Though the "corporations" represent real people, they do not represent "The People". They represent a select group of The People that happened to invest in that particular corporation.
No one (hopefully) complains that government creates policies aimed at specific groups of people (which don't do anything for people outside of that group). So why complain about these specific policies, especially ones that create jobs? Both benefit The People, and no one is stopped from creating their own large company to get the same sort of negotiating advantage. At least that's equal opportunity, versus, say, special treatment for people based on their skin color.
I think it's great that ordinary people are able to negotiate directly with state government to keep government in line. If only we could do that as powerfully with the federal government, though I suppose you could argue that moving production off-shore is a form of that.
I think it is a legitimate point to think that Tivo might wish to consider putting its retail customers first, since without them they are nothing.
How would their actions be different depending on which customer they put first? Selling that data does not affect the viewers at all.
The attempts to monitize their customers as if they are an asset owned by Tivo seems like a good way to alienate retail customers and to potentially hurt Tivo sales.
The more money TiVo makes from other sources, the lower they can move their prices for everyone else (perhaps even free, if the data was valuable enough). Consumers like low prices more than they like TiVo not selling ANONYMOUS data for some ridiculous notion of ethics.
It's their data, exactly as if a painter kept track of what colors he paints houses and sold that information to a painting company so they know what colors are popular.
That does not address the fact that the underlying things Google is doing are of a greedy and selfish nature.
So, I take it that when you file your taxes, you don't take any deductions? After all, you're only taking out those deductions because of selfishness and greed.
Sheesh, I can't believe the comments about this, that it's somehow damaging to Democracy. This sort of thing helps Deomcracy!
One of the unique things about the United States, and a very underrated aspect that helps strengthen our economy, is the fact that we have so many states with separate governments that compete with one another. When The People (read: business) have the opportunity to negotiate directly with governments, it helps keep them in line to not create punitive and damaging (and greed) tax laws.
"Corporations" are not alive. They represent real people. This was a win for The People against oppressive government taxation.
Disclaimer: I am NOT a Libertarian. Yes, government does have a role in regulation capitalism. But it's critical that government also be regulated.
The only reason we are not all using Java desktops with a common intermediate layer is the Microsoft "take and break" implementation of the JVM.
Oh, please. The reason we're not using Java desktops is because (in the early days, at least) Java applications SUCKED. The GUI was ugly, they took forever to start-up, they were incredibly slow once they did run, and used an enormous amount of memory. I'll defer whether it's still the case, but Microsoft had nothing to do with Java's lack of adoption. If people wanted to write standard apps for Windows, they were certainly able to.
Steve Jobs, Macworld, 2008: "We've invented the iPony!" (pulls back sheet to reveal shining white magical pony prancing on stage) "His name is Starshine, and we made him from moonbeams, fairy dust, suger, spice, and a tiny bit of neatsfoot oil. He can sing, dance, do your algebra homework, and go from 0-60 in 4.9 seconds!"
Meanwhile, all the rest of the ponies outside who are slightly less shiny look shocked at Apple taking credit for their long-time existence.
If you are however interested in airports and travel from airport to airport just to see them, then yes, you are a tourist.
I'd agree with that, but space is not an airport. An airport is a landing spot on the way to another destination. Space IS the destination. Even if I walked out of an airport and saw london for four minutes before a rubber strap whipped me back into the airplane, I don't think I would've been a tourist.
Rowling puts together good, simple story arcs expressed in accessible language. She is not a brilliant writer.
Simple story arcs? You either haven't read the books, or you didn't realize that the series is one book divided into seven parts, with a giant story arc and an enormous number of subplots. The brilliance of her writing is that you can either focus on the simple story arcs (which children tend to do), or the incredibly complex story arcs, depending on how deeply you delve into it. Take the question of the relationship between wizarding society and the Goblins and other "lesser" creatures. Interesting fountain in the Ministry, wasn't it?
