...that the delay is caused not by the multi-platform crap, but by the sudden need to go back and edit the content to fit the new "M" rating standards? They wouldn't want their blockbuster title to be rated "AO"....
Now, what are the chances that the facial recognition software will correctly identify me 99.99999% of the time? And how big is the risk that it might mistake another person for me?
The chances? Nil.
Last I looked into this technology (around 2001), the best available was only good for three nines. That's one person in 1000 getting access to your bank account. It's hard to say whether they've improved, because the benchmark used in the study this article is based on uses "FRR at FAR = 0.001" as the measure. FRR is the false reject rate, and FAR is the false acceptance rate. So they assume that 1 in 1000 people will be falsely accepted. Wonderful, huh? And even at that poor FAR, still 1 in 100 attempts results in a false reject.
This technology is several orders of magnitude too shitty to even be considered for anything but novelty use. It's improving, it seems, by 30-40% per year, so perhaps in a couple decades it'll be ready for use in non-financial situations (PC login?).
Regardless of all that.... It's the old "Something you have, something you know..." And it'll never be a good idea to switch to "Two things you have". Facial recognition, if it worked, should replace your ATM card, not your PIN. You should still need a PIN. Preferably one that is much longer than 4 digits.
My Sprint plan from 1998 is $35/month for 450 daytime/unlimited nights & weekend, 6pm start for nights, first incoming minute free. I have since added unlimited PDA data ($15/month), and unlimited SMS ($5/month). There is nothing comparable on the market today. The prices from every carrier are significantly higher than that for similar services, and on many carriers the early night start time, and first incoming minute free aren't available at all. Not only have prices gone up, but the service you get has degraded.
For similar service the current prices are as follows:
AT&T - 450/5000 $39.99/month + $8.99 for early nights & weekends + $44.99 for unlimited data and SMS = $91.97/month
Verizon - 450/unlimited including PDA data & SMS $99.99/month. Early nights & weekends unavailable. = $99.99/month
Sprint - 450/unlimited $39.99/month + $5 for early nights & weekends + $15 for unlimited PDA data + $10 for unlimited SMS = $69.99/month
Conclusion: You have to pay at least 25% more now for less services than what you could get 9 years ago.
Your reason for not using one service over the other is either a) It's Microsoft or b) it costs money. There is no thought for what the product actually is, what it does provide, (or does not) or what value that product carries. And if there is any thought to these things, you don't provide it.
You could turn that around you know... Your reason for using a particular service is based solely in what it provides, and now who provides it, how, or how much it costs. Why isn't it important to consider the who, and what they'll do with the money in making a purchasing decision. It's the same crap the "rootkit" whiners do. Not liking a company's behavior is a perfectly valid reason not to solicit the services of a company, and it's completely rational, not irrational.
Nobody with more than half a brain thinks the price of the PS3 is going to go back up to $599. Pretty much everybody accepts that they will start selling it for $499 but without the freebies after the 60GB models are sold out. (Which is almost everywhere now, though I personally have yet to see an 80GB model for sale in the US)
And the "experience"... Held on high as if it were the second coming by yet another person who hasn't even tried a PS3. Yeah, maybe matchmaking is slick, but it's not $50/year better. If I had to come up with a single adjective to describe how much better it was I'd pick "marginally".
The vast majority of people who purchase tickets "last minute" are people who MUST travel on date X at time Y. As a result, the airline can and does charge more for these seats, for the 'privilege' of booking last minute. If you study airline economics you'll see that there isn't a pool of last-minute travellers who snap up the cheap seats. There is, however, a pool of last-minute travellers who will pay more to travel right now.
You've got the cause and effect backwards. The only reason the airline can charge more is because they can prevent you from buying a seat from a third party. The only time tickets should be more expensive as the date grows nearer is if the flight is sold-out. The economics for ticket sales for air travel are minimally different than for concerts, theater, anything with a limited pool of tickets. And you'll be hard pressed to find disagreement on that from a non-industry source. With cheaper seats as the departure time nears, more flights would be full. People would be forced to pay a premium to book early and guarantee a seat. Business and casual travelers would be more likely to fly at the last minute, and the need for overbooking would diminish, as travelers who now stay home would once again start flying standby. Do you not remember what it was like before the rules changed in the '90s?
