Really? A $50 commission for signing up for a credit card? From what I hear, it is $1-2 each...
That does seems absurdly high. Perhaps this card had a high annual fee and the company would make recoup the commission within a year. Maybe a $50 commission was only paid if certain criteria were met, such the card being used within a month of signing up. There's no way that someone who only gets two applications per hour would be worth $100/hr. The $1-2 per application sounds much more plausible.
Yes, it was the most optimal code for this situation.
This code may have been optimal if the only measure was lines of code but that doesn't mean it would have executed any faster. Having fewer lines of code doesn't necessarily lead to better performance. Additionally, it can (and did in this case) lead to problems maintaining the code.
Many professors who multiple sections of classes in rooms with and without wireless access have noticed a major difference in grades between those classes where students have laptops on the net and those without.
I got a call from a salesman trying to tell me that you can "eliminate your debt" through an interpretation of the laws.
The problem stems from the fact that no US court actually shares this interpretation. This seems similar to the claims that various defects during ratification make collecting an income tax is illegal. While people would love to believe there's a "secret" way to avoid paying taxes, the IRS does not agree. If you have credit card debt pay your damn bills.
I don't think the parent was implying that MRIs are only for old or sick people. He was pointing out that while MRI was a breakhthrough in medical technology, it's not quite accurate to say "There are very few people around now that haven't been in an MRI machine these days..." I think it's safe to assume that far fewer than 60 million people undergo an MRI each year. This is likely a case where a few percent of people undergo MRI frequently while the majority of the population have no need.
I agree that this is a poorly disguised advertisement, but what really annoyed me was the choice to use blue text for the answers. Not only is it hard to read paragraphs comprised entirely of blue text, but they didn't even bother to make the questions stand out by using bold or italic text.
I have no knowledge of Australian commerce law, but did he actually do anything illegal? The story states that the salesman selected the merchandise from a glass case, accepted the payment and handed over the merchandise to the customer. Perhaps the customer had a moral or ethical obligation to inform the store that he received way more than he paid for, but there may not be a legal obligation. This situation would more complicated if the customer himself had carried the product to the register. Then there would have been the possibility that he had filled the filled the box with extra chips. As it stands, someone probably does deserve to get fired, or at least suspended.
If you're concerned with overpopulation, there's plenty of countries with far higher growth rates. Take a look here for a list of projected popuation growth between 2000 and 2050.
You'll notice that African countries dominate the top part of list. The U.S. is right in the middle and I'd bet that much of that growth is due to immigration. The US may hit 500 million by 2060, but the rest of the world won't exactly be standing still.
Flash memormay be around $100/GB right now, but if that drops low enough (say $20/GB), it'll be enough to replace HDDs...
There's no way that people will pay $20/GB for primary storage. The cost of a HDD is around $1/GB and dropping fast. It would be exceedingly difficult to convince people to pay a 100% premium (2x the price) for solid state storage. $20/GB would be a 1900% price premium! Smaller size and lower energy consumption are all very nice and good, but $2000 for a 100GB drive seems a little steep.
I've also taken my supra to 167 MPH on Interstate 84. I didn't kill anyone. Not even close, because I am a smart driver.
Fine. Keep trying to convince yourself that driving 167 MPH was smart. When people wonder why auto insurance rates are so high, they should read the parent post.
And if i were in the middle of performing a surgury, when said telemarkateers started calling me, would not they be "interfering with people's livelihoods[ and or lives]".
Oh please! While I highly doubt that anyone who has trouble spelling "surgery" will actually be performing it, I doubt even more that telemarketing calls are received in operating rooms. Don't make a mockery out of the issue by making up absurd "straw-man" scenarios.
On demand movies can be started at any time by the viewer. If you'd like to begin the movie at 8:27, that's possible with the on demand system. Normal pay-per-view movies (Comcast refers to them as In Demand) start at specified times. The most popular movies usually begin every 30 minutes while less popular ones begin every hour.
