because no one collects information on such things. Suppose I know of someone who is registered to vote, but unlikely to actually do so. I can go and vote in his place, and not only is there no mechanism to stop me at the time, or catch me after the fact, there's not even a way to determine that it's happened at all! This is the "not collecting evidence" I'm talking about. You're like a blind man wondering what all the fuss is about this "vision" thing - clearly it's not important, because you've never seen anything!
BTW, I agree completely about the "behind the ballot box" problems - they're completely unrelated, and probably more severe. If we were somehow limited to only fixing one side of the system, I'd say fix the behind the scenes aspects - like by getting rid of electronic voting. But we're not limited - we can fix (or at least improve) all sides.
P.S. As for photo IDs, I'd be just as happy with other solutions - the "indelible ink on your finger" is almost as good (if I can vote as you but then can't vote as me, then it's not really going to change the totals). I know it's fun to think that the photo ID requirement is part of a racist GOP conspiracy, but most people in favor of it are just trying to improve the system.
Also, lets say you live in a union town, but aren't particularly fond of unions or democrats so you vote republican. All your friends and neighbors and coworkers now know how you voted, and you end up being ostracized (or your tires mysteriously get slashed, or worse).
Same in the other direction, of course - I'm not taking a position on Democans vs Republicrats., just pointing out that the above sort of pressure could easily induce people to vote how they think their friends/neighbors/coworkers want them to vote, instead of how they really want to vote.
...can't imagine a way in which the deployment a new version can be achieved by "download the installer and run it" means.
These people have a serious lack of imagination. You install the app once, via whatever mechanism you choose, then it "self-heals" by downloading updates and replacing itself on disk. It's not that hard, and (assuming you never screw up the upgrade process;-) it works great.
Yeah, I gave up on news a couple of years ago... if there's anything important going on, I'll hear about it from someone at work or see it in the morning paper (as long as it's above the fold!).
Someone (possibly Bruce Schneier?) pointed out that you don't have to worry about anything on the news, because the very definition of news is "stuff that hardly ever happens".
Example: far more people die in car crashes than plane crashes (about 100x just in the US), but car crashes rarely rise above the level of the morning traffic report, while plane crashes are hashed over for weeks, months, even years.
Even leaving aside the MAC address problem, why would the client "rage" about seeing ads for something he's actually interested in? If you're gonna have ads on the page anyway, isn't that better than ads for, say, feminine hygiene products?
Slashdot Mirror
Odd then, that for any given aircraft type, on a given route, on a given date there isn't an optimal price that maximizes profit.
The trick is to charge each customer just the amount that he's willing to pay - ideally one cent less than the "walk away" price.
I'm sure most "Econ on the John" books have chapters on price discrimination and yield management.
True - there isn't just "an" ideal price, there are actually many ideal prices. I was simplifying a bit, for the benefit of those who weren't seeing why there should be different prices for diff movies at all. I've worked in the revenue management biz for many years, in multiple industries (including airlines), so I know quite a bit about the subject.
The trick, as always, is to find an excuse to charge different prices - to somehow separate what appears to be a single "product" into multiple products, so that people who are willing to pay more don't just pay the lower rate and save a few bucks. The airline biz does this in at least three ways:
1) Charge diff prices for diff seat qualities (arguably first class and coach really ARE separate products)
2) Charge diff prices for diff lead times (based on the fact that cheapskate vacationers tend to make their travel plans well in advance, whereas business travelers with expense accounts tend to make their travel plans at the last minute).
3) Charge diff prices for totally arbitrary things like saturday night stays, to ensure that even business travelers who DO plan ahead still pay a high rate.
The first two could theoretically apply to the movie biz (though the second would require "training" people to buy movie tickets weeks or even months in advance); the third doesn't seem to have any obvious equivalent.
It remains more or less the same as with books, lab equipment and classroom resources. Why does everyone expect something new when there's no real management and processing difference in what type of resource has been compared.