They save me money. The airline has said "If you're willing to commit to this flight on this day, X days in advance, and you're not going to change your ticket I'll only charge you $Z. If you want additional services on your ticket, we'll charge you more."
The flaw in your logic is two fold. First that $Z is the lowest you'll pay even if the rules were different, and second that you don't consider the costs of inflexibility. Yeah yeah, your life makes it easy to plan in advance, and you can work from the airport. Bully for you. Most people aren't like that.
And before you accuse people of not doing their homework, you should read your own link. The ability to make airline tickets non-transferable has all but destroyed the consolidator's market within the US; it remains only for niche travel and for associated group rates. Outside the US without the artificial restriction they are still flourishing and keeping airfare lower than it is here. You, sir, are the one who needs to do his homework.
If you show up sufficiently early to check in it's unlikely you'll be bumped due to an overbooking scenario.
More time waiting is equivalent to a higher cost ticket. Perhaps your time is worthless?
Tickets *are* transferable if you purchase the correct fare class.
Tickets are transferable if you give up any money you would have saved by purchasing early. In reality, ticket prices should go down as the flight nears, in order to encourage sales of the remaining seats. Additionally, agencies should be able to purchase discount tickets and resell them later on. Both of these things are only possible if all classes of tickets are transferable, and they also both reduce the costs to you as a consumer. Additionally a transferable ticket allows you to cut your losses if it turns out you can't travel as planned. You're a complete fool if you think non-transferable tickets save you money. They exist to extract the most money possible out of you, not to save you money.
Statistically speaking, the odds are that *none* of those would have been used nefariously had they been let on a plane.
Not only that, but they would have taken away the guns and incendiaries anyway before the security "increase", and they probably missed four or five times the number of items they caught.
Perhaps you're right about overbooking, but I doubt it has a significant effect on consumer prices, since the airline has to assume they will only get ($ticket price * number of seats) in revenue, so somebody not showing up and letting an overbooked passenger onto the flight is gravy.
You're definitely wrong about transferability though. This policy is merely a tool to allow the airlines to increase the price of tickets as the flight approaches, in exactly the opposite way prices for tickets to anything else with limited seating work. Making tickets transferable may increase early sale ticket prices slightly, but it would decrease last minute prices dramatically. This may drive some of the older non-discount airlines into bankruptcy, but I'm completely OK with that. It's time they had a management shakeup imposed on them from the outside anyway.
If they're not going to try and stop every possible threat, then the person wanting to cause harm is going to choose the option they're not trying to stop. So what "reward" are we getting for all this money we're spending and time we're wasting again?
I don't think that's so. Liberals traditionally support doing an investigation if there is suspicion of something, finding out who is guilty, and then punishing.
That was pretty much my point, wasn't it? Compare what you described with the vast majority of reactions in the comments for this story.
It didn't sound to me like he was defending anything.. Just condemning the artificial assignment of blame without evidence.
What is it about the Bush administration that makes ordinary liberals abandon their principals and turn into ordinary hypocrites? As long as they're sticking it to the administration, people are perfectly fine with assigning guilt and punishment first, and finding out what really happened second.
The free movies have nothing to do with Microsoft, and nothing to do with the price cut.
The add-on is not an HD-DVD player without an XBox 360, and thus the cost before the cut was signifigantly higher than $200. That makes the price cut significantly smaller than 10%.
Also, the movie selection sucks. It is unlikely that you could find 5 within the criteria that you would have bought more than one or two of, since it forces you to pick from multiple genres and eras. That's a lame offer. (BluRay has the same lame offer going too.)