If the device was not used to facilitate an illegal activity, then its libel/slander
I don't believe you're correct. The definiton of libel is:
1a. A false publication, as in writing, print, signs, or pictures, that damages a person's reputation. b. The act of presenting such material to the public. 2. The written claims presented by a plaintiff in an action at admiralty law or to an ecclesiastical court.
Slander:
1. Oral communication of false statements injurious to a person's reputation. 2. A false and malicious statement or report about someone
DirecTV doesn't seem to have committed either crime. However this might be considered malicious prosecution:
Malicious prosecution is a common law intentional tort. While similar to the tort of abuse of process it is the misuse of a prior legal process (civil or criminal) that is dismissed in favor of the victim that was brought without probable cause with intentional malice by the defendant.
This is probably because the Dems don't hold all 3 government branches like the Reps do right now.
The judicial branch doesn't have party affiliation. Of course, there's a division between liberal and conservative, but it's currently four on each side with Sandra Day O'Connor as the swing vote.
The legislative branch is held by Republicans, but by a very narrow majority in both houses.
The executive branch is held by the Republicans, but this is subject to change in 2004, just like it is every four years.
If Bush loses in 2004 and the Democrats pick up a few more seats they'll suddenly jump into control. Add in the replacement of a Supreme Court justice or two and now the left wing would be in the dominant position. The US certainly has its faults, but it also has plenty of checks and balances in place to prevent real abuse of the system.
You must work in a much higher margin industry than most people. Even in bulk, 64M keychains must cost $25-30. That's a lot to give away unless the product is really expensive or the profit margins are huge. In a few years, once the prices have dropped dramatically, this might be more realistic.
It's similar to the homeless disappearing from the media during Democratic administrations and magically reappearing as soon as a Republican is inaugurated.
Made curious by the continual claims of politicians and industry executives that stronger copyright leads to more innovation, I went to the library early Freshman year to see if there was any corroberating research. I was unable to find any, so I went to a historical index of statistics. However, that only had data until 1970, so I extracted the more recent data from the annual Statistical Abstract(s) of the United States.
The trends are fascinating, especially in a field where a surprising amount of innumeracy and overinterpretation appears from people who should know better. For instance:
"We did a survey in April that asked people the reasons why they downloaded, and 65% said because it was free," a BPI spokeswoman said.
They are, of course, absolutely correct. But they leave it up to the reader to infer that those respondents are displacing purchases with free music. In effect, however, what is happening is price discrimination. Those who are willing to tolerate lower-quality music are paying less (nothing) for it. Those who are not pay more. Society gains, the industry loses--and then only assuming recent studies showing that downloads serve as a form of music sampling, a free preview for users that later buy music, are incorrect.
Now, on to the data. Some of this pertains directly to copyright, others directly to the RIAA.
Most interesting to me was one trend that my statistics professor, Professor Wyner, pointed out. From the early 1950's until 1991, copyright registrations rise exponentially. In fact, a simple quadratic fit shows an Rsquare of over.99.
That a four-decade trend of such strength could reverse itself in a single year so dramatically--and without an apparent cause--is incredible. The fact that it happens across all categories of copyright suggests the effect is perhaps due to a change in the way the Copyright Office records entries. However, given that music registrations correlate well with overall registrations, it would have to have been a policy change for all copyright entries. The sheer precipitousness of the plummet belies many otherwise viable explanations. However, in 1992, Congress passed Public Law 102-307, making renewal automatic for works from 1964-1977. Depending on whether the Copyright Office was including renewals in its statistics, 1991 could be a break in analyzability for the data. Furthermore, if they did, indeed, include renewals, trends will be blurred and obfuscated by the lagging renewal registrations.
The single-category music registrations show the same plunge.
Also interesting is that, as the price of CDs increase, shipments increase. This trend is not nearly as strong as the former, and is only based on a decade of data provided by the RIAA. Possible explanations for this trend include that CDs are a luxury item--unlikely, I should think--or that the economy's rise during this period (1990-2000) lead to an increase in spending.
