You can set up a filter that removes (what you consider to be) an acceptable TP:FP ratio, but it won't be effective for long. The Spammers are constantly adjusting their tactics to get around filters. Eventually the noise will take over and you will either lose an unacceptable amount of non-spam email or you will receive an unacceptable amount of spam email.
Disagree. I have used gmail for quite a while and I very rarely see spam outside of the spam folder. This has been the case for many years now. I honestly cannot remember the last time I had a false positive (non-spam sent to the spam folder) and false negatives (spam that gets to my inbox) are fairly rare - less than 10 a month usually. It's good enough I don't even bother to check my spam folder anymore. When one does slip through I just flag it and the problem goes away. Spam effectively almost doesn't exist for me. While I do agree that no filter is perfect it isn't that hard to have one that is highly effective. With enough people flagging spam filters can be very useful in automating spam removal. It doesn't entirely solve the problem but it has made it manageable.
You cannot win with filters, period.
I have no illusions that I am going to eliminate spam entirely. The ISPs are the only ones really in a position to do something about the problem. So far nobody has come up with a credible and effective solution and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
The best we can do is make absolutely clear that the placebo is just a placebo and that it will not provide a cure for any disease, only at most a small bit of short-term pain relief.
No that is not the best we can do. We can make it illegal to even hint that homeopathy or anything resembling homeopathy is a cure for anything. If someone wants to represent something as a treatment then they can get it tested through the FDA like actual medicine. Furthermore a disclaimer ("this product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease") is NOT sufficient to get a free legal pass for you your snake oil.
Placebos _are_ scientifically proven options - for pain relief, mental health issues, and other ills. There are many illnesses for which placebos are literally the best known 'medicines'.
WRONG. Placebos do NOTHING. If it actually does something then it by definition is not a placebo. The placebo EFFECT is real but that is not the same thing as saying placebos are medicines. We use placebos as the benchmark for determining if a treatment has a curative effect. If it isn't better than placebo then it means it does nothing to treat the disease. Better than placebos is the demarcation for where medicine begins and snake oil ends. It certainly isn't an excuse for allowing a placebo to be represented or even implied to be a therapy.
OK, they're not the sharpest knives in the drawer, but do you think banning these things will help?
Short answer? Yes. Selling "medicine" under false pretenses is 100% of the reason why the FDA exists. If these products were represented accurately then I guess I have no problem with them being sold as entertainment but they are NOT medicine. You know what they call alternative medicine that is proven to work? MEDICINE.
Because it is fraud. It parts people from their money under false pretenses. It leads people to believe it has medicinal properties that it does not and they sometimes choose to not seek genuine medical care as a result.
I mean, these treatments are pretty much just water. If somebody wants to drink water that they think has special properties, why stop them?
Because it doesn't have special properties and can be shown to lack the special properties claimed. When you sell a product you are required by law (or should be) to represent the product accurately. You should not be allowed to claim health benefits unless there is evidence to support that claim.
It's not even like drugs, where there can be severe harm to the users and others in the vicinity.
It fraudulently separates people from their money. It also at times keeps people from seeking genuine medical care when they need it.
Ok, I don't believe in homeopathy, but I suspect the market is people with ongoing medical problems where they've been thru conventional medicine, the doctors haven't helped and have given up.
Sometimes. People do turn to witchcraft sometimes out of desperation. And make no mistake that homeopathy is witchcraft. It is a placebo sold at a huge markup to stupid and sometimes desperate people. Most people who buy into homeopathy however are rather stupid new-age granola types who lack critical reasoning ability. I'm particularly disappointed in places like Whole Foods that sell this snake oil even though they have no excuse for not knowing better.
If that happened to you, YOU would be willing to try homeopathy and pretty much anything else that might work, because you don't have an alternative.
No I wouldn't use homeopathy because I am not stupid enough to ever believe it would cure me of anything. I'm going to die someday and I'd rather do so with some dignity rather than paying money to some snake oil salesman for something that will do nothing.
No placebos do not work. They are the very definition of not working. There is a reason we use placebos as the control group when doing double blind tests. The placebo effect is real but the placebos by definition have no medicinal effect whatsoever.
Placebos do have their occasional use as a therapy but homeopathy is for all practical purposes a placebo sold at a huge markup to stupid people. Homeopathy is pure fraud for that reason. It astonishes me that it is legal to represent them in any way as something even vaguely medicinal.
Science can tell us what the planet is and where it's going, but it can't tell us if that's a good thing or not.
This is a very insightful comment, and I hope you don't get modded down by anti-religious morons.
Umm, religions can't tell us if it's a good thing or not either. Not in any objective sense of the word that we can all agree upon. Science can tell us the effects of our actions. Religion cannot. So science CAN tell us if what is happening is a good thing at least for any non-moral sense of the term good.
It certainly can be — faith operates in a different plane, so to speak.