As far as from an "HD-DVD player only" perspective, the price is really from $678 to $658, since you need something to connect this device to; it doesn't work by itself... That, of course, assumes you want HDMI, which practically everybody who isn't an early adopter (and got stuck with an HDMI-free TV) will want.
The 5-free thing is just a "me too" for the offer that is currently available for BluRay players.
You can't pick whichever ones you'd like. Similar to the BluRay offer, you have strict restrictions on which crappy movies you can get free. The list is available in PDF format only. Check it out. No Heroes.
$20 got them 3 days of coverage from all the major news outlets... It's been on the front page of Google news for days. Tiny price-cut, tons of press. Geniuses. They really are amazing.
Slashdot Mirror
...that the delay is caused not by the multi-platform crap, but by the sudden need to go back and edit the content to fit the new "M" rating standards? They wouldn't want their blockbuster title to be rated "AO"....
The chances? Nil.
Last I looked into this technology (around 2001), the best available was only good for three nines. That's one person in 1000 getting access to your bank account. It's hard to say whether they've improved, because the benchmark used in the study this article is based on uses "FRR at FAR = 0.001" as the measure. FRR is the false reject rate, and FAR is the false acceptance rate. So they assume that 1 in 1000 people will be falsely accepted. Wonderful, huh? And even at that poor FAR, still 1 in 100 attempts results in a false reject.
This technology is several orders of magnitude too shitty to even be considered for anything but novelty use. It's improving, it seems, by 30-40% per year, so perhaps in a couple decades it'll be ready for use in non-financial situations (PC login?).
Regardless of all that.... It's the old "Something you have, something you know..." And it'll never be a good idea to switch to "Two things you have". Facial recognition, if it worked, should replace your ATM card, not your PIN. You should still need a PIN. Preferably one that is much longer than 4 digits.
Perhaps you had an overpriced plan back then.
Or perhaps you have an unadvertised special deal now?
For similar service the current prices are as follows:
Conclusion: You have to pay at least 25% more now for less services than what you could get 9 years ago.
You could turn that around you know... Your reason for using a particular service is based solely in what it provides, and now who provides it, how, or how much it costs. Why isn't it important to consider the who, and what they'll do with the money in making a purchasing decision. It's the same crap the "rootkit" whiners do. Not liking a company's behavior is a perfectly valid reason not to solicit the services of a company, and it's completely rational, not irrational.
What games are there to buy from Amazon? Almost all of the good PS3 games that are out now are downloadable.
/me hands you some reading glasses...
It says "more than half a brain". People with only half a brain are expected to think whatever nonsense they'd like.
Nobody with more than half a brain thinks the price of the PS3 is going to go back up to $599. Pretty much everybody accepts that they will start selling it for $499 but without the freebies after the 60GB models are sold out. (Which is almost everywhere now, though I personally have yet to see an 80GB model for sale in the US)
Two separate stores, so it looks legit, but the price drop is only on the Premium, not the Elite.
On the whole since launch it's certainly negative, but you might be surprised as to the answer on an individual unit sold now.
Who said anything about console?
And the "experience"... Held on high as if it were the second coming by yet another person who hasn't even tried a PS3. Yeah, maybe matchmaking is slick, but it's not $50/year better. If I had to come up with a single adjective to describe how much better it was I'd pick "marginally".
You've got the cause and effect backwards. The only reason the airline can charge more is because they can prevent you from buying a seat from a third party. The only time tickets should be more expensive as the date grows nearer is if the flight is sold-out. The economics for ticket sales for air travel are minimally different than for concerts, theater, anything with a limited pool of tickets. And you'll be hard pressed to find disagreement on that from a non-industry source. With cheaper seats as the departure time nears, more flights would be full. People would be forced to pay a premium to book early and guarantee a seat. Business and casual travelers would be more likely to fly at the last minute, and the need for overbooking would diminish, as travelers who now stay home would once again start flying standby. Do you not remember what it was like before the rules changed in the '90s?