Yeah, like that time my history book got a virus while I was looking at pictures of naked statues... before anyone realized what was happening, the whole damn library had been infected, and they had to white-out all the pages and re-print everything... What a mess!
P.S. On the plus side, all the students got a week of free vacation, so it's not all bad.
At $5 you're likely to fill the theater, and have to turn people away. So maybe you could make more money by charging $6 and still being able to sell tons of concessions. Demand might go down a little, but as long as you can still fill the theater, you're making more money. In fact, any time you sell out and have to turn away would-be customers, you probably under-priced your product.
Wait, so it would be better to detach the butts from the people?
I have never seen 2 2d movies at the same cinema at different prices.
Yes, but why not? For any given movie, at a given cinema, at a given time, there's an optimal price that maximizes profit: charge a little more, and you discourage enough people that you end up with less profit; charge a little less, and while you may get more customers, you still end up with less profit.
If it were practical to determine this optimal price, any rational cinema would charge it.
It occurs to me, however, that determining the optimal price might be rather difficult: it probably varies from cinema to cinema, movie to movie, time of day, and "age" of movie (that is, the optimal price for a new movie is probably different than that same movie a month later). Since most of the money is made in the first couple of weeks, there's not much time to gather statistics, analyze them, and do all the necessary number-crunching.
Also, in many cinemas it would be fairly easy to defeat the system: buy a ticket for the cheapest movie listed, then sneak into the theater for the movie you actually want to see. Policing this might cost more than the additional profit.
I have no problem with what the US did to Japan - but that's not what I was referring to. I meant what the US did to tens of thousands of US citizens who happened to be of Japanese descent.
I'm an american, and I know where the middle east is. I've seen lots of muslims, and I've never attacked any.
The WW2/Japanese situation was complicated, and while I think what the US did was wrong, I understand that the people doing it thought it was the best way to ensure that the US won the war.
But the point you're missing is that I (me, personally) didn't do ANY of these things! Nor did 99% of other americans! Yet still you'd attack us just because of the area in which we live. Gosh, if only there were a word for pre-judging people based on superficial attributes... oh, yeah - PREJUDICE.
P.S. And what's with the british? I'm not british! I've never persecuted an irishman! Are all americans now guilty of that too by virtue of, what, LANGUAGE? Your "logic" just keeps getting better and better.
Lots of mountains on the eastern side of the peninsula... might not be so easy...
The day America goes Nuclear, is the day EVERY AMERICAN on the PLANET will be attacked. ON SIGHT.
I for one would welcome that and participate in that myself.
Really? You would attack me for something my government (who I didn't even vote for) did?
That's a very sophisticated attitude you've got there.... if only more people were like you (instead of being like us xenophobic war-mongering Americans), the world would be a better place...
Far too many websites actually DO store the password (because they're idiots)
erm ... so you think if your browser is safe, its totally okay to visit goatse?
OK, yes, I think there should be some reasonable expectation of "decency" (however one defines it), much as changing channels on TV might expose you to ideas you don't like but generally won't inflict goatse upon you.
But TFA isn't talking about that - it's talking about using QR codes as an ATTACK vector for malware - essentially tricking people into (virtually) clicking on links which will then perform drive-by-downloads or whatnot upon their PCs.
My point is that the very existence of drive-by-downloads is a damning indictment of browsers, email programs, and the like. It's as if certain TV channels caused your TV to explode, or to become a camera instead of a TV and start watching your every move. Even if I did accidentally click over to the goatse channel, I could click away without the image having changed the basic functioning of my TV set.
Something's fundamentally wrong, though, if you can't click on a random link. OK, maybe there's a browser vulnerability from time to time, and given how many there have been, clicking on random links (especially on the seedier side of the web) might not be the smartest thing you can do - but if end users are supposed to have to worry about clicking on a link, then we (the techies) are letting them down big time.
I've only gotten one internet virus in my life - via the "executable GIF" exploit, from visiting NVIDIA.COM !!!
If you think "reputable" means "safe", YOU'RE a few cards short of a full deck!