No it does not. Unless you have such a vague notion of faith as to make it effectively meaningless it HAS to intrude on the material plane. Furthermore religions have very detailed books and laws and traditions built around their faith and how it should dictate behavior. If there was no impact on the material world (the domain of science) then there would be no need for organized religion. Everyone would have a vague notion of something "beyond" and it would end there. But it doesn't.
It neither contradicts nor supports science, nor is it contradicted nor supported by science in return.
There is HUGE amounts of evidence that it doesn't really work like that in the real world. Organized religions cannot help but get involved in claiming all sorts of things that science can and does dispute.
The Lord's ways are neither known, nor even knowable
And yet the church claims to understand them in great detail except when it is convenient for them to claim to not know. Cannot work both ways.
Unlike Science, Religion does not need to offer predictions nor make falsifiable statements.
And yet religion regularly does make claims about things that clearly are falsifiable.
The Catholic Church has been pro-science for a while now.
A church almost by definition cannot be truly pro-science. Their entire MO is based on faith in unproven/unprovable things and do not readily accept questioning of that faith even in the face of overwhelming evidence. The fact that the catholic church hasn't stood in the way of science isn't the same thing as being pro-science. I think science and faith of the sort espoused by organized religion are irreconcilable to one another.
Could not disagree more. The signal to noise ratio on most reviews is seriously poor. I regularly see paid shills (some obvious others less so), idiots who order the wrong item but still feel the need to "review" what they got, people who conflate UPS delivery with Amazon's service, reviews for different products or obsolete models of earlier products unrelated to the one being sold, useless reviews with no details explaining why the product is good or bad, reviews that are years old and no longer relevant, etc. There is an awful lot of BS to filter through. Any online review needs to be read with a skeptical eye but Amazon definitely could do more to make the reviews more helpful and relevant.
Can you get useful information from Amazon reviews? Sure. They definitely can be useful. But to claim they don't need improvement is just absurdly and demonstrably false.
You would be amazed. Hell I do our company payroll and you would be astonished at the number of companies that literally CALL in their hours (very tedious and error prone) rather than using a simple web interface. Lots of people REALLY do not like to change.
The Cisco phones I've seen have a menu (small one, but its there) that you can see caller id, time and length of each message and select it directly.
Better but you still have to listen to the whole message. Doesn't help you when you are working remotely either. The system I use works whether I'm in the office or not.
I just really don't understand anyone that doesn't have something like visual voice mail.
Lots of people don't even know there are alternatives out there. Google voice is NOT known to the majority of people out there. Even people that do know about it often are resistant to change.
What will you do if you're on the phone with a customer and another customer calls?
That's why we have voicemail and a rollover chain. If I cannot answer one of my coworkers does. I'm not the only person who works here but we always try to make sure our customers can reach someone live.
The point is that interrupting a call is not in principle rude. There can be very good reasons to interrupt a conversation. There also can be good reasons to ignore a potential interruption. If I see a telemarketer call I'm probably going to ignore that call if I'm talking with someone important.
Why would you prioritize an unknown caller over someone with whom you're already having a conversation?
Who says they are unknown? I have caller ID at work. If I'm talking with a co-worker and a customer calls the customer should take priority in most cases. I've done this hundreds of times and it is the proper behavior. It's not rude, it's prudent. Our collective jobs depend on being responsive to our customers and we don't let our egos interfere with that fact.
Just as interrupting a conversation is rude, call waiting should be banned (just as voicemail!) and emergency calls routed $SOMEWHERE that guarantees a live immediate response (or perhaps keep the sole instance of voicemail in organizations).
It's only rude if there isn't a clearly understood reason for interrupting the call. My company employs just a handful of people and if a customer calls we need to have someone answer the phone. There is almost nothing I could be doing that would justify me ignoring a call from one of our customers during working hours. Anything I have to say to my coworker can probably wait a few minutes and we all understand that.
Voicemail isn't really a problem. The problem is the traditional dial in interface for voicemail sucks sour frog ass. It's time consuming, irritating, badly designed and frankly from a bygone era. Dialing in to listen to a voicemail message is technology that we no longer need. Getting messages via voice is useful but the format and interface need to update to modern technology.
I've been using a pair of systems (Google voice and one at work) which transcribe the voicemail, send it to you in an email with a recording and you can manage the calls though your computer or cell phone. I pretty much never actually listen to the voicemail because what I really care about is who called and roughly the topic of their call. Occasionally I listen to the actual message because the transcriptions usually read like a Mad-Lib but I can usually figure out the gist of the message.
Fax machines on the other hand are just pointless. They need to go away. My company doesn't have one anymore and we don't miss it a bit.
The article is from the British newspaper The Telegraph so it is directed at a British audience.