And, in fact, it did. A classical Demand Curve. Not such a great mystery after all, as it turns out.
Since we are starting to analyze statistics provided by the RIAA at this point, I should mention that they have a nasty tendency to only release data which they can put a proper spin on. Consequently, analyzing becomes much more difficult and leads to kludges such as the 2002 CDs shipped data extrapolated from news of an 8.8% decline from previous years. If anyone would provide me with a complete set of Nielson SoundScan statistics this project would be much easier. If anyone disputes my figures please provide me with a better set. Many of these numbers took hours to find, here from one source, there from another. Fortunately, most of the time there was some overlap in data provided, so I was able to see that the numbers were directly comparable.
That said, the numbers are interesting. The RIAA has been shipping fewer CDs in the last few years, by all accounts. The most recent (and most contested) numbers come from SoundScan
No, not really. The Wachowskis came up with a story that would take 4-5 hours of screen time. They had several choices:
- Make one movie with a running time of 4-5 hours. This would never be accepted by theaters or Warner Bros.
- Cut half of the script, leaving one standard length film. No artist would want half of their work to be thrown out.
- Make two films, each of standard length. This obviously was the preferred choice.
Now, given that two movies were going to be made based on one plot, it made sense to film them together. If you prefer to think of it as one movie with a six month intermission, feel free.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? A $50 commission for signing up for a credit card? From what I hear, it is $1-2 each...
That does seems absurdly high. Perhaps this card had a high annual fee and the company would make recoup the commission within a year. Maybe a $50 commission was only paid if certain criteria were met, such the card being used within a month of signing up. There's no way that someone who only gets two applications per hour would be worth $100/hr. The $1-2 per application sounds much more plausible.
Yes, it was the most optimal code for this situation.
This code may have been optimal if the only measure was lines of code but that doesn't mean it would have executed any faster. Having fewer lines of code doesn't necessarily lead to better performance. Additionally, it can (and did in this case) lead to problems maintaining the code.
Many professors who multiple sections of classes in rooms with and without wireless access have noticed a major difference in grades between those classes where students have laptops on the net and those without.
Which section had the higher grades?
Arggh, I meant that you can't tell from the statement if it works on a G5.
I'm sure that 10.3 works fine on a G5 but you can tell that from reading the parent's statement. I parsed it to have two criteria:
Panther requires
1. a minimum of 128MB of memory
2. the following Apple products with built-in USB support: iMac,(R) iBook(R), Power Macintosh(R) G3, Power Mac G4, Power Mac G4 Cube
I got a call from a salesman trying to tell me that you can "eliminate your debt" through an interpretation of the laws.
The problem stems from the fact that no US court actually shares this interpretation. This seems similar to the claims that various defects during ratification make collecting an income tax is illegal. While people would love to believe there's a "secret" way to avoid paying taxes, the IRS does not agree. If you have credit card debt pay your damn bills.
I don't think the parent was implying that MRIs are only for old or sick people. He was pointing out that while MRI was a breakhthrough in medical technology, it's not quite accurate to say "There are very few people around now that haven't been in an MRI machine these days..." I think it's safe to assume that far fewer than 60 million people undergo an MRI each year. This is likely a case where a few percent of people undergo MRI frequently while the majority of the population have no need.
this article isn't worth anyone's time.
I agree that this is a poorly disguised advertisement, but what really annoyed me was the choice to use blue text for the answers. Not only is it hard to read paragraphs comprised entirely of blue text, but they didn't even bother to make the questions stand out by using bold or italic text.
Bottom line: Skip this article
I have no knowledge of Australian commerce law, but did he actually do anything illegal? The story states that the salesman selected the merchandise from a glass case, accepted the payment and handed over the merchandise to the customer. Perhaps the customer had a moral or ethical obligation to inform the store that he received way more than he paid for, but there may not be a legal obligation. This situation would more complicated if the customer himself had carried the product to the register. Then there would have been the possibility that he had filled the filled the box with extra chips. As it stands, someone probably does deserve to get fired, or at least suspended.