Or Severus Snape, who is such a brilliant character that he can kill one of the biggest characters in the story and we STILL don't know what side he's on!
These novels are absolutely brilliant, deep and complex. And what's most amazing is that they can be read by such a wide age range and enjoyed. I actually pity people who don't really "get" them and think they're "just" children's books.
All jokes aside, I know what she should do. I think she should write a book of short stories. With her imagination, she probably has a zillion of them. And the book would be of sufficiently different type that it would be hard to compare to Harry Potter. It also improves the odds of there being *something* that most people would like, so it wouldn't be the inevitable reaction of, "this book is okay, but it's not as good as Harry Potter."
As far as I know staying somewhere is not a requirement for tourism. Actually I think that if you stayed it would be immigration.
Interesting analogy. So, if you land in London Heathrow Airport temporarily on the way to somewhere else, were you a tourist in London? I'd say most people would say "no", even though you were technically in "London Space". As with outer space, if you just enter temporarily on the way back down to Earth, I would say you weren't a tourist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n_line It's not an orbital flight, no, but it's definitely outer space. Alan Shepherd only went 50 miles higher.
That's the boundary of space, but that doesn't mean this is space travel. I define space travel as a controlled entry into space, a controlled stay there, and a controlled return. Throwing a can up high and letting it fall back to Earth is not space travel.
I hate marketing. Suborbital is NOT SPACE TOURISM! The other four space tourists entered orbit -- a controlled entry into space, and stayed there. A suborbital trip is a rocket ride. Fun, yes, but not space travel.
It is quite possible if Gates and Buffet had agreed privately to donate anonymously the creation of the world's largest charity by anonymous parties might have created more PR than said donations with known contributors.
I don't agree with your points (you seem determined to cast everything in the worst light... vaccinating children is possibly a net loss to the world??), but your above point is moot. It would have been impossible to move around 50 billion dollars anonymously. First, how many people do you think can do that? Second, since this is stock wealth we're talking about, it'd be tracked by the SEC.
Interestingly enough, some of the largest charitable contributions in history have been anonymous.
The reason most rich people make anonymous donations is two reasons: 1) to avoid being a target by more charities, and 2) to avoid having their name be identified as rich and a potential crime target.
Gates can actually do a lot more good by being public and raising awareness of the issues he's interested in helping, such as African children vaccinations. Case in point: Warren Buffet gave his huge pile of money because of the transparency of what he sees Gates doing.
I guess this just proves that if you have enough money you can always buy yourself some respectability. People won't concern themselves with how you got your money.
Or, another way to look at it, the Gates Foundation makes whatever minor annoyances* we've suffered from Microsoft worth it. The Gates Foundation is going to do a hell of a lot of good in the world. There are certain things that can only be done if you have an enormous pile of money in one place not beholden to elected leadership.
*And they are just minor annoyances. Would I like it if Windows wasn't so mediocre? Sure. But I'd say that Microsoft succeeded partly because of their business practices, but more because of the incompetence of the competition. And the software industry just ain't that important in the scheme of things. A better desktop operating system doesn't affect our lives to any great extent.
I want a government that does The Right Thing* or nothing at all; a government that does The Wrong Thing can be harmful in the extreme.
The problem is that "The Right Thing" doesn't exist. All the various contradictory sides believe passionately that their beliefs are the "Right Thing". Personally, there is no American party that represents my opinion of what the "Right Thing" is.
All you're really saying is that you'd rather the government do nothing than do something against your beliefs. Well, duh, wouldn't we all?
Saying my car is easy to fuel up therefore a battery is easy to charge at a rate which would require hundreds of kilowatts to megawatts to each house is so wrong it isn't even wrong.
The point is that you wouldn't charge it at your house -- you'd charge it at a filling station with big-ass cables wired into the grid -- just like we do now.
This is only valid when data storage is inexpensive enough for you to to allocate magnetic media to store said data.