The slashdot summary ISN'T from a British newspaper so that particular bit of information is irrelevant here. The entire quote is not required. Bad valves are a potential problem is news. The fact that it is some arbitrary distance from Britain isn't of particular consequence to all but perhaps a handful of slashdot readers and I'm pretty sure the ones that would care are pretty well aware that France is pretty close to England.
Are you saying that backdoor'ed encryption is a mathematical impossibility, or that it won't work in practice because the backdoor key will eventually leak due to hacking, rogue employees, etc?
It is almost certainly a practical impossibility and I'm confident it is a mathematical impossibility too. A key is either possible to crack in a reasonable amount of time or it isn't. There is no middle ground. You can hand a key to whomever you like but if you create the backdoor by weakening the encryption then it is weak for everyone who would be interested in cracking said encryption. If the NSA can figure it out, so can others. Furthermore, each additional party you had a key to creates another vector for attack which is the practical problem. Even if the encryption were somehow secure we know from experience that keeping the systems that store the keys secure presents some security challenges that we are in no danger of solving.
Weak encryption is effectively the same as no encryption. Encryption has no value unless it cannot be broken. You cannot make encryption only weak for the "good" guys. It simply doesn't work that way and wishing will not make it otherwise. Any government official that argues in favor of weak encryption is either ignorant of how encryption works or is corrupt/self-serving and just wants their job to be easier without regard to the consequences.
Yes I am fully aware that "bad" guys having access to strong encryption presents certain challenges. However weakening your own encryption to the government can spy on the populace will not EVER solve that problem.
This is only relevant because of overcomplicated tax laws, which are the result of too many lawyers, like I said. The law should not give a shit about depreciation.
You seem to have missed my point entirely. Complication in accounting can be in response to legal issues but legal issues (and lawyers specifically) are NOT the primary driver of it in most cases. The primary source of difficulty in accounting is simply incomplete data followed closely by the fact that there are multiple answers to many accounting issues. Classification or transactions and valuation of assets and liabilities is frequently difficult, ambiguous or even impossible to do accurately. Invoking the problems lawyers and politicians can cause adds to the pile but does not create the fundamental difficulties in accounting in most cases.
To address your rebuttal. The law doesn't give a shit about depreciation specifically. The law gives a shit about an accurate representation of the financial position of a company. Depreciation is a portion of that. Depreciation is a thing because if you buy a really expensive asset and expense it all at once it can give a rather twisted picture of the financial prospects of the company because it doesn't accurately capture the matching principle. As a second order effect of this companies would use expensing of assets to weasel out of taxes they should rightly owe and use it to manage earnings for Wall Street even more than they do now. That would involved lawyers but it isn't the source of the complication. If you have a better solution than depreciation (expense everything isn't one) I'd love to hear it but a lot of really smart people haven't come up with anything more practical. IFRS is pushing really hard on mark-to-market accounting but that is fraught with all sorts of issues. Believe me as someone who has to deal with depreciation in my day job I don't care much for it but it's a practical necessity to keep financial statements meaningful in many cases.
That's a highly subjective question, it's not simply accounting. It's politics. And then we get back to lawyers.
It IS a highly subjective question and that subjectivity has NOTHING to do with politics or lawyers. The value of a building is what someone is willing to buy it for. It's subjective after a sale because you cannot know the value of something unless there is either A) a liquid market for a near identical asset or B) you actually sell it. Since that does not describe the majority of assets any answer you come up with will be either a guess or a no longer accurate purchase price (book value). Since guesses are fraught with problems we tend to disallow them for practical reasons. You can probably make a decent guess but your answer will be wrong. There are follow on consequences can involve lawyers and politicians but they are generally a second order effect at most.
Yes, it won't be that way until we shoot all the lawyers. They're the ones responsible for all the blood-sucking, money-grubbing leech laws that make accounting so complicated.
Has (almost) nothing to do with lawyers or the lack thereof. Even seemingly basic things like how to classify transactions appropriately is not a trivial task. Let me give you an example. What is an appropriate useful lifetime for a milling machine so that you can determine a depreciation schedule? There is no single correct answer to this question. We have rules about it but the rules are just generalisms not actually correct in most cases. Another example. What is the current market value of building you purchased 20 years ago? You can guess at the answer but you cannot know for certain unless you sell it. So you either have to guess or you have to use an answer from 20 years ago that you know is wrong.
Accounting can be made more complicated by the lawmakers but it isn't a primary driver for that. A lot of the difficulty is simply in trying to answer questions for which there is insufficient data to make a correct answer.
Just because you think of it as an out-of-control chain reaction doesn't make it so. In fact, free markets are exactly the opposite: market mechanisms give you negative feedback, not positive feedback.
Please point out a single example of an unregulated free market that has never collapsed.
As Milton Friedman put it, your fallacy is that you assume that "government is a way that you put unselfish and un-greedy men in charge of selfish and greedy men."