If you're concerned with overpopulation, there's plenty of countries with far higher growth rates. Take a look here for a list of projected popuation growth between 2000 and 2050.
You'll notice that African countries dominate the top part of list. The U.S. is right in the middle and I'd bet that much of that growth is due to immigration. The US may hit 500 million by 2060, but the rest of the world won't exactly be standing still.
It is vastly preferable to be taxed once (say, on income and capital gains, because it needs to be progressive...
I can accept that you believe those tax rates should be progressive, but is there a reason why they need to be progressive?
Plus the fact that you can get Office 2003 for less than $50 on a Select License Agreement.
And what are the costs of obtaining a Select License Agreement? I imagine it's rather pricy.
Hey dude! Scope this far-out site.
Flash memormay be around $100/GB right now, but if that drops low enough (say $20/GB), it'll be enough to replace HDDs...
There's no way that people will pay $20/GB for primary storage. The cost of a HDD is around $1/GB and dropping fast. It would be exceedingly difficult to convince people to pay a 100% premium (2x the price) for solid state storage. $20/GB would be a 1900% price premium! Smaller size and lower energy consumption are all very nice and good, but $2000 for a 100GB drive seems a little steep.
I've also taken my supra to 167 MPH on Interstate 84. I didn't kill anyone. Not even close, because I am a smart driver.
Fine. Keep trying to convince yourself that driving 167 MPH was smart. When people wonder why auto insurance rates are so high, they should read the parent post.
And if i were in the middle of performing a surgury, when said telemarkateers started calling me, would not they be "interfering with people's livelihoods[ and or lives]".
Oh please! While I highly doubt that anyone who has trouble spelling "surgery" will actually be performing it, I doubt even more that telemarketing calls are received in operating rooms. Don't make a mockery out of the issue by making up absurd "straw-man" scenarios.
Aren't pay-per-view movies considered on-demand?
On demand movies can be started at any time by the viewer. If you'd like to begin the movie at 8:27, that's possible with the on demand system. Normal pay-per-view movies (Comcast refers to them as In Demand) start at specified times. The most popular movies usually begin every 30 minutes while less popular ones begin every hour.
You haven't been here very long then, have you?
If the device was not used to facilitate an illegal activity, then its libel/slander
I don't believe you're correct. The definiton of libel is:
1a. A false publication, as in writing, print, signs, or pictures, that damages a person's reputation.
b. The act of presenting such material to the public.
2. The written claims presented by a plaintiff in an action at admiralty law or to an ecclesiastical court.
Slander:
1. Oral communication of false statements injurious to a person's reputation.
2. A false and malicious statement or report about someone
DirecTV doesn't seem to have committed either crime. However this might be considered malicious prosecution:
Malicious prosecution is a common law intentional tort. While similar to the tort of abuse of process it is the misuse of a prior legal process (civil or criminal) that is dismissed in favor of the victim that was brought without probable cause with intentional malice by the defendant.
This is probably because the Dems don't hold all 3 government branches like the Reps do right now.
The judicial branch doesn't have party affiliation. Of course, there's a division between liberal and conservative, but it's currently four on each side with Sandra Day O'Connor as the swing vote.
The legislative branch is held by Republicans, but by a very narrow majority in both houses.
Senate: 51 Republican, 48 Democrats, 1 independent
House: 229 Republicans, 205 Democrats, 1 independent
The executive branch is held by the Republicans, but this is subject to change in 2004, just like it is every four years.
If Bush loses in 2004 and the Democrats pick up a few more seats they'll suddenly jump into control. Add in the replacement of a Supreme Court justice or two and now the left wing would be in the dominant position. The US certainly has its faults, but it also has plenty of checks and balances in place to prevent real abuse of the system.