Eh, it's not as hard (or as storage-consuming) as you might think. I developed a medical system in the early 90s that kept a history of all changes. The fact is that usually one gets new data much faster than old data changes. It depends on the application, of course, but that's been my experience. Of course, I only store what actually changes, I don't clone entire records.
Do you bother to look through the audit trail when they haven't bounced a payment or done anything dodgy like that? The original poster's stated intent wasn't to cheat anybody, after all.
There's an automated system that tracks new customers against all the old data in order to identify people who've cheated the company in the past. So it depends on what you define as "bother to look through". If I was going to create a marketing list for whatever reason, I might use the old data, but who knows what other people do with stuff like this. My point is only that any semi-competent company is going to have a policy of "never throw away data", especially if it's customer changeable.
I just get into the online form for the company in question and enter crazy trash into all the blanks. Afterwards, all they have is junk that has nothing to do with me. The likelihood that anyone searches the backups is nil.
That's assuming they don't keep easy-accessible audit trails and change logs for all of the fields. All of my e-commerce systems do. It's actually kind of funny when people change their information to garbage to keep us from tracking them when they bounce payments or something like that.
Yes, it's incredibly hard to believe. Can you fathom how unbelievably, incredibly huge our universe is? I can't. I mean, it's absolutely *enormous*.
That's the Sagan argument. The galaxy (never mind the universe) is so big that it "just has" to have life other than us. Unfortunately, there's that pesky Fermi Paradox. We have a direct argument of a lack of life in this galaxy at least, and absolutely zero evidence for it. The "just has to" argument isn't very strong.
Slashdot Mirror
Though the "corporations" represent real people, they do not represent "The People". They represent a select group of The People that happened to invest in that particular corporation.
No one (hopefully) complains that government creates policies aimed at specific groups of people (which don't do anything for people outside of that group). So why complain about these specific policies, especially ones that create jobs? Both benefit The People, and no one is stopped from creating their own large company to get the same sort of negotiating advantage. At least that's equal opportunity, versus, say, special treatment for people based on their skin color.
I think it's great that ordinary people are able to negotiate directly with state government to keep government in line. If only we could do that as powerfully with the federal government, though I suppose you could argue that moving production off-shore is a form of that.
I think it is a legitimate point to think that Tivo might wish to consider putting its retail customers first, since without them they are nothing.
How would their actions be different depending on which customer they put first? Selling that data does not affect the viewers at all.
The attempts to monitize their customers as if they are an asset owned by Tivo seems like a good way to alienate retail customers and to potentially hurt Tivo sales.
The more money TiVo makes from other sources, the lower they can move their prices for everyone else (perhaps even free, if the data was valuable enough). Consumers like low prices more than they like TiVo not selling ANONYMOUS data for some ridiculous notion of ethics.
It's their data, exactly as if a painter kept track of what colors he paints houses and sold that information to a painting company so they know what colors are popular.
That does not address the fact that the underlying things Google is doing are of a greedy and selfish nature.
So, I take it that when you file your taxes, you don't take any deductions? After all, you're only taking out those deductions because of selfishness and greed.
Sheesh, I can't believe the comments about this, that it's somehow damaging to Democracy. This sort of thing helps Deomcracy!
One of the unique things about the United States, and a very underrated aspect that helps strengthen our economy, is the fact that we have so many states with separate governments that compete with one another. When The People (read: business) have the opportunity to negotiate directly with governments, it helps keep them in line to not create punitive and damaging (and greed) tax laws.
"Corporations" are not alive. They represent real people. This was a win for The People against oppressive government taxation.
Disclaimer: I am NOT a Libertarian. Yes, government does have a role in regulation capitalism. But it's critical that government also be regulated.
Massachusetts in general and Boston in particular are probably the least religious places in the US.
Yeah, Catholicism is particularly under-represented (/sarcasm)
Sheesh.