You must be a conservative if you are quoting Friedman. Your fallacy is that you assume greedy men will work to the benefit of society when unconstrained by rule of law. I have centuries of evidence on my side that illustrates the fallacy of that notion. A reasonable amount of regulation is necessary for markets to function. As I said previously there can be too much regulation just as there can be too little. The trick is finding that spot where you have just enough to keep things moving in a positive direction.
Financial markets were heavily regulated even in 2008; the idea that the cause of the "financial crisis" was lack of regulation is ludicrous.
As someone who actually has worked in the finance industry you could not be more wrong. The cause of the meltdown was poorly regulated derivative financial instruments. People leveraged derivative contracts with huge counter-party risk without oversight well beyond what was prudent. Market forces were unable to keep the markets working because the regulation hadn't caught up to the state of financial practices. What regulations were in place were for problems other than the one that actually occurred. The "fixes" put in place after the fact probably still haven't appropriately addressed the problems. Markets are not magic and they need some amount of rules to actually function.
And to someone who works in a data center, the most important things are tracking power draw, heat dissipation, and cooling requirements.
Sorry but no. The financial aspects of asset tracking are at the end of the day paramount in a corporation. Those are important second order considerations as far as the business is concerned. Management of the company will only care about those things insofar as they affect profitability.
There is no one solution that fits all needs, and every user (like you) is going to claim that their needs are "priority one."
Given that the fixed asset list determines the value of assets on the balance sheet and the amount of depreciation, profits and taxes, I feel quite confident in claiming that the most important function of asset tracking in an organization is the financial one. That is the one that the owners of the company and the IRS and SEC are going to give a crap about. While I am by no means saying that the other purposes of an asset list are unimportant (they can be vital), tracking assets is fundamentally an accounting task by definition no matter which department is actually using the tools to do it.
Why aren't you people replaced entirely by computers yet?
That's as stupid a question as asking why engineers haven't been replaced by computers yet. I happen to be both an engineer and an accountant and I do both as a part of my job running a manufacturing company. Anyone who would ask that question simply doesn't understand or is willfully ignorant of what it is that accountants do for a living.
If you think that is possible to get rid of accounting with automation go ahead and try. If you succeed there is a Nobel prize in it for you. (not joking or even being sarcastic - there really would be a Nobel prize awarded for such an achievement) Accounting is hugely automated already but it is basically impossible to fully automate it until we develop some seriously advanced human level AI. Some (such as yourself) have this naive notion that accounting is a simple programmatic task of paper shuffling and that is completely false. There is substantial human judgement required to do it correctly. Many of the issues accountants deal with do not have single straightforward answers. If it was a simple enough job to be automated by computers it already would have been. Companies don't spend money on accounting because they think it is a good investment. There would be HUGE profits to be made if accounting functions could be fully automated.
What is the point of counting pebbles in an era of computers, energy and technology?
Because "counting pebbles" determines whether those computers, energy and technology are profitable or not. It ensures that financial information is accurate. It allows rational decisions making about what to invest in. This was, is and will remain a vital function of any business.
The problem though is if it's easy for the accountants but difficult to use by the staff (like Magic), you'll only have the basic asset information and we'll continue to use what works for us.
The amount of information that accounting needs is generally pretty modest (asset ID, description, cost, location, acquisition date). But you ignore the needs of your accounting department at your company's peril. You don't have to favor any particular department's needs but you damn well ought to be working closely with accounting when deciding what to use when it comes to asset tracking. Accounting WILL need that information for tax and reporting purposes. If an audit occurs this information WILL be looked at. I've seen plenty of companies make the foolish mistake of picking some tracking software based solely on the operational needs without considering how it affects other departments.
Speaking as an accountant, get/use something compatible with your accounting system. Find out what your accounting needs are ahead of time. Your accountants will need to have a fixed asset list for tax and reporting purposes. This is THE most important function of an asset tracking system. Whatever you do make damn sure it is easily compatible with the needs of the accounting department. Otherwise you are costing the company money and making life needlessly difficult. It may be that your accountants have modest needs like in my company - we do ours directly in our accounting software and that's fine for us. But if you are considering specialty software to keep track then chances are that you should be including your finance and accounting people in this conversation before you install anything.
They are greedy assholes. Even Adam Smith recognized that. The insight Smith had that greedy assholes actually produce beneficial outcomes for society.
Think of capitalism a bit like nuclear power. Capitalism is all about harnessing greed to the benefit of society. Unmanaged or poorly managed it results in a catastrophic meltdown to the detriment of all. With the right controls in place and good oversight (but not too much) it can be a hugely powerful force for good. This requires sensible rules fairly enforced. Too few rules and the meltdown occurs (see 2008 financial crisis). Too many rules and you don't get much benefit because nothing happens (the reaction shuts down). If things get too hot or a problem occurs you institute rules (like control rods) to throttle down the reaction before it blows.