The flaw in your logic is two fold. First that $Z is the lowest you'll pay even if the rules were different, and second that you don't consider the costs of inflexibility. Yeah yeah, your life makes it easy to plan in advance, and you can work from the airport. Bully for you. Most people aren't like that.
And before you accuse people of not doing their homework, you should read your own link. The ability to make airline tickets non-transferable has all but destroyed the consolidator's market within the US; it remains only for niche travel and for associated group rates. Outside the US without the artificial restriction they are still flourishing and keeping airfare lower than it is here. You, sir, are the one who needs to do his homework.
Multiple other systems give you both of those things for free. I'd ask for all of your money back if I were you.
More time waiting is equivalent to a higher cost ticket. Perhaps your time is worthless?
Tickets are transferable if you give up any money you would have saved by purchasing early. In reality, ticket prices should go down as the flight nears, in order to encourage sales of the remaining seats. Additionally, agencies should be able to purchase discount tickets and resell them later on. Both of these things are only possible if all classes of tickets are transferable, and they also both reduce the costs to you as a consumer. Additionally a transferable ticket allows you to cut your losses if it turns out you can't travel as planned. You're a complete fool if you think non-transferable tickets save you money. They exist to extract the most money possible out of you, not to save you money.
Statistically speaking, the odds are that *none* of those would have been used nefariously had they been let on a plane.
Not only that, but they would have taken away the guns and incendiaries anyway before the security "increase", and they probably missed four or five times the number of items they caught.
Perhaps you're right about overbooking, but I doubt it has a significant effect on consumer prices, since the airline has to assume they will only get ($ticket price * number of seats) in revenue, so somebody not showing up and letting an overbooked passenger onto the flight is gravy.
You're definitely wrong about transferability though. This policy is merely a tool to allow the airlines to increase the price of tickets as the flight approaches, in exactly the opposite way prices for tickets to anything else with limited seating work. Making tickets transferable may increase early sale ticket prices slightly, but it would decrease last minute prices dramatically. This may drive some of the older non-discount airlines into bankruptcy, but I'm completely OK with that. It's time they had a management shakeup imposed on them from the outside anyway.
If they're not going to try and stop every possible threat, then the person wanting to cause harm is going to choose the option they're not trying to stop. So what "reward" are we getting for all this money we're spending and time we're wasting again?
That was pretty much my point, wasn't it? Compare what you described with the vast majority of reactions in the comments for this story.
So how does somebody with the nick "HangingChad" detect that somebody is a "Bush supporter"?
As for your last line, you've essentially described 90% of US voters.
It didn't sound to me like he was defending anything.. Just condemning the artificial assignment of blame without evidence.
What is it about the Bush administration that makes ordinary liberals abandon their principals and turn into ordinary hypocrites? As long as they're sticking it to the administration, people are perfectly fine with assigning guilt and punishment first, and finding out what really happened second.
The free movies have nothing to do with Microsoft, and nothing to do with the price cut.
The add-on is not an HD-DVD player without an XBox 360, and thus the cost before the cut was signifigantly higher than $200. That makes the price cut significantly smaller than 10%.
Also, the movie selection sucks. It is unlikely that you could find 5 within the criteria that you would have bought more than one or two of, since it forces you to pick from multiple genres and eras. That's a lame offer. (BluRay has the same lame offer going too.)
As far as from an "HD-DVD player only" perspective, the price is really from $678 to $658, since you need something to connect this device to; it doesn't work by itself... That, of course, assumes you want HDMI, which practically everybody who isn't an early adopter (and got stuck with an HDMI-free TV) will want.
That's only a 3% price cut.
The 5-free thing is just a "me too" for the offer that is currently available for BluRay players.
You can't pick whichever ones you'd like. Similar to the BluRay offer, you have strict restrictions on which crappy movies you can get free. The list is available in PDF format only. Check it out. No Heroes.
$20 got them 3 days of coverage from all the major news outlets... It's been on the front page of Google news for days. Tiny price-cut, tons of press. Geniuses. They really are amazing.