The only reason we are not all using Java desktops with a common intermediate layer is the Microsoft "take and break" implementation of the JVM.
Oh, please. The reason we're not using Java desktops is because (in the early days, at least) Java applications SUCKED. The GUI was ugly, they took forever to start-up, they were incredibly slow once they did run, and used an enormous amount of memory. I'll defer whether it's still the case, but Microsoft had nothing to do with Java's lack of adoption. If people wanted to write standard apps for Windows, they were certainly able to.
Steve Jobs, Macworld, 2008: "We've invented the iPony!" (pulls back sheet to reveal shining white magical pony prancing on stage) "His name is Starshine, and we made him from moonbeams, fairy dust, suger, spice, and a tiny bit of neatsfoot oil. He can sing, dance, do your algebra homework, and go from 0-60 in 4.9 seconds!"
Meanwhile, all the rest of the ponies outside who are slightly less shiny look shocked at Apple taking credit for their long-time existence.
If you are however interested in airports and travel from airport to airport just to see them, then yes, you are a tourist.
I'd agree with that, but space is not an airport. An airport is a landing spot on the way to another destination. Space IS the destination. Even if I walked out of an airport and saw london for four minutes before a rubber strap whipped me back into the airplane, I don't think I would've been a tourist.
Rowling puts together good, simple story arcs expressed in accessible language. She is not a brilliant writer.
Simple story arcs? You either haven't read the books, or you didn't realize that the series is one book divided into seven parts, with a giant story arc and an enormous number of subplots. The brilliance of her writing is that you can either focus on the simple story arcs (which children tend to do), or the incredibly complex story arcs, depending on how deeply you delve into it. Take the question of the relationship between wizarding society and the Goblins and other "lesser" creatures. Interesting fountain in the Ministry, wasn't it?
Or Severus Snape, who is such a brilliant character that he can kill one of the biggest characters in the story and we STILL don't know what side he's on!
These novels are absolutely brilliant, deep and complex. And what's most amazing is that they can be read by such a wide age range and enjoyed. I actually pity people who don't really "get" them and think they're "just" children's books.
All jokes aside, I know what she should do. I think she should write a book of short stories. With her imagination, she probably has a zillion of them. And the book would be of sufficiently different type that it would be hard to compare to Harry Potter. It also improves the odds of there being *something* that most people would like, so it wouldn't be the inevitable reaction of, "this book is okay, but it's not as good as Harry Potter."
As far as I know staying somewhere is not a requirement for tourism. Actually I think that if you stayed it would be immigration.
Interesting analogy. So, if you land in London Heathrow Airport temporarily on the way to somewhere else, were you a tourist in London? I'd say most people would say "no", even though you were technically in "London Space". As with outer space, if you just enter temporarily on the way back down to Earth, I would say you weren't a tourist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n_line It's not an orbital flight, no, but it's definitely outer space. Alan Shepherd only went 50 miles higher.
That's the boundary of space, but that doesn't mean this is space travel. I define space travel as a controlled entry into space, a controlled stay there, and a controlled return. Throwing a can up high and letting it fall back to Earth is not space travel.
I hate marketing. Suborbital is NOT SPACE TOURISM! The other four space tourists entered orbit -- a controlled entry into space, and stayed there. A suborbital trip is a rocket ride. Fun, yes, but not space travel.
It is quite possible if Gates and Buffet had agreed privately to donate anonymously the creation of the world's largest charity by anonymous parties might have created more PR than said donations with known contributors.
I don't agree with your points (you seem determined to cast everything in the worst light... vaccinating children is possibly a net loss to the world??), but your above point is moot. It would have been impossible to move around 50 billion dollars anonymously. First, how many people do you think can do that? Second, since this is stock wealth we're talking about, it'd be tracked by the SEC.
Interestingly enough, some of the largest charitable contributions in history have been anonymous.
The reason most rich people make anonymous donations is two reasons: 1) to avoid being a target by more charities, and 2) to avoid having their name be identified as rich and a potential crime target.