Slashdot Mirror
You can set up a filter that removes (what you consider to be) an acceptable TP:FP ratio, but it won't be effective for long. The Spammers are constantly adjusting their tactics to get around filters. Eventually the noise will take over and you will either lose an unacceptable amount of non-spam email or you will receive an unacceptable amount of spam email.
Disagree. I have used gmail for quite a while and I very rarely see spam outside of the spam folder. This has been the case for many years now. I honestly cannot remember the last time I had a false positive (non-spam sent to the spam folder) and false negatives (spam that gets to my inbox) are fairly rare - less than 10 a month usually. It's good enough I don't even bother to check my spam folder anymore. When one does slip through I just flag it and the problem goes away. Spam effectively almost doesn't exist for me. While I do agree that no filter is perfect it isn't that hard to have one that is highly effective. With enough people flagging spam filters can be very useful in automating spam removal. It doesn't entirely solve the problem but it has made it manageable.
You cannot win with filters, period.
I have no illusions that I am going to eliminate spam entirely. The ISPs are the only ones really in a position to do something about the problem. So far nobody has come up with a credible and effective solution and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
The best we can do is make absolutely clear that the placebo is just a placebo and that it will not provide a cure for any disease, only at most a small bit of short-term pain relief.
No that is not the best we can do. We can make it illegal to even hint that homeopathy or anything resembling homeopathy is a cure for anything. If someone wants to represent something as a treatment then they can get it tested through the FDA like actual medicine. Furthermore a disclaimer ("this product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease") is NOT sufficient to get a free legal pass for you your snake oil.
Placebos _are_ scientifically proven options - for pain relief, mental health issues, and other ills. There are many illnesses for which placebos are literally the best known 'medicines'.
WRONG. Placebos do NOTHING. If it actually does something then it by definition is not a placebo. The placebo EFFECT is real but that is not the same thing as saying placebos are medicines. We use placebos as the benchmark for determining if a treatment has a curative effect. If it isn't better than placebo then it means it does nothing to treat the disease. Better than placebos is the demarcation for where medicine begins and snake oil ends. It certainly isn't an excuse for allowing a placebo to be represented or even implied to be a therapy.
OK, they're not the sharpest knives in the drawer, but do you think banning these things will help?
Short answer? Yes. Selling "medicine" under false pretenses is 100% of the reason why the FDA exists. If these products were represented accurately then I guess I have no problem with them being sold as entertainment but they are NOT medicine. You know what they call alternative medicine that is proven to work? MEDICINE.
Why does it even matter?
Because it is fraud. It parts people from their money under false pretenses. It leads people to believe it has medicinal properties that it does not and they sometimes choose to not seek genuine medical care as a result.
I mean, these treatments are pretty much just water. If somebody wants to drink water that they think has special properties, why stop them?
Because it doesn't have special properties and can be shown to lack the special properties claimed. When you sell a product you are required by law (or should be) to represent the product accurately. You should not be allowed to claim health benefits unless there is evidence to support that claim.
It's not even like drugs, where there can be severe harm to the users and others in the vicinity.
It fraudulently separates people from their money. It also at times keeps people from seeking genuine medical care when they need it.
Ok, I don't believe in homeopathy, but I suspect the market is people with ongoing medical problems where they've been thru conventional medicine, the doctors haven't helped and have given up.
Sometimes. People do turn to witchcraft sometimes out of desperation. And make no mistake that homeopathy is witchcraft. It is a placebo sold at a huge markup to stupid and sometimes desperate people. Most people who buy into homeopathy however are rather stupid new-age granola types who lack critical reasoning ability. I'm particularly disappointed in places like Whole Foods that sell this snake oil even though they have no excuse for not knowing better.
If that happened to you, YOU would be willing to try homeopathy and pretty much anything else that might work, because you don't have an alternative.
No I wouldn't use homeopathy because I am not stupid enough to ever believe it would cure me of anything. I'm going to die someday and I'd rather do so with some dignity rather than paying money to some snake oil salesman for something that will do nothing.
What's wrong with having placebos? Placebos work.
No placebos do not work. They are the very definition of not working. There is a reason we use placebos as the control group when doing double blind tests. The placebo effect is real but the placebos by definition have no medicinal effect whatsoever.
Placebos do have their occasional use as a therapy but homeopathy is for all practical purposes a placebo sold at a huge markup to stupid people. Homeopathy is pure fraud for that reason. It astonishes me that it is legal to represent them in any way as something even vaguely medicinal.
Science can tell us what the planet is and where it's going, but it can't tell us if that's a good thing or not.
This is a very insightful comment, and I hope you don't get modded down by anti-religious morons.
Umm, religions can't tell us if it's a good thing or not either. Not in any objective sense of the word that we can all agree upon. Science can tell us the effects of our actions. Religion cannot. So science CAN tell us if what is happening is a good thing at least for any non-moral sense of the term good.
It certainly can be — faith operates in a different plane, so to speak.