Somebody writes the code, doesn't bother to comment it at all and then you come in years after the fact. You look at the code and wonder, "why did he do it that way instead of this way?" Then the big gotcha, you think I could ask him but he left the company 5 years ago(At this point slap your forehead and hope you don't break anything working on the code.)
One way to mitigate this is "extreme programming" where developers pair and constantly switch off projects and tasks. You end up with a larger body of people that understand the code and comments and code
Nice theory - in practice you end up with code that nobody understands, because it never looks anything like what you vaguely remember it looking like, and it ends up being a hodge-podge of different approaches and re-invented wheels. Sort of like programming by committee.
Having experienced both ends of the spectrum, I think small tightly-focused teams (3-5 devs) are the solution - any smaller than that, and you're taking too much risk if someone gets hit by a truck; any larger than that and you end up with an incomprehensible mess that strictly adheres to trivial coding standards.
Only if Bill Clinton is now a republican
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
Nice try, though
No, he died of dysentery... don't you know anything about computer games?
Yes, and then when Reagan's attempt at altering the course of history (during a microphone TEST) backfired, he destroyed all the evidence of the law and quickly ginned up a "ventriloquist hacker" group to blame. Yup, same thing exactly.
P.S. WTF would it even mean to "outlaw Russia forever?"
Someone with mod points please vote this up
Well of course you can't find any instances of voter fraud where a photo ID would help - because no one collects information on such things. Suppose I know of someone who is registered to vote, but unlikely to actually do so. I can go and vote in his place, and not only is there no mechanism to stop me at the time, or catch me after the fact, there's not even a way to determine that it's happened at all! This is the "not collecting evidence" I'm talking about. You're like a blind man wondering what all the fuss is about this "vision" thing - clearly it's not important, because you've never seen anything!
BTW, I agree completely about the "behind the ballot box" problems - they're completely unrelated, and probably more severe. If we were somehow limited to only fixing one side of the system, I'd say fix the behind the scenes aspects - like by getting rid of electronic voting. But we're not limited - we can fix (or at least improve) all sides.
P.S. As for photo IDs, I'd be just as happy with other solutions - the "indelible ink on your finger" is almost as good (if I can vote as you but then can't vote as me, then it's not really going to change the totals). I know it's fun to think that the photo ID requirement is part of a racist GOP conspiracy, but most people in favor of it are just trying to improve the system.
Question: how do you know fraud isn't taking place, if you refuse to even collect evidence that might indicate whether or not it is taking place?
There have been any number of cases where the total vote count exceeds the number of registered voters in that district... What about those?
Also, lets say you live in a union town, but aren't particularly fond of unions or democrats so you vote republican. All your friends and neighbors and coworkers now know how you voted, and you end up being ostracized (or your tires mysteriously get slashed, or worse).
Same in the other direction, of course - I'm not taking a position on Democans vs Republicrats., just pointing out that the above sort of pressure could easily induce people to vote how they think their friends/neighbors/coworkers want them to vote, instead of how they really want to vote.
...can't imagine a way in which the deployment a new version can be achieved by "download the installer and run it" means.
These people have a serious lack of imagination. You install the app once, via whatever mechanism you choose, then it "self-heals" by downloading updates and replacing itself on disk. It's not that hard, and (assuming you never screw up the upgrade process ;-) it works great.
Yeah, I gave up on news a couple of years ago... if there's anything important going on, I'll hear about it from someone at work or see it in the morning paper (as long as it's above the fold!).
Someone (possibly Bruce Schneier?) pointed out that you don't have to worry about anything on the news, because the very definition of news is "stuff that hardly ever happens".
Example: far more people die in car crashes than plane crashes (about 100x just in the US), but car crashes rarely rise above the level of the morning traffic report, while plane crashes are hashed over for weeks, months, even years.
Study finds women who drink are way more fun to study:
http://www.satirewire.com/content1/?p=154
Even leaving aside the MAC address problem, why would the client "rage" about seeing ads for something he's actually interested in? If you're gonna have ads on the page anyway, isn't that better than ads for, say, feminine hygiene products?