Gates can actually do a lot more good by being public and raising awareness of the issues he's interested in helping, such as African children vaccinations. Case in point: Warren Buffet gave his huge pile of money because of the transparency of what he sees Gates doing.
I guess this just proves that if you have enough money you can always buy yourself some respectability. People won't concern themselves with how you got your money.
Or, another way to look at it, the Gates Foundation makes whatever minor annoyances* we've suffered from Microsoft worth it. The Gates Foundation is going to do a hell of a lot of good in the world. There are certain things that can only be done if you have an enormous pile of money in one place not beholden to elected leadership.
*And they are just minor annoyances. Would I like it if Windows wasn't so mediocre? Sure. But I'd say that Microsoft succeeded partly because of their business practices, but more because of the incompetence of the competition. And the software industry just ain't that important in the scheme of things. A better desktop operating system doesn't affect our lives to any great extent.
Here's the only comparison of operating systems that matters to the vast majority of people:
Software Selection:
Windows: The most and best selection
OS/X: Far less than Windows, but still serviceable
Linux: The least selection and most crude.
People use applications, not operating systems.
I want a government that does The Right Thing* or nothing at all; a government that does The Wrong Thing can be harmful in the extreme.
The problem is that "The Right Thing" doesn't exist. All the various contradictory sides believe passionately that their beliefs are the "Right Thing". Personally, there is no American party that represents my opinion of what the "Right Thing" is.
All you're really saying is that you'd rather the government do nothing than do something against your beliefs. Well, duh, wouldn't we all?
Saying my car is easy to fuel up therefore a battery is easy to charge at a rate which would require hundreds of kilowatts to megawatts to each house is so wrong it isn't even wrong.
The point is that you wouldn't charge it at your house -- you'd charge it at a filling station with big-ass cables wired into the grid -- just like we do now.
filling a gas tank and charging a battery are surprisingly different propositions.
So are filling a tank with gas compared with getting a bag of feed for the horse.
And even if they did, we don't have the 10,000amp service at my house necessary to actually charge them at speed.
I'm skeptical as well, but your argument above is silly. I don't have a refinery or a pumping station at my house, yet my car is quite practical.
This is only valid when data storage is inexpensive enough for you to to allocate magnetic media to store said data.
Eh, it's not as hard (or as storage-consuming) as you might think. I developed a medical system in the early 90s that kept a history of all changes. The fact is that usually one gets new data much faster than old data changes. It depends on the application, of course, but that's been my experience. Of course, I only store what actually changes, I don't clone entire records.
Do you bother to look through the audit trail when they haven't bounced a payment or done anything dodgy like that? The original poster's stated intent wasn't to cheat anybody, after all.
There's an automated system that tracks new customers against all the old data in order to identify people who've cheated the company in the past. So it depends on what you define as "bother to look through". If I was going to create a marketing list for whatever reason, I might use the old data, but who knows what other people do with stuff like this. My point is only that any semi-competent company is going to have a policy of "never throw away data", especially if it's customer changeable.
I just get into the online form for the company in question and enter crazy trash into all the blanks. Afterwards, all they have is junk that has nothing to do with me. The likelihood that anyone searches the backups is nil.
That's assuming they don't keep easy-accessible audit trails and change logs for all of the fields. All of my e-commerce systems do. It's actually kind of funny when people change their information to garbage to keep us from tracking them when they bounce payments or something like that.
Yes, it's incredibly hard to believe. Can you fathom how unbelievably, incredibly huge our universe is? I can't. I mean, it's absolutely *enormous*.
That's the Sagan argument. The galaxy (never mind the universe) is so big that it "just has" to have life other than us. Unfortunately, there's that pesky Fermi Paradox. We have a direct argument of a lack of life in this galaxy at least, and absolutely zero evidence for it. The "just has to" argument isn't very strong.