No it does not. Unless you have such a vague notion of faith as to make it effectively meaningless it HAS to intrude on the material plane. Furthermore religions have very detailed books and laws and traditions built around their faith and how it should dictate behavior. If there was no impact on the material world (the domain of science) then there would be no need for organized religion. Everyone would have a vague notion of something "beyond" and it would end there. But it doesn't.
It neither contradicts nor supports science, nor is it contradicted nor supported by science in return.
There is HUGE amounts of evidence that it doesn't really work like that in the real world. Organized religions cannot help but get involved in claiming all sorts of things that science can and does dispute.
The Lord's ways are neither known, nor even knowable
And yet the church claims to understand them in great detail except when it is convenient for them to claim to not know. Cannot work both ways.
Unlike Science, Religion does not need to offer predictions nor make falsifiable statements.
And yet religion regularly does make claims about things that clearly are falsifiable.
The Catholic Church has been pro-science for a while now.
A church almost by definition cannot be truly pro-science. Their entire MO is based on faith in unproven/unprovable things and do not readily accept questioning of that faith even in the face of overwhelming evidence. The fact that the catholic church hasn't stood in the way of science isn't the same thing as being pro-science. I think science and faith of the sort espoused by organized religion are irreconcilable to one another.
The reviews are (mostly) fine the way they are.
Could not disagree more. The signal to noise ratio on most reviews is seriously poor. I regularly see paid shills (some obvious others less so), idiots who order the wrong item but still feel the need to "review" what they got, people who conflate UPS delivery with Amazon's service, reviews for different products or obsolete models of earlier products unrelated to the one being sold, useless reviews with no details explaining why the product is good or bad, reviews that are years old and no longer relevant, etc. There is an awful lot of BS to filter through. Any online review needs to be read with a skeptical eye but Amazon definitely could do more to make the reviews more helpful and relevant.
Can you get useful information from Amazon reviews? Sure. They definitely can be useful. But to claim they don't need improvement is just absurdly and demonstrably false.
Pardon my ignorance, but who does that anymore?
You would be amazed. Hell I do our company payroll and you would be astonished at the number of companies that literally CALL in their hours (very tedious and error prone) rather than using a simple web interface. Lots of people REALLY do not like to change.
The Cisco phones I've seen have a menu (small one, but its there) that you can see caller id, time and length of each message and select it directly.
Better but you still have to listen to the whole message. Doesn't help you when you are working remotely either. The system I use works whether I'm in the office or not.
I just really don't understand anyone that doesn't have something like visual voice mail.
Lots of people don't even know there are alternatives out there. Google voice is NOT known to the majority of people out there. Even people that do know about it often are resistant to change.
What will you do if you're on the phone with a customer and another customer calls?
That's why we have voicemail and a rollover chain. If I cannot answer one of my coworkers does. I'm not the only person who works here but we always try to make sure our customers can reach someone live.
The point is that interrupting a call is not in principle rude. There can be very good reasons to interrupt a conversation. There also can be good reasons to ignore a potential interruption. If I see a telemarketer call I'm probably going to ignore that call if I'm talking with someone important.
Why would you prioritize an unknown caller over someone with whom you're already having a conversation?
Who says they are unknown? I have caller ID at work. If I'm talking with a co-worker and a customer calls the customer should take priority in most cases. I've done this hundreds of times and it is the proper behavior. It's not rude, it's prudent. Our collective jobs depend on being responsive to our customers and we don't let our egos interfere with that fact.
Just as interrupting a conversation is rude, call waiting should be banned (just as voicemail!) and emergency calls routed $SOMEWHERE that guarantees a live immediate response (or perhaps keep the sole instance of voicemail in organizations).
It's only rude if there isn't a clearly understood reason for interrupting the call. My company employs just a handful of people and if a customer calls we need to have someone answer the phone. There is almost nothing I could be doing that would justify me ignoring a call from one of our customers during working hours. Anything I have to say to my coworker can probably wait a few minutes and we all understand that.
Voicemail isn't really a problem. The problem is the traditional dial in interface for voicemail sucks sour frog ass. It's time consuming, irritating, badly designed and frankly from a bygone era. Dialing in to listen to a voicemail message is technology that we no longer need. Getting messages via voice is useful but the format and interface need to update to modern technology.
I've been using a pair of systems (Google voice and one at work) which transcribe the voicemail, send it to you in an email with a recording and you can manage the calls though your computer or cell phone. I pretty much never actually listen to the voicemail because what I really care about is who called and roughly the topic of their call. Occasionally I listen to the actual message because the transcriptions usually read like a Mad-Lib but I can usually figure out the gist of the message.
Fax machines on the other hand are just pointless. They need to go away. My company doesn't have one anymore and we don't miss it a bit.
The article is from the British newspaper The Telegraph so it is directed at a British audience.