You must work in a much higher margin industry than most people. Even in bulk, 64M keychains must cost $25-30. That's a lot to give away unless the product is really expensive or the profit margins are huge. In a few years, once the prices have dropped dramatically, this might be more realistic.
It's similar to the homeless disappearing from the media during Democratic administrations and magically reappearing as soon as a Republican is inaugurated.
Made curious by the continual claims of politicians and industry executives that stronger copyright leads to more innovation, I went to the library early Freshman year to see if there was any corroberating research. I was unable to find any, so I went to a historical index of statistics. However, that only had data until 1970, so I extracted the more recent data from the annual Statistical Abstract(s) of the United States.
.99 .
The trends are fascinating, especially in a field where a surprising amount of innumeracy and overinterpretation appears from people who should know better. For instance:
"We did a survey in April that asked people the reasons why they downloaded, and 65% said because it was free," a BPI spokeswoman said.
They are, of course, absolutely correct. But they leave it up to the reader to infer that those respondents are displacing purchases with free music. In effect, however, what is happening is price discrimination. Those who are willing to tolerate lower-quality music are paying less (nothing) for it. Those who are not pay more. Society gains, the industry loses--and then only assuming recent studies showing that downloads serve as a form of music sampling, a free preview for users that later buy music, are incorrect.
Now, on to the data. Some of this pertains directly to copyright, others directly to the RIAA.
Most interesting to me was one trend that my statistics professor, Professor Wyner, pointed out. From the early 1950's until 1991, copyright registrations rise exponentially. In fact, a simple quadratic fit shows an Rsquare of over
That a four-decade trend of such strength could reverse itself in a single year so dramatically--and without an apparent cause--is incredible. The fact that it happens across all categories of copyright suggests the effect is perhaps due to a change in the way the Copyright Office records entries. However, given that music registrations correlate well with overall registrations, it would have to have been a policy change for all copyright entries. The sheer precipitousness of the plummet belies many otherwise viable explanations. However, in 1992, Congress passed Public Law 102-307, making renewal automatic for works from 1964-1977. Depending on whether the Copyright Office was including renewals in its statistics, 1991 could be a break in analyzability for the data. Furthermore, if they did, indeed, include renewals, trends will be blurred and obfuscated by the lagging renewal registrations.
The single-category music registrations show the same plunge.
Also interesting is that, as the price of CDs increase, shipments increase. This trend is not nearly as strong as the former, and is only based on a decade of data provided by the RIAA. Possible explanations for this trend include that CDs are a luxury item--unlikely, I should think--or that the economy's rise during this period (1990-2000) lead to an increase in spending.
And, in fact, it did. A classical Demand Curve. Not such a great mystery after all, as it turns out.
Since we are starting to analyze statistics provided by the RIAA at this point, I should mention that they have a nasty tendency to only release data which they can put a proper spin on. Consequently, analyzing becomes much more difficult and leads to kludges such as the 2002 CDs shipped data extrapolated from news of an 8.8% decline from previous years. If anyone would provide me with a complete set of Nielson SoundScan statistics this project would be much easier. If anyone disputes my figures please provide me with a better set. Many of these numbers took hours to find, here from one source, there from another. Fortunately, most of the time there was some overlap in data provided, so I was able to see that the numbers were directly comparable.
That said, the numbers are interesting. The RIAA has been shipping fewer CDs in the last few years, by all accounts. The most recent (and most contested) numbers come from SoundScan
Take a closer look. All of the text is in italics. That means it's the submitter's opinion, not the editor's.
Does this strike anybody as disgusting, or odd.
No, not really. The Wachowskis came up with a story that would take 4-5 hours of screen time. They had several choices:
- Make one movie with a running time of 4-5 hours. This would never be accepted by theaters or Warner Bros.
- Cut half of the script, leaving one standard length film. No artist would want half of their work to be thrown out.
- Make two films, each of standard length. This obviously was the preferred choice.
Now, given that two movies were going to be made based on one plot, it made sense to film them together. If you prefer to think of it as one movie with a six month intermission, feel free.