The slashdot summary ISN'T from a British newspaper so that particular bit of information is irrelevant here. The entire quote is not required. Bad valves are a potential problem is news. The fact that it is some arbitrary distance from Britain isn't of particular consequence to all but perhaps a handful of slashdot readers and I'm pretty sure the ones that would care are pretty well aware that France is pretty close to England.
Are you saying that backdoor'ed encryption is a mathematical impossibility, or that it won't work in practice because the backdoor key will eventually leak due to hacking, rogue employees, etc?
It is almost certainly a practical impossibility and I'm confident it is a mathematical impossibility too. A key is either possible to crack in a reasonable amount of time or it isn't. There is no middle ground. You can hand a key to whomever you like but if you create the backdoor by weakening the encryption then it is weak for everyone who would be interested in cracking said encryption. If the NSA can figure it out, so can others. Furthermore, each additional party you had a key to creates another vector for attack which is the practical problem. Even if the encryption were somehow secure we know from experience that keeping the systems that store the keys secure presents some security challenges that we are in no danger of solving.
Weak encryption is effectively the same as no encryption. Encryption has no value unless it cannot be broken. You cannot make encryption only weak for the "good" guys. It simply doesn't work that way and wishing will not make it otherwise. Any government official that argues in favor of weak encryption is either ignorant of how encryption works or is corrupt/self-serving and just wants their job to be easier without regard to the consequences.
Yes I am fully aware that "bad" guys having access to strong encryption presents certain challenges. However weakening your own encryption to the government can spy on the populace will not EVER solve that problem.
Sigh.
A very eloquent retort.
This is only relevant because of overcomplicated tax laws, which are the result of too many lawyers, like I said. The law should not give a shit about depreciation.
You seem to have missed my point entirely. Complication in accounting can be in response to legal issues but legal issues (and lawyers specifically) are NOT the primary driver of it in most cases. The primary source of difficulty in accounting is simply incomplete data followed closely by the fact that there are multiple answers to many accounting issues. Classification or transactions and valuation of assets and liabilities is frequently difficult, ambiguous or even impossible to do accurately. Invoking the problems lawyers and politicians can cause adds to the pile but does not create the fundamental difficulties in accounting in most cases.
To address your rebuttal. The law doesn't give a shit about depreciation specifically. The law gives a shit about an accurate representation of the financial position of a company. Depreciation is a portion of that. Depreciation is a thing because if you buy a really expensive asset and expense it all at once it can give a rather twisted picture of the financial prospects of the company because it doesn't accurately capture the matching principle. As a second order effect of this companies would use expensing of assets to weasel out of taxes they should rightly owe and use it to manage earnings for Wall Street even more than they do now. That would involved lawyers but it isn't the source of the complication. If you have a better solution than depreciation (expense everything isn't one) I'd love to hear it but a lot of really smart people haven't come up with anything more practical. IFRS is pushing really hard on mark-to-market accounting but that is fraught with all sorts of issues. Believe me as someone who has to deal with depreciation in my day job I don't care much for it but it's a practical necessity to keep financial statements meaningful in many cases.
That's a highly subjective question, it's not simply accounting. It's politics. And then we get back to lawyers.
It IS a highly subjective question and that subjectivity has NOTHING to do with politics or lawyers. The value of a building is what someone is willing to buy it for. It's subjective after a sale because you cannot know the value of something unless there is either A) a liquid market for a near identical asset or B) you actually sell it. Since that does not describe the majority of assets any answer you come up with will be either a guess or a no longer accurate purchase price (book value). Since guesses are fraught with problems we tend to disallow them for practical reasons. You can probably make a decent guess but your answer will be wrong. There are follow on consequences can involve lawyers and politicians but they are generally a second order effect at most.
Yes, it won't be that way until we shoot all the lawyers. They're the ones responsible for all the blood-sucking, money-grubbing leech laws that make accounting so complicated.
Has (almost) nothing to do with lawyers or the lack thereof. Even seemingly basic things like how to classify transactions appropriately is not a trivial task. Let me give you an example. What is an appropriate useful lifetime for a milling machine so that you can determine a depreciation schedule? There is no single correct answer to this question. We have rules about it but the rules are just generalisms not actually correct in most cases. Another example. What is the current market value of building you purchased 20 years ago? You can guess at the answer but you cannot know for certain unless you sell it. So you either have to guess or you have to use an answer from 20 years ago that you know is wrong.
Accounting can be made more complicated by the lawmakers but it isn't a primary driver for that. A lot of the difficulty is simply in trying to answer questions for which there is insufficient data to make a correct answer.
Just because you think of it as an out-of-control chain reaction doesn't make it so. In fact, free markets are exactly the opposite: market mechanisms give you negative feedback, not positive feedback.
Please point out a single example of an unregulated free market that has never collapsed.
As Milton Friedman put it, your fallacy is that you assume that "government is a way that you put unselfish and un-greedy men in charge of selfish and greedy men."
You must be a conservative if you are quoting Friedman. Your fallacy is that you assume greedy men will work to the benefit of society when unconstrained by rule of law. I have centuries of evidence on my side that illustrates the fallacy of that notion. A reasonable amount of regulation is necessary for markets to function. As I said previously there can be too much regulation just as there can be too little. The trick is finding that spot where you have just enough to keep things moving in a positive direction.
Financial markets were heavily regulated even in 2008; the idea that the cause of the "financial crisis" was lack of regulation is ludicrous.
As someone who actually has worked in the finance industry you could not be more wrong. The cause of the meltdown was poorly regulated derivative financial instruments. People leveraged derivative contracts with huge counter-party risk without oversight well beyond what was prudent. Market forces were unable to keep the markets working because the regulation hadn't caught up to the state of financial practices. What regulations were in place were for problems other than the one that actually occurred. The "fixes" put in place after the fact probably still haven't appropriately addressed the problems. Markets are not magic and they need some amount of rules to actually function.
And to someone who works in a data center, the most important things are tracking power draw, heat dissipation, and cooling requirements.
Sorry but no. The financial aspects of asset tracking are at the end of the day paramount in a corporation. Those are important second order considerations as far as the business is concerned. Management of the company will only care about those things insofar as they affect profitability.
There is no one solution that fits all needs, and every user (like you) is going to claim that their needs are "priority one."
Given that the fixed asset list determines the value of assets on the balance sheet and the amount of depreciation, profits and taxes, I feel quite confident in claiming that the most important function of asset tracking in an organization is the financial one. That is the one that the owners of the company and the IRS and SEC are going to give a crap about. While I am by no means saying that the other purposes of an asset list are unimportant (they can be vital), tracking assets is fundamentally an accounting task by definition no matter which department is actually using the tools to do it.
Why aren't you people replaced entirely by computers yet?
That's as stupid a question as asking why engineers haven't been replaced by computers yet. I happen to be both an engineer and an accountant and I do both as a part of my job running a manufacturing company. Anyone who would ask that question simply doesn't understand or is willfully ignorant of what it is that accountants do for a living.
If you think that is possible to get rid of accounting with automation go ahead and try. If you succeed there is a Nobel prize in it for you. (not joking or even being sarcastic - there really would be a Nobel prize awarded for such an achievement) Accounting is hugely automated already but it is basically impossible to fully automate it until we develop some seriously advanced human level AI. Some (such as yourself) have this naive notion that accounting is a simple programmatic task of paper shuffling and that is completely false. There is substantial human judgement required to do it correctly. Many of the issues accountants deal with do not have single straightforward answers. If it was a simple enough job to be automated by computers it already would have been. Companies don't spend money on accounting because they think it is a good investment. There would be HUGE profits to be made if accounting functions could be fully automated.
What is the point of counting pebbles in an era of computers, energy and technology?
Because "counting pebbles" determines whether those computers, energy and technology are profitable or not. It ensures that financial information is accurate. It allows rational decisions making about what to invest in. This was, is and will remain a vital function of any business.
The problem though is if it's easy for the accountants but difficult to use by the staff (like Magic), you'll only have the basic asset information and we'll continue to use what works for us.
The amount of information that accounting needs is generally pretty modest (asset ID, description, cost, location, acquisition date). But you ignore the needs of your accounting department at your company's peril. You don't have to favor any particular department's needs but you damn well ought to be working closely with accounting when deciding what to use when it comes to asset tracking. Accounting WILL need that information for tax and reporting purposes. If an audit occurs this information WILL be looked at. I've seen plenty of companies make the foolish mistake of picking some tracking software based solely on the operational needs without considering how it affects other departments.
Speaking as an accountant, get/use something compatible with your accounting system. Find out what your accounting needs are ahead of time. Your accountants will need to have a fixed asset list for tax and reporting purposes. This is THE most important function of an asset tracking system. Whatever you do make damn sure it is easily compatible with the needs of the accounting department. Otherwise you are costing the company money and making life needlessly difficult. It may be that your accountants have modest needs like in my company - we do ours directly in our accounting software and that's fine for us. But if you are considering specialty software to keep track then chances are that you should be including your finance and accounting people in this conversation before you install anything.
They are greedy assholes. Even Adam Smith recognized that. The insight Smith had that greedy assholes actually produce beneficial outcomes for society.
Think of capitalism a bit like nuclear power. Capitalism is all about harnessing greed to the benefit of society. Unmanaged or poorly managed it results in a catastrophic meltdown to the detriment of all. With the right controls in place and good oversight (but not too much) it can be a hugely powerful force for good. This requires sensible rules fairly enforced. Too few rules and the meltdown occurs (see 2008 financial crisis). Too many rules and you don't get much benefit because nothing happens (the reaction shuts down). If things get too hot or a problem occurs you institute rules (like control rods) to throttle down the reaction before it blows.